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• Insurers Pushed to Transform Their Business

  - by Calvin Glenn

  Everyone in the P&C industry has heard it “We can’t do it.” “Nobody wants to do it.” “We can’t afford to do it.”  Unfortunately, what they’re referencing are the reasons many insurers are still trying to maintain their business processing on legacy policy administration systems, attempting to bide time until there is no other recourse but to give in, bite the bullet, and take on the monumental task of replacing an entire policy administration system (PAS). Just the thought of that project sends IT, Business Users and Management reeling. However, is that fear real?  It is a bit daunting when one realizes that a complete policy administration system replacement will touch most every function an insurer manages, from quoting and rating, to underwriting, distribution, and even customer service. With that, everyone has heard at least one horror story around a transformation initiative that has far exceeded budget and the promised implementation / go-live timeline.    But, does it have to be that hard?  Surely, in the age where a person can voice-activate their DVR to record a TV program from a cell phone, there has to be someone somewhere who’s figured out how to simplify this process. To be able to help insurers, of all sizes, transform and grow their business while also delivering on their overall objectives of providing speed to market, straight-through-processing for applications, quoting, underwriting, and simplified product development. Maybe we’re looking too hard and the answer is simple and straight-forward. Why replace the entire machine when all it really needs is a new part…a single enterprise rating system? This core, modular piece of the policy administration system is the foundation of product development and rate management that enables insurers to provide the right product at the right price to the right customer through the best channels at any given moment in time. The real benefit of a single enterprise rating system is the ability to deliver enhanced business capabilities, such as improved product management, streamlined underwriting, and speed to market. With these benefits, carriers have accomplished a portion of their overall transformation goal. Furthermore, lessons learned from the rating project can be applied to the bigger, down-the-road PAS project to support the successful completion of the overall transformation endeavor. At the recent Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, information was shared with attendees about a recent “go-live” project from an Oracle Insurance Tier 1 insurer who did what is proposed above…replaced just the rating portion of their legacy policy administration system with Oracle Insurance Insbridge Rating and Underwriting.  This change provided the insurer greater flexibility to set rates that better reflect risk while enabling the company to support its market segment strategy. Using the Oracle Insurance Insbridge enterprise rating solution, the insurer was able to reduce processing time for agents and underwriters, gained the ability to support proprietary rating models and improved pricing accuracy.      There is mounting pressure on P&C insurers to produce growth and show net profitability in the midst of modest overall industry growth, large weather-related losses and intensifying competition for market share.  Insurers are also being asked to improve customer service, offer a differentiated value proposition and simplify insurance processes.  While the demands are many there is an easy answer…invest in and update the most mission critical application in your arsenal, the single enterprise rating system. Download the Podcast to listen to “Stand-Alone Rating Engine - Leading Force Behind Core Transformation Projects in the P&C Market,” a podcast originally recorded in October 2013. Related Resources: White Paper: Stand-Alone Rating Engine: Leading Force Behind Core Transformation Projects in the P&C Market Webcast On Demand: Stand-Alone Rating Engine and Core Transformation for P&C Insurers Don’t forget to keep up with us year-round: Facebook: www.facebook.com/oracleinsurance Twitter: www.twitter.com/oracleinsurance YouTube: www.youtube.com/oracleinsurance

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• Process Is The New App by Leon Smiers

  - by JuergenKress

  Process-on-the-Fly #2 - Process is the New App The next generation of business process management and business rules management tools is so powerful that it actually can be seen as the successor to custom-built applications. Being able to define detailed process, flows, decision trees and business helps on both the business and IT side to create powerful, differentiating solutions that would have required extensive custom coding in the past. Now much of the definition can be done ‘on the fly,’ using visual models and (semi) natural language in the nearest proximity to the business. Over the years, ERP systems have been customized to enter organization-specific functionality into the ERP application. This leads to better support for the business, but at the same time involves higher costs for maintenance, high dependency on the personnel involved in this customization, long timelines to deliver change to the system and increased risk involved in upgrading the ERP system. However, the best of both worlds can be created by bringing back the functionality to out-of-the-box usage of the ERP system and at the same time introducing change and flexibility by means of externalized 'Process Apps' in direct connection with the ERP system. The ERP system (or legacy bespoke system, for that matter) is used as originally intended and designed, resulting in more predictable behavior of the system related to usage and performance, and clearly can be maintained in a more standardized and cost-effective way. The Prrocess App externalizes the needed functionality into a highly customizable application outside the ERP for which it is supported by rules engines, task inboxes and can be delivered to different channels. The reasons for needing Process Apps may include the following: The ERP system just doesn't deliver this functionality in a specific industry; the volatility of changing certain functionality is high; or an umbrella type of functionality across (ERP) silos is needed. An example of bringing all this together is around the hiring process for a new employee at a university. Oracle PeopleSoft HCM could be used as the HR system to store all employee details. In the hiring process, an authorization scheme is involved for getting the approval to create a contract for the employee-to-be. In the university world, this authorization scheme is complex and involves faculties/colleges (with different organizational structures) and cross-faculty organizational structures. Including such an authorization scheme into PeopleSoft would require a lot of customization. By adding a handle inside PeopleSoft towards an externalized authorization Process App, the execution of the authorization of the employee is done outside the ERP: in a tool that is aimed to deliver approval schemes via a worklist-type of application. The Process App here works as an add-on to the PeopleSoft system, but can also be extended to support the full lifecycle of the end-to-end hiring process with the possibility to involve multiple applications. The actual core functionality is kept in the supporting ERP systems, while at the same time the Process App acts as an umbrella function to control the end-to-end flow and give insight into the efficiency of the end-to-end process. How to get there? Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: Capgemini,Leon Smiers,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Gartner PCC: A Shovel & Some Ah-Ha's

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  When Gartner Vice President and leading analyst Whit Andrews kicked off the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit on Monday, March 12 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL by bringing a shovel to the stage, eyebrows raised and a few thoughts went through my head. Either this guy plans to go help the construction workers outside construct that new pool at the Gaylord or he took a wrong turn and is at the wrong conference. Oh and how did he get that shovel through airport security? As Whit explained more his objective became more clear…take everything anyone has ever told you about portals and throw it out the window, as portals have evolved and times they are most certainly changing. The future Web is here, available not only on browsers but also via a broad spectrum of access points, including automobiles, consumer electronics and more and more mobile devices. Not merely prevalent, the future Web is also multimedia-driven and operates in real time, driven by mobility, social media, streaming video and other dynamic services. Applications and user experiences are in the midst of an evolution — from the early, simple mobile Web models to today’s Web 2.0 mobile apps and, ultimately, to a world of predominantly Web apps. Additionally, cloud services will forever change how portals and user experience are designed, built, delivered, sourced and managed. So what does this mean for you? Today’s organizations need software that will enable them to not just do their jobs, but to do it in a way that is familiar and easy for them.  What does this mean for IT? Use software and technology as an enabler, not as a roadblock. Overall, we had a great week in Orlando learning about how to improve the user experience, manage content explosion, launch social initiatives, transition to mobile environments and understand cloud and SaaS options.  We had some great conversations throughout the conference and at the Oracle booth. Lots of demonstrations were given of Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Social Network. And as Christie mentioned earlier this week, our Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for WebCenter Loren Weinberg presented on the topic of customer engagement and talked about how organization’s relationships with their customers have fundamentally changed today and the resulting impact that has on their priorities.  Loren also talked about the importance of customer engagement, why that matters now more than ever, and what you can do to help your company or organization succeed in this new world. The question asked in every keynote and session was a simple one: What is your “ah-ha” moment? I personally had quite a few, some of which I’ve captured below. 70% of internal social initiatives eventually fail. By 2014, refusing to communicate with consumers via social media will be as harmful as ignoring emails/phone calls is today. Customer engagement = multi-channel + social & interactive + personal & relevant + optimized. If people choose to talk about your product/company/service, it's because it's remarkable. -- Seth Godin's keynote (one of the highlights of the conference!) The Web will become the primary method used for delivering content and applications to mobile devices. By 2015, 20% of smart phone users worldwide will conduct commerce using context-enriched services on a weekly basis.  86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. 6 P's of Quality User Experience. Product. Enabled by: People, Patterns, Process, Profit, Priorities. Did you attend the Gartner Summit? What were your ah-ha moments?

