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• The JRockit Performance Counters

  - by Marcus Hirt

  Every now and then I get a question regarding what the attributes in the PerfCounters dynamic MBean represent. Now, all the MBeans under the oracle.jrockit.management (bea.jrockit.management pre R28) domain are part of what we call JMXMAPI (the JRockit JMX based Management API), which is unsupported. Therefore there is no official documentation for the API. I did however write a bit about JMXMAPI in my recent JRockit book, Oracle JRockit: The Definitive Guide. The information in the table below is from that book: Counter Description java.cls.loadedClasses The number of classes loaded since the start of the JVM. java.cls.unloadedClasses The number of classes unloaded since the start of the JVM. java.property.java.class.path The class path of the JVM. java.property.java.endorsed.dirs The endorsed dirs. See the Endorsed Standards Override Mechanism. java.property.java.ext.dirs The ext dirs, which are searched for jars that should be automatically put on the classpath. See the Java documentation for java.ext.dirs. java.property.java.home The root of the JDK or JRE installation. java.property.java.library.path The library path used to find user libraries. java.property.java.vm.version The JRockit version. java.rt.vmArgs The list of VM arguments. java.threads.daemon The number of running daemon threads. java.threads.live The total number of running threads. java.threads.livePeak The peak number of threads that has been running since JRockit was started. java.threads.nonDaemon The number of non-daemon threads running. java.threads.started The total number of threads started since the start of JRockit. jrockit.gc.latest.heapSize The current heap size in bytes. jrockit.gc.latest.nurserySize The current nursery size in bytes. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.compaction.time How long, in ticks, the last compaction lasted. Reset to 0 if compaction is skipped. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.heapUsedAfter Used heap at the end of the last OC, in bytes. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.heapUsedBefore Used heap at the start of the last OC, in bytes. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.number The number of OCs that have occurred so far. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.sumOfPauses The paused time for the last OC, in ticks. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.time The time the last OC took, in ticks. jrockit.gc.latest.yc.sumOfPauses The paused time for the last YC, in ticks. jrockit.gc.latest.yc.time The time the last YC took, in ticks. jrockit.gc.max.oc.individualPause The longest OC pause so far, in ticks. jrockit.gc.max.yc.individualPause The longest YC pause so far, in ticks. jrockit.gc.total.oc.compaction.externalAborted Number of aborted external compactions so far. jrockit.gc.total.oc.compaction.internalAborted Number of aborted internal compactions so far. jrockit.gc.total.oc.compaction.internalSkipped Number of skipped internal compactions so far. jrockit.gc.total.oc.compaction.time The total time spent doing compaction so far, in ticks. jrockit.gc.total.oc.ompaction.externalSkipped Number of skipped external compactions so far. jrockit.gc.total.oc.pauseTime The sum of all OC pause times so far, in ticks. jrockit.gc.total.oc.time The total time spent doing OC so far, in ticks. jrockit.gc.total.pageFaults The number of page faults that have occurred during GC so far. jrockit.gc.total.yc.pauseTime The sum of all YC pause times, in ticks. jrockit.gc.total.yc.promotedObjects The number of objects that all YCs have promoted. jrockit.gc.total.yc.promotedSize The total number of bytes that all YCs have promoted, in bytes. jrockit.gc.total.yc.time The total time spent doing YC, in ticks. oracle.ci.jit.count The number of methods JIT compiled. oracle.ci.jit.timeTotal The total time spent JIT compiling, in ticks. oracle.ci.opt.count The number of methods optimized. oracle.ci.opt.timeTotal The total time spent optimizing, in ticks. oracle.rt.counterFrequency Used to convert ticks values to seconds. Note that many of these counters are excellent choices for attributes to plot in the Management Console. Also note that many values are in ticks – to convert them to seconds, divide by the value in the oracle.rt.counterFrequency counter.

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• Kanban Tools Review

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  The first two sessions on Sunday were Collaboration and why it is so hard and the following, which was a perfect following session was on Kanban.  While in that second session two online Saas Style Tools were mentioned; AgileZen and Leankit.  I decided right then and there that I would throw together some first impressions and setup some sample projects.  I did this by setting up an account and creating the projects. Agile Zen Account Creation Setting up the initial account required an e-mail verification, which is understandable.  Within a few seconds it was mailed out and I was logged in. Setting Up the Kanban Board The initial setup of the board was pretty easy.  I maybe clicked around an extra few times, but overall everything I needed to use the tool was immediately available.  The representation of everything was very similar to what one expects in a real Kanban Board too.  This is a HUGE plus, especially if a team is smart and places this tool in a centrally viewable area to allow for visibility. Each of the board items is just like a post it, being blue, grey, green, pink, or one of another few colors.  Dragging them onto each swim lane on the board was flawless, making changes through the work super easy and intuitive. The other thing I really liked about AgileZen is that the Kanban Board had the swim lanes setup immediately.  One can change them, but when you know you immediately need a Ready Lane, Working Lane, and a Complete Lane it is nice to just have them right in front of you in the interface.  In addition, the Backlog is simply a little tab on the left hand side.  This is perfect for the Backlog Queue.  Out of the way, with the focus on the primary items. Once  I got the items onto the board I was easily able to get back to the actual work at hand versus playing around with the tool.  The fact that it was so easy to use, fast and easy UX, and overall a great layout put me back to work on things I needed to do versus sitting a playing with the tool.  That, in the end is the key to using these tools. LeanKit Kanban Account Creation Setting up the account got me straight into the online tool.  This I thought was pretty cool. Setting Up the Kanban Board Setting up the Kanban Board within Leankit was a bit of trouble.  There were multiple UX issues in regard to process and intuitiveness.  The Leankit basically forces one to design the whole board first, making no assumptions about how the board should look.  The swim lanes in my humble opinion should be setup immediately without any manipulation with the most common lanes;  ready, working, and complete. The other UX hiccup that I had a problem with is that as soon as I managed to get the swim lanes into place, I wanted to remove the redundant Backlog Lane.  The Backlog Lane, or Backlog Bucket should be somewhere that I accidentally added as a lane.  Then on top of that I screwed up and added an item inside the lane, which then prevented me from deleting the lane.  I had to go back out of the lane manipulation, remove the item, and then remove the excess lane.  Summary Leankit wasn't a bad interface, it just wasn't as good as AgileZen.  The AgileZen interface was just better UX design overall.  AgileZen also presents a much better user interface graphical design all together.  It is much closer to what the Kanban Board would look like if it were a physical Kanban Board.  Since one of the HUGE reasons for Kanban is to increase visibility, the fact the design is similar to what a real Kanban Board is actually a pretty big deal. This is an image (click for larger) that shows the two Kanban Boards side by side.  The one on the left is AgileZen and the right is Leankit. Original Entry

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• Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

  - by Michael Hylton

  Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group.  I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara.  Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time:  1) The Dynamic Customer Journey:  Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations.  Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this.  2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance.  Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation.  As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides.  3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond.  Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not.  It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond.  In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires.  All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am.  Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks.  There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com.  A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang.  As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now.  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon?  J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast?  J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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• It’s the thought that counts…

  - by Tony Davis

  I recently finished editing a book called Tribal SQL, and it was a fantastic experience. It’s a community-sourced book written by first-timers. Fifteen previously unpublished authors contributed one chapter each, with the seemingly simple remit to write about “what makes them passionate about working with SQL Server, something that all SQL Server DBAs and developers really need to know”. Sure, some of the writing skills were a bit rusty as one would expect from busy people, but the ideas and energy were sheer nectar. Any seasoned editor can deal easily with the problem of fixing the output of untrained writers. We can handle with the occasional technical error too, which is why we have technical reviewers. The editor’s real job is to hone the clarity and flow of ideas, making the author’s knowledge and experience accessible to as many others as possible. What the writer needs to bring, on the other hand, is enthusiasm, attention to detail, common sense, and a sense of the person behind the writing. If any of these are missing, no editor can fix it. We can see these essential characteristics in many of the more seasoned and widely-published writers about SQL. To illustrate what I mean by enthusiasm, or passion, take a look at the work of Laerte Junior or Fabiano Amorim. Both authors have English as a second language, but their energy, enthusiasm, sheer immersion in a technology and thirst to know more, drives them, with a little editorial help, to produce articles of far more practical value than one can find in the “manuals”. There’s the attention to detail of the likes of Jonathan Kehayias, or Paul Randal. Read their work and one begins to understand the knowledge coupled with incredible rigor, the willingness to bend and test every piece of advice offered to make sure it’s correct, that marks out the very best technical writing. There’s the common sense of someone like Louis Davidson. All writers, including Louis, like to stretch the grey matter of their readers, but some of the most valuable writing is that which takes a complicated idea, or distils years of experience, and expresses it in a way that sounds like simple common sense. There’s personality and humor. Contrary to what you may have been told, they can and do mix well with technical writing, as long as they don’t become a distraction. Read someone like Rodney Landrum, or Phil Factor, for numerous examples of articles that teach hard technical lessons but also make you smile at least twice along the way. Writing well is not easy and it takes a certain bravery to expose your ideas and knowledge for dissection by others, but it doesn’t mean that writing should be the preserve only of those trained in the art, or best left to the MVPs. I believe that Tribal SQL is testament to the fact that if you have passion for what you do, and really know your topic then, with a little editorial help, you can write, and people will learn from what you have to say. You can read a sample chapter, by Mark Rasmussen, in this issue of Simple-Talk and I hope you’ll consider checking out the book (if you needed any further encouragement, it’s also for a good cause, Computers4Africa). Cheers, Tony  

