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• Is Agile the new micromanagement?

  - by Smith James

  Hi, This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial basis. It has been 4 months with 3 iterations and they continue to do it without going fully agile for the rest of us. This is due to the fact that management's trust to meet business requirements with a quite a bit of ad hoc type request from high above. Recently, I talked to the developers who are part of this initiative; they tell me that it's not fun. They are not allowed to talk to other developers by their Scrum master and are not allowed to take any phone calls in the work area (which maybe fine to an extent). For example, if I want to talk to my friend for kicks who is in the agile team, I am not allowed without the approval of the Scrum master; who is sitting right next to the agile team. The idea of all this or the agile is to provide a complete vacuum for agile developers from any interruptions and to have them put in good 6+ productive hours. Well, guys, I am no agile guru but what I have read Yahoo agile rollout document and similar for other organizations, it gives me a feeling that agile is not cheap. It require resources and budget to instill agile into the teams and correct issue as they arrive to put them back on track. For starters, it requires training for developers and coaching for managers and etc, etc... The current Scrum master was a manager who took a couple days agile training class paid by the management is now leading this agile team. I have also heard in the meeting that agile manifesto doesn't dictate that agile is not set in stones and is customized differently for each company. Well, it all sounds good and reason. In conclusion, I always thought the agile was supposed to bring harmony in the development teams which results in happy developers. However, I am getting a very opposite feeling when talking to the developers in the agile team. They are unhappy that they cannot talk anything but work, sitting quietly all day just working, and they feel it's just another way for management to make them work more. Tell me please, if this is one of the examples of good practices used for the purpose of selfish advantage for more dollars? Or maybe, it's just us the developers like me and this agile team feels that they don't like to work in an environment where they only breathe work because they are at work. Thanks. Edit: It's a company in healthcare domain that has offices across US, but we're in Texas. It definitely feels like a cowboy style agile which makes me really not wanting to go for agile at all, esp at my current company. All of it has to do with the management being completely cheap. Cutting out expensive coffee for cheaper version, emphasis on savings and being productive while staying as lean as possible. My feeling is that someone in the management behind the door threw out this idea, that agile makes you produce more so we can show our bosses we're producing more with the same headcount. Or, maybe, it will allow us to reduce headcount if that's the case. EDITED: They are having their 5 min daily meeting. But not allowed to chat or talk with someone outside of their team. All focus is on work.

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• Java Spotlight Episode 57: Live From #Devoxx - Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg of the London JUG with Yara Senger of SouJava

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Tweet Live from Devoxx 11,  an interview with Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg from the London JUG along with  Yara Senger from the SouJava JUG on the JCP Executive Committee Elections, JSR 248, and Adopt-a-JSR program. Both the London JUG and SouJava JUG are JCP Standard Edition Executive Committee Members. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Geertjan Wielenga, Principal Product Manger in Oracle Developer Tools; Stephen Chin, Java Champion and Java FX expert; and Antonio Goncalves, Paris JUG leader. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Netbeans 7.1 JDK 7 upgrade tools Netbeans First Patch Program OpenJFX approved as an OpenJDK project Devoxx France April 18-20, 2012 Events Nov 22-25, OTN Developer Days in the Nordics Nov 22-23, Goto Conference, Prague Dec 6-8, Java One Brazil, Sao Paulo Feature interview Ben Evans has lived in "Interesting Times" in technology - he was the lead performance testing engineer for the Google IPO, worked on the initial UK trials of 3G networks with BT, built award-winning websites for some of Hollywood's biggest hits of the 90s, rearchitected and reimagined technology helping some of the most vulnerable people in the UK and has worked on everything from some of the UKs very first ecommerce sites, through to multi-billion dollar currency trading systems. He helps to run the London Java Community, and represents the JUG on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee. His first book "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" (with Martijn Verburg) has just been published by Manning. Martijn Verburg (aka 'the Diabolical Developer') herds Cats in the Java/open source communities and is constantly humbled by the creative power to be found there. Currently he resides in London where he co-leads the London JUG (a JCP EC member), runs a couple of open source projects & drinks too much beer at his local pub. You can find him online moderating at the Javaranch or discussing (ranting?) subjects on the Prgorammers Stack Exchange site. Most recently he's become a regular speaker at conferences on Java, open source and software development and has recently wrapped up his first Manning title - "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" with his co-author Ben Evans. Yara Senger is the partner and director of teacher education and Globalcode, graduated from the University of Sao Paulo, Sao Carlos, has significant experience in Brazil and abroad in developing solutions to critical Java. She is the co-creator of Java programs Academy and Academy of Web Developer, accumulating over 1000 hours in the classroom teaching Java. She currently serves as the President of Sou Java. In this interview Ben, Martijn, and Yara talk about the JCP Executive Committee Elections, JSR 348, and the Adopt-a-JSR program. Mail Bag What's Cool Show Transcripts Transcript for this show is available here when available.

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• Call Webservices&hellip;Maybe!?

  - by MOSSLover

  So I have been doing preliminary work for my iOS talk for a while, but did not get into the meat of the project until recently.  One day I envision my talk uploading pictures from a camera on an iPhone or iPad into SharePoint and telling people how I did it.  As you know with my Silverlight talk and any new technology, building new talks with new technologies always ends up with some pain points that you must jump over just to grab data.  So step 1 always starts out with how do we even access a webservice using the new technology. I started out watching every single SPC video available on oAuth and Rest Webservices in SharePoint 2013.  I also sent an email to Eric Shupps about some REST and 2013 examples.  The videos further confused me, because all the videos were on SharePoint hosted apps (provider and autohosted).  I did not want to create a SharePoint hosted app, but instead a mobile app outside of the SharePoint context altogether.  Nick Swan sent me his code and it was great for a starting point on how the JSON calls would look like on iOS, but I was still missing a piece.  Nick does a great job on showing how to use the REST/JSON calls in a non-MS tech, however his presentation uses the SharePoint context and can grab the SPAppToken.  At this point I had to ask the question how do you grab the SAML token outside of SharePoint 2013 in iOS using Objective-C?  After reading all the MSDN documentation, some documentation on Restkit and Objective-C/oAuth calls, and some SharePoint 2013 blog post my head was swimming.  I was dreaming about REST and iOS in SharePoint 2013.  SAML tokens were taunting me.  I was nowhere near understanding 2013. I started talking to my friend, Pedro Jimenez, who is also playing with Objective-C and went to SPC.  He found me a couple good MSDN posts with REST/JSON calls that basically showed the accessToken was all I needed (at this point I was still thinking iOS needed to be a provider hosted app which is wrong).  So then again I had to ask the SAML token question…How do you get a SAML token outside of SharePoint without the TokenHelper class? So then I started talking to people and thinking why do I need to completely avoid TokenHelper…The solution in concept is basically create a webservice in Azure wrapped into a Provider Hosted App in SharePoint.  Wictor Wilen created a helper webservice in the following blog post: http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/How-to-do-active-authentication-to-Office-365-and-SharePoint-Online.aspx. So now I have to basically stand up the webservice, the SharePoint app wrapper, and then use Restkit to call the first webservice to grab the token and then the second webservice to pass in the token and grab some SharePoint data.  What this means is that you can no longer just pass credentials into SharePoint webservices and get data back.  You have to pass in a SAML token with every single webservice call to SharePoint.  The theory is that this token is associated with the permissions the app can handle (read, write, whatever).  It seems like a ton of pain and a lot of work, but this is step 1 in my crusade to pull some piece of data into iOS from SharePoint and show people how to do it themselves.  In the upcoming months hopefully I can get halfway to my end goal. Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2013,REST,oAuth,Objective-C,iOS

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• Today's Links (6/29/2011)