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• Simple MVVM Walkthrough – Refactored

  - by Sean Feldman

  JR has put together a good introduction post into MVVM pattern. I love kick start examples that serve the purpose well. And even more than that I love examples that also can pass the real world projects check. So I took the sample code and refactored it slightly for a few aspects that a lot of developers might raise a brow. Michael has mentioned model (entity) visibility from view. I agree on that. A few other items that don’t settle are using property names as string (magical strings) and Saver class internal casting of a parameter (custom code for each Saver command). Fixing a property names usage is a straight forward exercise – leverage expressions. Something simple like this would do the initial job: class PropertyOf<T> { public static string Resolve(Expression<Func<T, object>> expression) { var member = expression.Body as MemberExpression; return member.Member.Name; } } With this, refactoring of properties names becomes an easy task, with confidence that an old property name string will not get left behind. An updated Invoice would look like this: public class Invoice : INotifyPropertyChanged { private int id; private string receiver; public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private void OnPropertyChanged(string propertyName) { if (PropertyChanged != null) { PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } public int Id { get { return id; } set { if (id != value) { id = value; OnPropertyChanged(PropertyOf<Invoice>.Resolve(x => x.Id)); } } } public string Receiver { get { return receiver; } set { receiver = value; OnPropertyChanged(PropertyOf<Invoice>.Resolve(x => x.Receiver)); } } } For the saver, I decided to change it a little so now it becomes a “view-model agnostic” command, one that can be used for multiple commands/view-models. Updated Saver code now accepts an action at construction time and executes that action. No more black magic internal class Command : ICommand { private readonly Action executeAction; public Command(Action executeAction) { this.executeAction = executeAction; } public bool CanExecute(object parameter) { return true; } public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged; public void Execute(object parameter) { // no more black magic executeAction(); } } Change in InvoiceViewModel is instantiation of Saver command and execution action for the specific command. public ICommand SaveCommand { get { if (saveCommand == null) saveCommand = new Command(ExecuteAction); return saveCommand; } set { saveCommand = value; } } private void ExecuteAction() { DisplayMessage = string.Format("Thanks for creating invoice: {0} {1}", Invoice.Id, Invoice.Receiver); } This way internal knowledge of InvoiceViewModel remains in InvoiceViewModel and Command (ex-Saver) is view-model agnostic. Now the sample is not only a good introduction, but also has some practicality in it. My 5 cents on the subject. Sample code MvvmSimple2.zip

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• Delivering SOA Governance with EAMS and Oracle Enterprise Repository by Link Consulting Team

  - by JuergenKress

  In the last 12 years Link Consulting has been making its presence in specific areas such as Governance and Architecture, both in terms of practices and methodologies, products, know-how and technological expertise. The Enterprise Architecture Management System - Oracle Enterprise Edition (EAMS - OER Edition) is the result of this experience and combines the architecture management solution with OER in order to deliver a product specialized for SOA Governance that gathers the better of two worlds in solution that enables SOA Governance projects, initiatives and programs. Enterprise Architecture Management System Enterprise Architecture Management System (EAMS), is an automation based solution that enables the efficient management of Enterprise Architectures. The solution uses configured enterprise repositories and takes advantages of its features to provide automation capabilities to the users. EAMS provides capabilities to create/customize/analyze repository data, architectural blueprints, reports and analytic charts. Oracle Enterprise Repository Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) is one of the major and central elements of the Oracle SOA Governance solution. Oracle Enterprise Repository provides the tools to manage and govern the metadata for any type of software asset, from business processes and services to patterns, frameworks, applications, components, and models. OER maps the relationships and inter-dependencies that connect those assets to improve impact analysis, promote and optimize their reuse, and measure their impact on the bottom line. It provides the visibility, feedback, controls, and analytics to keep your SOA on track to deliver business value. The intense focus on automation helps to overcome barriers to SOA adoption and streamline governance throughout the lifecycle. Core capabilities of the OER include: Asset Management Asset Lifecycle Management Usage Tracking Service Discovery Version Management Dependency Analysis Portfolio Management EAMS - OER Edition The solution takes the advantages and features from both products and combines them in a symbiotic tool that enhances the quality of SOA Governance Initiatives and Programs. EAMS is able to produce a vast number of outputs by combining its analytical engine, SOA-specific configurations and the assets in OER and other related tools, catalogs and repositories. The configurations encompass not only the extendable parametrization of the metadata but also fully configurable blueprints, PowerPoint reports, charts and queries. The SOA blueprints The solution comes with a set of predefined architectural representations that help the organization better perceive their SOA landscape. More blueprints can be easily created in order to accommodate the organizations needs in terms of detail, audience and metadata. Charts & Dashboards The solution encompasses a set of predefined charts and dashboards that promote a more agile way to control and explore the assets. Time Based Visualization All representations are time bound, and with EAMS - OER you can truly govern SOA with a complete view of the Past, Present and Future; The solution delivers Gap Analysis, a project oriented approach while taking into consideration the As-Was, As-Is an To-Be. Time based visualization differentiating factors: Extensive automation and maintenance of architectural representations Organization wide solution. Easy access and navigation to and between all architectural artifacts and representations. Flexible meta-model, customization and extensibility capabilities. Lifecycle management and enforcement of the time dimension over all the repository content. Profile based customization. Comprehensive visibility Architectural alignment Friendly and striking user interfaces For more information on EAMS visit us here. For more information on SOA visit us here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Link Consulting,OER,OSR,SOA Governance,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Communication between state machines with hidden transitions

  - by slartibartfast

  The question emerged for me in embedded programming but I think it can be applied to quite a number of general networking situations e.g. when a communication partner fails. Assume we have an application logic (a program) running on a computer and a gadget connected to that computer via e.g. a serial interface like RS232. The gadget has a red/green/blue LED and a button which disables the LED. The LEDs color can be driven by software commands over the serial interface and the state (red/green/blue/off) is read back and causes a reaction in the application logic. Asynchronous behaviour of the application logic with regard to the LED color down to a certain delay (depending on the execution cycle of the application) is tolerated. What we essentially have is a resource (the LED) which can not be reserved and handled atomically by software because the (organic) user can at any time press the button to interfere/break the software attempt to switch the LED color. Stripping this example from its physical outfit I dare to say that we have two communicating state machines A (application logic) and G (gadget) where G executes state changes unbeknownst to A (and also the other way round, but this is not significant in our example) and only A can be modified at a reasonable price. A needs to see the reaction and state of G in one piece of information which may be (slightly) outdated but not inconsistent with respect to the short time window when this information was generated on the side of G. What I am looking for is a concise method to handle such a situation in embedded software (i.e. no layer/framework like CORBA etc. available). A programming technique which is able to map the complete behaviour of both participants on classical interfaces of a classical programming language (C in this case). To complicate matters (or rather, to generalize), a simple high frequency communication cycle of A to G and back (IOW: A is rapidly polling G) is out of focus because of technical restrictions (delay of serial com, A not always active, etc.). What I currently see as a general solution is: the application logic A as one thread of execution an adapter object (proxy) PG (presenting G inside the computer), together with the serial driver as another thread a communication object between the two (A and PG) which is transactionally safe to exchange The two execution contexts (threads) on the computer may be multi-core or just interrupt driven or tasks in an RTOS. The com object contains the following data: suspected state (written by A): effectively a member of the power set of states in G (in our case: red, green, blue, off, red_or_green, red_or_blue, red_or_off...etc.) command data (written by A): test_if_off, switch_to_red, switch_to_green, switch_to_blue operation status (written by PG): operation_pending, success, wrong_state, link_broken new state (written by PG): red, green, blue, off The idea of the com object is that A writes whichever (set of) state it thinks G is in, together with a command. (Example: suspected state="red_or_green", command: "switch_to_blue") Notice that the commands issued by A will not work if the user has switched off the LED and A needs to know this. PG will pick up such a com object and try to send the command to G, receive its answer (or a timeout) and set the operation status and new state accordingly. A will take back the oject once it is no longer at operation_pending and can react to the outcome. The com object could be separated of course (into two objects, one for each direction) but I think it is convenient in nearly all instances to have the command close to the result. I would like to have major flaws pointed out or hear an entirely different view on such a situation.

