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• Spotlight on an office - Denmark

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  Hi, my name is Michael. I work as an Intern at the Danish office in Ballerup. My job is a part-time position beside my bachelor study in International Business at Copenhagen Business School. I joined Oracle end of February last year, and what a thrilling ride it has been! Last year, when I was offered the position, there was no doubt that I wanted to go for it. Back then, I only had little idea about Oracle as a company and what kind of exciting assignments lay ahead of me. My main role is internal communications, i.e. editor of a monthly employee’s news letter; Newszone. It is an interesting task, since it requires that I am updated on the different activities that take place within the Oracle Denmark office. I try to bring interesting articles, which are relevant and interesting news to my colleagues and it allows me to interact with many different persons at the office and to learn from their experience, which give me great inspiration and ideas for the magazine. Besides being the editor of Newszone, I also make sure that other communication flow freely at the Oracle Denmark office. I do this through our LCD screen channels. I update the internal channel with the latest information and important messages for employees, and on the external channel I circulate marketing videos featuring Oracle products and customer reference stories. In addition to this, I have the responsibility acting as a content manager of the Local Communication Denmark site on MyOracle (UCM). These are more or less my usual work assignments. On top of these I take care of various ad hoc assignments such as updating the GCM database, renew newspaper subscriptions etc. The Oracle Denmark office Being part of the local employees club I also assist with arranging social events outside working hours – e.g. evenings at the theater or cinema or by attending many of the sportsactivities;such as our running club, cycling club, food club and book club. These activities have indeed helped me grow my personal network within Oracle.  The office is packed with engaging, high-paced and motivated people who manage to take time off to spend a day attending Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, one of them being GVD (Global Volunteer Day) with approximately 40 employees attending. This proofs some of the social responsible aspects of Oracle. I was positively surprised on how the office (named O-Zone) is designed. The office is designed into three distinct zones, namely Call zone, Project and Dialogue zone and Quiet zone, having different working environments for different job roles. The other thing which I like is that you do not have your own desk, which means you get to sit next to different people every day, getting new ideas and inspiration as well as getting to know more people in the organization you work in. To sum up: If you are considering pursuing an intern or a career after graduation in Oracle, do it! You will not regret it. It has given me many relevant practical experiences beside my study, and I am sure many great experiences will await you too.   Want to know more about the current vacancies in Denmark? Check http://campus.oracle.com for all of our vacancies.

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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part II

  - by Tara Kizer

  I arrived in Seattle last Monday afternoon to attend PASS Summit 2011.  I had really wanted to attend Gail Shaw’s (blog|twitter) and Grant Fritchey’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar “All About Execution Plans” on Monday, but that would have meant flying out on Sunday which I couldn’t do.  On Tuesday, I attended Allan Hirt’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar entitled “A Deep Dive into AlwaysOn: Failover Clustering and Availability Groups”.  Allan is a great speaker, and his seminar was packed with demos and information about AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2012.  Unfortunately, I have lost my notes from this seminar and the presentation materials are only available on the pre-con DVD.  Hmpf! On Wednesday, I attended Gail Shaw’s “Bad Plan! Sit!”, Andrew Kelly’s (blog|twitter) “SQL 2008 Query Statistics”, Dan Jones’ (blog|twitter) “Improving your PowerShell Productivity”, and Brent Ozar’s (blog|twitter) “BLITZ! The SQL – More One Hour SQL Server Takeovers”.  In Gail’s session, she went over how to fix bad plans and bad query patterns.  Update your stale statistics! How to fix bad plans Use local variables – optimizer can’t sniff it, so it’ll optimize for “average” value Use RECOMPILE (at the query or stored procedure level) – CPU hit OPTIMIZE FOR hint – most common value you’ll pass How to fix bad query patterns Don’t use them – ha! Catch-all queries Use dynamic SQL OPTION (RECOMPILE) Multiple execution paths Split into multiple stored procedures OPTION (RECOMPILE) Modifying parameter values Use local variables Split into outer and inner procedure OPTION (RECOMPILE) She also went into “last resort” and “very last resort” options, but those are risky unless you know what you are doing.  For the average Joe, she wouldn’t recommend these.  Examples are query hints and plan guides. While I enjoyed Andrew’s session, I didn’t take any notes as it was familiar material.  Andrew is a great speaker though, and I’d highly recommend attending his sessions in the future. Next up was Dan’s PowerShell session.  I need to look into profiles, manifests, function modules, and function import scripts more as I just didn’t quite grasp these concepts.  I am attending a PowerShell training class at the end of November, so maybe that’ll help clear it up.  I really enjoyed the Excel integration demo.  It was very cool watching PowerShell build the spreadsheet in real-time.  I must look into this more!  On a side note, I am jealous of Dan’s hair.  Fabulous hair! Brent’s session showed us how to quickly gather information about a server that you will be taking over database administration duties for.  He wrote a script to do a fast health check and then later wrapped it into a stored procedure, sp_Blitz.  I can’t wait to use this at my work even on systems where I’ve been the primary DBA for years, maybe there’s something I’ve overlooked.  We are using EPM to help standardize our environment and uncover problems, but sp_Blitz will definitely still help us out.  He even provides a cloud-based update feature, sp_BlitzUpdate, for sp_Blitz so you don’t have to constantly update it when he makes a change.  I think I’ll utilize his update code for some other challenges that we face at my work.

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• Analytics in an Omni-Channel World

  - by David Dorf

  Retail has been around ever since mankind started bartering.  The earliest transactions were very specific to the individuals buying and selling, then someone had the bright idea to open a store.  Those transactions were a little more generic, but the store owner still knew his customers and what they wanted.  As the chains rolled out, customer intimacy was sacrificed for scale, and retailers began to rely on segments and clusters.  But thanks to the widespread availability of data and the technology to convert said data into information, retailers are getting back to details. The retail industry is following a maturity model for analytics that is has progressed through five stages, each delivering more value than the previous. Store Analytics Brick-and-mortar retailers (and pure-play catalogers as well) that collect anonymous basket-level data are able to get some sense of demand to help with allocation decisions.  Promotions and foot-traffic can be measured to understand marketing effectiveness and perhaps focus groups can help test ideas.  But decisions are influenced by the majority, using faceless customer segments and aggregated industry data points.  Loyalty programs help a little, but in many cases the cost outweighs the benefits. Web Analytics The Web made it much easier to collect data on specific, yet still anonymous consumers using cookies to track visits. Clickstreams and product searches are analyzed to understand the purchase journey, gauge demand, and better understand up-selling opportunities.  Personalization begins to allow retailers target market consumers with recommendations. Cross-Channel Analytics This phase is a minor one, but where most retailers probably sit today.  They are able to use information from one channel to bolster activities in another. However, there are technical challenges combining data silos so its not an easy task.  But for those retailers that are able to perform analytics on both sources of data, the pay-off is pretty nice.  Revenue per customer begins to go up as customers have a better brand experience. Mobile & Social Analytics Big data technologies are enabling a 360-degree view of the customer by incorporating psychographic data from social sites alongside traditional demographic data.  Retailers can track individual preferences, opinions, hobbies, etc. in order to understand a consumer's motivations.  Using mobile devices, consumers can interact with brands anywhere, anytime, accessing deep product information and reviews.  Mobile, combined with a loyalty program, presents an opportunity to put shopping into geographic context, understanding paths to the store, patterns within the store, and be an always-on advertising conduit. Omni-Channel Analytics All this data along with the proper technology represents a new paradigm in which the clock is turned back and retail becomes very personal once again.  Rich, individualized data better illuminates demand, allows for highly localized assortments, and helps tailor up-selling.  Interactions with all channels help build an accurate profile of each consumer, and allows retailers to tailor the retail experience to meet the heightened expectations of today's sophisticated shopper.  And of course this culminates in greater customer satisfaction and business profitability.