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Event-Driven SOA: Events meet Services | Guido Schmutz Oracle ACE Director Guido Schmutz shows you how to achieve extreme loose coupling within a Service-Oriented Architecture by using event-driven interactions. Misconceptions About Software Architecture | Sanjeev Kumar A concise, to-the-point, and informative article by Sanjeev Kumar. Good Leaders Acknowledge What Can't Be Done - Jeffrey Pfeffer - Harvard Business Review "None of us likes to admit to bad decisions," says Jeffrey Pfeffer. "But imagine how much harder that is for someone who has been chosen to lead a large organization precisely because he or she is thought to have the power to see the future more clearly and chart a wise course." Suboptimal Thinking within Enterprise Architecture | James McGovern McGovern says: "We need to remember that enterprises live and thrive beyond just the current person at the helm." Boundaryless Information Flow | Richard Veryard "If all the boundaries are removed or porous, then the (extended) enterprise or ecosystem becomes like a giant sponge, in which all information permeates the whole," Veryard says. "Some people may think that's a good idea, but it's not what I'd call loose coupling." Coming to a City Near You: Oracle Business Analytics Summits | Rob Reynolds This series of events includes a Technology and Architecture track. New Date for Implementation of Sun Hands-On Course Requirement (Oracle Certification) As announced on the Oracle Certification website, Java Architect, Java Developer, Solaris System Administrator and Solaris Security Administrator certification tracks will include a new mandatory course attendance requirement. VirtualBox 4.0.10 is now available for download | Bob Netherton Netherton shares information on the new release. Updated Technical Best Practices whitepaper | Anthony Shorten The Technical Best Practices whitepaper has been updated with the latest advice. "New advice includes new installation advice, advanced settings, new security settings and advice for both Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere installations," says Shorten. Kscope 11 ADF, AIA and Business Rules | Peter Paul van de Beek Whitehorses Solution Architect Peter Paul van de Beek shares his impressions of KScope11 presentations by Markus Eisele, Sten Vesterli, and Edwin Biemond. Amazon AWS for the learning experience | Andrej Koelewijn "Using AWS changes your expectations how your internal data center should operate," says Koelewijn. BPMN is dead, long live BPEL! (SOA Partner Community Blog) Jürgen Kress shares information -- including a long list of speakers -- for the SOA & BPM Integration Days 2011 conference, October 12th & 13th 2011 in Düsseldorf. InfoQ: HTML5 and the Dawn of Rich Mobile Web Applications James Pearce introduces cross-platform web apps development using HTML5 and web frameworks, such as jQTouch, jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, outlining what makes a good framework. InfoQ: Interview and Book Excerpt: CMMI for Development "Frameworks like TOGAF are used to define an architecture that aligns IT assets and resources to support key business needs and processes of key stakeholders," says SEI's Mike Konrad. "But the individual application systems, capabilities, services, networks, and other IT assets and infrastructure still need to be acquired, developed, or sustained." InfoQ: Architecting a Cloud-Scale Identity Fabric | Eric Olden "The most cited reason for not moving to the cloud is concern about security," says Olden. "In particular, managing user identity and access in the cloud is a tough problem to solve and a big security concern for organizations."

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• SharePoint OCR image files indexing

  Introduction This article describes how to setup indexing of the image files (including TIFF, PDF, JPEG, BMP...) using OCR technology. The indexing described below utilizes Microsoft IFilter technology and as such is not specific to SharePoint, but can be used with any product that uses Microsoft indexing: Microsoft Search, Desktop search, SQL Server search, and through the plug-ins with Google desktop search. I however use it with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2003. For those other products, the registration may need to be slightly different. Background  One of the projects I was working on required a storage of old documents scanned into PDF files. Then there was a separate team of people responsible for providing a tags for a search engine so those image documents could be found. The whole process was clumsy, labor intensive, and error prone. That was what started me on my exploration path. OCR The first search I fired was for the Open Source OCR products. Pretty quickly, I narrowed it down to TESSERACT (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/). Tesseract is an orphaned brain child of HP that worked on it from 1985 to 1995. Then it was moved to the Open Source, and now if I understand it correctly, Google is working on it. With credentials like that, it's no wonder that Tesseract scores one of the highest marks on OCR recognition and accuracy. After downloading and struggling just a bit, I got Tesseract to work. The struggling part was that the home page claims that its base input format is a TIFF file. May be my TIFFs were bad, but I was able to get it to work only for BMP files. Image files conversion So now that I have an OCR that can convert BMP files into text, how do I get text out of the image PDF files? One more search, and I settled down on ImageMagic (http://www.imagemagick.org/). This is another wonderful Open Source utility that can convert any file into image. It did work out of the box, converting any TIFF files into bitmaps, but to get PDF files converted, it requires a GhostScript (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs864/gs864w32.exe). Dealing with text PDFs With that utility installed, I was cooking - I can convert any file (in particular PDF and TIFF) into bitmap, and then I can extract the text out of the bitmap. The only consideration was to somehow treat PDF files containing text differently - after all, OCR is very computation intensive and somewhat error prone even with perfect image quality and resolution. So another quick search, and I have a PDFTOTEXT (ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02pl4-win32.zip) - thank God for Open Source! With these guys, I can pull text out of PDF in an eye blink. However, I would get nothing for pure image PDFs, but I already have a solution for that! Batch process It took another 15 minutes to setup a batch script to automate the process: Check the file extension If file is a PDF file try to extract text out of it if there is more than certain amount of text in the file - done! if there is no text, convert first page into bitmap run OCR on the bitmap For any other file type, convert file into bitmap Run OCR on the bitmap Once you unzip the attached project, check out the bin\OCR.BAT file. It will create a temporary file in the directory where your source file is with the same name + the '.txt' extension.Continue span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Book Reviews: Art of Community and Eyetracking Web Usability

  - by ultan o'broin

  Holidays time offers a chance to catch up on some user experience and user assistance related material. So, two short book reviews (which I considered using my new Tumblr blog for. More about that another time) coming up. The Art of Community by Jono Bacon Excellent starting point for anyone wanting to get going in the community software (FLOSS, for example) space or understand how to set up, manage, and leverage the collective intelligence of communities for whatever ends. The book is a little too long in my opinion, and of course, usage of what Jono is recommending needs to be nuanced and adapted for enterprise applications space (hardly surprising there is a lot about Ubuntu, Lug Radio, and so on given Jono's interests). Shame there wasn't more information on international, non-English community considerations too. Still, some great ideas and insight into setting up and managing communities that I will leverage (watch out for the results on this blog, later in 2011). One section, on collaborative writing really jumped out. It reinforced the whole idea that to successful community initiatives are based on instigators knowing what makes the community tick in the first place. How about this for insight into user profiles for people who write community user assistance (OK then, "doc") and what tools they might use (in this case, we're talking about Jokosher): "Most people who write documentation for open source software projects would fall into the category of power user. They are technology enthusiasts who are not interested in the super-technical avenues of programming, but want to help out. Many of these people have good writing skills and a good knowledge of using the software, so the documentation fit is natural. With Jokosher we wanted to acknowledge this profile of user. As such, instead of focussing on complex text processing tools, we encouraged our documentation contributors to use a wiki." The book is available for free here, and well as being available from usual sources. Eyetracking Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Prentice Another fine book by established experts. I have some field experience of eyetracking studies myself --in the user assistance for enterprise applications space--though Jakob and Kara concentrate on websites for their research here. I would caution how much about websites transfers easily to the applications space, especially enterprise applications, as claimed in the book too. However, Jakob and Kara do make the case very well that understanding design goals (for example, productivity improvement in the case of applications) and the context of the software use is critical. Executing a study using eyetracking technology requires that you know what you want to test, can set up realistic tasks for testing by representative testers, and then analyze the results. Be precise, as lots of data will be generated (I think the authors underplay the effort in analyzing data too). What I found disappointing was the lack of emphasis on eyetracking as only part of the usability solution. It's really for fine-tuning designs in my opinion, and should be used after other design reviews. I also wasn't that crazy about the level of disengagement between the qualitative and quantitative side of this kind of testing that the book indicated. I think it is useful to have testers verbalize their thoughts and for test engineers to prompt, intervene, or guide as necessary. More on cultural or international aspects to usability testing might have been included too (websites are available to everyone). To conclude, I enjoyed the book, took on board some key takeaways about methodologies and found the recommendations sensible and easy to follow (for example about Forms layouts). Applying enterprise applications requirements such as those relating to user profiles, design goals, and overall context of use in conjunction with what's in this book would be the way to go here. It also made me think of how interesting it would be to compare eyetracking findings between website and enterprise applications usage.