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• Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition Recap and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  If you’ve noticed my blogging activity has reduced in frequency and technical content lately it’s primarily due to all of the conferences I’ve been attending, speaking at, or planning in the past few months.  This past Friday myself and six other dedicated individuals put on Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition as the culmination of a few months of hard work.  For those unfamiliar, Stir Trek is a web developer conference that was founded last year as an event to showcase content from Microsoft’s MIX conference and end the day with a private showing of the then just-released Star Trek movie.  This year’s conference expanded from 2 to 4 content tracks and upped the number of tickets from 350 to 600.  Even more amazing was the fact that we had 592 people show up day of the event for the lowest drop-off percentage of any conference I’ve been to before.   Nerd Dinner and Swag Bags     The night before Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition we hosted a nerd dinner at the Polaris Shopping mall food court with about 30 in attendance.  Nerd dinners are a great time to meet others passionate about technology and socialize before the whirlwind of the conference hits.  After the nerd dinner 20+ volunteers headed to the conference location and helped us stuff swag bags.  This in and of itself was a monumental task of putting together 600 swag bags with numerous leaflets, sponsor items, and t-shirts.  A big thanks goes out to all who assisted us that night so that we could finish in just under 2 hours instead of taking all night.  My sleep schedule also thanks you. Morning of Stir Trek     After getting a decent amount of sleep I arrived at Marcus Crosswoods theater at 6am to begin setting up for the day.  Myself and Jody Morgan were in charge of registration so we got tables set up, laid out swag bags, and organized our volunteer crew to assist with checking-in attendees.  Despite having 600+ people registration went fairly smoothly and got the day off to a great start.  I especially appreciated the 3+ cups of coffee from Crimson Cup, a local coffee shop.  For any of you that know me you’ll know that I rarely drink coffee except a few times a year when I really need the energy, so that says a lot about how good their coffee is.   Conference Starts     Once registration was completed the day kicked off with Molly Holzschlag keynoting.  Unfortunately Molly suffered from an ear infection and wasn’t able to fly so she had a virtual keynote and a session later in the day.  I was working behind the scenes on various tasks so I was only able to drop in very briefly on the keynote and rest of the morning sessions.  Throughout the day I tried to grab at least 1 or 2 pics of each presenter.  See my album below for the full set of pics.      For lunch we ordered around 150 pizzas from Mellow Mushroom, a local pizza place (notice the theme of supporting local businesses.)  Early on we were concerned about Mellow Mushroom being able to supply that many pizzas and get them delivered (still hot) to the theater, but they did an excellent job day of the event.  I wish I had gotten some pictures of the old school VW van they delivered the pizza in, but I was just a bit busy running around trying to get theaters ready for lunch.  We had attendees from last year who specifically requested that we have Mellow Mushroom supply lunch this year and I’m glad everything worked out being able to use them again.     During the afternoon I was able to attend a few sessions and hear some great content from various speakers.  It was also nice to just sit down and get off my feet for a bit.  After the last sessions the day concluded with a raffle.  There were a few logistical and technical issues that hampered our ability to smoothly conduct the raffle.  To those of you that agree the raffle wasn’t the smoothest experience I would like to say that the Stir Trek planning committee has already begun meeting to discuss ways of improving the conference for next year.  We are also accepting feedback (both positive and negative) at the following link: click here.  If you don’t wish to use the Joind In site you can also email me directly and I’ll be sure to pass along the feedback.   Iron Man 2 Movie     Last but not least, what Stir Trek event would be complete without the feature movie.  This year’s movie was Iron Man 2.  The theater had some really cool props and promotions (see pic below) for the movie.  I really enjoyed Iron Man 2, but I would recommend brushing up on the Iron Man comics and Marvel’s plans for future movies to understand some of the plot elements that come up.  Also make sure you stay through to the end of the movie credits to see a sneak peak of something special, that’s all I’ll say. Conclusion     Again a big thanks goes out to all of the speakers, sponsors, attendees, movie theater staff, volunteers, and everyone else involved in making this event great.  Also big thanks to my fellow Stir Trek planning committee members: Jeff Blankenburg, Matt Casto, Carey Payette, Jody Morgan, Rick Kierner, and Sarah Dutkiewitcz.  I am grateful for everything I learned while helping plan this event and look forward to being involved again next year.  For those interested we are currently targeting Thor as our movie theme for 2011 and then The Avengers for 2012.  These are tentative based on release dates that could shift as we get closer, but for now look solid.   Photos Pics on Facebook (includes tagging)     Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition photos on Facebook Pics on Live site (higher res)      View Full Album         -Frog Out

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• IIS Logfile Visualization with XNA

  - by BobPalmer

  In my office, I have a wall mounted monitor who's whole purpose in life is to display perfmon stats from our various servers.  And on a fairly regular basis, I have folks walk by asking what the lines mean.    After providing the requisite explaination about CPU utilization, disk I/O bottlenecks, etc. this is usually followed by some blank stares from the user in question, and a distillation of all of our engineering wizardry down to the phrase 'So when the red line goes up that's bad then?'   This of course would not do.  So I talked to my friends and our network admin about an option to show something more eye catching and visual, with which we could catch at a glance a feel for what was up with our site.    He initially pointed me out to a video showing GLTail and Chipmunk done in Ruby.  Realizing this was both awesome, and that I needed an excuse to do something in XNA, I decided to knock out a proof of concept for something very similar, but with a few tweaks.   Here's a link to a video of the current prototype:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM_PWZbtH2I   Essentially this app opens up a log file (even an active one) and begins pulling out the lines of text.  (Here's a good Code Project link that covers how to do tail reading from an active text file: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/files/tail.aspx).   As new data is added, a bubble is generated in the application - a GET statement comes from the left, and a POST from the right.  I then run it through a series of expression checkers, and based on the kind of statement and the pattern, a bubble of an appropriate color is generated.   For example, if I get a 500, a huge red bubble pops out.  Others are based on the part of the system the page is from - i.e. green bubbles are from our claims management subsystem, and blue bubbles are from the pages our scheduling staff use to schedule patients.  Others include the purple bubbles for security and login, and yellow bubbles for some miscellaneous pages.   The little grey bubbles represent things like images, JS, CSS, etc - and their small size makes them work like grease to keep the larger page bubbles moving.   The app is also smart enough that if it is starting to bog down with handling the physics and interactions, it will suspend new bubbles until enough have dropped off that performance can resume (you can see this slight stuttering in the sample video).   The net result is that anyone will be able to look up on the wall monitor, and instantly get a quick feel for how things are going on the floor.  Website slow?  You can get a feel for both volume and utilized modules with one glance.  Website crashing?  Look for a wall of giant red bubbles.  No activity at all?  Maybe the site is down.  Now couple this with utilization within a farm, and cross referenced with a second app showing the same kind of data from your SQL database...   As for the app itself, it's a windows XNA project with the code in C#.   The physics are handled by the Farseer physicis eingine for XNA (http://www.codeplex.com/FarseerPhysics) which is just pure goodness.  The samples are great, and I had the app up and working in two evenings (half of that was fine tuning, and the other was me coding with a kid in my lap).   My next steps include wiring this to SQL (I have some ideas...), and adding a nice configuration module.  For example, you could use polygons, etc to tie to your regex - or more entertaining things like having a little human ragdoll to represent a user login.     Once that's wrapped up and I have a chance to complete some hardening, I will be releasing the whole thing into the wild as opensource.     Feel free to ping me if you have any questions! -Bob

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• Oracle Delivers Latest Release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Scott McNeil