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• Friday Tips #6, Part 1

  - by Chris Kawalek

  We have a two parter this week, with this post focusing on desktop virtualization and the next one on server virtualization. Question: Why would I use the Oracle Secure Global Desktop Secure Gateway? Answer by Rick Butland, Principal Sales Consultant, Oracle Desktop Virtualization: Well, for the benefit of those who might not be familiar with client connections in Oracle Secure Global Desktop (SGD), let me back up and briefly explain. An SGD client connects to an SGD server using two distinct protocols, which, by default, require two distinct TCP ports. The first is the HTTP protocol, used by the web browser to connect to the SGD webserver on TCP port 80, or if secure connections are enabled (SSL/TLS), then TCP port 443, commonly identified as the "HTTPS" port, that is, "SSL encrypted HTTP." The second protocol from the client to the server is the Adaptive Internet Protocol, or AIP, which is used for displaying applications, transferring drive mapping data, print jobs, and so on. By default, AIP uses the TCP port 3104, or port 5307 when SSL is enabled. When SGD clients need to access SGD over a firewall, the ports that AIP requires are typically "closed"; and most administrators are reluctant, to put it mildly, to change their firewall configurations to allow AIP traffic on 3144/5307.   To avoid this problem, SGD introduced "Firewall Forwarding", a technique where, in effect, both http and AIP traffic are "multiplexed" onto a single "well-known" TCP port, that is port 443, the https port.  This is also known as single-port firewall traversal.  This technique takes advantage of the fact that, as a "well-known service", port 443 is usually "open",   allowing (encrypted) traffic to pass. At the target SGD server, the two protocols are de-multiplexed and routed appropriately. The Secure Gateway was developed in response to requirements from customers for SGD to support multi-stage DMZ's, and to avoid exposing SGD servers and the information they contain directly to connections from the Internet. The Secure Gateway acts as a reverse-proxy in the first-tier of the DMZ, accepting, authenticating, and terminating incoming client connections, and then re-encrypting the connections, and proxying them, routing them on to SGD servers, deeper in the network. The client no longer needs to know the name/IP address of the SGD servers in their network, they connect to the gateway, only. The gateway takes care of those internal network details.     The Secure Gateway supports the same "single-port firewall" capability as does "Firewall Forwarding", but offers the additional advantage of load-balancing incoming client connections amongst SGD array members, which could be cumbersome without a forward-deployed secure gateway. Load-balancing weights and policies can be monitored and tuned using the "Balancer Manager" application, and Apache mod_proxy_balancer directives.   Going forward, our architects recommend the use of the Secure Gateway over "Firewall Forwarding" for single-port firewall traversal, due to its architectural advantages, its greater flexibility and enhanced features.  Finally, it should be noted that the Secure Gateway is not separately priced; any licensed SGD customer may use the Secure Gateway component at no additional cost.   For more information, see the "Secure Gateway Administrator's Guide".

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• History of Mobile Technology

  - by David Dorf

  Over the last ten years, mobile phones have gone through several incremental technology leaps that have added capabilities that impact the retail industry.  I've listed the six major ones below, along with their long-lasting impact. 1. Location In the US, the FCC required mobile phones to implement E911 (emergency calls) by 2006, requiring the caller to be located to within 300 meters.  Back in 2000, GPS was opened up for civilian use, and by 2004 Qualcomm had figured out how to use GPS in mobile phones.  So mobile operators moved from cell tower triangulation to GPS, principally for E911.  But then lots of other uses became apparent, especially navigation.  The earliest mobile apps from retailers made it easy to find nearby stores, and companies are looking at ways to use WiFi triangulation inside stores. 2. Computer Vision In 1997 Philippe Kahn shared a photo of his newborn using a mobile phone thus launching the popularity of instant visual communications.  Over the years the quality of the cameras got better, reaching the point where barcodes could be read around 2008.  That's when Occipital came on the scene with their Red Laser application, which was eventually acquired by eBay.  This opened up the ability for consumers to easily price compare inside stores.  Other interesting apps included Tesco's Wine Finder and Amazon's Price Checker, both allowing products to be identified by picture. 3. Augmented Reality Once the mobile phone had GPS, a video camera, and compass functionality it was suddenly possible to overlay digital information on the screen in real-time.  Yelp, which was using GPS to find nearby merchants, created a backdoor called Monocle on the iPhone that showed nearby merchants overlayed on the video camera view.  Today AR apps are mostly used by retailers for marketing, like Moosejaw's app that undresses models in their catalog. 4. Geo-Fencing So if we're able to track the location of a mobile phone, why not use that context to offer timely information?  My first experience with geo-fencing came courtesy of North Face, the outdoor enthusiast store. When a mobile phone enters a predetermined area, like near a store, a text message is sent to phone with an offer or useful information.  Of course retailers can geo-fence their competitors as well and find out which customers are aren't so loyal. 5. Digital Wallet Mobile payments leverage different technologies such as NFC, QRCodes, bluetooth, and SMS to facilitate communication between the consumers's phone and the retailer's point-of-sale. The key here is the potential to consolidate loyalty cards, coupons, and bank cards into the mobile phone and enable faster checkout.  Nobody does this better than Starbucks today, but McDonald's and Duncan Donuts aren't far behind.  Google, Isis, Paypal, Square, and MCX are all vying for leadership in this area.  If NFC does finally take off, it will be leveraged by retailers in more places than just the POS. 6. Voice Response Mobile Phones have had the ability to interpret simple voice commands for a while, but Google and Amazon were the first to use voice to allow searches for products.  Allowing searches by text, barcode, and voice makes it easy to comparison shop in the aisles.  Walmart even uses voice to build shopping lists, and if the Siri API is even opened we could see lots more innovation in this area.

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• A more elegant way of embedding a SOAP security header in Silverlight 4

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  The current situation with Silverlight is, that there is no support for the WCF federation binding. This means that all security token related interactions have to be done manually. Requesting the token from an STS is not really the bad part, sending it along with outgoing SOAP messages is what’s a little annoying. So far you had to wrap all calls on the channel in an OperationContextScope wrapping an IContextChannel. This “programming model” was a little disruptive (in addition to all the async stuff that you are forced to do). It seems that starting with SL4 there is more support for traditional WCF extensibility points – especially IEndpointBehavior, IClientMessageInspector. I never read somewhere that these are new features in SL4 – but I am pretty sure they did not exist in SL3. With the above mentioned interfaces at my disposal, I thought I have another go at embedding a security header – and yeah – I managed to make the code much prettier (and much less bizarre). Here’s the code for the behavior/inspector: public class IssuedTokenHeaderInspector : IClientMessageInspector {     RequestSecurityTokenResponse _rstr;       public IssuedTokenHeaderInspector(RequestSecurityTokenResponse rstr)     {         _rstr = rstr;     }       public void AfterReceiveReply(ref Message reply, object correlationState)     { }       public object BeforeSendRequest(ref Message request, IClientChannel channel)     {         request.Headers.Add(new IssuedTokenHeader(_rstr));                  return null;     } }   public class IssuedTokenHeaderBehavior : IEndpointBehavior {     RequestSecurityTokenResponse _rstr;       public IssuedTokenHeaderBehavior(RequestSecurityTokenResponse rstr)     {         if (rstr == null)         {             throw new ArgumentNullException();         }           _rstr = rstr;     }       public void ApplyClientBehavior(       ServiceEndpoint endpoint, ClientRuntime clientRuntime)     {         clientRuntime.MessageInspectors.Add(new IssuedTokenHeaderInspector(_rstr));     }       // rest omitted } This allows to set up a proxy with an issued token header and you don’t have to worry anymore with embedding the header manually with every call: var client = GetWSTrustClient();   var rst = new RequestSecurityToken(WSTrust13Constants.KeyTypes.Symmetric) {     AppliesTo = new EndpointAddress("https://rp/") };   client.IssueCompleted += (s, args) => {     _proxy = new StarterServiceContractClient();     _proxy.Endpoint.Behaviors.Add(new IssuedTokenHeaderBehavior(args.Result));   };   client.IssueAsync(rst); Since SL4 also support the IExtension<T> interface, you can also combine this with Nicholas Allen’s AutoHeaderExtension.

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• PASS Summit 2012: keynote and Mobile BI announcements #sqlpass