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• The dislikes of TDD

  - by andrewstopford

  I enjoy debates about TDD and Brian Harrys blog post is no exception. Brian sounds out what he likes and dislikes about TDD and it's the dislikes I'll focus on. The idea of having unit tests that cover virtually every line of code that I’ve written that I have to refactor every time I refactor my code makes me shudder.  Doing this way makes me take nearly twice as long as it would otherwise take and I don’t feel like I get sufficient benefits from it. Refactoring your tests to match your refactored code sounds like the tests are suffering. Too many hard dependencies with no SOLID concerns are a sure fire reason you would do this. Maybe at the start of a TDD cycle you would need to do this as your design evolves and you remove these dependencies but this should quickly be resolved as you refactor. If you find your self still doing it then stop and look back at your design. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of unit tests.  I just prefer to write them after the code has stopped shaking a bit.  In fact most of my early testing is “manual”.  Either I write a small UI on top of my service that allows me to plug in values and try it or write some quick API tests that I throw away as soon as I have validated them. The problem with this is that a UI can make assumptions on your code that then just unit test around and very quickly the design becomes bad and you technical debt sweeps in. If you want to blackbox test your code with a UI then do so after your TDD cycles not before. This is probably by biggest issue with a literal TDD interpretation.  TDD says you never write a line of code without a failing test to show you need it.  I find it leads developers down a dangerous path.  Without any help from a methodology, I have met way too many developers in my life that “back into a solution”.  By this, I mean they write something, it mostly works and they discover a new requirement so they tack it on, and another and another and when they are done, they’ve got a monstrosity of special cases each designed to handle one specific scenario.  There’s way more code than there should be and it’s way too complicated to understand. I believe in finding general solutions to problems from which all the special cases naturally derive rather than building a solution of special cases.  In my mind, to do this, you have to start by conceptualizing and coding the framework of the general algorithm.  For me, that’s a relatively monolithic exercise. TDD is an development pratice not a methodology, the danger is that the solution becomes a mass of different things that violate DRY. TDD won't solve these problems, only good communication and practices like pairing will help. Above all else an assumption that TDD replaces a methodology is a mistake, combine it with what ever works for your team\business but only good communication will help. A good naming scheme\structure for folders, files and tests can help you and your team isolate what tests are for what.

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• Value of SOA Specialization interview with Thomas Schaller IPT - part III

  - by Jürgen Kress

  Recognized by Oracle, Preferred by Customers. We had the great opportunity to interview Thomas Schaller – Partner from our SOA Specialized Partner IPT Innovation Process Technology from Switzerland Why did IPT decide to become SOA Specialized? " SOA Specialization is a great branding for IPT. We are the SOA Specialists in the Swiss market, as we focus all our services around SOA. With 65 Swiss consultants focused on SOA Security & SOA Testing & BPM – Business Process Management & BSM – Business Service Modeling the partnership with Oracle as the technology leader in SOA is key, therefore it was important to us to become the first SOA Specialized company in Switzerland. As a result IPT is mentioned by Gartner as one of eight European SOA Consulting Firms and included in „Guide to SOA Consulting and System Integration Service Providers“ Can you describe the marketing activities with Oracle? Once a year we organize the largest SOA Conference in Switzerland “SOA, BPM & Integration Forum 2011“ Oracle is much more than a sponsor for the conference. Jointly we invite our customer base to attend this key event. The sales teams address jointly their most important prospects and customers. Oracle supports us with key speakers who present future directions of the Oracle SOA portfolio like Clemens Utschig-Utschig who presented details about the Complex Event Processing (CEP) solution in 2009 and James Allerton-Austin who presented details about the social BPM solution (BPM) in 2010. Additional our key customers presented their Oracle SOA success stories. How did you team with Oracle around the sales activities? "Sales alignment is key for the successful partnership. When we achieved! SOA Specialization we celebrated jointly with the Oracle and IPT middleware sales team. At the Aperol may interesting discussions resulted in joint opportunities and business. A key section of our joint business planning are marketing and sales activities. Together we define campaign topics and target customers. Matthias Breitschmid our superb Oracle partner manager ensures that the defined sales teams align and start the joint business. Regular we review our joint business plan with the joint management teams and Jürgen Kress our EMEA Oracle Sponsor. It is great to see that both companies profit from each other and we receive leads from Oracle!” Did you get Oracle support to train your consultants in the Oracle SOA Suite? “Enablement is key for us to deliver successful SOA projects. Together with Ralph Bellinghausen from the Oracle Enablement team we defined an Oracle trainings plan for our consultants. The monthly SOA Partner Community newsletter is a great resource to get the latest product updates, webcasts and trainings. As a SOA Specialized partner we get also invited to the SOA Blackbelt trainings, this trainings are hosted by Oracle product management where we get not only first hand information we get also direct access to the developers who can support us in critical project phases. Driven by the customer success we have increased our Oracle SOA practice by more than 200% in the last years!” Why did the customer decide for the IPT SOA offering? “SOA Specialization becomes a brand for customers, it proofs that we have the certified SOA skills and that IPT has delivered successful Oracle SOA projects. Jointly with Oracle and all the support we get from marketing, sales, enablement, support and product management we can ensure our customers to deliver their SOA project successful!” What are the next steps for IPT? “SOA Specialization is a super beneficial for IPT. We are looking forward to our upcoming SOA, BPM & Integration Forum 2011 and prepare to become BPM Specialized. part I Torsten Winterberg, Opitz Consulting & part II Debra Lilley, Fujitsu For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website

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• Is Agile the new micromanagement?

  - by Smith James

  This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial basis. It has been 4 months with 3 iterations and they continue to do it without going fully agile for the rest of us. This is due to the fact that management's trust to meet business requirements with a quite a bit of ad hoc type request from high above. Recently, I talked to the developers who are part of this initiative; they tell me that it's not fun. They are not allowed to talk to other developers by their Scrum master and are not allowed to take any phone calls in the work area (which maybe fine to an extent). For example, if I want to talk to my friend for kicks who is in the agile team, I am not allowed without the approval of the Scrum master; who is sitting right next to the agile team. The idea of all this or the agile is to provide a complete vacuum for agile developers from any interruptions and to have them put in good 6+ productive hours. Well, guys, I am no agile guru but what I have read Yahoo agile rollout document and similar for other organizations, it gives me a feeling that agile is not cheap. It require resources and budget to instill agile into the teams and correct issue as they arrive to put them back on track. For starters, it requires training for developers and coaching for managers and etc, etc... The current Scrum master was a manager who took a couple days agile training class paid by the management is now leading this agile team. I have also heard in the meeting that agile manifesto doesn't dictate that agile is not set in stones and is customized differently for each company. Well, it all sounds good and reason. In conclusion, I always thought the agile was supposed to bring harmony in the development teams which results in happy developers. However, I am getting a very opposite feeling when talking to the developers in the agile team. They are unhappy that they cannot talk anything but work, sitting quietly all day just working, and they feel it's just another way for management to make them work more. Tell me please, if this is one of the examples of good practices used for the purpose of selfish advantage for more dollars? Or maybe, it's just us the developers like me and this agile team feels that they don't like to work in an environment where they only breathe work because they are at work. Thanks. Edit: It's a company in healthcare domain that has offices across US. It definitely feels like a cowboy style agile which makes me really not wanting to go for agile at all, esp at my current company. All of it has to do with the management being completely cheap. Cutting out expensive coffee for cheaper version, emphasis on savings and being productive while staying as lean as possible. My feeling is that someone in the management behind the door threw out this idea, that agile makes you produce more so we can show our bosses we're producing more with the same headcount. Or, maybe, it will allow us to reduce headcount if that's the case. EDITED: They are having their 5 min daily meeting. But not allowed to chat or talk with someone outside of their team. All focus is on work.