  Richer Service Catalog for Database and Middleware as a Service; Enhanced Database and Middleware Management Help Drive Enterprise-Scale Private Cloud Adoption News Summary IT organizations are adopting private clouds as a stepping-stone to business-driven, self-service IT. Successful implementations hinge on the ability to efficiently deploy and manage cloud services at enterprise scale. Having a complete cloud management solution integrated with an enterprise-class technology stack is a fundamental requirement for IT. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 meets that requirement by helping businesses become more agile and responsive, while reducing cost, complexity, and risk. News Facts Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4, available today, lets organizations rapidly adopt Oracle-based, enterprise-scale private clouds. New capabilities provide advanced technology stack management, secure database administration, and enterprise service governance, enabling Oracle customers and partners to maximize database and application performance and drive innovation using self-service IT platforms. The enhancements have been driven by customers and the growing Oracle Enterprise Manager Ecosystem, comprised of more than 750 Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized partners. Oracle and its partners and customers have built over 140 plug-ins and connectors for Oracle Enterprise Manager. Watch the video highlights. Automation for Broader Cloud Services Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 allows for a rapid enterprise-wide adoption of database, middleware and infrastructure services in the private cloud, driven by an enhanced API-enabled service catalog. The release features “push button” style provisioning of complete environments such as SOA and Oracle Active Data Guard, and fast data cloning that enables rapid deployment and testing of enterprise applications. Out-of-the-box capabilities to detect data and configuration vulnerabilities provide enhanced cloud service governance along with greater operational control through a flexible and extensible showback mechanism. Enhanced Database Management A new performance warehouse enables predictive database diagnostics and trend analysis and helps identify database problems before they occur. New enterprise data-governance capabilities enhance security by helping systematically discover and protect sensitive data. Step-by-step orchestration of upgrades with the ability to rollback changes enables faster adoption of Oracle Database 12c. Expanded Fusion Middleware Management A new consolidated view of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c deployments with a guided management capability lets administrators apply best management practices to diverse middleware environments and identify performance issues quickly. A Java VM Diagnostics as a Service feature allows governed access to diagnostics data for IT workers across multiple disciplines for accelerated DevOps resolutions of defects and performance optimization. New automated provisioning for SOA lets middleware administrators perform mass SOA provisioning with ease. Superior Enterprise-Grade Management Private roles and preferred credentials have been added to Oracle Enterprise Manager to provide additional fine-grained security for organizations with complex access control requirements. A new security console provides a single point of control for managing the security of Oracle Enterprise Manager environments. Support for the latest industry standard SNMP v3 protocol, including encryption, enables more secure heterogeneous management. “Smart monitoring” adapts to observed environmental changes and adds self-management capabilities to help Oracle Enterprise Manager run at peak performance, while demanding less IT supervision. Supporting Quotes “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a strong tradition of technology breakthroughs and leadership. As a member of Oracle’s Customer Advisory Board for Oracle Enterprise Manager, we have consistently provided feedback and guidance in the areas of enterprise-scale cloud, self-diagnosability, and secure administration for the product,” said Tim Frazier, CIO, NIF and Photon Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “We intend to take advantage of the Release 4 features that support enterprise-scale availability and fine-grained security capabilities for private cloud deployments.” “IDC's most recent CloudTrack survey shows that most enterprises plan to adopt hybrid cloud architectures over the next three years,” said Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC. “These organizations plan to deploy a wide range of workloads into cloud environments including mission critical database and middleware services that require high levels of fault tolerance and disaster recovery. Such capabilities were traditionally custom configured for each application but cloud offers the possibility to incorporate such properties within the service definition, enabling organizations to adopt cloud without compromise. With the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, Oracle is providing customers with an out-of-the-box experience for delivering highly-resilient cloud services for databases and applications.” “Since its inception, Oracle has been leading the way in innovative, scalable and high performance solutions for the enterprise. With this release of Oracle Enterprise Manager, we are extending this leadership by providing enterprise-scale capabilities for planning, delivering, and managing private clouds. We call this ‘zero-to-cloud – accelerated.’ These enhancements help our customers to expedite their adoption of cloud computing and prepares them for the next generation of self-service IT,” said Prakash Ramamurthy, senior vice president of Systems and Cloud Management at Oracle. Supporting Resources Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Video: Cerner Delivers High Performance Private Cloud Video: BIAS Achieves Outstanding Results with Private Cloud Press Release Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Mobile app

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• Buy iPads In India From eZone, Reliance iStores [Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai]

  - by Gopinath

  Close to an year wait for Apple iPad in India is over. Now everyone can buy a genuine iPad with manufacturers’ warranty from dozens of retail outlets set up by Future Bazar’s eZone and Reliance iStore. This puts an end to the grey market that was importing iPads through illegal channels, selling them at staggering high prices and with no warranty. iPad Retail Price at eZone & Outlet Address The iPad page on eZone’s website has price details of various models and they range from Rs.27,900/- to Rs.44,000/-. iPad 16 GB WiFi  – Rs. 27900.00 iPad 32 GB WiFi  – Rs. 32900.00 iPad 64 GB WiFi  – Rs. 37900.00 iPad 16 GB WiFi  + 3G – Rs. 34900.00 iPad 32 GB WiFi  + 3G – Rs. 39900.00 iPad 64 GB WiFi  + 3G – Rs. 44900.00 Here is the list of eZone stores selling iPads Chennai Stores eZone :: CHENNAI-GANDHI SQUARE Gandhi Square, ( G2),No. 46, Old Mahabalipuram Road, Kandanchavadi, Chennai ( Before Lifeline Hospital) – 600096. Phone : 24967771/7 eZone :: CHENNAI-MYLAPORE Grand Terrace, Old no. 94, new door no. 162, Luz Church Road, Mylapore, Chennai – . Tamil Nadu. Phone : 24987867/68. Mumbai Stores eZone :: MUMBAI-GOREGAON Shop No-S-23, 2nd Floor, Oberoi Mall Off Western Express Highway , Goregaon(E) , Mumbai – 400063, Phone: 28410011/40214771. eZone :: MUMBAI-POWAI-HAIKO MALL Hailko Mall, Level 2, Central Avenue, Hiranandani Garden, Powai, Mumbai, 400076. Phone: 25717355/56. eZone :: EZ-Sobo Central C wing,SOBO Central, Next to Tardoe AC Market, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya Road, Mumbai – 400034. Phone : 022-30089344. Bangalore Stores eZone :: Koramangala (Bnglr) Regent Insignia, Ground Floor,# 414, 100 Ft Road, Koramangala, Bangalore – 560034 Phone : 080-25520241/242/243. eZone :: BANGALORE-INDIRA NAGAR No.62, Asha Pearl,100 Feet Road, Opp.AXIS Bank.Indiranagar, Bangalore – 560038 Phone : 25216857/6855/6856. eZone :: BANGALORE-PASADENA pasadena’ (Ground floor),18/1.(old number 125/a),10th main,Ashoka pillar road,Jaynagar 1st block,Bangalore – 560 011. Phone : 26577527. Delhi Stores eZone :: NEW DELHI-PUSA ROAD Ground/Lower Ground Floor, Plot # 26, Pusa Road, Adjacent to Karol Bagh Metro Station, Karol Bagh, New Delhi – 110005. Phone :28757040/41. For more details check eZone iPad Product Page iPads at Reliance iStore Reliance iStores are exclusive outlets for selling Apple products in India. All the models of iPad are available at Reliance iStore and the price details are not available on their websites. You may walk into any of the iStore close by your locality or call them to get the details. To locate the stores close by your locality please check store locator page on iStore Website. Do you know any other retail stores selling iPads in India? This article titled,Buy iPads In India From eZone, Reliance iStores [Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai], was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• IBM "per core" comparisons for SPECjEnterprise2010

  - by jhenning

  I recently stumbled upon a blog entry from Roman Kharkovski (an IBM employee) comparing some SPECjEnterprise2010 results for IBM vs. Oracle. Mr. Kharkovski's blog claims that SPARC delivers half the transactions per core vs. POWER7. Prior to any argument, I should say that my predisposition is to like Mr. Kharkovski, because he says that his blog is intended to be factual; that the intent is to try to avoid marketing hype and FUD tactic; and mostly because he features a picture of himself wearing a bike helmet (me too). Therefore, in a spirit of technical argument, rather than FUD fight, there are a few areas in his comparison that should be discussed. Scaling is not free For any benchmark, if a small system scores 13k using quantity R1 of some resource, and a big system scores 57k using quantity R2 of that resource, then, sure, it's tempting to divide: is  13k/R1 > 57k/R2 ? It is tempting, but not necessarily educational. The problem is that scaling is not free. Building big systems is harder than building small systems. Scoring  13k/R1  on a little system provides no guarantee whatsoever that one can sustain that ratio when attempting to handle more than 4 times as many users. Choosing the denominator radically changes the picture When ratios are used, one can vastly manipulate appearances by the choice of denominator. In this case, lots of choices are available for the resource to be compared (R1 and R2 above). IBM chooses to put cores in the denominator. Mr. Kharkovski provides some reasons for that choice in his blog entry. And yet, it should be noted that the very concept of a core is: arbitrary: not necessarily comparable across vendors; fluid: modern chips shift chip resources in response to load; and invisible: unless you have a microscope, you can't see it. By contrast, one can actually see processor chips with the naked eye, and they are a bit easier to count. If we put chips in the denominator instead of cores, we get: 13161.07 EjOPS / 4 chips = 3290 EjOPS per chip for IBM vs 57422.17 EjOPS / 16 chips = 3588 EjOPS per chip for Oracle The choice of denominator makes all the difference in the appearance. Speaking for myself, dividing by chips just seems to make more sense, because: I can see chips and count them; and I can accurately compare the number of chips in my system to the count in some other vendor's system; and Tthe probability of being able to continue to accurately count them over the next 10 years of microprocessor development seems higher than the probability of being able to accurately and comparably count "cores". SPEC Fair use requirements Speaking as an individual, not speaking for SPEC and not speaking for my employer, I wonder whether Mr. Kharkovski's blog article, taken as a whole, meets the requirements of the SPEC Fair Use rule www.spec.org/fairuse.html section I.D.2. For example, Mr. Kharkovski's footnote (1) begins Results from http://www.spec.org as of 04/04/2013 Oracle SUN SPARC T5-8 449 EjOPS/core SPECjEnterprise2010 (Oracle's WLS best SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS/core result on SPARC). IBM Power730 823 EjOPS/core (World Record SPECjEnterprise2010 EJOPS/core result) The questionable tactic, from a Fair Use point of view, is that there is no such metric at the designated location. At www.spec.org, You can find the SPEC metric 57422.17 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for Oracle and You can also find the SPEC metric 13161.07 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for IBM. Despite the implication of the footnote, you will not find any mention of 449 nor anything that says 823. SPEC says that you can, under its fair use rule, derive your own values; but it emphasizes: "The context must not give the appearance that SPEC has created or endorsed the derived value." Substantiation and transparency Although SPEC disclaims responsibility for non-SPEC information (section I.E), it says that non-SPEC data and methods should be accurate, should be explained, should be substantiated. Unfortunately, it is difficult or impossible for the reader to independently verify the pricing: Were like units compared to like (e.g. list price to list price)? Were all components (hw, sw, support) included? Were all fees included? Note that when tpc.org shows IBM pricing, there are often items such as "PROCESSOR ACTIVATION" and "MEMORY ACTIVATION". Without the transparency of a detailed breakdown, the pricing claims are questionable. T5 claim for "Fastest Processor" Mr. Kharkovski several times questions Oracle's claim for fastest processor, writing You see, when you publish industry benchmarks, people may actually compare your results to other vendor's results. Well, as we performance people always say, "it depends". If you believe in performance-per-core as the primary way of looking at the world, then yes, the POWER7+ is impressive, spending its chip resources to support up to 32 threads (8 cores x 4 threads). Or, it just might be useful to consider performance-per-chip. Each SPARC T5 chip allows 128 hardware threads to be simultaneously executing (16 cores x 8 threads). The Industry Standard Benchmark that focuses specifically on processor chip performance is SPEC CPU2006. For this very well known and popular benchmark, SPARC T5: provides better performance than both POWER7 and POWER7+, for 1 chip vs. 1 chip, for 8 chip vs. 8 chip, for integer (SPECint_rate2006) and floating point (SPECfp_rate2006), for Peak tuning and for Base tuning. For example, at the 8-chip level, integer throughput (SPECint_rate2006) is: 3750 for SPARC 2170 for POWER7+. You can find the details at the March 2013 BestPerf CPU2006 page SPEC is a trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, www.spec.org. The two specific results quoted for SPECjEnterprise2010 are posted at the URLs linked from the discussion. Results for SPEC CPU2006 were verified at spec.org 1 July 2013, and can be rechecked here.