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Today at PASS Summit 2012 there have been several announcements during the keynote. Moreover, other news have not been highlighted in the keynote but are equally if not more important for the BI community. Let’s start from the big news in the keynote (other details on SQL Server Blog): Hekaton: this is the codename for in-memory OLTP technology that will appear (I suppose) in the next release of the SQL Server relational engine. The improvement in performance and scalability is impressive and it enables new scenarios. I’m curious to see whether it can be used also to improve ETL performance and how it differs from using SSD technology. Updates on Columnstore: In the next major release of SQL Server the columnstore indexes will be updatable and it will be possible to create a clustered index with Columnstore index. This is really a great news for near real-time reporting needs! Polybase: in 2013 it will debut SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), which will include the Polybase technology. By using Polybase a single T-SQL query will run queries across relational data and Hadoop data. A single query language for both. Sounds really interesting for using BigData in a more integrated way with existing relational databases. And, of course, to load a data warehouse using BigData, which is the ultimate goal that we all BI Pro have, right? SQL Server 2012 SP1: the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2012 is available now and it enable the use of PowerPivot for SharePoint and Power View on a SharePoint 2013 installation with Excel 2013. Power View works with Multidimensional cube: the long-awaited feature of being able to use PowerPivot with Multidimensional cubes has been shown by Amir Netz in an amazing demonstration during the keynote. The interesting thing is that the data model behind was based on a many-to-many relationship (something that is not fully supported by Power View with Tabular models). Another interesting aspect is that it is Analysis Services 2012 that supports DAX queries run on a Multidimensional model, enabling the use of any future tool generating DAX queries on top of a Multidimensional model. There are still no info about availability by now, but this is *not* included in SQL Server 2012 SP1. So what about Mobile BI? Well, even if not announced during the keynote, there is a dedicated session on this topic and there are very important news in this area: iOS, Android and Microsoft mobile platforms: the commitment is to get data exploration and visualization capabilities working within June 2013. This should impact at least Power View and SharePoint/Excel Services. This is the type of UI experience we are all waiting for, in order to satisfy the requests coming from users and customers. The important news here is that native applications will be available for both iOS and Windows 8 so it seems that Android will be supported initially only through the web. Unfortunately we haven’t seen any demo, so it’s not clear what will be the offline navigation experience (and whether there will be one). But at least we know that Microsoft is working on native applications in this area. I’m not too surprised that HTML5 is not the magic bullet for all the platforms. The next PASS Business Analytics conference in 2013 seems a good place to see this in action, even if I hope we don’t have to wait other six months before seeing some demo of native BI applications on mobile platforms! Viewing Reporting Services reports on iPad is supported starting with SQL Server 2012 SP1, which has been released today. This is another good reason to install SP1 on SQL Server 2012. If you are at PASS Summit 2012, come and join me, Alberto Ferrari and Chris Webb at our book signing event tomorrow, Thursday 8 2012, at the bookstore between 12:00pm and 12:30pm, or follow one of our sessions!

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• Development Quirk From ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation

  - by jkauffman

  The Problem I got a compilation error in my ASP.NET MVC3 project that tested my sanity today. (As always, names are changed to protect the innocent) The type or namespace name 'FishViewModel' does not exist in the namespace 'Company.Product.Application.Models' (are you missing an assembly reference?) Sure looks easy! There must be something in the project referring to a FishViewModel. The Confusing Part The first thing I noticed was the that error was occuring in a folder clearly not in my project and in files that I definitely had not created: %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\(versionNumber)\Temporary ASP.NET Files\ App_Web_mezpfjae.1.cs I also ascertained these facts, each of which made me more confused than the last: Rebuild and Clean had no effect. No controllers in the project ever returned a ViewResult using FishViewModel. No views in the project defined that they use FishViewModel. Searching across all files included in the project for “FishViewModel” provided no results. The build server did not report a problem. The Solution The problem stemmed from a file that was not included in the project but still present on the file system: (By the way, if you don’t know this trick already, there is a toolbar button in the Solution Explorer window to “Show All Files” which allows you to see files all files in the file system) In my situation, I was working on the mission-critical Fish view before abandoning the feature. Instead of deleting the file, I excluded it from the project. However, this was a bad move. It caused the build failure, and in order to fix the error, this file must be deleted. By the way, this file was not in source control, so the build server did not have it. This explains why my build server did not report a problem for me. The Explanation So, what’s going on? This file isn’t even a part of the project, so why is it failing the build? This is a behavior of the ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation. This is the same process that occurs when deploying a webpage; ASP.NET compiles the web application’s code. When this occurs on a production server, it has to do so without the .csproj file (which isn’t usually deployed, if you’ve taken your time to do a deployment cleanly). This process has merely the file system available to identify what to compile. So, back in the world of developing the webpage in visual studio on my developer box, I run into the situation because the same process is occuring there. This is true even though I have more files on my machine than will actually get deployed. I can’t help but think that this error could be attributed back to the real culprit file (Fish.cshtml, rather than the temporary files) with some work, but at least the error had enough information in it to narrow it down. The Conclusion I had previously been accustomed to the idea that for c# projects, the .csproj file always “defines” the build behavior. This investigation has taught me that I’ll need to shift my thinking a bit to remember that the file system has the final say when it comes to web applications, even on the developer’s machine!

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• How do you formulate the Domain Model in Domain Driven Design properly (Bounded Contexts, Domains)?

  - by lko

  Say you have a few applications which deal with a few different Core Domains. The examples are made up and it's hard to put a real example with meaningful data together (concisely). In Domain Driven Design (DDD) when you start looking at Bounded Contexts and Domains/Sub Domains, it says that a Bounded Context is a "phase" in a lifecycle. An example of Context here would be within an ecommerce system. Although you could model this as a single system, it would also warrant splitting into separate Contexts. Each of these areas within the application have their own Ubiquitous Language, their own Model, and a way to talk to other Bounded Contexts to obtain the information they need. The Core, Sub, and Generic Domains are the area of expertise and can be numerous in complex applications. Say there is a long process dealing with an Entity for example a Book in a core domain. Now looking at the Bounded Contexts there can be a number of phases in the books life-cycle. Say outline, creation, correction, publish, sale phases. Now imagine a second core domain, perhaps a store domain. The publisher has its own branch of stores to sell books. The store can have a number of Bounded Contexts (life-cycle phases) for example a "Stock" or "Inventory" context. In the first domain there is probably a Book database table with basically just an ID to track the different book Entities in the different life-cycles. Now suppose you have 10+ supporting domains e.g. Users, Catalogs, Inventory, .. (hard to think of relevant examples). For example a DomainModel for the Book Outline phase, the Creation phase, Correction phase, Publish phase, Sale phase. Then for the Store core domain it probably has a number of life-cycle phases. public class BookId : Entity { public long Id { get; set; } } In the creation phase (Bounded Context) the book could be a simple class. public class Book : BookId { public string Title { get; set; } public List<string> Chapters { get; set; } //... } Whereas in the publish phase (Bounded Context) it would have all the text, release date etc. public class Book : BookId { public DateTime ReleaseDate { get; set; } //... } The immediate benefit I can see in separating by "life-cycle phase" is that it's a great way to separate business logic so there aren't mammoth all-encompassing Entities nor Domain Services. A problem I have is figuring out how to concretely define the rules to the physical layout of the Domain Model. A. Does the Domain Model get "modeled" so there are as many bounded contexts (separate projects etc.) as there are life-cycle phases across the core domains in a complex application? Edit: Answer to A. Yes, according to the answer by Alexey Zimarev there should be an entire "Domain" for each bounded context. B. Is the Domain Model typically arranged by Bounded Contexts (or Domains, or both)? Edit: Answer to B. Each Bounded Context should have its own complete "Domain" (Service/Entities/VO's/Repositories) C. Does it mean there can easily be 10's of "segregated" Domain Models and multiple projects can use it (the Entities/Value Objects)? Edit: Answer to C. There is a complete "Domain" for each Bounded Context and the Domain Model (Entity/VO layer/project) isn't "used" by the other Bounded Contexts directly, only via chosen paths (i.e. via Domain Events). The part that I am trying to figure out is how the Domain Model is actually implemented once you start to figure out your Bounded Contexts and Core/Sub Domains, particularly in complex applications. The goal is to establish the definitions which can help to separate Entities between the Bounded Contexts and Domains.

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• Gaming on Cloud

  - by technomad

  Sometimes I wonder the pundits of cloud computing are way to consumed with the enterprise applications. With all the CAPEX / OPEX, ROI-talk taking the center stage, an opportunity to affect masses directly is getting overlooked. I am a self proclaimed die hard gamer. I come from the generation of gamers who started their journey in DOS games like Wolfenstein 3D and Allan Border Cricket (the latter is still a favorite pastime). In the late 90s, a revolution called accelerated graphics started in DirectX and OpenGL. Games got more advanced. Likes of Quake III and Unreal Tournament became the crown jewels of the industry. But with all these advancements, there started a race. A race of GFX giants ATI and NVIDIA to beat each other for better frame and image quality. Revisions to the graphics chipsets became frequent. Games became eye candies but at the cost of more GPU power / memory. Every eagerly awaited title started demanding more muscle power in graphics and PC hardware. Latest games and all the liquid smooth frame rates became the territory of the once with deep pockets who could spend lavishly on latest hardware. Enthusiasts like yours truly, who couldn’t afford this route, started exploring over-clocking, optimized hardware cooling... etc. to pursue the passion. Ever rising cost of hardware requirements lead to rampant piracy of PC games. Gamers were willing to spend on the latest titles, but the ones with tight budget prefer hardware upgrades against a legal copy of the game. It was also fueled by emergence of the P2P file sharing networks. Then came the era of Xbox and PS3s. It solved the major issue of hardware standardization and provided an alternative to ever increasing hardware costs. I have always admired these consoles, but being born and brought up in a keyboard/mouse environment, I still find it difficult to play first person shooters with a gamepad. I leave the topic of PC v/s Consol gaming for another day, but the bottom line is… PC gamers deserve an equally democratized solution. This is where I think Cloud Computing can come to rescue. It can minimize hardware requirements. Virtually end the software piracy and rationalize costs for gamers. Subscription based models like pay-as-you-play. In game rewards, like extended subscription credits for exceptional gamers (oh yes, I have beaten Xaero on nightmare in Quake III, time and again!) Easy deployment for patches and fixes. Better game AI. The list goes on and on… Fortunately, companies like OnLive are thinking in the same direction. Their gaming service is all set to launch on 17th June 2010 in E3 2010 expo in L.A. I wish them all the luck. I hope they will start a trend which will bring the smiles back on the face of budget gamers with the help of cloud computing.