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• Silverlight Cream for January 30, 2011 - 2 -- #1038

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Renuka Prasad, Ollie Riches, Jesse Liberty(-2-, -3-, -4-, -5-), Medusa M, John Papa, Beth Massi, and Joost van Schaik. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming" Jesse Liberty WP7: "Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits " Max Paulousky Lightswitch: "How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuch has niether GooNews for users of his cool WP7 app or or for the WP7 Marketplace in general: R.I.P. GooNews From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits Max Paulousky expanded on the Looping selector for some customization allowing him to display width/height metric measurement selectors... great job, Max! WP7 – How to Create a Simple Checked Listbox In Windows Phone 7 Renuka Prasad has the code for a nicely-working checked Listbox for WP7 on his blog... the post is the code... WP7Contrib: Network Connectivity Push Model Ollie Riches had a post last week that I'm just catching up to... about the 'push model' for network connectivity they produced in WP7 Contrib. Using the Camera in Windows Phone 7 Jesse Liberty has a bunch of posts up... I'm just going to bite the bullet and catch up! ... this 'From Scratch post 24 is all about the camera in your WP7 dev travails... and he makes it look so darned easy :) Linq and Fluent Programming Jesse Liberty's next post is 'From Scratch 25 and is all about Linq and Fluent Programming which started with a discussion at Codemash with Bill Wagner... wanna get a handle on fluent programming? ... check this out. Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming Another item you might want to get your head around is Reactive Programming, or Rx... Jesse Liberty has a great post up discussing this, as his 'From Scratch post 26... good external links, and lots of commentary as well. Rx–Reactive Programming for Windows Phone Jesse Liberty's 'From Scratch 27 follows the previous on about Rx by taking the Rx show to the WP7 development arena. Want a solid Rx example... here ya go! Reactive Extensions–Observable Sequences are First Class Objects Finally catching up with Jesse Liberty (for now), I find this 'From Scratch number 28 which is again on Rx and WP7 dev, expanding on the example from the previous post by harnessing the power of Rx Localizing Silverlight applications Medusa M has a nice post up at dotnetslackers on localization in Silverlight. If you haven't had to do localization before, it can get to be a pain... understanding an article like this will get you part of the way to being pain-free. Silverlight TV 59: What Goes Into Baking Silverlight? Very cool presentation for those of you interested in the bits ... John Papa's Silverlight TV number 59 is up and he's chatting with Andy Rivas about the process followed getting the bits to us. How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application Beth Massi's latest Lightswitch post is on sending HTML Email via SMTP from Lightswitch, and then follows that up with sending Email via Outlook automation. ViewModel driven animations using the Visual State Manager, DataStateBehavior and Expression Blend After some good user feedback, Joost van Schaik decided to make some modifications to his WP7 app, and got involved in a Page Title collapse animation driven from the ViewModel. Check out the nice write-up, video, external links, and source... all good! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• You Are Hiring But Do Candidate&rsquo;s Want to Work For You

  - by david.talamelli

  So here you are – it has happened, you are now interviewing for that position that you have either applied for or maybe were called about. Whether you are an “active” candidate looking for a job or a “passive” candidate who was contacted about the opportunity, it doesn’t matter now. Regardless of the circumstances of how you got to the interview stage, how you and your new potential manager connect with each other at interview will play a part in whether you are successful in landing that job. The best manager/employee relationships I think tend to be the ones where both the manager and employee have a common goal that they are both working towards and they work together in unison to achieve these goals. Candidates – when you are interviewing for a role, remember that an interview is a two way process. An interview shouldn’t be just a case of a company interviewing you to see if you are a good fit for a certain role. Don’t forget in an interview process it is equally important that you take the opportunity to similarly interview the company to see if that role/company are the right place for you to move to as the next step in your career. I think an interview should not only be a chance for a Hiring Manager to get to better know a candidate and asses his capability and cultural fit for a team/company but it should also be a chance for the candidate to similarly assess a company or manager about whether they are someone that they want to work with. Managers – I know Recruiters have been talking about the “war for talent” since before many of you were managers, but there is no denying it – it exists. You are not only competing with other companies for talented individuals but you are also competing with the existing companies that those talented individuals are working at. Companies are not going to let the people they have identified as superstars resign without a fight (this is the classic Counter Offer scenario which may be another blog post in itself). So how do we get these great people – their current employer will do all they can to keep them, everyone else wants them – does this mean all hope is lost? No, absolutely not. The same reasons that have always existed on why candidates are interested in other opportunities is still there: it could be that someone is looking for career advancement, or they want the chance to work with new technology or maybe you have an opportunity that is exactly what that person is looking to do. As a Hiring Manager don’t just conduct your interviews in question/answer mode. You should talk to that individual to work out what it is they are looking for and you can then relate how your role addresses that. It is potentially going to be the two of you working together so you two are the ones who have to be most comfortable with each other. Don’t oversell the role – set realistic expectations of what that candidate can expect working in your team – give them the good, the bad and the ugly so they can make an informed decision. Manager’s think back to when you last were looking for a job and put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. When you were looking for a job, what was it that you wanted to know about Oracle, or what was it that you wanted more information about. There are some great Business Leaders that work here at Oracle – if you are one of them it is likely that you already are doing all these things anyway. The good news for you is that you are also likely raising yourself head and shoulders above what many interviewers do – that in itself gives you a competitive advantage in this ‘war for talent’ but as a great Business Leader you already know that

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• 2010 April Fools Joke

  - by Dane Morgridge

  I started at my current job at the end of March last year and there were some pretty funny April fools jokes.  Nothing super crazy, but pretty funny.  One guy came in and there was a tree in his cube.  We (me and the rest of my team) were planning for a couple of weeks on what we could do that would be just awesome.  We had a lot of really good ideas but nothing was spectacular.  Then Steve Andrews had a brilliant idea (yes it's true).  Since we have internal DNS servers we could redirect DNS to our internal servers for a site such as cnn.com.  Then we would lift the code from the site and create our own home page that would contain news about people in the company.  Steve was actually laughing so hard when he thought of the idea that it took him almost 30 minutes to spit it out. I thought, "this is perfect". I had enlisted a couple of people to help come up with the stories and at the same time we were trying to figure out how to get everybody to the site the morning of the 1st.  Then it hit me.  We could have the main article be one of my getting picked up by the FBI on hacking charges.  Then Chris (my boss) could send an email out telling everyone that I would not be there today and direct them to the site.  That would for sure get everyone to go to cnn.com first thing and see our prank.  I begun the process of looking for photos I could crop myself into and found the perfect one.  Then my wife took a good pic with our Canon 40D and I went to work.  The night before I didn't have any other stories due to everyone being really busy at work, but I decided to go ahead with just the FBI bust on it's own.  I got everything working and tested and coordinated with Chris for me to come in late so no one would see me at the office until after everyone had seen the joke. And so the morning of April fools came and I was waiting at home and the email was perfect.  Chris told everyone that I wouldn't be in and that not to answer any questions if you got any calls from anybody.  The Photoshop job I did was not perfect, but good enough and I even wrote an article with it that went into more detail about how I had been classified as a terrorist and all kinds of stuff. People at work started getting the emails and a few people didn't realize it was a joke (as I had hoped), including some from senior management (one person in particular who shall remain nameless in this post).  Emails started flying around about how to contain the situation and how to handle bad PR.  He basically bought it hook, line and sinker and then went in to crisis mode.  It was awesome! He did finally realize it was a joke and I will likely print and frame the email he sent out.  In short, April fools this year was a huge success.

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• Open Your Windows - 4/Maio/10

  - by Claudia Costa

  This FREE technical briefing is designed to show ISVs/SIs how to leverage the Oracle11g Technology especially in the small to medium business. The briefing focuses on Oracle's 11g platform on Windows & Linux and gives a very comprehensive technical competitive overview to the products offered by Microsoft. The technical part covers Integration and Migration aspects of various Microsoft products such as SQL Server, .NET and Active Directory. Register Today! With Oracle11g Oracle introduced various products (ApplicationExpress, OracleExpress Edition, ADF, BPEL) and licenses (Oracle Database Standard Edition One, Application Server Java Edition) specifically targetting the small to medium business market and to show that Oracle Database and Application Server are as easy to use and costs less than Microsoft products in terms of purchase price and ongoing support & maintenance and even much much less when considering the Linux platform.. For those ISVs have already adopted Microsoft .NET framework and using SQL Server as their database layer, we will demostrate that Oracle11g Database is as easy as SQL Server to install, configure, and manage. In addition to that, their application development .NET platform does not requires dramatic changes to enable it to run on the Oracle database. Besides the standard functionalities, Oracle has enhanced some of the advanced features; such as Intermedia, Security, Ref Cursor, etc., tightly integrated with .NET framework so that .NET developers can take full advantage of the Oracle technology, without worrying or programming the complexity components. Objectives ·         Understand Oracle's strategy and commitment on Windows & Linux ·         Learn how to migrate from SQL Server to Oracle on Windows AND Linux ·         Understand that Oracle11g is easy to manage and to install on Windows & Linux ·         Learn how to integrate Windows products with the Oracle11g Platform ·         Learn how Oracle products interoperate & integrate with Microsoft .NET ·         Learn how an Oracle database on Windows will easily be ported to a lower cost Linux database platform and interoperate with a .NET application Prerequisites General Operating System expertise including MS-Windows and Linux. Agenda ·         Welcome and Intro ·         Oracle at a glance ·         Strategy; Small to Medium Business, Microsoft and Linux ·         Oracle 11g Architecture on Linux & Windows ·         Managing Oracle 11g on Linux & Windows ·         Application Development ·         Migration ·         Value propositions for ISVs & Wrap-up   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Para mais informações/inscrições, contacte: [email protected].