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• Things I've noticed with DVCS

  - by Wes McClure

  Things I encourage: Frequent local commits This way you don't have to be bothered by changes others are making to the central repository while working on a handful of related tasks.  It's a good idea to try to work on one task at a time and commit all changes at partitioned stopping points.  A local commit doesn't have to build, just FYI, so a stopping point doesn't mean a build point nor a point that you can push centrally.  There should be several of these in any given day.  2 hours is a good indicator that you might not be leveraging the power of frequent local commits.  Once you have verified a set of changes works, save them away, otherwise run the risk of introducing bugs into it when working on the next task.  The notion of a task By task I mean a related set of changes that can be completed in a few hours or less.  In the same token don’t make your tasks so small that critically related changes aren’t grouped together.  Use your intuition and the rest of these principles and I think you will find what is comfortable for you. Partial commits Sometimes one task explodes or unknowingly encompasses other tasks, at this point, try to get to a stopping point on part of the work you are doing and commit it so you can get that out of the way to focus on the remainder.  This will often entail committing part of the work and continuing on the rest. Outstanding changes as a guide If you don't commit often it might mean you are not leveraging your version control history to help guide your work.  It's a great way to see what has changed and might be causing problems.  The longer you wait, the more that has changed and the harder it is to test/debug what your changes are doing! This is a reason why I am so picky about my VCS tools on the client side and why I talk a lot about the quality of a diff tool and the ability to integrate that with a simple view of everything that has changed.  This is why I love using TortoiseHg and SmartGit: they show changed files, a diff (or two way diff with SmartGit) of the current selected file and a commit message all in one window that I keep maximized on one monitor at all times. Throw away / stash commits There is extreme value in being able to throw away a commit (or stash it) that is getting out of hand.  If you do not commit often you will have to isolate the work you want to commit from the work you want to throw away, which is wasted productivity and highly prone to errors.  I find myself doing this about once a week, especially when doing exploratory re-factoring.  It's much easier if I can just revert all outstanding changes. Sync with the central repository daily The rest of us depend on your changes.  Don't let them sit on your computer longer than they have to.  Waiting increases the chances of merge conflict which just decreases productivity.  It also prohibits us from doing deploys when people say they are done but have not merged centrally.  This should be done daily!  Find a way to partition the work you are doing so that you can sync at least once daily. Things I discourage: Lots of partial commits right at the end of a series of changes If you notice lots of partial commits at the end of a set of changes, it's likely because you weren't frequently committing, nor were you watching for the size of the task expanding beyond a single commit.  Chances are this cost you productivity if you use your outstanding changes as a guide, since you would have an ever growing list of changes. Committing single files Committing single files means you waited too long and no longer understand all the changes involved.  It may mean there were overlapping changes in single files that cannot be isolated.  In either case, go back to the suggestions above to avoid this.  Committing frequently does not mean committing frequently right at the end of a day's work. It should be spaced out over the course of several tasks, not all at the end in a 5 minute window.

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• SQLAuthority News – Speaking at Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference 2013 – Singapore

  - by pinaldave

  Two years ago I spoke at Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference 2011, Singapore and I had a fantastic time to present to the Singapore audience. The session was very well received and lots of interest was generated. The event is back again this year and with much bigger scale. I will be presenting on SQL Server and Sharepoint subject at the conference. Session Details: Title: Performance in 60 Seconds – Database Tricks Every SharePoint Developer & Admin MUST Know Abstract: SharePoint Developers and System Administrators often come across situations where they face a slow server response, even though their hardware specifications are above  par. This session is for all the SharePoint Developers who want their server to perform at blazing fast speed but want to invest very little time to make it happen. We will go over various database tricks which require absolutely no time to master and require practically no SQL coding at all. After attending this session, Developers will only need 60 seconds to improve performance of their database server in their SharePoint implementation. Date and Time: January 18, 20013 - 3:15 PM-4:15 PM Location: Max Atria is located at Singapore Expo, 1 Expo Drive, Singapore Tel 65 6403 2160 This session will cover lots of interesting tips and tricks about SQL Server and SharePoint co-exists together. I promise that every attendee will walk out with a trick which they can walk out of session and directly apply to their production server to improve its performance. The event is going to be again fantastic event – if you are in Singapore – you must not miss this event. If you are planning vacation – this is the right time to take days off and travel to Singapore for vacation. The event features over 30 sessions to choose from, focus on three areas of business gain: Exploring Information, Improving Productivity and Making it Work. This event has an excellent line up of international speakers (speakers traveling from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and India). Register early to reserve a spot at your choice of more than 30 classes taught by Microsoft Certified Masters, MVPs, and other top SharePoint experts! Here I have attempted to answer a few of the questions which every SharePoint professional half: Which sessions suit my skill level? Click here. What sessions are right for me? Click here. Which sessions are of my interests? Click here. Which sessions are on when? Click here. If you register by next Friday, 14, December – you can save $126 on the regular price of the conference. Prizes, Giveaways and … I love conference goodies – I collect them as a souvenir . This event is known for its generous prizes. The first 100 people to register on the day will get a SPECIAL gift at the event. Additionally there are exhibitor booth give away too. Here is the page listing all the prizes and giveaways. Do leave a comment or send me email if you are going to the event, we can sit together and have a coffee. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• The Power of Goals