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• Java, two JPanel on JFrame - Settings JPanel, StartMenu JPanel [on hold]

  - by Andy Tyurin

  There is my first question and I welcome community! I'm making a simple game and have some problems with Start menu. I have three buttons on my JPanel StartMenu and when I click "Settings" button, new JPanel will be open, but I don't know why buttons from StartMenu JPanel appeared in my Settings JPanel. My "Settings" JPanel has one ugly button "Back" in center and ugly grey background. I made some screens to see a problem. Start Menu JPanel when game launched Settings JPanel when button clicked Settings JPanel when mouse was over settings window There is code of StartMenu class: public class StartMenu extends JPanel { private GameButton startGameButton = new GameButton("Start game"); private GameButton settingsGameButton = new GameButton("Settings"); private GameButton exitGameButton = new GameButton("Exit game"); private Image bgImage = new ImageIcon(getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("ru/andydevs/astraLaserForce/bg.png")).getImage(); private int posX; private int posY; final private int WIDTH=(int)Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getWidth()/3; final private int HEIGHT=(int)Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getHeight()/2; public StartMenu() { setLayout(new GridBagLayout()); GridBagConstraints c = new GridBagConstraints(); setSize(new Dimension(WIDTH, HEIGHT)); posX=(int)Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getWidth()/2-WIDTH/2; posY=(int)Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getHeight()/2-HEIGHT/2; setBounds(posX, posY,WIDTH,HEIGHT); c.ipadx=95; c.ipady=15; c.fill = GridBagConstraints.HORIZONTAL; c.insets = new Insets(20,0,0,0); c.gridy=0; add(startGameButton, c); c.gridy=1; c.insets = new Insets(20,0,0,0); System.out.println(settingsGameButton.getWidth()); add(settingsGameButton, c); c.gridy=2; c.insets = new Insets(20,0,0,0); add(exitGameButton, c); settingsGameButton.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { GameOptionsPanel gop = new GameOptionsPanel(); Game.container.add(gop); Game.container.setComponentZOrder(gop, 0); Game.container.revalidate(); Game.container.repaint(); } }); exitGameButton.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { Main.currentGame.stop(); } }); } public void paintComponent(Graphics g) { g.drawImage(bgImage,0,0,WIDTH,HEIGHT,null); } } There is code of Settings JPanel public class GameOptionsPanel extends GamePanel { private GameButton backButton = new GameButton("Back"); private GameOptionsPanel that; public GameOptionsPanel() { super((int) (Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getWidth()/3), (int) (Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getHeight()/2), new Color(50,50,50)); that=this; setLayout(new GridBagLayout()); GridBagConstraints gbc = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc.fill=gbc.HORIZONTAL; add(backButton); backButton.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { Game.container.remove(that); Game.container.revalidate(); Game.container.repaint(); } }); } } I glad to see some suggestions. Thanks.

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• Create bullet physics rigid body along the vertices of a blender model

  - by Krishnabhadra

  I am working on my first 3D game, for iphone, and I am using Blender to create models, Cocos3D game engine and Bullet for physics simulation. I am trying to learn the use of physics engine. What I have done I have created a small model in blender which contains a Cube (default blender cube) at the origin and a UVSphere hovering exactly on top of this cube (without touching the cube) I saved the file to get MyModel.blend. Then I used File -> Export -> PVRGeoPOD (.pod/.h/.cpp) in Blender to export the model to .pod format to use along with Cocos3D. In the coding side, I added necessary bullet files to my Cocos3D template project in XCode. I am also using a bullet objective C wrapper. -(void) initializeScene { _physicsWorld = [[CC3PhysicsWorld alloc] init]; [_physicsWorld setGravity:0 y:-9.8 z:0]; /*Setup camera, lamp etc.*/ .......... ........... /*Add models created in blender to scene*/ [self addContentFromPODFile: @"MyModel.pod"]; /*Create OpenGL ES buffers*/ [self createGLBuffers]; /*get models*/ CC3MeshNode* cubeNode = (CC3MeshNode*)[self getNodeNamed:@"Cube"]; CC3MeshNode* sphereNode = (CC3MeshNode*)[self getNodeNamed:@"Sphere"]; /*Those boring grey colors..*/ [cubeNode setColor:ccc3(255, 255, 0)]; [sphereNode setColor:ccc3(255, 0, 0)]; float *cVertexData = (float*)((CC3VertexArrayMesh*)cubeNode.mesh).vertexLocations.vertices; int cVertexCount = (CC3VertexArrayMesh*)cubeNode.mesh).vertexLocations.vertexCount; btTriangleMesh* cTriangleMesh = new btTriangleMesh(); // for (int i = 0; i < cVertexCount * 3; i+=3) { // printf("\n%f", cVertexData[i]); // printf("\n%f", cVertexData[i+1]); // printf("\n%f", cVertexData[i+2]); // } /*Trying to create a triangle mesh that curresponds the cube in 3D space.*/ int offset = 0; for (int i = 0; i < (cVertexCount / 3); i++){ unsigned int index1 = offset; unsigned int index2 = offset+6; unsigned int index3 = offset+12; cTriangleMesh->addTriangle( btVector3(cVertexData[index1], cVertexData[index1+1], cVertexData[index1+2] ), btVector3(cVertexData[index2], cVertexData[index2+1], cVertexData[index2+2] ), btVector3(cVertexData[index3], cVertexData[index3+1], cVertexData[index3+2] )); offset += 18; } [self releaseRedundantData]; /*Create a collision shape from triangle mesh*/ btBvhTriangleMeshShape* cTriMeshShape = new btBvhTriangleMeshShape(cTriangleMesh,true); btCollisionShape *sphereShape = new btSphereShape(1); /*Create physics objects*/ gTriMeshObject = [_physicsWorld createPhysicsObjectTrimesh:cubeNode shape:cTriMeshShape mass:0 restitution:1.0 position:cubeNode.location]; sphereObject = [_physicsWorld createPhysicsObject:sphereNode shape:sphereShape mass:1 restitution:0.1 position:sphereNode.location]; sphereObject.rigidBody->setDamping(0.1,0.8); } When I run the sphere and cube shows up fine. I expect the sphere object to fall directly on top of the cube, since I have given it a mass of 1 and the physics world gravity is given as -9.8 in y direction. But What is happening the spere rotates around cube three or times and then just jumps out of the scene. Then I know I have some basic misunderstanding about the whole process. So my question is, how can I create a physics collision shape which corresponds to the shape of a particular mesh model. I may need complex shapes than cube and sphere, but before going into them I want to understand the concepts.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for August 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most popular items shared via the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the month of August 2012. Now Available: Oracle SQL Developer 3.2 (3.2.09.23) New features include APEX listener, UI enhancements, and 12c database support. The Role of Oracle VM Server for SPARC in a Virtualization Strategy In this article, Matthias Pfutzner discusses hardware, desktop, and operating system virtualization, along with various Oracle virtualization technologies, including Oracle VM Server for SPARC. How to Manually Install Flash Player Plugin to see the Oracle Enterprise Manager Performance Page | Kai Yu So, you're a DBA and you want to check the Performance page in Oracle Enterprise Manager (11g or 12c). So you click the Performance tab and… nothing. Zip. Nada. The Flash plugin is a no-show. Relax! Oracle ACE Director Kai Yu shows you what you need to do to see all the pretty colors instead of that dull grey screen. Relationally Challenged (CX - CRM - EQ/RQ/CRQ) | Chris Warticki Self-proclaimed Oracle Support "spokesmodel" Chris Chris Warticki has some advice for those interested in Customer Relationship Management: "How about we just dumb it down, strip it to the core, keep it simple and LISTEN?! No more focus groups, no more surveys, and no need to gather more data. We have plenty of that. Why not just provide the customer what they are asking for?" Free WebLogic Server Course | Middleware Magic So you want to sharpen your Oracle WebLogic Server skills, but you prefer to skip the whole classroom bit and don't want to be bothered with dealing with an instructor? No problem! Oracle ACE Rene van Wijk, a prolific Middleware Magic blogger, has information on an Oracle WebLogic course you can take on your own time, at your own pace. Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.20 released Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.20 was just released at the community and Oracle download sites, reports the Fat Bloke. This is a maintenance release containing bug fixes and stability improvements. Optimizing OLTP Oracle Database Performance using Dell Express Flash PCIe SSDs | Kai Yu Oracle ACE Director Kai Yu shares resources based on "several extensive performance studies on a single node Oracle 11g R2 database as well as a two node 11gR2 Oracle Real Application clusters (RAC) database running on Dell PowerEdge R720 servers with Dell Express Flash PCIe SSDs on Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.2 platform." Oracle ACE sessions at Oracle OpenWorld With so many great sessions at this year's event, building your Oracle OpenWorld schedule can involve making a lot of tough choices. But you'll find that the sessions led by Oracle ACEs just might be the icing on the cake for your OpenWorld experience. MySQL Update: The Cleveland MySQL Meetup (Independence, OH) Oracle MySQL team member Benjamin Wood, a MySQL engineer and five year veteran of the MySQL organization, will speak at the Cleveland MySQL Meetup event on September 12. The presentation will include a MySQL 5.5 Overview, Oracle's Roadmap for MySQL, including specifics on MySQL 5.6, best practices and how to overcome development and operational MySQL challenges, and the new MySQL commercial extensions. Click the link for time and location information. Parsing XML in Oracle Database | Martijn van der Kamp Martijn van der Kamp's post deals with processing XML in PL/SQL code and processing the data into the database. Thought for the Day "Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen." — Edward V. Berard Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Career guidance/advice for Junior-level Software Engineer [closed]