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• Silverlight Cream for May 15, 2010 -- #862

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Victor Gaudioso, Antoni Dol(-2-), Brian Genisio, Shawn Wildermuth, Mike Snow, Phil Middlemiss, Pete Brown, Kirupa, Dan Wahlin, Glenn Block, Jeff Prosise, Anoop Madhusudanan, and Adam Kinney. Shoutouts: Victor Gaudioso would like you to Checkout my Interview with Microsoft’s Murray Gordon at MIX 10 Pete Brown announced: Connected Show Podcast #29 With … Me! From SilverlightCream.com: New Silverlight Video Tutorial: How to Create Fast Forward for the MediaElement Victor Gaudioso's latest video tutorial is on creating the ability to fast-forward a MediaElement... check it out in the tutorial player itself! Overlapping TabItems with the Silverlight Toolkit TabControl Antoni Dol has a very cool tutorial up on the Toolkit TabItems control... not only is he overlapping them quite nicely but this is a very cool tutorial... QuoteFloat: Animating TextBlock PlaneProjections for a spiraling effect in Silverlight Antoni Dol also has a Blend tutorial up on animating TextBlock items... run the demo and you'll want to read the rest :) Adventures in MVVM – My ViewModel Base – Silverlight Support! Brian Genisio continues his MVVM tutorials with this update on his ViewModel base using some new C# 4.0 features, and fully supports Silverlight and WPF My Thoughts on the Windows Phone 7 Shawn Wildermuth gives his take on WP7. He included a port of his XBoxGames app to WP7 ... thanks Shawn! Silverlight Tip of the Day #20 – Using Tooltips in Silverlight I figured Mike Snow was going to overrun me with tips since I have missed a couple days, but there's only one! ... and it's on Tooltips. Animating the Silverlight opacity mask Phil Middlemiss has an article at SilverZine describing a Behavior he wrote (and is sharing) that turns a FrameworkElement into an opacity mask for it's parent container... cool demo on the page too. Breaking Apart the Margin Property in Xaml for better Binding Pete Brown dug in on a Twitter message and put some thoughts down about breaking a Margin apart to see about binding to the individual elements. Building a Simple Windows Phone App Kirupa has a 6-part tutorial up on building not-your-typical first WP7 application... all good stuff! Integrating HTML into Silverlight Applications Dan Wahlin has a post up discussing three ways to display HTML inside a Silverlight app. Hello MEF in Silverlight 4 and VB! (with an MVVM Light cameo) Glenn Block has a post up discussing MEF, MVVM, and it's in VB this time... and it's actually a great tutorial top to bottom... all source included of course :) Understanding Input Scope in Silverlight for Windows Phone Jeff Prosise has a good post up on the WP7 SIP and how to set the proper InputScope to get the SIP you want. Thinking about Silverlight ‘desktop’ apps – Creating a Standalone Installer for offline installation (no browser) Anoop Madhusudanan is discussing something that's been floating around for a while... installing Silverlight from, say, a CD or DVD when someone installs your app. He's got some good code, but be sure to read Tim Heuer and Scott Guthrie's comments, and consider digging deeper into that part. Using FluidMoveBehavior to animate grid coordinates in Silverlight Adam Kinney has a cool post up on animating an object using the FluidMotionBehavior of Blend 4... looks great moving across a checkerboard... check out the demo, then grab the code. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• I spy a Live Framework portal

  - by jamiet

  Those that have followed my blogs for a while may know that I have a slightly banal interest in Windows Live and, more specifically, the Live Services developer platform'; if that doesn’t sound interesting to you then stop reading now. My interest mainly stems from the Live Mesh technology that was announced a couple of years ago and the data synchronisation platform API that underpins it; that platform is called the Live Framework or LiveFX for short. At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) 2008 Microsoft made LiveFX available to the public as a Tech Preview and I spent some time learning to use it and also built a few test apps on it too. In August 2009 an announcement came that that tech preview was getting shut down: "At the Professional Developer Conference 2008, we gave the developer community access to the technical preview of the Live Framework. The Live Framework is core to our vision of providing you with a consistent programming interface. Now we are working to integrate existing services, controls and the Live Framework into the next release of Windows Live. Your feedback continues to help us build the best possible offerings for Windows Live users, for you and for your customers. " Since then news on LiveFX has disappeared save for a throwaway session at PDC09 and I was hoping that news was going to appear at this week’s MIX conference but nothing was forthcoming. Instead though today I stumbled upon an unannounced portal for future LiveFX applications on Microsoft’s Azure portal at http://live.azure.com. Check it out: I consider this to be very good news. This Azure portal was built after the LiveFX tech preview was decommissioned so seeing Live Services existing so prominently alongside Microsoft’s other cloud efforts like Windows Azure and SQL Azure vindicates my early investment in the platform and gives me hope that we’re going to see something get released very very soon. I believe that the potential uses for this platform are extremely compelling and I’m looking forward to trying some out in the near future. I am also expecting LiveFX to have a heavy dependency on the OData protocol that I talked about yesterday in my post OData.org updated - gives clues about future sql azure enhancements so you can tell where my interest in that stems from. In case you’re wondering the projects that you see listed above (Basic List Sample, JT-proj etc…) are projects that I built on the old Tech Preview platform so clearly that stuff has not gone for good which is also good news; not just because it means I’ll have access to the code I wrote before but I also assume it means that LiveFX won’t have changed much since its tech preview incarnation. I know there are other LiveFX buffs out there and hopefully this news reaches some of them. If you are one of them the please put a comment below and let me know your thoughts! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Four New Java Champions

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Four luminaries in the Java community have been selected as new Java Champions. The are Agnes Crepet, Lars Vogel, Yara Senger and Martijn Verburg. They were selected for their technical knowledge, leadership, inspiration, and tireless work for the community. Here is how they rock the Java world: Agnes Crepet Agnes Crepet (France) is a passionate technologist with over 11 years of software engineering experience, especially in the Java technologies, as a Developer, Architect, Consultant and Trainer. She has been using Java since 1999, implementing multiple kinds of applications (from 20 days to 10000 men days) for different business fields (banking, retail, and pharmacy). Currently she is a Java EE Architect for a French pharmaceutical company, the homeopathy world leader. She is also the co-founder, with other passionate Java developers, of a software company named Ninja Squad, dedicated to Software Craftsmanship. Agnes is the leader of two Java User Groups (JUG), the Lyon JUG Duchess France and the founder of the Mix-IT Conferenceand theCast-IT Podcast, two projects about Java and Agile Development. She speaks at Java and JUG conferences around the world and regularly writes articles about the Java Ecosystem for the French print Developer magazine Programmez! and for the Duchess Blog. Follow Agnes @agnes_crepet. Lars Vogel Lars Vogel (Germany) is the founder and CEO of the vogella GmbH and works as Java, Eclipse and Android consultant, trainer and book author. He is a regular speaker at international conferences, such as EclipseCon, Devoxx, Droidcon and O'Reilly's Android Open. With more than one million visitors per month, his website vogella.com is one of the central sources for Java, Eclipse and Android programming information. Lars is committer in the Eclipse project and received in 2010 the "Eclipse Top Contributor Award" and 2012 the "Eclipse Top Newcomer Evangelist Award." Follow Lars on Twitter @vogella. Yara Senger Yara Senger (Brazil) has been a tireless Java activist in Brazil for many years. She is President of SouJava and she is an alternate representative of the group on the JCP Executive Committee. Yara has led SouJava in many initiatives, from technical events to social activities. She is co-founder and director of GlobalCode, which trains developers throughout Brazil.  Last year, she was recipient of the Duke Choice's Award, for the JHome embedded environment.  Yara is also an active speaker, giving presentations in many countries, including JavaOne SF, JavaOne Latin Ameria, JavaOne India, JFokus, and JUGs throughout Brazil. Yara is editor of InfoQ Brasil and also frequently posts at http://blog.globalcode.com.br/search/label/Yara. Follow Yara @YaraSenger. Martijn Verburg Martijn Verburg (UK) is the CTO of jClarity (a Java/JVM performance cloud tooling start-up) and has over 12 years experience as a Java/JVM technology professional and OSS mentor in a variety of organisations from start-ups to large enterprises. He is the co-leader of the London Java Community (~2800 developers) and leads the global effort for the Java User Group "Adopt a JSR" and "Adopt OpenJDK" programmes. These programmes encourage day to day Java developer involvement with OpenJDK, Java standards (JSRs), an important relationship for keeping the Java ecosystem relevant to the 9 million Java developers out there today. As a leading expert on technical team optimisation, his talks and presentations are in high demand by major conferences (JavaOne, Devoxx, OSCON, QCon) where you'll often find him challenging the industry status quo via his alter ego "The Diabolical Developer." You can read more in the OTN ariticle "Challenging the Diabolical Developer: A Conversation with JavaOne Rock Star Martijn Verburg." Follow Martijn @karianna. The Java Champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technology and community leaders who are community-nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. Java Champions get the opportunity to provide feedback, ideas, and direction that will help Oracle grow the Java Platform. Congratulations to these new Java Champions!