  - by BuckWoody

  Every year we read blogs, articles, magazines, hear news stories and blurbs on making New Year’s Resolutions. Well, I for one don’t do that. I do something else. Each year, on January 1, my wife, daughter and I get up early - like before 6:00 A.M. - and find a breakfast place that’s open. When I used to live in Safety Harbor, Florida, that was the “Paradise Café”, which has some of the best waffles around…but I digress. We find that restaurant and have a great breakfast while everyone else is recuperating from the night before. And we bring along a worn leather book that we’ve been writing in since my daughter wasn’t even old enough to read. It’s our book of Goals. A resolution, as it is purely defined, is a decision to change, stop or start an action. It has a sense of continuance, and that’s the issue. Some people decide things like “I’m going to lose weight” or “I’m going to spend more time with my family or hobby”. But a goal is different. A goal tends to have a defined start and end point. It’s something that can be measured. So each year on January 1 we sit down with the little leather book and we make a few - and only a few - individual and family goals. Sometimes it’s to exercise three times a week at the gym, sometimes it’s to save a certain percentage of income, and sometimes it’s to give away some of our possessions or to help someone we know in a specific way. Each person is responsible for their own goals - coming up with them, and coming up with a plan to meet them. Then we write it down in the little leather book. But it doesn’t end there. Each month, we grab the little leather book and read out the goals from that year to each person with a question or two: How are you doing on your goal? And what are you doing about reaching it? Can I help? Am I helping? At the end of the year, we put a checkmark by the goals we reached, and an X by the ones we didn’t. There’s no judgment, there’s no statements, each person is just expected to handle the success or failure in their own way. We also have family goals, and those we work on together. This might seem a little “corny” to some people. “I don’t need to write goals down” they say, “I keep track in my head of the things I do all the time. That’s silly.” But let me give you a little challenge: find a book, get with your family, and write down the things you want to do by the next January 1. Each month, look at the book. You can make goals for your career, your education, your spiritual side, your family, whatever. But if you make your goals realistic, think them through, and think about how you will achieve them, you will be surprised by the power of written goals.

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• If not now, then when?

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2013/10/25/if-not-now-then-when.aspx The time has been flying by this year. It seems like only yesterday that I mentioned the gorillagator, a simple construct of confusion to try to draw attention to my message. In reality, that message was sent over a month ago. During that time, the hours slipped to days and days to weeks. Many exciting things have happened to myself; I'm sure many exciting things have happened to you. I'm also sure that many terrifying things have happened to children and their families. 62 children enter treatment at a Children's Miracle Network Hospital every minute. That's nearly 60,000 children since I sent the last email. To put that number in perspective, that is more than the population of Greenland. If we expand that to the past year, they have been nearly 550,000 children treated. That is almost the population of Huntsville, Decatur, and all their suburbs combined. Over the past 4 years, I have raised a little more than $3,000 for Children's Hospital of Alabama. As a result, I received a call from the organizers of Extra Life thanking me for my dedicated work and informing me that I was the top supporters for Children's Hospital of Alabama ... with my measly three grand. We can do much better than that. It may sound like I'm trying to have fun by playing games for 24 hours. It is more than that. It is me using my time and body as a catalyst. It is me putting my passion to work for a cause. It is me turning my love into something tangible. I have been campaigning and fighting to give these children a chance for years. I have been asking you to help me support these children and families. I've been putting in countless hours of talking to people, impassioned emails, and carefully constructed tweets. I have been fighting with cutting edge, and sometimes expensive, technology to try to provide live streams of my marathons. I yearly put my body through 24 (and, this year, 25) hours of no sleep. I do this to represent the countless hours these families sit awake at their children's side. All I ask is a few minutes on a website and a few dollars. These few minutes and few dollars go a long way help people that are experiencing circumstances that only occur in our nightmares. I also ask that you take one extra step. Forward this plea to those that you know. I can only reach a small fraction of a percentage of the people that may be able to help. Together, we can reach the world. I raise money for Children's Hospital of Alabama. As this message branches out, people may wish to support a hospital closer to their area. I have included a link to the list of people that have dedicated their time and have received no donations. Find someone on the list supporting your local hospital and give them a donation. Let them know that their time and effort are appreciated. Together, we can do something great. Together, we can make a difference. Together, we all stand tall. Thank you. You can get more information at http://www.extra-life.org and http://childrensmiraclenetworkhospitals.org/" My donation page is http://www.extra-life.org/participant/cgardner The list of participants without donations is http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.eventParticipantList&page=629&eventID=512

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• How to recover after embarrassing yourself and your company?

  - by gaearon

  I work in an outsourcing company in Russia, and one of our clients is a financial company located in USA. For the last six months I have been working on several projects for this particular company, and as I was being assigned a larger project, I was invited to work onsite in USA in order to understand and learn the new system. Things didn't work out as well as I hoped because the environment was messy after original developers, and I had to spent quite some time to understand the quirks. However we managed to do the release several days ago, and it looks like everything's going pretty smooth. From technical perspective, my client seems to be happy with me. My solutions seem to work, and I always try to add some spark of creativity to what I do. However I'm very disorganized in a certain sense, as I believe many of you fellas are. Let me note that my current job is my first job ever, and I was lucky enough to get a job with flexible schedule, meaning I can come in and out of the office whenever I want as long as I have 40 hours a week filled. Sometimes I want to hang out with friends in the evening, and days after that I like to have a good sleep in the morning—this is why flexible schedule (or lack of one) is ideal fit for me. [I just realized this paragraph looks too serious, I should've decorated it with some UNICORNS!] Of course, after coming to the USA, things changed. This is not some software company with special treatment for the nerdy ones. Here you have to get up at 7:30 AM to get to the office by 9 AM and then sit through till 5 PM. Personally, I hate waking up in the morning, not to say my productivity begins to climb no sooner than at 5 o'clock, i.e. I'm very slow until I have to go, which is ironic. Sometimes I even stay for more than 8 hours just to finish my current stuff without interruptions. Anyway, I could deal with that. After all, they are paying for my trip, who am I to complain? They need me to be in their working hours to be able to discuss stuff. It makes perfect sense that fixed schedule doesn't make any sense for me. But it does makes sense that it does make sense for my client. And I am here for client, therefore sense is transferred. Awww, you got it. I was asked several times to come exactly at 9 AM but out of laziness and arrogance I didn't take these requests seriously enough. This paid off in the end—on my last day I woke up 10 minutes before final status meeting with business owner, having overslept previous day as well. Of course this made several people mad, including my client, as I ignored his direct request to come in time for two days in the row, including my final day. Of course, I didn't do it deliberately but certainly I could've ensured that I have at least two alarms to wake me up, et cetera...I didn't do that. He also emailed my boss, calling my behavior ridiculous and embarrassing for my company and saying “he's not happy with my professionalism at all”. My boss told me that “the system must work both in and out” and suggested me to stay till late night this day working in a berserker mode, fixing as many issues as possible, and sending a status email to my client. So I did, but I didn't receive the response yet. These are my questions to the great programmers community: Did you have situations where your ignorance and personal non-technical faults created problems for your company? Were you able to make up for your fault and stay in a good relationship with your client or boss? How? How would you act if you were in my situation?