  - by John Do

  I have quite a few questions on my mind, so please bare with me. Please don't feel obligated to answer all of them, any as you choose will do. I'd appreciate if you could share some insight on any of these. Before I begin, some context: I currently have almost two years of professional experience as a Software Engineer, mainly developing software in Java. At this point, I feel that I have reached the peak in my career growth at the current company I am at and therefore I am looking for a new job, ideally again, as a Software Engineer. I have been interviewing for the past few months casually but have not had luck with companies I have a passion for. So, in no particular order - 1) In general, what are your thoughts on having graduate degrees in CS / Software Engineering. How much does it influence a salary increase, and do you think it's beneficial when working on real-world problems? I get the sense that a graduate degree in the field is trivial unless you really have a passion for research. 2) In general, in professional practice, how often had you have to write your own data structures and "complex" algorithms from scratch? In my own work, I have found myself relying mainly on third-party frameworks and the Java standard library to implement solutions as per business requirements. What are your thoughts on this? 3) In terms of resume, I feel the most ambivalent here. I want to be able to "blemish" my resume to a certain extent so that it stands out from others', but at the same time I do not want to over-exagerate my abilities. How do you strike a balance here? For example: I say that I am proficient in Java with data structures and algorithms. This is obviously a subjective and relative statement. I've taken the classes in my undergrad, and I've applied it in my work experience. What I feel as "prociency" can be seen as junior-level to others. How do you know what to say? Most of the time, recruiters (with no technical background) will be looking for keywords that stand out. This leads me to my next question (4). 4) Just from interviewing for the past few months (and getting plenty of rejections), I've come to realize that I may not be as proficient in data structures and algorithms as I thought I was. Do you think it's a good idea to remove the "proficient in java/data structure and algorithms"? I feel that being too hoenst on the resume will impede me from scoring opportunities to even have an interview with top-notch companies. What are your thoughts? 5) What is the absolute "must-have" knowledge going into a technical interview? I've been practicing several algorithmic and data sturcture problems now, and I feel that my abilities to solve arbitrary problems efficiently has not gotten significantly better. Do you think these abilities are something innate - it's either you have in you, or you don't? How can you teach yourself to learn, if you will? 6) How easy is it to go from industry/function to the next? I work mainly with backend technologies and I'm now interested in working with the frontend, i.e javascript,jquery,php or even mobile development. In your own experience, how did you not get pidgeon holed in your career? I feel that the choices you make now ultimately decide your future. As cliche as it sounds, I think it may be true. Here's what I mean: you've worked mainly as a backend engineer, people are interested in you doing the same thing since you've already accumulated experience in that function. How do get experience in a new function if people won't accept you because you don't already have it? It's a catch 22, you see... Are side projects the only real way to help you move from one function to another that you're truly interested in? For example: I could start writing my own mobile applications, even though I've worked mainly on the backend. Thanks so much for the long read. As a relatively new engineer to the real world, I am very humble and would like those who are experienced to shed some light. Thank you so much.

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• Going by the eBook

  - by Tony Davis

  The book and magazine publishing world is rapidly going digital, and the industry is faced with making drastic changes to their ways of doing business. The sudden take-up of digital readers by the book-buying public has surprised even the most technological-savvy of the industry. Printed books just aren't selling like they did. In contrast, eBooks are doing well. The ePub file format is the standard around which all publishers are converging. ePub is a standard for formatting book content, so that it can be reflowed for various devices, with their widely differing screen-sizes, and can be read offline. If you unzip an ePub file, you'll find familiar formats such as XML, XHTML and CSS. This is both a blessing and a curse. Whilst it is good to be able to use familiar technologies that have been developed to a level of considerable sophistication, it doesn't get us all the way to producing a viable publication. XHTML is a page-description language, not a book-description language, as we soon found out during our initial experiments, when trying to specify headers, footers, indexes and chaptering. As a result, it is difficult to predict how any particular eBook application will decide to render a book. There isn't even a consensus as to how the cover image is specified. All of this is awkward for the publisher. Each book must be created and revised in a form from which can be generated a whole range of 'printed media', from print books, to Mobi for kindles, ePub for most Tablets and SmartPhones, HTML for excerpted chapters on websites, and a plethora of other formats for other eBook readers, each with its own idiosyncrasies. In theory, if we can get our content into a clean, semantic XML form, such as DOCBOOKS, we can, from there, after every revision, perform a series of relatively simple XSLT transformations to output anything from a HTML article, to an ePub file for reading on an iPad, to an ICML file (an XML-based file format supported by the InDesign tool), ready for print publication. As always, however, the task looks bigger the closer you get to the detail. On the way to the utopian world of an XML-based book format that encompasses all the diverse requirements of the different publication media, ePub looks like a reasonable format to adopt. Its forthcoming support for HTML 5 and CSS 3, with ePub 3.0, means that features, such as widow-and-orphan controls, multi-column flow and multi-media graphics can be incorporated into eBooks. This starts to make it possible to build an "app-like" experience into the eBook and to free publishers to think of putting context before container; to think of what content is required, be it graphical, textual or audio, from the point of view of the user, rather than what's possible in a given, traditional book "Container". In the meantime, there is a gap between what publishers require and what current technology can provide and, of course building this app-like experience is far from plain sailing. Real portability between devices is still a big challenge, and achieving the sort of wizardry seen in the likes of Theodore Grey's "Elements" eBook will require some serious device-specific programming skills. Cheers, Tony.

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• Learn Many Languages

  - by Phil Factor

  Around twenty-five years ago, I was trying to solve the problem of recruiting suitable developers for a large business. I visited the local University (it was a Technical College then). My mission was to remind them that we were a large, local employer of technical people and to suggest that, as they were in the business of educating young people for a career in IT, we should work together. I anticipated a harmonious chat where we could suggest to them the idea of mentioning our name to some of their graduates. It didn’t go well. The academic staff displayed a degree of revulsion towards the whole topic of IT in the world of commerce that surprised me; tweed met charcoal-grey, trainers met black shoes. However, their antipathy to commerce was something we could have worked around, since few of their graduates were destined for a career as university lecturers. They asked me what sort of language skills we needed. I tried ducking the invidious task of naming computer languages, since I wanted recruits who were quick to adapt and learn, with a broad understanding of IT, including development methodologies, technologies, and data. However, they pressed the point and I ended up saying that we needed good working knowledge of C and BASIC, though FORTRAN and COBOL were, at the time, still useful. There was a ghastly silence. It was as if I’d recommended the beliefs and practices of the Bogomils of Bulgaria to a gathering of Cardinals. They stared at me severely, like owls, until the head of department broke the silence, informing me in clipped tones that they taught only Modula 2. Now, I wouldn’t blame you if at this point you hurriedly had to look up ‘Modula 2′ on Wikipedia. Based largely on Pascal, it was a specialist language for embedded systems, but I’ve never ever come across it in a commercial business application. Nevertheless, it was an excellent teaching language since it taught modules, scope control, multiprogramming and the advantages of encapsulating a set of related subprograms and data structures. As long as the course also taught how to transfer these skills to other, more useful languages, it was not necessarily a problem. I said as much, but they gleefully retorted that the biggest local employer, a defense contractor specializing in Radar and military technology, used nothing but Modula 2. “Why teach any other programming language when they will be using Modula 2 for all their working lives?” said a complacent lecturer. On hearing this, I made my excuses and left. There could be no meeting of minds. They were providing training in a specific computer language, not an education in IT. Twenty years later, I once more worked nearby and regularly passed the long-deserted ‘brownfield’ site of the erstwhile largest local employer; the end of the cold war had led to lean times for defense contractors. A digger was about to clear the rubble of the long demolished factory along with the accompanying growth of buddleia and thistles, in order to lay the infrastructure for ‘affordable housing’. Modula 2 was a distant memory. Either those employees had short working lives or they’d retrained in other languages. The University, by contrast, was thriving, but I wondered if their erstwhile graduates had ever cursed the narrow specialization of their training in IT, as they struggled with the unexpected variety of their subsequent careers.