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• WEB203 &ndash; Jump into Silverlight!&hellip; and Become Effective Immediately with Tim Huckaby, Fou

  - by Robert Burger

  Getting ready for the good stuff. Definitely wish there were more Silverlight and WCF RIA sessions, but this is a start.  Was lucky to get a coveted power-enabled seat.  Luckily, due to my trustily slow Verizon data card, I can get these notes out amidst a total Internet outage here.  This is the second breakout session of the day, and is by far standing-room only.  I stepped out before the session started to get a cool Diet COKE and wouldn’t have gotten back in if I didn’t already have a seat. Tim says this is an intro session and that he’s been begging for intro sessions at TechEd for years and that by looking at this audience, he thinks the demand is there.  Admittedly, I didn’t know this was an intro session, or I might have gone elsewhere.  But, it was the very first Silverlight session, so I had to be here. Tim says he will be providing a very good comprehensive reference application at the end of the presentation.  He has just demoed it, and it is a full CRUD-based Sales Manager application based on…  AdventureWorks! Session Agenda What it is / How to get started Declarative Programming Layout and Controls, Events and Commands Working with Data Adding Style to Your Application   Silverlight…  “WPF Light” Why is the download 4.2MB?  Because the direct competitor is a 4.2MB download.  There is no technical reason it is not the entire framework.  It is purely to “be competitive”.   Getting Started Get all of the following downloads from www.silverlight.net/getstarted Install VS2010 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 Install Silverlight 4 Tools for VS2010 Install Expression Blend 4 Install the Silverlight 4 Toolkit   Reference Application Features Uses MVVM pattern – a way to move data access code that would normally be inline within the UI and placing it in nice data access libraries Images loaded dynamically from the database, converting GIF to PNG because Silverlight does not support GIF. LINQ to SQL is the data access model WCF is the data provider and is using binary message encoding   Declarative Programming XAML replaces code for UI representation Attributes control Layout and Style Event handlers wired-up in XAML Declarative Data Binding   Layout Overview Content rendering flows inside of parent Fixed positioning (Canvas) is seldom used Panels are used to house content Margins and Padding over fixed size   Panels StackPanel – Arranges child elements into a single line oriented horizontally or vertically Grid – A flexible grid are that consists of rows and columns Canvas – An are where positions are specifically fixed WrapPanel (in Toolkit) – Positions child elements in sequential position left to right and top to bottom. DockPanel (in Toolkit) – Positions child controls within a dockable area   Positioning Horizontal and Vertical Alignment Margin – Separates an element from neighboring elements Padding – Enlarges the effective size of an element by a thickness   Controls Overview Not all controls created equal Silverlight, as a subset of WPF, so many WPF controls do not exist in the core Siverlight release Silverlight Toolkit continues to add controls, but are released in different quality bands Plenty of good 3rd party controls to fill the gaps Windows Phone 7 is to have 95% of controls available in Silverlight Core and Toolkit.   Events and Commands Standard .NET Events Routed Events Commands – based on the ICommand interface – logical action that can be invoked in several ways   Adding Style to Your Application Resource Dictionaries – Contains a hash table of key/value pairs.  Silverlight can only use Static Resources whereas WPF can also use Dynamic Resources Visual State Manager Silverlight 4 supports Implicit styles ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries combines many different file-based resources   Downloads

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• Know Your Audience, And/Or Your Customer

  - by steve.diamond

  Yesterday I gave an internal presentation to about 20 Oracle employees on "messaging," not messaging technology, but embarking on the process of building messages. One of the elements I covered was the importance of really knowing and understanding your audience. As a humorous reference I included two side-by-side photos of Oakland A's fans and Oakland Raiders fans. The Oakland A's fans looked like happy-go-lucky drunk types. The Oakland Raiders fans looked like angry extras from a low budget horror flick. I then asked my presentation attendees what these two groups had in common. Here's what I heard. --They're human (at least I THINK they're human). --They're from Oakland. --They're sports fans. After that, it was anyone's guess. A few days earlier we were putting the finishing touches on a sales presentation for one of our product lines. We had included an upfront "lead in" addressing how the economy is improving, yet that doesn't mean sales executives will have any more resources to add to their teams, invest in technology, etc. This "lead in" included miscellaneous news article headlines and statistics validating the slowly improving economy. When we subjected this presentation to internal review two days ago, this upfront section in particular was scrutinized. "Is the economy really getting better? I (exclamation point) don't think it's really getting better. Haven't you seen the headlines coming out of Greece and Europe?" Then the question TO ME became, "Who will actually be in the audience that sees and hears this presentation? Will s/he be someone like me? Or will s/he be someone like the critic who didn't like our lead-in?" We took the safe route and removed that lead in. After all, why start a "pitch" with a component that is arguably subjective? What if many of our audience members are individuals at organizations still facing a strong headwind? For reasons I won't go into here, it was the right decision to make. The moral of the story: Make sure you really know your audience. Harness the wisdom of the information your organization's CRM systems collect to get that fully informed "customer view." Conduct formal research. Conduct INFORMAL research. Ask lots of questions. Study industries and scenarios that have nothing to do with yours to see "how they do it." Stop strangers in coffee shops and on the street...seriously. Last week I caught up with an old friend from high school who recently retired from a 25 year career with the USMC. He said, "I can learn something from every single person I come into contact with." What a great way of approaching the world. Then, think about and write down what YOU like and dislike as a customer. But also remember that when it comes to your company's products, you are most likely NOT the customer, so don't go overboard in superimposing your own world view. Approaching the study of customers this way adds rhyme, reason and CONTEXT to lengthy blog posts like this one. Know your audience.

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• Silverlight Cream for May 13, 2010 -- #861

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Sigurd Snørteland, Jeff Prosise, DaveDev, Joe Zhou, Chris Eargle, John Papa(-2-, -3-), and David Anson(-2-). Shoutouts: In with the links I've listed below, Sigurd Snørteland also sent a link to this app he's working on which is actually pretty cool to see: ZuneLight. The code is not yet available. He also has a no-code demo of a Silverlight Media Center Pieter Voloshyn, Luiz Thadeu, and Jhun Iti have a very nice Silverlight image editor up: Thumba From SilverlightCream.com: WP7 - Silverlight on mobile Sigurd Snørteland submitted some links for me that have been translated to English from his blog. I hope the pages come out good because he's got a lot of good stuff on there. This one has a link to a presentation he did, and 4 projects you can load up in the emulator that he's converted to the phone: weather, worldclock, coverflow, and solitaire ... pretty cool... thanks for the links Sigurd! Understanding Page Orientation in Silverlight for Windows Phone Jeff Prosise has a really nice post up on page orientation in WP7 ... what it means to your app, how to detect it, and example code for what to do then... also love a quote by Jeff: "Silverlight for Windows Phone is the hottest thing since color TV" Why you should check out Expression Blend Behaviors when using Silverlight DaveDev has a post up describing Behaviors and why we should use them, plus tons of external links to resources, blogs, videos... all good stuff... Fiddler inspector for WCF Silverlight Polling Duplex and WCF RIA Joe Zhou announces and provides a link to a new Fiddler inspector that understands the framing in Polling Duplex and also raw binary xml and binary SOAP. Windows Phone Controls v0.7 Chris Eargle reports the release of Version 0.7 of the Windows Phone Controls project on CodePlex ... this includes a Pivot Control and a Panorama Control... both very nicely done. Binding to Silverlight ComboBox and Using SelectedValue, SelectedValuePath and DisplayMemberPath John Papa responds to a user question and put up a nice post about binding to a ComboBox and then go from the selected item to some other property ... code included No More Boxes! Exploring the PathListBox (Silverlight TV #25) Silverlight TV 25 went up on Tuesday ... thought it was going to be Thursday?? anyway ... John Papa and Adam Kinney are discussing the PathListBox and looking at some cool demos thereof. Exposing SOAP, OData, and JSON Endpoints for RIA Services (Silverlight TV 26) Since today IS Thursday, we have a new Silverlight TV, number 26, and John Papa is chatting with Deepesh Mohnani of the WCF RIA Services team about exposing all sorts of endpoints... should be something in there for everybody :) Workaround for a Silverlight data binding bug affecting various scenarios - including DataGrid+ContextMenu David Anson details the rabbit-trail he and others on the team followed in response to a problem reported via Twitter where the binding on a DataGrid seemed off by a row(!) ... weird but true, validated, and SL3/4 are bug-for-bug compatible with this too! ... But David wouldn't leave us there.. he also has a workaround. Sharing the code for a simple Silverlight 4 REST-based cloud-oriented file management app for Azure and S3 David Anson had an opportunity to build an app he's wanted to build for a while and shares it with us: Blobstore -- a small, lightweight Silverlight 4 application that acts as a basic front-end for the Windows Azure Simple Data Storage and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) -- and remember I said he shared the source :) Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Cross platform application revolution