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• FBX Importer - Texture Name

  - by CmasterG

  I have a problem with the FBX SDK. I read in the data for the vertex position and the uv coordinates. It works fine, but now I want to read for each polygon to which texture it belongs, so that I can have models with multiple textures. Can anyone tell me how I can get the texture name (file name) for my polygon. My code to read in vertex position and uv coordinates is the following: int i, j, lPolygonCount = pMesh->GetPolygonCount(); FbxVector4* lControlPoints = pMesh->GetControlPoints(); int vertexId = 0; for (i = 0; i < lPolygonCount; i++) { int lPolygonSize = pMesh->GetPolygonSize(i); for (j = 0; j < lPolygonSize; j++) { int lControlPointIndex = pMesh->GetPolygonVertex(i, j); FbxVector4 pos = lControlPoints[lControlPointIndex]; current_model[vertex_index].x = pos.mData[0] - pivot_offset[0]; current_model[vertex_index].y = pos.mData[1] - pivot_offset[1]; current_model[vertex_index].z = pos.mData[2]- pivot_offset[2]; FbxVector4 vertex_normal; pMesh->GetPolygonVertexNormal(i,j, vertex_normal); current_model[vertex_index].nx = vertex_normal.mData[0]; current_model[vertex_index].ny = vertex_normal.mData[1]; current_model[vertex_index].nz = vertex_normal.mData[2]; //read in UV data FbxStringList lUVSetNameList; pMesh->GetUVSetNames(lUVSetNameList); //get lUVSetIndex-th uv set const char* lUVSetName = lUVSetNameList.GetStringAt(0); const FbxGeometryElementUV* lUVElement = pMesh->GetElementUV(lUVSetName); if(!lUVElement) continue; // only support mapping mode eByPolygonVertex and eByControlPoint if( lUVElement->GetMappingMode() != FbxGeometryElement::eByPolygonVertex && lUVElement->GetMappingMode() != FbxGeometryElement::eByControlPoint ) return; //index array, where holds the index referenced to the uv data const bool lUseIndex = lUVElement->GetReferenceMode() != FbxGeometryElement::eDirect; const int lIndexCount= (lUseIndex) ? lUVElement->GetIndexArray().GetCount() : 0; FbxVector2 lUVValue; //get the index of the current vertex in control points array int lPolyVertIndex = pMesh->GetPolygonVertex(i,j); //the UV index depends on the reference mode //int lUVIndex = lUseIndex ? lUVElement->GetIndexArray().GetAt(lPolyVertIndex) : lPolyVertIndex; int lUVIndex = pMesh->GetTextureUVIndex(i, j); lUVValue = lUVElement->GetDirectArray().GetAt(lUVIndex); current_model[vertex_index].tu = (float)lUVValue.mData[0]; current_model[vertex_index].tv = (float)lUVValue.mData[1]; vertex_index ++; } } float v1[3], v2[3], v3[3]; v1[0] = current_model[vertex_index - 3].x; v1[1] = current_model[vertex_index - 3].y; v1[2] = current_model[vertex_index - 3].z; v2[0] = current_model[vertex_index - 2].x; v2[1] = current_model[vertex_index - 2].y; v2[2] = current_model[vertex_index - 2].z; v3[0] = current_model[vertex_index - 1].x; v3[1] = current_model[vertex_index - 1].y; v3[2] = current_model[vertex_index - 1].z; collision_model->addTriangle(v1,v2,v3);

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• Know your Data Lineage

  - by Simon Elliston Ball

  An academic paper without the footnotes isn’t an academic paper. Journalists wouldn’t base a news article on facts that they can’t verify. So why would anyone publish reports without being able to say where the data has come from and be confident of its quality, in other words, without knowing its lineage. (sometimes referred to as ‘provenance’ or ‘pedigree’) The number and variety of data sources, both traditional and new, increases inexorably. Data comes clean or dirty, processed or raw, unimpeachable or entirely fabricated. On its journey to our report, from its source, the data can travel through a network of interconnected pipes, passing through numerous distinct systems, each managed by different people. At each point along the pipeline, it can be changed, filtered, aggregated and combined. When the data finally emerges, how can we be sure that it is right? How can we be certain that no part of the data collection was based on incorrect assumptions, that key data points haven’t been left out, or that the sources are good? Even when we’re using data science to give us an approximate or probable answer, we cannot have any confidence in the results without confidence in the data from which it came. You need to know what has been done to your data, where it came from, and who is responsible for each stage of the analysis. This information represents your data lineage; it is your stack-trace. If you’re an analyst, suspicious of a number, it tells you why the number is there and how it got there. If you’re a developer, working on a pipeline, it provides the context you need to track down the bug. If you’re a manager, or an auditor, it lets you know the right things are being done. Lineage tracking is part of good data governance. Most audit and lineage systems require you to buy into their whole structure. If you are using Hadoop for your data storage and processing, then tools like Falcon allow you to track lineage, as long as you are using Falcon to write and run the pipeline. It can mean learning a new way of running your jobs (or using some sort of proxy), and even a distinct way of writing your queries. Other Hadoop tools provide a lot of operational and audit information, spread throughout the many logs produced by Hive, Sqoop, MapReduce and all the various moving parts that make up the eco-system. To get a full picture of what’s going on in your Hadoop system you need to capture both Falcon lineage and the data-exhaust of other tools that Falcon can’t orchestrate. However, the problem is bigger even that that. Often, Hadoop is just one piece in a larger processing workflow. The next step of the challenge is how you bind together the lineage metadata describing what happened before and after Hadoop, where ‘after’ could be  a data analysis environment like R, an application, or even directly into an end-user tool such as Tableau or Excel. One possibility is to push as much as you can of your key analytics into Hadoop, but would you give up the power, and familiarity of your existing tools in return for a reliable way of tracking lineage? Lineage and auditing should work consistently, automatically and quietly, allowing users to access their data with any tool they require to use. The real solution, therefore, is to create a consistent method by which to bring lineage data from these data various disparate sources into the data analysis platform that you use, rather than being forced to use the tool that manages the pipeline for the lineage and a different tool for the data analysis. The key is to keep your logs, keep your audit data, from every source, bring them together and use the data analysis tools to trace the paths from raw data to the answer that data analysis provides.

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• Best approach to depth streaming via existing codec

  - by Kevin

  I'm working on a development system (and game) intended for games set mostly in static third-person views. We produce our scenery by CG and photographic techniques. Our background art is rendered off-line by a production-grade renderer. To allow the runtime imagery to properly interact with the background art, I wrote a program to convert from depth output by Mental Ray into a texture, and a pixel shader to draw a quad such that the Z data comes from the texture. This technique is working out very well, but now we've decided that some of the camera angle changes between scenes should be animated. The animation itself is straightforward to produce from our CG models. We intend to encode it to some HD video codec such as H.264. The problem is that in order to maintain our runtime imagery on the screen, the depth buffer will need to be loaded for each video frame. Due to the bandwidth, the video's depth data will need to be compressed efficiently. I've looked into methods for performing temporal compression of depth info and found an interesting research paper here: http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.kautz/publications/depth-streaming.pdf The method establishes a mapping between 16-bit depth values and YCbCr values. The mapping is tuned to the properties of existing video codecs in order to maximize precision of the decoded depths after the YCbCr has undergone video compression. It allows an existing, unmodified video codec to be used on the backend. I'm looking at how to pull this off with the least possible work. (This design change was unplanned.) Our game engine itself is native C++, presently for Win32 and DirectX, although we've worked hard to keep platform dependence segregated because we intend other ports. We don't have motion video facilities in the engine yet but will ultimately need that anyway for cinematics. I was planning on using some off-the-shelf motion video solution we can plug into our engine, and haven't chosen one yet. This new added requirement makes selecting one harder since, among other things, we'll now need to bypass colourspace conversion on one of the streams, and also will need to be playing two streams simultaneously in lockstep, on top of in some cases audio on one of them (for the cinematics). I'm also wondering if it's possible (or even useful) to do the conversion from YCbCr to depth in a pixel shader, or if it's better to just do it in CPU and separately load the resulting depth values into a locked tex. The conversion unfortunately does involve branching logic per-pixel. (There are more naive mappings that don't need branching, but they produce inferior results.) It could be reduced to a table lookup but the table would be 32MB. Programming is second-nature to me but I'm not that experienced with pix shaders and have zero knowledge of off-the-shelf video solutions. I'd therefore be interested in advice from others who may have dealt more with depth streaming, pixel shaders, and/or off-the-shelf codecs, regarding how feasible the proposed application is and what off-the-shelf video systems out there would best get along with this usage case.