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• Comparing Isis, Google, and Paypal

  - by David Dorf

  Back in 2010 I was sure NFC would make great strides, but here we are two years later and NFC doesn't seem to be sticking. The obvious reason being the chicken-and-egg problem.  Retailers don't want to install the terminals until the phones support NFC, and vice-versa. So consumers continue to sit on the sidelines waiting for either side to blink and make the necessary investment.  In the meantime, EMV is looking for a way to sneak into the US with the help of the card brands. There are currently three major solutions that are battling in the marketplace.  All three know that replacing mag-stripe alone is not sufficient to move consumers.  Long-term it's the offers and loyalty programs combined with tendering that make NFC attractive. NFC solutions cross lots of barriers, so a strong partner system is required.  The solutions need to include the carriers, card brands, banks, handset manufacturers, POS terminals, and most of all lots of merchants.  Lots of coordination is necessary to make the solution seamless to the consumer. Google Wallet Google's problem has always been that only the Nexus phone has an NFC chip that supports their wallet.  There are a couple of additional phones out there now, but adoption is still slow.  They acquired Zavers a while back to incorporate digital coupons, but the the bulk of their users continue to be non-NFC.  They have taken an open approach by not specifying particular payment brands.  Google is piloting in San Francisco and New York, supporting both MasterCard PayPass and stored value. I suppose the other card brands may eventually follow.  There's no cost for consumers or merchants -- Google will make money via targeted ads. Isis Not long after Google announced its wallet, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile announced a joint venture called Isis.  They are in the unique position of owning the SIM in the phones they issue.  At first it seemed Isis was a vehicle for the carriers to compete with the existing card brands, but Isis later switched to a generic wallet that supports the major card brands.  Isis reportedly charges issuers a $5 fee per customer per year.  Isis will pilot this summer in Salt Lake City and Austin. PayPal PayPal, the clear winner in the online payment space beyond traditional credit cards, is trying to move into physical stores.  After negotiations with Google to provide a wallet broke off, PayPal decided to avoid NFC altogether, at least for now, and focus on payments without any physical card or phone.  By avoiding NFC, consumers don't need an NFC-enabled phone and merchants don't need a new reader.  Consumers must enter their phone number and PIN in the merchant's existing device, or they can enter their PIN in the PayPal inStore app running on their phone, then show the merchant a unique barcode which authorizes payment. Paypal is free for consumers and charges a fee for merchants.  Its not clear, at least to me, how PayPal handles fraudulent transactions and whether the consumer is protected. The wildcard is, of course, Apple.  Their mobile technologies set the standard, so incorporating NFC chips would certainly accelerate adoption of many payment solutions.  Their announcement today of the iOS Passbook is a step in the right direction, but stops short of handling payments. For those retailers that have invested in modern terminals, it seems the best strategy is to support all the emerging solutions and let the consumers choose the winner.

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• At the Java DEMOgrounds - Oracle Java ME Embedded Enables the “Internet of Things”

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  I caught up with Oracle’s Robert Barnes, Senior Director, Java Product Management, who was demonstrating a new product from Oracle’s Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) product portfolio, Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2, a complete client Java runtime optimized for microcontrollers and other resource-constrained devices. Oracle’s Java ME Embedded 3.2 is a Java ME runtime based on CLDC 1.1 (JSR-139) and IMP-NG (JSR-228).“What we are showing here is the Java ME Embedded 3.2 that we announced last week,” explained Barnes. “It’s the start of the 'Internet of Things,’ in which you have very very small devices that are on the edge of the network where the sensors sit. You often have a middle area called a gateway or a concentrator which is fairly middle to higher performance. On the back end you have a very high performance server. What this is showing is Java spanning all the way from the server side right down towards the type of chip that you will get at the sensor side as the network.” Barnes explained that he had two different demos running.The first, called the Solar Panel System Demo, measures the brightness of the light.  “This,” said Barnes, “is a light source demo with a Cortex M3 controlling the motor, on the end of which is a sensor which is measuring the brightness of the lamp. This is recording the data of the brightness of the lamp and as we move the lamp out of the way, we should be able using the server to turn the sensor towards the lamp so the brightness reading will go higher. This sends the message back to the server and we can look at the web server sitting on the PC underneath the desk. We can actually see the data being passed back effectively through a back office type of function within a utility environment.” The second demo, the Smart Grid Response Demo, Barnes explained, “has the same board and processor and is still using Java ME embedded with a different app on top. This is a demand response demo. What we are seeing within the managing environment is that people want to track the pricing signals of the electricity. If it’s particularly expensive at any point in time, they may turn something off. This demo sets the price of the electricity as though this is coming from the back of the server sending pricing signals to my home.” The demo had a lamp and a fan and it was tracking the price of electricity. “If I set the price of the electricity to go over 5 cents, then the device will turn off,” explained Barnes. “I can go into my settings and, in this case, change the price to 50 cents and we can wait a minus and the lamp will go off. When I change the pricing signal so that it is lower, the lamp will come back on. The key point is that the Java software we have running is the same across all the different devices; it’s a way to build applications across multiple devices using the same software. This is important because it fixes peak loading on the network and can stops blackouts.” This demo brought me back to a prior decade when Sun Microsystems first promoted  Jini technology, a version of Java that would put everything on the network and give us the smart home. Your home would be automated to tell you when you were out of milk, when to change your light bulbs, etc. You would have access to the web and the network throughout your home.It’s interesting to see how technology moves over time – from the smart home to the Internet of Things.

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• Acceptance tests done first...how can this be accomplished?

  - by Crazy Eddie

  The basic gist of most Agile methods is that a feature is not "done" until it's been developed, tested, and in many cases released. This is supposed to happen in quick turnaround chunks of time such as "Sprints" in the Scrum process. A common part of Agile is also TDD, which states that tests are done first. My team works on a GUI program that does a lot of specific drawing and such. In order to provide tests, the testing team needs to be able to work with something that at least attempts to perform the things they are trying to test. We've found no way around this problem. I can very much see where they are coming from because if I was trying to write software that targeted some basically mysterious interface I'd have a very hard time. Although we have behavior fairly well specified, the exact process of interacting with various UI elements when it comes to automation seems to be too unique to a feature to allow testers to write automated scripts to drive something that does not exist. Even if we could, a lot of things end up turning up later as having been missing from the specification. One thing we considered doing was having the testers write test "scripts" that are more like a set of steps that must be performed, as described from a use-case perspective, so that they can be "automated" by a human being. This can then be performed by the developer(s) writing the feature and/or verified by someone else. When the testers later get an opportunity they automate the "script" for regression purposes mainly. This didn't end up catching on in the team though. The testing part of the team is actually falling behind us by quite a margin. This is one reason why the apparently extra time of developing a "script" for a human being to perform just did not happen....they're under a crunch to keep up with us developers. If we waited for them, we'd get nothing done. It's not their fault really, they're a bottle neck but they're doing what they should be and working as fast as possible. The process itself seems to be set up against them. Very often we end up having to go back a month or more in what we've done to fix bugs that the testers have finally gotten to checking. It's an ugly truth that I'd like to do something about. So what do other teams do to solve this fail cascade? How can we get testers ahead of us and how can we make it so that there's actually time for them to write tests for the features we do in a sprint without making us sit and twiddle our thumbs in the meantime? As it's currently going, in order to get a feature "done", using agile definitions, would be to have developers work for 1 week, then testers work the second week, and developers hopefully being able to fix all the bugs they come up with in the last couple days. That's just not going to happen, even if I agreed it was a reasonable solution. I need better ideas...