  - by anirudha

  Every developer know that if they make a windows application that they work only on windows. that’s a small pity thing we all know. this is a lose point for windows application who make developer thing small means only for windows and other only for mac. this is a big point behind success of web because who purchase a operating system if they want to use a application on other platform. why they purchase when they can’t try them. that’s a thing better in Web means IE 6 no problem IE 6 to IE 8 chrome to chrome 8 Firefox to Firefox 3.6.13 even that’s beta no problem the good website is shown as same as other browser. some minor difference may be can see. the cross platform application development thinking is much big then making a application who is only for some audience. the difference between audience make by OS what they use Windows or mac. if they use mac they can’t use this they use windows they can’t use this. Web for Everyone starting from a children to grandfather. male and female Everyone can use internet.no worrying what you have even you have Windows or mac , any browser even as silly IE 6. the cross platform have a good thing that “People”. everyone can use them without a problem that. just like some time problem come in windows that “some component is missing click here to get them” , you can’t use this [apps] software because you have windows sp1 , sp2  sp3. you need to install this first before this. this stupidity mainly comes in Microsoft software. in last year i found a issue on WPI that they force user to install another software when they get them from WPI. ex:- you need to install Visual studio 2008 before installing Visual studio 2010 express. are anyone tell me why user get old version 2008 when they get latest and express version. i never try again their to check the issue is solved or not. a another thing is you can’t get IE 9 on windows XP version. in that’case don’t thing and worrying about them because Firefox and Chrome is much better. the stupidity from Microsoft is too much. they never told you about Firebug even sometime they discuss about damage tool in IE they called them developer tool because they are Microsoft and they only thing how they can market their products. you need to install many thing without any reason such as many SQL server component even you use other RDBMS. you can’t say no to them because you need a tool and tool require a useless component called SQL server. i never found any software force me to install this for this and this for this before install me. that’s another good thing in WEB that no thing require i means you not need to install dotnet framework 4 before enjoy facebook or twitter. may be you found out that Microsoft's fail project Window planet force you to get silverlight before going their. i never hear about them. some month ago my friend talked to me about them i found nothing better their. Wha’t user do when facebook force user to install silverlight or adobe flash or may be Microsoft dotnet framework 4. if you not install them facebook tell  you bye bye tata ! never come here before installing Microsoft dotnet framework 4. the door is open for you after installing them not before. the story is same as “ tell me sorry before coming in home” as mother says to their child when they do something wrong. the web never force you to do something for them. sometime they allow you to use other website account their that’s very fast login for you. because they know the importance of your time.

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• Using the Onboard VGA output with a PCIe video card. Both nVidia

  - by sebikul

  I have 2 video cards, one On board, a nVidia 6150SE nForce 430 and a PCIe nVidia GeForce GT 220 1GB DDR2 RAM I have already configured the PCIe card to use the dual monitor feature, using the VGA and HDMI ports, but now I want to add a third monitor, using the On board VGA port I have managed to enable the On board graphics processor, which is taking 400MB of ram, but I cant manage to use it, nvidia-settings does not detect it, like it's not usable (but is there) My questions are the following: How can I manage to get the On board VGA display to work together with the PCIe graphics card? If possible, how can I recover those 400 MB the on board card is taking (even without being used) or how can I get it to use the PCIe card available memory? System Details: Linux 2.6.35-28-generic i686 Ubuntu 10.10 (All updates installed) NVIDIA Driver Version: 260.19.06 (Official) If more info is needed please let me know. Here is the lspci output when the On board card is disabled: 00:00.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP61 Memory Controller (rev a1) 00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 LPC Bridge (rev a2) 00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP61 SMBus (rev a2) 00:01.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP61 Memory Controller (rev a2) 00:01.3 Co-processor: nVidia Corporation MCP61 SMU (rev a2) 00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP61 USB Controller (rev a3) 00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP61 USB Controller (rev a3) 00:04.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI bridge (rev a1) 00:05.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio (rev a2) 00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP61 IDE (rev a2) 00:07.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 Ethernet (rev a2) 00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP61 SATA Controller (rev a2) 00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2) 00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2) 00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2) 00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2) 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control 01:09.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100 (rev 08) 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT216 [GeForce GT 220] (rev a2) 02:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1) And this is when both are enabled: 00:00.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP61 Memory Controller (rev a1) 00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 LPC Bridge (rev a2) 00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP61 SMBus (rev a2) 00:01.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP61 Memory Controller (rev a2) 00:01.3 Co-processor: nVidia Corporation MCP61 SMU (rev a2) 00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP61 USB Controller (rev a3) 00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP61 USB Controller (rev a3) 00:04.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI bridge (rev a1) 00:05.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio (rev a2) 00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP61 IDE (rev a2) 00:07.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 Ethernet (rev a2) 00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP61 SATA Controller (rev a2) 00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2) 00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2) 00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2) 00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2) 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control 01:09.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100 (rev 08) 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT216 [GeForce GT 220] (rev a2) 02:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1) Output of lshw -class display: *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: GT216 [GeForce GT 220] vendor: nVidia Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 version: a2 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0 resources: irq:18 memory:df000000-dfffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:da000000-dbffffff ioport:ef80(size=128) memory:def80000-deffffff *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] vendor: nVidia Corporation physical id: d bus info: pci@0000:00:0d.0 version: a2 width: 64 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: pm msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0 resources: irq:22 memory:dd000000-ddffffff memory:b0000000-bfffffff memory:dc000000-dcffffff memory:deb40000-deb5ffff If what I'm looking for is not possible, please tell me, so I can disable the On board card and recover those 400MB of wasted RAM Thanks for your help!

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• Building vs. Buying a Master Data Management Solution