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• Would this be a good web application architecture?

  - by Gustav Bertram

  My problem Our MVC based framework does not allow us to cache only part of our output. Ideally we want to cahce static and semi-static bits, and run dynamic bits. In addition, we need to consider data caching that reacts to database changes. My idea The concept I came up with was to represent a page as a tree of XML fragment objects. (I say XML, but I mean XHTML). Some of the fragments are dynamic, and can pull their data directly from models or other sources, but most of the fragments are static scaffolding. If a subtree of fragments is completely static, then I imagine that they could unfold into pure XML that would then be cached as the text representation of their parent element. This process would ideally continue until we are left with a root element that contains all of the static XML, and has a couple of dynamic XML fragments that are resolved and attached to the relevant nodes of the XML tree just before the page is displayed. In addition to separating content into dynamic and static fragments, some fragments could be dynamic and cached. A simple expiry time which propagates up through the XML fragment tree would indicate that a specific fragment should periodically be refreshed. A newspaper section or front page does not need to be updated each second. Minutes or sometimes even longer is sufficient. Other fragments would be dynamic and uncached. Typically too many articles are viewed for them to be cached - the cache would overflow. Some individual articles may be cached if they are extremely popular. Functional notes The folding mechanism could be to be smart enough to judge when it would be more profitable to fold a dynamic cached fragment and propagate the expiry date to the parent fragment, or to keep it separate and simple attach to the XML tree when resolving the page. If some dynamic cached fragments are associated to database objects through mechanisms like a globally unique content id, then changes to the database could trigger changes to the output cache. If fragments store the identifiers of parent fragments, then they could trigger a refolding process that would then include the updated data. A set of pure XML with an ordered array of fragment objects (that each store the identifying information of the node to which they should be attached), can be resolved in a fairly simple way by walking the XML tree, and merging the data from the fragments. Because it is not necessary to parse and construct the entire tree in memory before attaching nodes, processing should be fairly fast. The identifiers of each fragment would be a combination of relevant identity data and the type of fragment object. Cached parent fragments would contain references to these identifiers, in order to then either pull them from the fragment cache, or to run their code. The controller's responsibility is reduced to making changes to the database, and telling the root XML fragment object to render itself. The Question My question has two parts: Is this a good design? Are there any obvious flaws I'm missing? Has somebody else thought of this before? References? Is there an existing alternative that I should consider? A cool templating engine maybe?

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• ARTS Reference Model for Retail

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  Consider a hypothetical scenario where you have been tasked to set up retail operations for a electronic goods or daily consumables or a luxury brand etc. It is very likely you will be faced with the following questions: What are the essential business capabilities that you must have in place?  What are the essential business activities under-pinning each of the business capabilities, identified in Step 1? What are the set of steps that you need to perform to execute each of the business activities, identified in Step 2? Answers to the above will drive your investments in software and hardware to enable the core retail operations. More importantly, the choices you make in responding to the above questions will several implications in the short-run and in the long-run. In the short-term, you will incur the time and cost of defining your technology requirements, procuring the software/hardware components and getting them up and running. In the long-term, as you grow in operations organically or through M&A, partnerships and franchiser business models  you will invariably need to make more technology investments to manage the greater complexity (scale and scope) of business operations.  "As new software applications, such as time & attendance, labor scheduling, and POS transactions, just to mention a few, are introduced into the store environment, it takes a disproportionate amount of time and effort to integrate them with existing store applications. These integration projects can add up to 50 percent to the time needed to implement a new software application and contribute significantly to the cost of the overall project, particularly if a systems integrator is called in. This has been the reality that all retailers have had to live with over the last two decades. The effect of the environment has not only been to increase costs, but also to limit retailers' ability to implement change and the speed with which they can do so." (excerpt taken from here) Now, one would think a lot of retailers would have already gone through the pain of finding answers to these questions, so why re-invent the wheel? Precisely so, a major effort began almost 17 years ago in the retail industry to make it less expensive and less difficult to deploy new technology in stores and at the retail enterprise level. This effort is called the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS). Without standards such as those defined by ARTS, you would very likely end up experiencing the following: Increased Time and Cost due to resource wastage arising from re-inventing the wheel i.e. re-creating vanilla processes from scratch, and incurring, otherwise avoidable, mistakes and errors by ignoring experience of others Sub-optimal Process Efficiency due to narrow, isolated view of processes thereby ignoring process inter-dependencies i.e. optimizing parts but not the whole, and resulting in lack of transparency and inter-departmental finger-pointing Embracing ARTS standards as a blue-print for establishing or managing or streamlining your retail operations can benefit you in the following ways: Improved Time-to-Market from parity with industry best-practice processes e.g. ARTS, thus avoiding “reinventing the wheel” for common retail processes and focusing more on customizing processes for differentiations, and lowering integration complexity and risk with a standardized vocabulary for exchange between internal and external i.e. partner systems Lower Operating Costs by embracing the ARTS enterprise-wide process reference model for developing and streamlining retail operations holistically instead of a narrow, silo-ed view, and  procuring IT systems in compliance with ARTS thus avoiding IT budget marginalization While parity with industry standards such as ARTS business process model by itself does not create a differentiation, it does however provide a higher starting point for bridging the strategy-execution gap in setting up and improving retail operations.

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• My shiny new gadget

  - by TechTwaddle

  About 3 months ago when I had tweeted (or twit?) that the HD7 could be my next phone I wasn’t a 100 percent sure, and when the HTC Mozart came out it was switch at first sight. I wanted to buy the Mozart mainly for three reasons; its unibody construction, smaller screen and the SLCD display. But now, holding a HD7 in my hand, I reminisce and think about how fate had its own plan. Too dramatic for a piece of gadget? Well, sort of, but seriously, this has been most exciting. So in short, I bought myself a HTC HD7 and am really loving it so far. Here are some pics (taken from my HD2 which now lies in a corner, crying),     Most of my day was spent setting up the device. Email accounts, Facebook, Marketplace etc. Since marketplace isn’t officially launched in India yet, my primary live id did not work. Whenever I tried launching marketplace it would say ‘marketplace is not currently supported in your country’. Searching the forums I found an easy work around. Just create a dummy live id with the country set to UK or US and log in to the device using this id. I was worried if the contacts and feeds from my primary live account would not be updated but that was not a problem. Adding another live account into the device does import your contacts, calendar and feeds from it. And that’s it, marketplace now works perfectly. I installed a few trial and free applications; haven’t checked if I can purchase apps though, will check that later and update this post. There is one issue I am still facing with the device, I can’t access the internet over GPRS. Windows Phone 7 only gives you the option to add an ‘APN’ and nothing else. Checking the connection settings on my HD2, I found out that there is also a proxy server I need to add to access GPRS, but so far I haven’t found a way to do that on WP7. Ideally HTC should have taken care of this, detect the operator and apply that operators settings on the device, but looks like that’s not happening. I also tried the ‘Connection Settings’ application that HTC bundled with the device, but it did nothing magical. If you’re reading this and know how to fix this problem please leave a comment. The next thing I did is install apps, a lot of apps. Read Engadget’s guide to essential apps for WP7. The apps and games I installed so far include Beezz (twitter app with push notifications), twitter (the official twitter app), Facebook, Youtube, NFS Undercover, Rocket Riot, Krashlander, Unite and the list goes on. All the apps run super smooth. The display looks fine indoors but I know it’s going to suck in bright sunlight. Anyhow, I am really impressed with what I’ve seen so far. I leave you with a few more photos. Have a great year ahead. Ciao!