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• Top Questions and Answers for Pluging into Oracle Database as a Service

  - by David Swanger

  Yesterday we hosted a comprehensive online forum that shared a comprehensive path to help your organization design, deploy, and deliver a Database as a Service cloud. If you missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand by registering here. We received numerous questions.  Below are highlights of the most informative: DBaaS requires a lengthy and careful design efforts. What is the minimum requirements of setting up a scaled-down environment and test it out? You should have an OEM 12c environment for DBaaS administration and then a target database deployment platform that has the key characteristics of what your production environment will look like. This could be a single server or it could be a small pool of hosts if your production DBaaS will be larger and you want to test a more robust / real world configuration with Zones and Pools or DR capabilities for example. How does this benefit companies having their own data center? This allows companies to transform their internal IT to a service delivery model for the database. The benefits to the company are significant cost savings, improved business agility and reduced risk. The benefits to the consumers (internal) of services if much fast provisioning, and response to change in business requirements. From a deployment perspective, is DBaaS's job solely DBA's job? The best deployment model enables the DBA (or end-user) to control the entire process. All resources required to deploy the service are pre-provisioned, and there are no external dependencies (on network, storage, sysadmins teams). The service is created either via a self-service portal or by the DBA. The purpose of self service seems to be that the end user does not rely on the DBA. I just need to give him a template. He decides how much AMM he needs. Why shall I set it one by one. That doesn't seem to be the purpose of self service. Most customers we have worked with define a standardized service catalog, with a few (2 to 5) different classes of service. For each of these classes, there is a pre-defined deployment template, and the user has the ability to select from some pre-defined service sizes. The administrator only has to create this catalog once. Each user then simply selects from the options offered in the catalog.  Looking at DBaaS service definition, it seems to be no different from a service definition provided by a well defined DBA team. Why do you attribute it to DBaaS? There are a couple of perspectives. First, some organizations might already be operating with a high level of standardization and a higher level of maturity from an ITIL or Service Management perspective. Their journey to DBaaS could be shorter and their Service Definition will evolve less but they still might need to add capabilities such as Self Service and Metering/Chargeback. Other organizations are still operating in highly siloed environments with little automation and their formal Service Definition (if they have one) will be a lot less mature today. Therefore their future state DBaaS will look a lot different from their current state, as will their Service Definition. How database as a service impact or help with "Click to Compute" or deploying "Database in cloud infrastructure" DBaaS enables Click to Compute. Oracle DBaaS can be implemented using three architecture models: Oracle Multitenant 12c, native consolidation using Oracle Database and consolidation using virtualization in infrastructure cloud. As Deploy session showed, you get higher consolidating density and efficiency using Multitenant and higher isolation using infrastructure cloud. Depending upon your business needs, DBaaS can be implemented using any of these models. How exactly is the DBaaS different from the traditional db? Storage/OS/DB all together to 'transparently' provide service to applications? Will there be across-databases access by application/user. Some key differences are: 1) The services run on a shared platform. 2) The services can be rapidly provisioned (< 15 minutes). 3) The services are dynamic and can be relocated, grown, shrunk as needed to meet business needs without disruption and rapidly. 4) The user is able to provision the services directly from a standardized service catalog.. With 24x7x365 databases its difficult to find off peak hrs to do basic admin tasks such as gathering stats, running backups, batch jobs. How does pluggable database handle this and different needs/patching downtime of apps databases might be serving? You can gather stats in Oracle Multitenant the same way you had been in regular databases. Regarding patching/upgrading, Oracle Multitenant makes patch/upgrade very efficient in that you can pre-provision a new version/patched multitenant db in a different ORACLE_HOME and then unplug a PDB from its CDB and plug it into the newer/patched CDB in seconds.  Thanks for all the great questions!  If you'd like to learn more and missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand here.

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• 4 Ways Your Brand Can Jump From the Edge of Space

  - by Mike Stiles

  Can your brand’s social media content captivate the world and make it hold its collective breath? Can you put something on the screen that’s so compelling that your audience can’t look away? Will they want to make sure their friends see it so they can talk about it? If not, you’re probably not with Red Bull. I was impressed with Red Bull’s approach to social content even before Felix Baumgartner’s stunning skydive from the edge of space. And then they did this. According to Visible Measures, videos of the jump scored 50 million views in 4 days. 1,700 clips were generated from both official and organic sources. The live stream was the most watched YouTube Stream of all time (8 million concurrent viewers). The 2nd most watched live stream was…Felix’ first attempt Oct. 9. Are you ready to compete with that? I ask that question because some brands are still out there tying themselves up in knots about whether or not they should tweet. The public’s time and attention are scarce commodities, commodities they value greatly. The competition amongst brands for that time and attention is intense and going up like Felix’s capsule. If you still view your press releases as “content,” you won’t even be counted as being among the competition. Here are 5 lessons learned from Red Bull’s big leap: 1. They have a total understanding of their target market and audience. Not only do they have an understanding of it, they do something about it. They act on it. They fill the majority of their thoughts with what the audience wants. They hunger for wild applause from that audience. They want to do things that embrace the audience’s lifestyle and immerse in it so the target will identify the brand as “one of them.” Takeaway: BE your target market. 2. They deliver content that strikes the audience right where they emotionally live. If you want your content to have impact, you have to make your audience’s heart race, or make them tear up, or make them laugh. Label them “data points” all you want, but humans are emotional creatures. No message connects that’s not carried in on an emotion. Takeaway: You’re on the inside. If your content doesn’t make you say “wow,” it’s unlikely it will register with fans. 3. They put aside old school marketing and don’t let their content be degraded into a commercial. Their execs seem to understand the value in keeping a lid on the hard sell. So many brands just can’t bring themselves to disconnect advertising and social content. The result is, otherwise decent content gets contaminated with a desperation the viewer can smell a mile away. Think the Baumgartner skydive didn’t do Red Bull any good since he wasn’t drinking one on the way down while singing a jingle? Analysis company Taykey discovered that at the peak of the skydive buzz, about 1% of all online conversation was about the jump. Mentions of Red Bull constituted 1/3 of 1% of all Internet activity. Views of other Red Bull videos also shot up. Takeaway: Chill out with the ads. Your brand will get full credit for entertaining/informing fans in a relevant way, provided you do it. 4. They don’t hesitate to ask, “What can we do next”? Most corporate cultures are a virtual training facility for “we can’t do that.” Few are encouraged to innovate or think big, if think at all. Thinking big involves faith, and work. It means freedom and letting employees run a little wild with their ideas. There will always be the opportunity to let fear of everything that moves creep in and kill grand visions dead in their tracks. Experimenting must be allowed. Failure must be allowed. Red Bull didn’t think big. They thought mega. They tried to outdo themselves. Felix could have gone ahead and jumped halfway up, thinking, “This is still relatively high up. Good enough.” But that wouldn’t have left us breathless. Takeaway: Go for it. Jump. In putting up social properties and gathering fans of your brand, you’ve basically invited people to a party. A good host doesn’t just set out warm beer and stale chips because that’s inexpensive and easy. Be on the lookout for ways to make your guests walk away saying, “That was epic.”

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• A Patent for Workload Management Based on Service Level Objectives