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• SR Activity Summaries Via Direct Email? You Bet!

  - by PCat

  Courtesy of Ken Walker. I’m a “bottom line” kind of guy.  My friends and co-workers will tell you that I’m a “Direct Communicator” when it comes to work or my social life.  For example, if I were to come up with a fantastic new recipe for a low-fat pan fried chicken, I’d Tweet, email, or find a way to blast the recipe directly to you so that you could enjoy it immediately.  My friends would see the subject, “Awesome New Fried Chicken” and they’d click and see the recipe there before them.Others are “Indirect Communicators.”  My friend Joel is like this.  He would post the recipe in his blog, and then Tweet or email a link back to his blog with a subject, “Fried Chicken.”  Then Joel would sit back and expect his friends to read the email, AND click the link to his blog, and then read the recipe.  As a fan of the “Direct” method, I wish there was a way for me to “Opt-in” for immediate updates from Joel so I could see the recipe without having to click over to his blog to search for it.The same is true for MOS.  If you’ve ever opened a Service Request through My Oracle Support (MOS), you know that most of the communication between you and the Oracle Support Engineer with respect to the issue in the SR, is done via email.  Which type of email would you rather receive in your email account? Example1:Your SR has been updated.  Click HERE to see the update. Or Example2:Your SR has been updated.  Here is the update:  “Hi John, Oracle Development has completed the patch we’ve been waiting for!  Here’s a direct “LINK” to the patch that should resolve your issue.  Please download and install the patch via the instructions (included with the link) and let me know if it does, in fact, resolve your issue!”Example2 is available to you!  All you need to do is to “Opt-In” for the direct email updates.  The default is for the indirect update as seen in Example1.  To turn on “Service Request Details in Email” simply follow these instructions (aided by the screenshot below):1.    Log into MOS, and click on your name in the upper right corner.  Select “My Account.”2.    Make sure “My Account” is highlighted in bold on the left.3.    Turn ON, “Service Request Details in Email” That’s it!  You will now receive the SR Updates, directly in your email account without having to log into MOS, click the SR, scroll down to the updates, etc.  That’s better than Fried Chicken!  (Well; almost better....).

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• Passed: Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3

  First off: Mission accomplished successfully. And it was fun! Using the resources listed in my previous article about Learning Content, I'd like to thank Microsoft Technical Evangelists Jeremy Foster and Michael Palermo for their excellent jump start videos on Channel 9, and the various authors at Pluralsight. Local Prometric testing centre Back in November I chose a local testing centre which was the easiest to access from my office despite the horrible traffic you might experience here on the island. Actually, it was not the closest one. But due to their website, their awards as Microsoft Learning Center, and my general curiosity about the premises, I gave FRCI my priority. Boy, how should I regret this decision this morning... The official Prometric exam guide asks any attendee to show up at least 30 minutes prior to the scheduled time of the test. Well, this should have been the easier part but unfortunately due to heavier traffic than usual I arrived only 20 minutes before time. Not too bad but more to come. The building called 'le Hub' is nicely renovated and provides the right environment for an IT group of companies like FRCI. I think they have currently 5 independent IT departments over there. Even the handling at the reception was straight forward, welcoming and at my ease. But then... first shock: "We don't have any exam registration for today." - Hm, that's nice... Here's my mail confirmation from Prometric. First attack successfully handled and the lady went off again to check their records. Next shock: A couple of minutes later, another guy tries to explain me that "the staff of the testing centre is already on vacation and the centre is officially closed." - Are you kidding me? Here's the official confirmation by Prometric, and I don't find it funny that I take a day off today only to hear this kind of blubbering nonsense. I thought that I'll be on the safe side choosing a company with a good reputation here on the island. Another 40 (!) minutes later, they finally come back to the waiting area with a pre-filled form about the test appointment. And finally, after an hour of waiting, discussing, restarting the testing PC, and lots of talk, I am allowed to sit down and take the exam. Exam details Well, you know the rules. Signing an NDA doesn't allow me to provide you any details about the questions or topics that have been covered. Please check out the official exam description, and you're on the right way. Sorry, guys... ;-) The result "Congratulations! You have passed this Microsoft Certification exam." - In general, I have to admit that the parts on HTML5 and CSS3 were the easiest after all, and that I have to get myself a little bit more familiar with certain Javascript features like class definitions, inheritance and data security. Anyway, exam passed - who cares about the details? Next goal Of course, the journey to Microsoft Certifications continues and my next goal is to pass exams 70-481 - Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps using HTML5 and JavaScript and 70-482 - Advanced Windows Store App Development using HTML5 and JavaScript. This would allow me to achieve the certification of MCSD: Windows Store Apps using HTML5. I guess, during 2013 I'll be busy with various learning and teaching lessons.

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• Does Jquery and Mootools usually have conflict if both are used on a webpage? [migrated]

  - by Charming Prince

  I have this website am designing, i tried using mootools 1.31 to animate some of the div boxes when clicked or when the mouse hover rounds it, to shows the content. the thing is that it doesn't seem to work on the webpage, but if i try the same script on a blank webpage it works, am thinking probably it's because i have Jquery 1.52 on the same page and maybe both scripts are conflicting with each other because, if i remove the Jquery, the Mootools works. What should be my option, because i need the Jquery to do some validations for me, so i can't remove it completely. Here are the codes <script> //-vertical var mySlide = new Fx.Slide('test'); $('slidein').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.slideIn(); e.stop(); }); $('slideout').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.slideOut(); e.stop(); }); $('toggle').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.toggle(); e.stop(); }); $('hide').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.hide(); e.stop(); }); </script> here's the HTML <html> <h3 class="section">Fx.Slide Vertical</h3> <a id="slideout" href="#">slideout</a> | <a id="slidein" href="#">slidein</a> | <a id="toggle" href="#"> toggle</a> | <a id="hide" href="#">hide</a> <div id="test"> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad mi nim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. </div> Here's the CSS #test { background: #222; color: #fff; padding: 10px; margin: 20px; border: 10px solid pink; } #test2 { background: #222; color: #fff; padding: 10px; margin: 20px; border: 10px solid pink; } Am using the exact same code supplied by Mootools in their own example, if i do this on a blank webpage it works but incorporated into my own webpage, it doesn't, and my own page just have the script tag of the Jquery in the head section of the HTML.