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• Approach for packing 2D shapes while minimizing total enclosing area

  - by Dennis

  Not sure on my tags for this question, but in short .... I need to solve a problem of packing industrial parts into crates while minimizing total containing area. These parts are motors, or pumps, or custom-made components, and they have quite unusual shapes. For some, it may be possible to assume that a part === rectangular cuboid, but some are not so simple, i.e. they assume a shape more of that of a hammer or letter T. With those, (assuming 2D shape), by alternating direction of top & bottom, one can pack more objects into the same space, than if all tops were in the same direction. Crude example below with letter "T"-shaped parts: ***** xxxxx ***** x ***** *** ooo * x vs * x vs * x vs * x o * x * xxxxx * x * x o xxxxx xxx Right now we are solving the problem by something like this: using CAD software, make actual models of how things fit in crate boxes make estimates of actual crate dimensions & write them into Excel file (1) is crazy amount of work and as the result we have just a limited amount of possible entries in (2), the Excel file. The good things is that programming this is relatively easy. Given a combination of products to go into crates, we do a lookup, and if entry exists in the Excel (or Database), we bring it out. If it doesn't, we say "sorry, no data!". I don't necessarily want to go full force on making up some crazy algorithm that given geometrical part description can align, rotate, and figure out best part packing into a crate, given its shape, but maybe I do.. Question Well, here is my question: assuming that I can represent my parts as 2D (to be determined how), and that some parts look like letter T, and some parts look like rectangles, which algorithm can I use to give me a good estimate on the dimensions of the encompassing area, while ensuring that the parts are packed in a minimal possible area, to minimize crating/shipping costs? Are there approximation algorithms? Seeing how this can get complex, is there an existing library I could use? My thought / Approach My naive approach would be to define a way to describe position of parts, and place the first part, compute total enclosing area & dimensions. Then place 2nd part in 0 degree orientation, repeat, place it at 180 degree orientation, repeat (for my case I don't think 90 degree rotations will be meaningful due to long lengths of parts). Proceed using brute force "tacking on" other parts to the enclosing area until all parts are processed. I may have to shift some parts a tad (see 3rd pictorial example above with letters T). This adds a layer of 2D complexity rather than 1D. I am not sure how to approach this. One idea I have is genetic algorithms, but I think those will take up too much processing power and time. I will need to look out for shape collisions, as well as adding extra padding space, since we are talking about real parts with irregularities rather than perfect imaginary blocks. I'm afraid this can get geometrically messy fairly fast, and I'd rather keep things simple, if I can. But what if the best (practical) solution is to pack things into different crate boxes rather than just one? This can get a bit more tricky. There is human element involved as well, i.e. like parts can go into same box and are thus a constraint to be considered. Some parts that are not the same are sometimes grouped together for shipping and can be considered as a common grouped item. Sometimes customers want things shipped their way, which adds human element to constraints. so there will have to be some customization.

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• New PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 On Demand Standard Edition provides a complete set of IT services at a low, predictable monthly cost

  - by Robbin Velayedam

  At Oracle Open World last month, Oracle announced that we are extending our On Demand offerings with the general availability of PeopleSoft On Demand Standard Edition. Standard Edition represents Oracle’s commitment to providing customers a choice of solutions, technology, and deployment options commensurate with their business needs and future growth. The Standard Edition offering complements the traditional On Demand offerings (Enterprise and Professional Editions) by focusing on a low, predictable monthly cost model that scales with the size of your business.   As part of Oracle's open cloud strategy, customers can freely move PeopleSoft licensed applications between on premise and the various  on demand options as business needs arise.    In today’s business climate, aggressive and creative business objectives demand more of IT organizations. They are expected to provide technology-based solutions to streamline business processes, enable online collaboration and multi-tasking, facilitate data mining and storage, and enhance worker productivity. As IT budgets remain tight in a recovering economy, the challenge becomes how to meet these demands with limited time and resources. One way is to eliminate the variable costs of projects so that your team can focus on the high priority functions and better predict funding and resource needs two to three years out. Variable costs and changing priorities can derail the best laid project and capacity plans. The prime culprits of variable costs in any IT organization include disaster recovery, security breaches, technical support, and changes in business growth and priorities. Customers have an immediate need for solutions that are cheaper, predictable in cost, and flexible enough for long-term growth or capacity changes. The Standard Edition deployment option fulfills that need by allowing customers to take full advantage of the rich business functionality that is inherent to PeopleSoft HCM, while delegating all application management responsibility – such as future upgrades and product updates – to Oracle technology experts, at an affordable and expected price. Standard Edition provides the advantages of the secure Oracle On Demand hosted environment, the complete set of PeopleSoft HCM configurable business processes, and timely management of regular updates and enhancements to the application functionality and underlying technology. Standard Edition has a convenient monthly fee that is scalable by number of employees, which helps align the customer’s overall cost of ownership with its size and anticipated growth and business needs. In addition to providing PeopleSoft HCM applications' world class business functionality and Oracle On Demand's embassy-grade security, Oracle’s hosted solution distinguishes itself from competitors by offering customers the ability to transition between different deployment and service models at any point in the application ownership lifecycle. As our customers’ business and economic climates change, they are free to transition their applications back to on-premise at any time. HCM On Demand Standard Edition is based on configurability options rather than customizations, requiring no additional code to develop or maintain. This keeps the cost of ownership low and time to production less than a month on average. Oracle On Demand offers the highest standard of security and performance by leveraging a state-of-the-art data center with dedicated databases, servers, and secured URL all within a private cloud. Customers will not share databases, environments, platforms, or access portals with other customers because we value how mission critical your data are to your business. Oracle’s On Demand also provides a full breadth of disaster recovery services to provide customers the peace of mind that their data are secure and that backup operations are in place to keep their businesses up and running in the case of an emergency. Currently we have over 50 PeopleSoft customers delegating us with the management of their applications through Oracle On Demand. If you are a customer interested in learning more about the PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Standard Edition and how it can help your organization minimize your variable IT costs and free up your resources to work on other business initiatives, contact Oracle or your Account Services Representative today.

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• 4 Key Ingredients for the Cloud

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  It's a short week here with the US Thanksgiving Holiday. So, before we put on our stretch pants and get ready to belly up to the dinner table for turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes, let's spend a little time this week talking about the Cloud (kind of like the feathery whipped goodness that tops the infamous Thanksgiving pumpkin pie!) But before we dive into the Cloud, let's do a side by side comparison of the key ingredients for each. Cloud Whipped Cream  Application Integration  1 cup heavy cream  Security  1/4 cup sugar  Virtual I/O  1 teaspoon vanilla  Storage  Chilled Bowl It’s no secret that millions of people are connected to the Internet. And it also probably doesn’t come as a surprise that a lot of those people are connected on social networking sites.  Social networks have become an excellent platform for sharing and communication that reflects real world relationships and they play a major part in the everyday lives of many people. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and hundreds of others have transformed the way we interact and communicate with one another.Social networks are becoming more than just an online gathering of friends. They are becoming a destination for ideation, e-commerce, and marketing. But it doesn’t just stop there. Some organizations are utilizing social networks internally, integrated with their business applications and processes and the possibility of social media and cloud integration is compelling. Forrester alone estimates enterprise cloud computing to grow to over $240 billion by 2020. It’s hard to find any current IT project today that is NOT considering cloud-based deployments. Security and quality of service concerns are no longer at the forefront; rather, it’s about focusing on the right mix of capabilities for the business. Cloud vs. On-Premise? Policies & governance models? Social in the cloud? Cloud’s increasing sophistication, security in applications, mobility, transaction processing and social capabilities make it an attractive way to manage information. And Oracle offers all of this through the Oracle Cloud and Oracle Social Network. Oracle Social Network is a secure private network that provides a broad range of social tools designed to capture and preserve information flowing between people, enterprise applications, and business processes. By connecting you with your most critical applications, Oracle Social Network provides contextual, real-time communication within and across enterprises. With Oracle Social Network, you and your teams have the tools you need to collaborate quickly and efficiently, while leveraging the organization’s collective expertise to make informed decisions and drive business forward. Oracle Social Network is available as part of a portfolio of application and platform services within the Oracle Cloud. Oracle Cloud offers self-service business applications delivered on an integrated development and deployment platform with tools to rapidly extend and create new services. Oracle Social Network is pre-integrated with the Fusion CRM Cloud Service and the Fusion HCM Cloud Service within the Oracle Cloud. If you are looking for something to watch as you veg on the couch in a post-turkey dinner hangover, you might consider watching these how-to videos! And yes, it is perfectly ok to have that 2nd piece of pie

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• How do you deal with poor management [closed]