  - by jsavit

  I'm very pleased to announce that after a tiny :-) wait of about 5 years, my patent application for a workload manager was finally approved. Background Many operating systems have a resource manager which lets you control machine resources. For example, Solaris provides controls for CPU with several options: shares for proportional CPU allocation. If you have twice as many shares as me, and we are competing for CPU, you'll get about twice as many CPU cycles), dedicated CPU allocation in which a number of CPUs are exclusively dedicated to an application's use. You can say that a zone or project "owns" 8 CPUs on a 32 CPU machine, for example. And, capped CPU in which you specify the upper bound, or cap, of how much CPU an application gets. For example, you can throttle an application to 0.125 of a CPU. (This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of Solaris RM controls.) Workload management Useful as that is (and tragic that some other operating systems have little resource management and isolation, and frighten people into running only 1 app per OS instance - and wastefully size every server for the peak workload it might experience) that's not really workload management. With resource management one controls the resources, and hope that's enough to meet application service objectives. In fact, we hold resource distribution constant, see if that was good enough, and adjust resource distribution if that didn't meet service level objectives. Here's an example of what happens today: Let's try 30% dedicated CPU. Not enough? Let's try 80% Oh, that's too much, and we're achieving much better response time than the objective, but other workloads are starving. Let's back that off and try again. It's not the process I object to - it's that we to often do this manually. Worse, we sometimes identify and adjust the wrong resource and fiddle with that to no useful result. Back in my days as a customer managing large systems, one of my users would call me up to beg for a "CPU boost": Me: "it won't make any difference - there's plenty of spare CPU to be had, and your application is completely I/O bound." User: "Please do it anyway." Me: "oh, all right, but it won't do you any good." (I did, because he was a friend, but it didn't help.) Prior art There are some operating environments that take a stab about workload management (rather than resource management) but I find them lacking. I know of one that uses synthetic "service units" composed of the sum of CPU, I/O and memory allocations multiplied by weighting factors. A workload is set to make a target rate of service units consumed per second. But this seems to be missing a key point: what is the relationship between artificial 'service units' and actually meeting a throughput or response time objective? What if I get plenty of one of the components (so am getting enough service units), but not enough of the resource whose needed to remove the bottleneck? Actual workload management That's not really the answer either. What is needed is to specify a workload's service levels in terms of externally visible metrics that are meaningful to a business, such as response times or transactions per second, and have the workload manager figure out which resources are not being adequately provided, and then adjust it as needed. If an application is not meeting its service level objectives and the reason is that it's not getting enough CPU cycles, adjust its CPU resource accordingly. If the reason is that the application isn't getting enough RAM to keep its working set in memory, then adjust its RAM assignment appropriately so it stops swapping. Simple idea, but that's a task we keep dumping on system administrators. In other words - don't hold the number of CPU shares constant and watch the achievement of service level vary. Instead, hold the service level constant, and dynamically adjust the number of CPU shares (or amount of other resources like RAM or I/O bandwidth) in order to meet the objective. Instrumenting non-instrumented applications There's one little problem here: how do I measure application performance in a way relating to a service level. I don't want to do it based on internal resources like number of CPU seconds it received per minute - We need to make resource decisions based on externally visible and meaningful measures of performance, not synthetic items or internal resource counters. If I have a way of marking the beginning and end of a transaction, I can then measure whether or not the application is meeting an objective based on it. If I can observe the delay factors for an application, I can see which resource shortages are slowing an application enough to keep it from meeting its objectives. I can then adjust resource allocations to relieve those shortages. Fortunately, Solaris provides facilities for both marking application progress and determining what factors cause application latency. The Solaris DTrace facility let's me introspect on application behavior: in particular I can see events like "receive a web hit" and "respond to that web hit" so I can get transaction rate and response time. DTrace (and tools like prstat) let me see where latency is being added to an application, so I know which resource to adjust. Summary After a delay of a mere few years, I am the proud creator of a patent (advice to anyone interested in going through the process: don't hold your breath!). The fundamental idea is fairly simple: instead of holding resource constant and suffering variable levels of success meeting service level objectives, properly characterise the service level objective in meaningful terms, instrument the application to see if it's meeting the objective, and then have a workload manager change resource allocations to remove delays preventing service level attainment. I've done it by hand for a long time - I think that's what a computer should do for me.

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• Seperation of project responsibilities in new project

  - by dreza

  We have very recently started a new project (MVC 3.0) and some of our early discussion has been around how the work and development will be split amongst the team members to ensure we get the least amount of overlap of work and so help make it a bit easier for each developer to get on and do their work. The project is expected to take about 6 months - 1 year (although not all developers are likely to be on and might filter off towards the end), Our team is going to be small so this will help out a bit I believe. The team will essentially consist of: 3 x developers (1 a slightly more experienced and will be the lead) 1 x project manager / product owner / tester An external company responsbile for doing our design work General project/development decisions so far have included: Develop in an Agile way using SCRUM techniques (We are still very much learning this approach as a company) Use MVVM archectecture Use Ninject and DI where possible Attempt to use as TDD as much as possible to drive development. Keep our controllers as skinny as possible Keep our views as simple as possible During our discussions two approaches have been broached as too how to seperate the workload given our objectives outlined above. OPTION 1: A framework seperation where each person is responsible for conceptual areas with overlap and discussion primarily in the integration areas. The integration areas would the responsibily of both developers as required. View prototypes (**Graphic designer**) | - Mockups | Views (Razor and view helpers etc) & Javascript (**Developer 1**) | - View models (Integration point) | Controllers and Application logic (**Developer 2**) | - Models (Integration point) | Domain model and persistence (**Developer 3**) PROS: Integration points are quite clear and so developers can work without dependencies on others fairly easily Code practices such as naming conventions and style is more easily managed in regards to consistancy as primarily only one developer will be handling an area CONS: Completion of an entire feature becomes a bit grey as no single person is responsible for an entire feature (story?) A person might not have a full appreciation for all areas of the project and so code overlap might be lacking if suddenly that person left. OPTION 2: A more task orientated approach where each person is responsible for the completion of the entire task from view - controller - model. PROS: A person is responsible for one entire feature so it's "complete" state can be clearly defined Code overlap into different areas will occur so each individual has good coverage over the entire application CONS: Overlap of development will occur in all the modules and developers can develop/extend without a true understanding of what the original code owner was intending. This could potentially lead more easily to code bloat? Following a convention might be harder as developers are adding to all areas of the project If a developer sets up a way of doing things would it be harder to enforce the other developers to follow that convention or even build on it (or even discuss it?). Dunno.. Bugs could more easily be introduced into areas not thought about by the developer It's easier to possibly to carry a team member in so far as one member just hacks code together to complete a task whilst another takes time to build a foundation that could be used by others and so help make future tasks easier i.e. starts building a framework? QUESTION: As it might appear I'm more in favor of option 1, however I'm interested to see how others might have approached this or what is the standard or best or preferred way of undertaking a project. Or indeed any different approach to handling this?

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• Drivers for Atheros AR928X?

  - by Pato7

  I am new in Ubuntu and I had a big trouble with wifi. My ubuntu 12.10 doesn't detect my wifi card and I can't toggle the "activate wireless" option on the tasks bar (it is grey). I searched for drivers to make it work, but nothing worked for me. Can anyone give me a hand? Many thanks in advanced! lspci output 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 07) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset PCI Express Graphics Port (rev 07) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03) 00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03) 00:1a.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 03) 00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03) 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 93) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ICH9M LPC Interface Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801IBM/IEM (ICH9M/ICH9M-E) 4 port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 03) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV710 [Mobility Radeon HD 4500/5100 Series] 01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series] 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8057 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10) 03:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01) 0c:03.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05) 0c:03.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22) 0c:03.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 12) lshw -c network output *-network descripción: Ethernet interface producto: 88E8057 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller fabricante: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. id físico: 0 información del bus: pci@0000:02:00.0 nombre lógico: eth0 versión: 10 serie: 00:24:be:83:b2:4f tamaño: 100Mbit/s capacidad: 1Gbit/s anchura: 64 bits reloj: 33MHz capacidades: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuración: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=sky2 driverversion=1.30 duplex=full ip=192.168.1.123 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=100Mbit/s recursos: irq:45 memoria:d3520000-d3523fff ioport:c000(size=256) memoria:d3500000-d351ffff *-network DESACTIVADO descripción: Interfaz inalámbrica producto: AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) fabricante: Atheros Communications Inc. id físico: 0 información del bus: pci@0000:03:00.0 nombre lógico: wlan0 versión: 01 serie: 2c:81:58:e6:b6:03 anchura: 64 bits reloj: 33MHz capacidades: pm msi pciexpress msix bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuración: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.5.0-18-generic firmware=N/A latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn recursos: irq:17 memoria:d2100000-d210ffff rfkill list all output 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: yes 1: sony-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no

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• Exploring TCP throughput with DTrace (2)