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• iOS 5 New Features vs Android

  - by kerry

  Browsing through the iOS 5 features list, I can’t help but notice a lot of it is catch up. Having owned both an iPhone and an Android for a considerable amount of time, I figured I would jot down my opinions. Notification Center – Completely ripped off from Android but looks good and is a much needed addition iMessage – This is very interesting as most people who would think it’s cool, probably really wouldn’t understand the significance.  Basically, Apple is adding an IM application to iOS.  Now iPhone / iPad users can sit around messaging each other how cool it is like Crackberry users circa 2003.  I guess the only real improvement over MMS is that you can easily setup groups, see when each other are typing, and don’t incur text messaging charges; at the expense of leaving your non-iOS buddies out (who wants to talk to those losers anyways?). Newstand – An app update and not an OS one (Apple typically doesn’t make distinctions).  It all seems like stuff my current Nook stuff will do.  Note: I did look to compare prices but it seems that information is not available without downloading iTunes.  lame. Reminders – TODO lists are ho hum, but the ability to have reminders when you arrive or leave a position is pretty cool. Twitter integration – The fact that the best Apple can come up with is ‘one at a timing’ online service integration is laughable at best. Camera – Can control it from the lock screen.  Now you’ll have tons of pocket lint photos in your iCloud to go along with the wicked shot of that cheetah that just unexpectedly ran by your apartment. Photos – Speaking of iCloud, all of your devices photos will be synced through it.  That’s cool I guess, not sure if Android will do the same. Safari – What?  You haven’t been reading rss feeds on your device this whole time?  Something tells me you aren’t about to start. PC Free – Finely Apple untethers the iPhone.  What took them so long? Game Center – This should be an interesting service.  Attention Apple fanboys immediately forget how they are blatantly copying Microsoft achievements (at least rename them). Wifi Sync – Just couldn’t cut the cord completely could they?  For what it’s worth, the Zune has been doing this for 5 years now. All in all a pretty big update.  Mostly iCloud.  Mostly keeping up the mobile status quo.  As an Android user, I can’t say there is anything I am envious of.

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• The Social Content Conundrum

  - by Mike Stiles

  Here’s the social content conundrum: people who are not entertainers are being asked to entertain. Despite a world of skilled MBAs, marketing savants, technological innovators, analysts, social strategists and consultants, every development in social for brands keeps boomeranging right back to the same unavoidable truth. Success hinges on having content creators who know how to entertain the target audience. You can’t make this all about business-processes. You can’t make this all about technology, though data is critical and helps inform content. This is about having human beings who know the audience, know what they’d love to see, and can create the magic that will draw and hold them. Since showing up in the News Feed is critical for exposition and engagement, and since social ads primarily serve to amplify content that’s performing well, I’m comfortable saying content creators are becoming exponentially recruited and valued. They will no longer be commodities. They’ll be your stars. Social has fundamentally changed the relationship between brand and consumer. No longer can the customer be told to sit down, shut up, and listen to our ads. It’s now all about what consumers are willing to watch or read. Their patience for subjecting themselves to material they aren’t interested in is waning. Therefore, brands must now be producers of entertainment and information content, not merely placers of ads within someone else’s content. Social has given you a huge stage, with an audience sitting out there waiting to see what you’re going to do. What are you putting on that stage? For most corporate environments, entertaining is alien. It’s risky and subjective. Most operate around two foundational principles: control and fear. To entertain and inform with branded content, some control has to go. You control the product. Past that, control is being transferred into the hands of the consumer. The “fear first” culture also has to yield. If you strive to never make waves, you will move absolutely nothing. Because most corporations don’t house entertainers, they must be found then trusted. They’re usually a little weird. The ideas they’ll bring may seem “out there.” But like any business professional, they’ve gone through the training and experiences that make them uniquely good at what they do, even if you don’t quite understand them. It’s okay. It’s what the audience thinks that matters. Get it right, and you’ll be generating one ambassador after another who’s proud to be identified with the brand and will regularly consume and share your content. Entertainment entities are able to shape our culture and succeed beyond their wildest dreams by being beholden to one thing…what the public likes and wants. When brands put the same emphasis on crowd-pleasing content, they too will enjoy brand fame the likes of which they’ve never seen. The stage is yours. Now get out there and go for that applause.

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• Spotlight on an office – Utrecht

  - by Maria Sandu

  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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} This time in our monthly topic, we have our spotlight on the brand new Oracle office in Utrecht, the Netherlands. About 35km south-east of Schiphol Airport and centrally located in the Netherlands, Oracle moved into the Facet building in March 2011. Facet is much more than an office building, it creates a work environment that relates to the ‘No Limits’ philosophy Oracle has in the Netherlands. “No Limits” means the building belongs to everyone. You choose the best place to work, based on the activities of that moment. To point this out, we currently have 1050 people working for Oracle Netherlands, and 623 workplaces. There is virtually no limit to where you can sit in our shiny new offices; we no longer have 'zoning', where departments own specific areas in the building, Even the Managing Director of Oracle Netherlands, does not have an office and he chooses a different working place every day. So make sure you are prepared when he is sitting next to you one day! If nobody has a fixed workplace, then you would think that finding a colleague could be tricky. Oracle uses CU (‘SeeYou’) which makes all of us easier to locate. Upon entering the building you receive a text stating where the greatest concentration of your buddies is sitting. Our internal messaging service also proves to be very valuable finding your colleagues. The heart of our building is the great RestOrant, with a very busy coffee bar. It offers an informal place for people to meet and is busy all day, not just at lunch time! The O-Bar in the atrium on the ground floor is also a very popular place to meet and drink tea or coffee and gives a breathtaking introduction to the office to any of our first time visitors. For a few minutes of relaxation during the working day, there are table tennis facilities and a Wii room on every floor! So if you are interested in joining Oracle in this Netherlands or anywhere else in EMEA, please have a look at http://campus.oracle.com for all of our latest vacancies and internships.