  - by Sybiam

  I come from a company where during a project, we saw the client 3 time during the whole project. We were never informed when did the client came in office in order to discuss with him about his requirements. I did setup redmine and told them that if they have any request they can post an issue there. But they never really used redmine to publish anything. They would instead: harass a team member on the phone at any time of the day or night hand us over sheets of paper with new requests or changes hand us over new design (graphical) They requested how much time it would take us to finish the project, I gave them a date and a week to test everything and deployment. I calculated that time taking into account the current features we had to do. And then blamed us that our deadline was wrong and that we lied. But the truth is that one week before that deadline they added a couple of monster feature from nowhere and that week were we were supposed to test and deploy, my friends spent all day in the office changing all little things. After that project, my friend got some kind of depression and got scared everytime his phone rang. They kind of used him as a communication proxy. After that project of hell, (every body got pissed off on that project) as far as I know the designer who was working with us left work after that project and she had some kind of issue too with managers. My team also started looking for work somewhere else. At first I tried to get things straight with management, I tried to make a meeting to discuss about the communication issues and so on.. What really pissed me off and made me leave that job for good is the following. Me: "We have to discuss about what went wrong on the last project. It's quite important" Him: "Lets talk about it in a week or two. Just make a list of all the things you did wrong" Me: "We already have a new project and we want to prevent what happened on the last project to happen again" Him: "Just do it and well have our meeting in a week, make a list of all the thing you did wrong." It kind of ended there then he organized a meeting at a moment I wasn't unable to come. My friend discussed with him and tried to explained him that we really had to discuss about organization issue on how to manage a project. And his answer was pretty much: "During the meeting I don't want to ear how you want to us to manage a project but I want to know what you guys did wrong" After that I felt it wasn't even worth it discussing anything since they weren't even ready listening to us. Found a new job and I'm pretty happy with my choice. I'd like to know how you'd handle such situation. Is there anything to do to solve communication problem? After that project my friend got a depression and some other employee had their down too as far as I know. I wonder what else we can do other than leave these place as soon as possible. Feel sad for the people that are still there and get screamed at just because they need money in order to eat and finding an other job like that isn't that easy. note I died a little when our boss asked us to make a list of things we (programmers) did wrong. This is probably the stupidest request I ever got. If everybody thinks they did everything right, it doesn't mean that there is no problems. Individual problem are rarely the big issue. Colleagues help each others and solve theses issues to prevent problems.

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• Html.ValidationSummary and Multiple Forms

  - by MightyZot

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/MightyZot/archive/2013/11/11/html.validationsummary-and-multiple-forms.aspxThe Html.ValidationSummary helper writes a div with a list of general errors added to the model state while a request is being serviced. There is generally one form per view or partial view, I think, so often there is only one call to Html.ValidationSummary in the page resulting from the assembly of your views. And, consequently, there is no problem with the markup that Html.ValidationSummary spits out as a result. What if you want to put multiple forms in one view? Even if you create a view model that’s an aggregate of the view models for each form, the error validation summary is going to contain errors from both forms. Check out this screen shot, which shows a page with multiple forms. Notice how the error validation summary shows up twice. Grrr! Errors for the login form also show up in the registration form. Luckily, there is an easy way around this. Pull the errors out of the model state and separate them for each form. You’ll need to identify the appropriate form by setting the key when you make calls to ModelState.AddModelError. Assume in my example that errors for the login form are added to model state using the “LoginForm” key. And, likewise, assume that errors for the registration form are added to model state using the “RegistrationForm” key. An example of that might look like this… // If we got this far, something failed, redisplay form ModelState.AddModelError("LoginForm", "User name or password is not right..."); return View(model); Over in the code for your View, you can pull each form’s errors from the model state using lambda expressions that look like these… var LoginFormErrors = ViewData.ModelState.Where(ms => ms.Key == "LoginForm"); var RegistrationFormErrors = ViewData.ModelState.Where(ms => ms.Key == "RegistrationForm"); Now that you have two collections containing errors, you can display only the errors specific to each form. I’m doing that in my code by removing the calls to Html.ValidationSummary and replacing them with enumerators that look like this… if(LoginFormErrors.Count() > 0) { <div class="cdt-error-list">     <ul>     @foreach (var entry in LoginFormErrors)     {         foreach (var error in entry.Value.Errors)         {             <li>@error.ErrorMessage</li>         }     }     </ul> </div> } …and for the registration form, the code looks like this… @if(RegistrationFormErrors.Count() > 0) { <div class="cdt-error-list">     <ul>     @foreach (var entry in RegistrationFormErrors)     {         foreach (var error in entry.Value.Errors)         {             <li>@error.ErrorMessage</li>         }     }     </ul> </div> } The result is a nice clean separation of the list of errors that are specific to each form. And, this is important because each form is submitted separately in my case, so both forms don’t generate errors in the same context. As you’ll see in the screen shot below, errors added to the model state when the login form is submitted do not show up in the registration form’s validation summary.

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• HLSL Shader not working right?

  - by dvds414

  Okay so I have this shader for ambient occlusion. It loads to world correctly, but it just shows all the models as being white. I do not know why. I am just running the shader while the model is rendering, is that correct? or do I need to make a render target or something? if so then how? I'm using C++. Here is my shader. float sampleRadius; float distanceScale; float4x4 xProjection; float4x4 xView; float4x4 xWorld; float3 cornerFustrum; struct VS_OUTPUT { float4 pos : POSITION; float2 TexCoord : TEXCOORD0; float3 viewDirection : TEXCOORD1; }; VS_OUTPUT VertexShaderFunction( float4 Position : POSITION, float2 TexCoord : TEXCOORD0) { VS_OUTPUT Out = (VS_OUTPUT)0; float4 WorldPosition = mul(Position, xWorld); float4 ViewPosition = mul(WorldPosition, xView); Out.pos = mul(ViewPosition, xProjection); Position.xy = sign(Position.xy); Out.TexCoord = (float2(Position.x, -Position.y) + float2( 1.0f, 1.0f ) ) * 0.5f; float3 corner = float3(-cornerFustrum.x * Position.x, cornerFustrum.y * Position.y, cornerFustrum.z); Out.viewDirection = corner; return Out; } texture depthTexture; texture randomTexture; sampler2D depthSampler = sampler_state { Texture = <depthTexture>; ADDRESSU = CLAMP; ADDRESSV = CLAMP; MAGFILTER = LINEAR; MINFILTER = LINEAR; }; sampler2D RandNormal = sampler_state { Texture = <randomTexture>; ADDRESSU = WRAP; ADDRESSV = WRAP; MAGFILTER = LINEAR; MINFILTER = LINEAR; }; float4 PixelShaderFunction(VS_OUTPUT IN) : COLOR0 { float4 samples[16] = { float4(0.355512, -0.709318, -0.102371, 0.0 ), float4(0.534186, 0.71511, -0.115167, 0.0 ), float4(-0.87866, 0.157139, -0.115167, 0.0 ), float4(0.140679, -0.475516, -0.0639818, 0.0 ), float4(-0.0796121, 0.158842, -0.677075, 0.0 ), float4(-0.0759516, -0.101676, -0.483625, 0.0 ), float4(0.12493, -0.0223423, -0.483625, 0.0 ), float4(-0.0720074, 0.243395, -0.967251, 0.0 ), float4(-0.207641, 0.414286, 0.187755, 0.0 ), float4(-0.277332, -0.371262, 0.187755, 0.0 ), float4(0.63864, -0.114214, 0.262857, 0.0 ), float4(-0.184051, 0.622119, 0.262857, 0.0 ), float4(0.110007, -0.219486, 0.435574, 0.0 ), float4(0.235085, 0.314707, 0.696918, 0.0 ), float4(-0.290012, 0.0518654, 0.522688, 0.0 ), float4(0.0975089, -0.329594, 0.609803, 0.0 ) }; IN.TexCoord.x += 1.0/1600.0; IN.TexCoord.y += 1.0/1200.0; normalize (IN.viewDirection); float depth = tex2D(depthSampler, IN.TexCoord).a; float3 se = depth * IN.viewDirection; float3 randNormal = tex2D( RandNormal, IN.TexCoord * 200.0 ).rgb; float3 normal = tex2D(depthSampler, IN.TexCoord).rgb; float finalColor = 0.0f; for (int i = 0; i < 16; i++) { float3 ray = reflect(samples[i].xyz,randNormal) * sampleRadius; //if (dot(ray, normal) < 0) // ray += normal * sampleRadius; float4 sample = float4(se + ray, 1.0f); float4 ss = mul(sample, xProjection); float2 sampleTexCoord = 0.5f * ss.xy/ss.w + float2(0.5f, 0.5f); sampleTexCoord.x += 1.0/1600.0; sampleTexCoord.y += 1.0/1200.0; float sampleDepth = tex2D(depthSampler, sampleTexCoord).a; if (sampleDepth == 1.0) { finalColor ++; } else { float occlusion = distanceScale* max(sampleDepth - depth, 0.0f); finalColor += 1.0f / (1.0f + occlusion * occlusion * 0.1); } } return float4(finalColor/16, finalColor/16, finalColor/16, 1.0f); } technique SSAO { pass P0 { VertexShader = compile vs_3_0 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_3_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } }

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