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Many organizations prefer to build their own MDM solutions. The argument is that they know their data quality issues and their data better than anyone. Plus a focused solution will cost less in the long run then a vendor supplied general purpose product. This is not unreasonable if you think of MDM as a point solution for a particular data quality problem. But this approach carries significant risk. We now know that organizations achieve significant competitive advantages when they deploy MDM as a strategic enterprise wide solution: with the most common best practice being to deploy a tactical MDM solution and grow it into a full information architecture. A build your own approach most certainly will not scale to a larger architecture unless it is done correctly with the larger solution in mind. It is possible to build a home grown point MDM solution in such a way that it will dovetail into broader MDM architectures. A very good place to start is to use the same basic technologies that Oracle uses to build its own MDM solutions. Start with the Oracle 11g database to create a flexible, extensible and open data model to hold the master data and all needed attributes. The Oracle database is the most flexible, highly available and scalable database system on the market. With its Real Application Clusters (RAC) it can even support the mixed OLTP and BI workloads that represent typical MDM data access profiles. Use Oracle Data Integration (ODI) for batch data movement between applications, MDM data stores, and the BI layer. Use Oracle Golden Gate for more real-time data movement. Use Oracle's SOA Suite for application integration with its: BPEL Process Manager to orchestrate MDM connections to business processes; Identity Management for managing users; WS Manager for managing web services; Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for analytics; and JDeveloper for creating or extending the MDM management application. Oracle utilizes these technologies to build its MDM Hubs.  Customers who build their own MDM solution using these components will easily migrate to Oracle provided MDM solutions when the home grown solution runs out of gas. But, even with a full stack of open flexible MDM technologies, creating a robust MDM application can be a daunting task. For example, a basic MDM solution will need: a set of data access methods that support master data as a service as well as direct real time access as well as batch loads and extracts; a data migration service for initial loads and periodic updates; a metadata management capability for items such as business entity matrixed relationships and hierarchies; a source system management capability to fully cross-reference business objects and to satisfy seemingly conflicting data ownership requirements; a data quality function that can find and eliminate duplicate data while insuring correct data attribute survivorship; a set of data quality functions that can manage structured and unstructured data; a data quality interface to assist with preventing new errors from entering the system even when data entry is outside the MDM application itself; a continuing data cleansing function to keep the data up to date; an internal triggering mechanism to create and deploy change information to all connected systems; a comprehensive role based data security system to control and monitor data access, update rights, and maintain change history; a flexible business rules engine for managing master data processes such as privacy and data movement; a user interface to support casual users and data stewards; a business intelligence structure to support profiling, compliance, and business performance indicators; and an analytical foundation for directly analyzing master data. Oracle's pre-built MDM Hub solutions are full-featured 3-tier Internet applications designed to participate in the full Oracle technology stack or to run independently in other open IT SOA environments. Building MDM solutions from scratch can take years. Oracle's pre-built MDM solutions can bring quality data to the enterprise in a matter of months. But if you must build, at lease build with the world's best technology stack in a way that simplifies the eventual upgrade to Oracle MDM and to the full enterprise wide information architecture that it enables.

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• Enterprise 2.0 - Connecting People, Processes & Content

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  With recent technological advances, the Internet is changing. When users head to the web, they are no longer just looking for information from a simple text and picture based website. Users want a more interactive experience - they want to participate, to share their views and get the feedback of others. And this is precisely what Web 2.0 technology addresses. Web 2.0 is about web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 technology is everywhere on the Internet and is radically changing the speed and medium in which we interact and communicate. There are thousands of examples in the consumer world of Web 2.0 applications, technologies and solutions at work. You might be familiar with some of them...blogs, wikis (Wikipedia), Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn - these are all examples of Web 2.0. And these technologies are transforming our world into a real-time, participation-oriented, user-driven, content-centric world. With all of these Web 2.0 solutions it's about the user, the consumer and all the content they are generating. It's a world full of online communities where people share and participate. We're not talking about disseminating information top-down , nor is it a bottom-up fight. Everyone has an equal opportunity to participate and share. The more you participate, the more you share, the more valued you are in the community. The web is not just a collection of documents online. It is the social web.  For the active users in the community, staying connected becomes critically important so they can participate at anytime and from anywhere. And because feedback and interaction are so critical, time is of the essence. When everyone is providing immediate responses, you feel the urge to do the same. Hence everything needs to be done right now, together...and collaboratively. With all the content being generated online by users, there is complete information overload out there. (That's a good thing for Google). But...it's no longer just about search. Sometimes you want the information to just come to you. Recommendations and discovery engines will deliver you more applicable results than a non-contextual search. How many of you have heard about a news headline on Facebook as part of your feed before you read the paper or see it on TV? This is how the new generation of workers live their daily lives...and as they enter the workforce, these trends and technologies are showing up in the enterprise too. A lot of the Web 2.0 technologies and solutions in the consumer world are geared for just that....consumers. But the core concepts that put them into the Web 2.0 category can be applied to the enterprise as well. And that is what we mean when we talk about Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 is the use of Web 2.0 tools and technologies in the workplace.  It provides a modern user experience by connecting the people, content and business processes inside and outside the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 empowers users to collaborate more effectively, find and share information in the proper content and improves the overall business processes which they participate in. As we head into 2011, is your organization using Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to the fullest? Are you connecting your people, processes and content together to provide a modern user experience?

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• Big Data – Beginning Big Data – Day 1 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  What is Big Data? I want to learn Big Data. I have no clue where and how to start learning about it. Does Big Data really means data is big? What are the tools and software I need to know to learn Big Data? I often receive questions which I mentioned above. They are good questions and honestly when we search online, it is hard to find authoritative and authentic answers. I have been working with Big Data and NoSQL for a while and I have decided that I will attempt to discuss this subject over here in the blog. In the next 21 days we will understand what is so big about Big Data. Big Data – Big Thing! Big Data is becoming one of the most talked about technology trends nowadays. The real challenge with the big organization is to get maximum out of the data already available and predict what kind of data to collect in the future. How to take the existing data and make it meaningful that it provides us accurate insight in the past data is one of the key discussion points in many of the executive meetings in organizations. With the explosion of the data the challenge has gone to the next level and now a Big Data is becoming the reality in many organizations. Big Data – A Rubik’s Cube I like to compare big data with the Rubik’s cube. I believe they have many similarities. Just like a Rubik’s cube it has many different solutions. Let us visualize a Rubik’s cube solving challenge where there are many experts participating. If you take five Rubik’s cube and mix up the same way and give it to five different expert to solve it. It is quite possible that all the five people will solve the Rubik’s cube in fractions of the seconds but if you pay attention to the same closely, you will notice that even though the final outcome is the same, the route taken to solve the Rubik’s cube is not the same. Every expert will start at a different place and will try to resolve it with different methods. Some will solve one color first and others will solve another color first. Even though they follow the same kind of algorithm to solve the puzzle they will start and end at a different place and their moves will be different at many occasions. It is  nearly impossible to have a exact same route taken by two experts. Big Market and Multiple Solutions Big Data is exactly like a Rubik’s cube – even though the goal of every organization and expert is same to get maximum out of the data, the route and the starting point are different for each organization and expert. As organizations are evaluating and architecting big data solutions they are also learning the ways and opportunities which are related to Big Data. There is not a single solution to big data as well there is not a single vendor which can claim to know all about Big Data. Honestly, Big Data is too big a concept and there are many players – different architectures, different vendors and different technology. What is Next? In this 31 days series we will be exploring many essential topics related to big data. I do not claim that you will be master of the subject after 31 days but I claim that I will be covering following topics in easy to understand language. Architecture of Big Data Big Data a Management and Implementation Different Technologies – Hadoop, Mapreduce Real World Conversations Best Practices Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer one of the very essential questions – What is Big Data? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Reflections on Life

  - by MOSSLover

  I haven’t written a blog post in a while.  I understand there is blog neglect going on, but there is a lot going on in my life.  I am trying really hard to embrace the change and roll with everything thrown my way.  I had a really hard year it was not my best and it was not my worst.  I cannot say it was entirely hard, because January 1st I received the MVP Award.  If you know me you know the three things that happened starting in August, but if you really know me it was miserable for a substantial period of time prior to August.  There was some personal life issues I neglected to deal with that came into a headway.  Anyway I’d like to think that as of today I am doing much better.  I finally went to Paris and London.  I found out I love Paris and Nottingham.  I think that London is something I need to visit a few more times.  I would love to go back to the UK and France.  I think I’d love to live overseas someday, but not anytime soon. The past few weeks were like a whirlwind experience.  I felt like I had been sitting around for months just waiting for this trip and the big move.  Maybe it was something I was waiting to do for several years.  I needed a big change.  I needed to get unstuck.  I feel like August, however horrible it was, helped me get to the point where I am somewhere happy.  For at least two years I have been miserable outside of my work (community and otherwise).  I was just downright unhappy.  One of my coworkers said that my tweets were just horrible this past year.  Depressing might I add.  I agree they were incredibly depressing for the past several years.  But things are on an upturn.  I decided a month or so ago that I was going to do all the things I have wanted to do without looking back.  So I dove into this trip and into this move to NYC head first.  I was scared for a bit and I didn’t think it would come through.  Everyone friend-wise and coworker-wise has helped me accomplish this great feat.  I am now a New Yorker and as of January 1st 100% living in the city. Thank you for those who have checked up on me.  Thank you for those who listened to all my problems and continue to do so.  Thank you to everyone who has helped me through this really terrible time.  You guys mean the world to me.  You are my friends.  Some of you I have not met and some of you I barely know.  I have been to a lot of events where people just walked up to me and asked me if I was doing ok.  I will continue to keep moving forward one foot in front of the other.  If I ever get so down again please remind me about this year.  I hope to see you all in the upcoming year as I attend more events.  Have a good night or a good morning or a good afternoon.  I will catch you all later. Technorati Tags: Life,2011,Disaster Year,Happinness

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