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• ADO and Two Way Storage Tiering

  - by Andy-Oracle

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 We get asked the following question about Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) storage tiering quite a bit. Can you tier back to the original location if the data gets hot again? The answer is yes but not with standard Automatic Data Optimization policies, at least not reliably. That's not how ADO is meant to operate. ADO is meant to mirror a traditional view of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) where data will be very volatile when first created, will become less active or cool, and then will eventually cease to be accessed at all (i.e. cold). I think the reason this question gets asked is because customers realize that many of their business processes are cyclical and the thinking goes that those segments that only get used during month end or year-end cycles could sit on lower cost storage when not being used. Unfortunately this doesn't fit very well with the ADO storage tiering model. ADO storage tiering is based on the amount of free and used space in the source tablespace. There are two parameters that control this behavior, TBS_PERCENT_USED and TBS_PERCENT_FREE. When the space in the tablespace exceeds the TBS_PERCENT_USED value then segments specified in storage tiering clause(s) can be moved until the percent of free space reaches the TBS_PERCENT_FREE value. It is worth mentioning that no checks are made for available space in the target tablespace. Now, it is certainly possible to create custom functions to control storage tiering, but this can get complicated. The biggest problem is insuring that there is enough space to move the segment back to tier 1 storage, assuming that that's the goal. This isn't as much of a problem when moving from tier 1 to tier 2 storage because there is typically more tier 2 storage available. At least that's the premise since it is supposed to be less costly, lower performing and higher capacity storage. In either case though, if there isn't enough space then the operation fails. In the case of a customized function, the question becomes do you attempt to free the space so the move can be made or do you just stop and return false so that the move cannot take place? This is really the crux of the issue. Once you cross into this territory you're really going to have to implement two-way hierarchical storage and the whole point of ADO was to provide automatic storage tiering. You're probably better off using heat map and/or business access requirements and building your own hierarchical storage management infrastructure if you really want two way storage tiering. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-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;}

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• College Ratings via the Federal Government

  - by user9147039

  A few weeks back you might remember news about a higher education rating system proposal from the Obama administration. As I've discussed previously, political and stakeholder pressures to improve outcomes and increase transparency are stronger than ever before. The executive branch proposal is intended to make progress in this area. Quoting from the proposal itself, "The ratings will be based upon such measures as: Access, such as percentage of students receiving Pell grants; Affordability, such as average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt; and Outcomes, such as graduation and transfer rates, graduate earnings, and advanced degrees of college graduates.” This is going to be quite complex, to say the least. Most notably, higher ed is not monolithic. From community and other 2-year colleges, to small private 4-year, to professional schools, to large public research institutions…the many walks of higher ed life are, well, many. Designing a ratings system that doesn't wind up with lots of unintended consequences and collateral damage will be difficult. At best you would end up potentially tarnishing the reputation of certain institutions that were actually performing well against the metrics and outcome measures that make sense in their "context" of education. At worst you could spend a lot of time and resources designing a system that would lose credibility with its "customers". A lot of institutions I work with already have in place systems like the one described above. They are tracking completion rates, completion timeframes, transfers to other institutions, job placement, and salary information. As I talk to these institutions there are several constants worth noting: • Deciding on which metrics to measure is complicated. While employment and salary data are relatively easy to track, qualitative measures are more difficult. How do you quantify the benefit to someone who studies in one field that may not compensate him or her as well as another field but that provides huge personal fulfillment and reward is a difficult measure to quantify? • The data is available but the systems to transform the data into actual information that can be used in meaningful ways are not. Too often in higher ed information is siloed. As such, much of the data that need to be a part of a comprehensive system sit in multiple organizations, oftentimes outside the reach of core IT. • Politics and culture are big barriers. One of the areas that my team and I spend a lot of time talking about with higher ed institutions all over the world is the imperative to optimize for student success. This, like the tracking of the students’ achievement after graduation, requires a level or organizational capacity that does not currently exist. The primary barrier is the culture of "data islands" in higher ed, and the need for leadership to drive out the divisions between departments, schools, colleges, etc. and institute academy-wide analytics and data stewardship initiatives that will enable student success. • Data quality is a very big issue. So many disparate systems exist (some on premise, some "in the cloud") that keep data about "persons" using different means to identify them. Establishing a single source of truth about an individual and his or her data is difficult without some type of data quality policy and tools. Good tools actually exist but are seldom leveraged. Don't misunderstand - I think it's a great idea to drive additional transparency and accountability into the system of higher education. And not just at home, but globally. Students and parents need access to key data to make informed, responsible choices. The tools exist to not only enable this kind of information to be shared but to capture the very metrics stakeholders care most about and in a way that makes sense in the context of a given institution's "place" in the overall higher ed panoply.

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• Introducing the Metro User Interface on Windows 2012

  - by andywe

  Although I am a big fan of using PowerShell to do many of my server operations, that aspect is well covered by those far more knowledgeable than I, and there is vast information around the web already on that. The new Metro interface, and getting around both Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 though is relatively new, even for those whop ran the previews. What is this? A blank Desktop!   Where did the start button go? Well, it is still there...sort of. It is hidden, and acts like an auto hidden component that appear only when the mouse is hovered over the lower left corner of the screen. Those familiar with Gnome or OSX can relate this to the "Hot Corners" functions. To get to the start button, hover your mouse in the very left corner of the task bar. Let it sit there a moment, and a small blue square with colored tiles in it called start will appear. Click it. I clicked it and now I have all the tiles..What is this?   Welcome to the Metro interface. This is a much more modern look, and although at first seems weird and cumbersome, I have actually found that it is a bit more extensible, allowing greater organization and customization than the older explorer desktop. If you look closely, you'll see each box represents either a program, or program group. First, a few basics about using the start view. First and foremost, a right mouse click will bring up a bar on the bottom, with an icon towards the right. Notice it is titled “All Apps”. An even easier way in many places is to hover your mouse in the exact opposite corner, in the upper right. A sidebar will open and expose what used to be a widget bar (remember Vista?), and there are options for Search, Start, and Settings.   Ok Great, but where is everything? It’s all there…Click the All Apps icon.   Look better? Notice the scroll bar at the bottom. Move it right..your desktop is sized to your content..so you can have a smaller, or larger amount of programs exposed. Each icon can be secondary clicked (right mouse click for most of us, and an options bar at the bottom, rather than the old small context menu, is opened with some very familiar options.   Notice the top of the Windows Explorer window has some new features. You still have your right mouse click functions, but since the shortcuts for these items already exist..just copy them. There are many ways, but here is a long way to show you more of the interface. 1. Right mouse click a program icon, and select the Open File Location option. 2. Trusty file manager opens…but if you look closely up at top edge of the window, you’ll see a nifty enhancement. An orange colored box that is titled Shortcut Tools and another lavender box Title Application tools. Each of these adds options at the top of the file manager window to make selection easy. Of course, you can still secondary click an item in the listing window too. 3. Click shortcut tools, right click your app shortcut and copy it. Then simply paste it into the desktop outside the File Explorer window Also note some of the newer features. The large icons up top below the menu that has many common operations. The options change as you select each menu item. Well, that’s it for this installment. I hope this helps you out.

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• Career-Defining Moments

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2013/06/25/career-defining-moments.aspx Fear holds us back from many things. A little fear is healthy, but don’t let it overwhelm you into missing opportunities. In every career there is a moment when you can either step forward and define yourself, or sit down and regret it later. Why do we hold back: is it fear, constraints, family concerns, or that we simply can't do it? I think in many cases it comes to the unknown, and we are good at fearing the unknown. Some people hold back because they are fearful of what they don’t know. Some hold back because they are fearful of learning new things. Some hold back simply because to take on a new challenge it means they have to give something else up. The phrase sometimes used is “It’s the devil you know versus the one you don’t.” That fear sometimes allows us to miss great opportunities. In many people’s case it is the opportunity to go into business for yourself, to start something that never existed. Most hold back hear for a fear of failing. We’ve all heard the phrase “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”, which is intended to get people to think about the opportunities they might create. A better term I heard recently on the Ruby Rogues podcast was “What would be worth doing even if you knew you were going to fail?” I think that wording suits the intent better. If you knew (or thought) going in that you were going to fail and you didn’t care, it would open you up to the possibility of paying more attention to the journey and not the outcome. In my case it is a fear of acceptance. I am fearful that I may not learn what I need to learn or may not do a good enough job to be accepted. At the same time that fear drives me and makes me want to leap forward. Some folks would define this as “The Flinch”. I’m learning Ruby and Puppet right now. I have limited experience with both, limited to the degree it scares me some that I don’t know much about either. Okay, it scares me quite a bit! Some people’s defining moment might be going to work for Microsoft. All of you who know me know that I am in love with automation, from low-tech to high-tech automation. So for me, my “mecca” is a little different in that regard. Awhile back I sat down and defined where I wanted my career to go and it had to do more with DevOps, defined as applying developer practices to system administration operations (I could not find this definition when I searched). It’s an area that interests me and why I really want to expand chocolatey into something more awesome. I want to see Windows be as automatable and awesome as other operating systems that are out there. Back to the career-defining moment. Sometimes these moments only come once in a lifetime. The key is to recognize when you are in one of these moments and step back to evaluate it before choosing to dive in head first. So I am about to embark on what I define as one of these “moments.”  On July 1st I will be joining Puppet Labs and working to help make the Windows automation experience rock solid! I’m both scared and excited about the opportunity!

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• WPF MVVM ComboBox SelectedItem or SelectedValue not working

  - by cjibo

  Update After a bit of investigating. What seems to be the issue is that the SelectedValue/SelectedItem is occurring before the Item source is finished loading. If I sit in a break point and weight a few seconds it works as expected. Don't know how I'm going to get around this one. End Update I have an application using in WPF using MVVM with a ComboBox. Below is the ViewModel Example. The issue I'm having is when we leave our page and migrate back the ComboBox is not selecting the current Value that is selected. View Model public class MyViewModel { private MyObject _selectedObject; private Collection<Object2> _objects; private IModel _model; public MyViewModel(IModel model) { _model = model; _objects = _model.GetObjects(); } public Collection<MyObject> Objects { get { return _objects; } private set { _objects = value; } } public MyObject SelectedObject { get { return _selectedObject; } set { _selectedObject = value; } } } For the sake of this example lets say MyObject has two properties (Text and Id). My XAML for the ComboBox looks like this. XAML <ComboBox Name="MyComboBox" Height="23" Width="auto" SelectedItem="{Binding Path=SelectedObject,Mode=TwoWay}" ItemsSource="{Binding Objects}" DisplayMemberPath="Text" SelectedValuePath="Id"> No matter which way I configure this when I come back to the page and the object is reassembled the ComboBox will not select the value. The object is returning the correct object via the get in the property though. I'm not sure if this is just an issue with the way the ComboBox and MVVM pattern works. The text box binding we are doing works correctly.

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• NServiceBus and NHibernate - Message Handler and Transactions

  - by mattcodes

  From my understanding NServiceBus executes the Handle method of an IMessageHandler within a transaction, if an exception propagates out of this method, then NServiceBus will ensure the message is put back on the message queue (up X amount of times before error queue) etc.. so we have an atomic operation so to speak. Now when if I inside my NServiceBus Message Handle method I do something like this using(var trans = session.BeginTransaction()) { person.Age = 10; session.Update<Person>(person); trans.Commit() } using(var trans2 = session.BeginTransaction()) { person.Age = 20; session.Update<Person>(person); // throw new ApplicationException("Oh no"); trans2.Commit() } What is the effect of this on the transaction scope? Is trans1 now counted as a nested transaction in terms of its relationship with the Nservicebus transaction even though we have done nothing to marry them up? (if not how would one link onto the transaction of NServiceBus? Looking at the second block (trans2), if I uncomment the throw statement, will the NServiceBus transaction then rollback trans1 as well? In basic scenarios, say I dump the above into a console app, then trans1 is independent, commit, flushed and won't rollback. I'm trying to clarify what happens now we sit in someone else's transaction like NServiceBus? The above is just example code, im wouldnt be working directly with session, more like through a uow pattern.

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• Cannot debug views in MVC2 project, getting "The resource cannot be found" error

  - by schefdev

  I'm running Visual Studio 2008 sp1 on Win7, with MVC2 RTM installed. I created a new MVC2 project using the wizard and am unable to debug specific pages. With webforms and even MVC1, I was able to sit on a View page, hit F5, and then have the integrated web server in VS2008 start on the page I was working on. Very handy for building up app logic. When I try this now I get a "The resource cannot be found" error page. I retried this just now with a stock new MVC2 Web Application project. Here are the steps I took after creating the new project to reproduce: Open up project settings. Under the Web subtab, set the Start Action to "Current Page". Leave all the other settings as is. Open one of the views up (e.g. Account/Register.aspx) Hit F5 to debug the project Note that the browser window which displays shows the error message "The resource cannot be found". The link I saw in my browser for this run was: http://localhost:49471/Views/Account/Register.aspx I did some googling and found suggestions related to ensuring all HTTP server pieces were installed. I double checked and made sure that "HTTP Errors" and "HTTP Redirection" were both installed. If I leave the project setting as it was originally, set to "Specific Page" with nothing in the text box, then routing works and I always get the default home page. I'm hoping this isn't the only option. Thanks!

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• asp.net ajax control toolkit combobox displays incorectly when in fieldset with style of position:re

  - by Jon P

  I currently have an Instance of the ASP.net ajax control toolkit combo box residing in a field set with a style of position:releative applied. The control also sits in a very plain table (please no comments about using tables for lay-out, I know it is evil and try to avoid it). There are two problems with the display of the list: The list does not sit flush with the text box. In I.E. 7 (which is the majority of my target audience, intranet where IE7 is the company standard) the list display about 10px below the fieldset, which is what the bottom margin of the fieldset is set to. In FF 2.0 the list sits sinificantly lower and off-set to the right. Below the filed set there is more content in a div, also with a style of position:relative applied. The list from the combo box displays behind the content of this div, which is obviouly an issue. Removing position:releative from the fieldset resolves the display issue of the combo box, but results in other unwanted display side effects. My interim workaround is to specifically restyle this fieldset without the position:absolute style, but I'm hoping for a better solution. Thanks

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