  - by user12820842

  Last time, I described how we can use the overlap in distributions of unacknowledged byte counts and send window to determine whether the peer's receive window may be too small, limiting throughput. Let's combine that comparison with a comparison of congestion window and slow start threshold, all on a per-port/per-client basis. This will help us Identify whether the congestion window or the receive window are limiting factors on throughput by comparing the distributions of congestion window and send window values to the distribution of outstanding (unacked) bytes. This will allow us to get a visual sense for how often we are thwarted in our attempts to fill the pipe due to congestion control versus the peer not being able to receive any more data. Identify whether slow start or congestion avoidance predominate by comparing the overlap in the congestion window and slow start distributions. If the slow start threshold distribution overlaps with the congestion window, we know that we have switched between slow start and congestion avoidance, possibly multiple times. Identify whether the peer's receive window is too small by comparing the distribution of outstanding unacked bytes with the send window distribution (i.e. the peer's receive window). I discussed this here. # dtrace -s tcp_window.d dtrace: script 'tcp_window.d' matched 10 probes ^C cwnd 80 10.175.96.92 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count 1024 | 0 2048 | 4 4096 | 6 8192 | 18 16384 | 36 32768 |@ 79 65536 |@ 155 131072 |@ 199 262144 |@@@ 400 524288 |@@@@@@ 798 1048576 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 3848 2097152 | 0 ssthresh 80 10.175.96.92 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count 268435456 | 0 536870912 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 5543 1073741824 | 0 unacked 80 10.175.96.92 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count -1 | 0 0 | 1 1 | 0 2 | 0 4 | 0 8 | 0 16 | 0 32 | 0 64 | 0 128 | 0 256 | 3 512 | 0 1024 | 0 2048 | 4 4096 | 9 8192 | 21 16384 | 36 32768 |@ 78 65536 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 5391 131072 | 0 swnd 80 10.175.96.92 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count 32768 | 0 65536 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 5543 131072 | 0 Here we are observing a large file transfer via http on the webserver. Comparing these distributions, we can observe: That slow start congestion control is in operation. The distribution of congestion window values lies below the range of slow start threshold values (which are in the 536870912+ range), so the connection is in slow start mode. Both the unacked byte count and the send window values peak in the 65536-131071 range, but the send window value distribution is narrower. This tells us that the peer TCP's receive window is not closing. The congestion window distribution peaks in the 1048576 - 2097152 range while the receive window distribution is confined to the 65536-131071 range. Since the cwnd distribution ranges as low as 2048-4095, we can see that for some of the time we have been observing the connection, congestion control has been a limiting factor on transfer, but for the majority of the time the receive window of the peer would more likely have been the limiting factor. However, we know the window has never closed as the distribution of swnd values stays within the 65536-131071 range. So all in all we have a connection that has been mildly constrained by congestion control, but for the bulk of the time we have been observing it neither congestion or peer receive window have limited throughput. Here's the script: #!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s tcp:::send / (args[4]-tcp_flags & (TH_SYN|TH_RST|TH_FIN)) == 0 / { @cwnd["cwnd", args[4]-tcp_sport, args[2]-ip_daddr] = quantize(args[3]-tcps_cwnd); @ssthresh["ssthresh", args[4]-tcp_sport, args[2]-ip_daddr] = quantize(args[3]-tcps_cwnd_ssthresh); @unacked["unacked", args[4]-tcp_sport, args[2]-ip_daddr] = quantize(args[3]-tcps_snxt - args[3]-tcps_suna); @swnd["swnd", args[4]-tcp_sport, args[2]-ip_daddr] = quantize((args[4]-tcp_window)*(1 tcps_snd_ws)); } One surprise here is that slow start is still in operation - one would assume that for a large file transfer, acknowledgements would push the congestion window up past the slow start threshold over time. The slow start threshold is in fact still close to it's initial (very high) value, so that would suggest we have not experienced any congestion (the slow start threshold is adjusted when congestion occurs). Also, the above measurements were taken early in the connection lifetime, so the congestion window did not get a changes to get bumped up to the level of the slow start threshold. A good strategy when examining these sorts of measurements for a given service (such as a webserver) would be start by examining the distributions above aggregated by port number only to get an overall feel for service performance, i.e. is congestion control or peer receive window size an issue, or are we unconstrained to fill the pipe? From there, the overlap of distributions will tell us whether to drill down into specific clients. For example if the send window distribution has multiple peaks, we may want to examine if particular clients show issues with their receive window.

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• Is there any kind of established architecture for browser based games?

  - by black_puppydog

  I am beginning the development of a broser based game in which players take certain actions at any point in time. Big parts of gameplay will be happening in real life and just have to be entered into the system. I believe a good kind of comparison might be a platform for managing fantasy football, although I have virtually no experience playing that, so please correct me if I am mistaken here. The point is that some events happen in the program (i.e. on the server, out of reach for the players) like pulling new results from some datasource, starting of a new round by a game master and such. Other events happen in real life (two players closing a deal on the transfer of some team member or whatnot - again: have never played fantasy football) and have to be entered into the system. The first part is pretty easy since the game masters will be "staff" and thus can be trusted to a certain degree to not mess with the system. But the second part bothers me quite a lot, especially since the actions may involve multiple steps and interactions with different players, like registering a deal with the system that then has to be approved by the other party or denied and passed on to a game master to decide. I would of course like to separate the game logic as far as possible from the presentation and basic form validation but am unsure how to do this in a clean fashion. Of course I could (and will) put some effort into making my own architectural decisions and prototype different ideas. But I am bound to make some stupid mistakes at some point, so I would like to avoid some of that by getting a little "book smart" beforehand. So the question is: Is there any kind of architectural works that I can read up on? Papers, blogs, maybe design documents or even source code? Writing this down this seems more like a business application with business rules, workflows and such... Any good entry points for that? EDIT: After reading the first answers I am under the impression of having made a mistake when including the "MMO" part into the title. The game will not be all fancy (i.e. 3D or such) on the client side and the logic will completely exist on the server. That is, apart from basic form validation for the user which will also be mirrored on the server side. So the target toolset will be HTML5, JavaScript, probably JQuery(UI). My question is more related to the software architecture/design of a system that enforces certain rules. Separation of ruleset and presentation One problem I am having is that I want to separate the game rules from the presentation. The first step would be to make an own module for the game "engine" that only exposes an interface that allows all actions to be taken in a clean way. If an action fails with regard to some pre/post condition, the engine throws an exception which is then presented to the user like "you cannot sell something you do not own" or "after that you would end up in a situation which is not a valid game state." The problem here is that I would like to be able to not even present invalid action in the first place or grey out the corresponding UI elements. Changing and tweaking the ruleset Another big thing is the ruleset. It will probably evolve over time and most definitely must be tweaked. What's more, it should be possible (to a certain extent) to build a ruleset that fits a specific game round, i.e. choosing different kinds of behaviours in different aspects of the game. This would do something like "we play it with extension A today but we throw out extension B." For me, this screams "Architectural/Design pattern" but I have no idea on who might have published on something like this, not even what to google for.

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• Modeling distribution of performance measurements

  - by peterchen

  How would you mathematically model the distribution of repeated real life performance measurements - "Real life" meaning you are not just looping over the code in question, but it is just a short snippet within a large application running in a typical user scenario? My experience shows that you usually have a peak around the average execution time that can be modeled adequately with a Gaussian distribution. In addition, there's a "long tail" containing outliers - often with a multiple of the average time. (The behavior is understandable considering the factors contributing to first execution penalty). My goal is to model aggregate values that reasonably reflect this, and can be calculated from aggregate values (like for the Gaussian, calculate mu and sigma from N, sum of values and sum of squares). In other terms, number of repetitions is unlimited, but memory and calculation requirements should be minimized. A normal Gaussian distribution can't model the long tail appropriately and will have the average biased strongly even by a very small percentage of outliers. I am looking for ideas, especially if this has been attempted/analysed before. I've checked various distributions models, and I think I could work out something, but my statistics is rusty and I might end up with an overblown solution. Oh, a complete shrink-wrapped solution would be fine, too ;) Other aspects / ideas: Sometimes you get "two humps" distributions, which would be acceptable in my scenario with a single mu/sigma covering both, but ideally would be identified separately. Extrapolating this, another approach would be a "floating probability density calculation" that uses only a limited buffer and adjusts automatically to the range (due to the long tail, bins may not be spaced evenly) - haven't found anything, but with some assumptions about the distribution it should be possible in principle. Why (since it was asked) - For a complex process we need to make guarantees such as "only 0.1% of runs exceed a limit of 3 seconds, and the average processing time is 2.8 seconds". The performance of an isolated piece of code can be very different from a normal run-time environment involving varying levels of disk and network access, background services, scheduled events that occur within a day, etc. This can be solved trivially by accumulating all data. However, to accumulate this data in production, the data produced needs to be limited. For analysis of isolated pieces of code, a gaussian deviation plus first run penalty is ok. That doesn't work anymore for the distributions found above. [edit] I've already got very good answers (and finally - maybe - some time to work on this). I'm starting a bounty to look for more input / ideas.

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• How to sort my paws?

  - by Ivo Flipse

  In my previous question I got an excellent answer that helped me detect where a paw hit a pressure plate, but now I'm struggling to link these results to their corresponding paws: I manually annotated the paws (RF=right front, RH= right hind, LF=left front, LH=left hind). As you can see there's clearly a pattern repeating pattern and it comes back in aknist every measurement. Here's a link to a presentation of 6 trials that were manually annotated. My initial thought was to use heuristics to do the sorting, like: There's a ~60-40% ratio in weight bearing between the front and hind paws; The hind paws are generally smaller in surface; The paws are (often) spatially divided in left and right. However, I’m a bit skeptical about my heuristics, as they would fail on me as soon as I encounter a variation I hadn’t thought off. They also won’t be able to cope with measurements from lame dogs, whom probably have rules of their own. Furthermore, the annotation suggested by Joe sometimes get's messed up and doesn't take into account what the paw actually looks like. Based on the answers I received on my question about peak detection within the paw, I’m hoping there are more advanced solutions to sort the paws. Especially because the pressure distribution and the progression thereof are different for each separate paw, almost like a fingerprint. I hope there's a method that can use this to cluster my paws, rather than just sorting them in order of occurrence. So I'm looking for a better way to sort the results with their corresponding paw. For anyone up to the challenge, I have pickled a dictionary with all the sliced arrays that contain the pressure data of each paw (bundled by measurement) and the slice that describes their location (location on the plate and in time). To clarfiy: walk_sliced_data is a dictionary that contains ['ser_3', 'ser_2', 'sel_1', 'sel_2', 'ser_1', 'sel_3'], which are the names of the measurements. Each measurement contains another dictionary, [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] (example from 'sel_1') which represent the impacts that were extracted. Also note that 'false' impacts, such as where the paw is partially measured (in space or time) can be ignored. They are only useful because they can help recognizing a pattern, but won't be analyzed. And for anyone interested, I’m keeping a blog with all the updates regarding the project!

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• How to I serialize a large graph of .NET object into a SQL Server BLOB without creating a large bu

  - by Ian Ringrose

  We have code like: ms = New IO.MemoryStream bin = New System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter bin.Serialize(ms, largeGraphOfObjects) dataToSaveToDatabase = ms.ToArray() // put dataToSaveToDatabase in a Sql server BLOB But the memory steam allocates a large buffer from the large memory heap that is giving us problems. So how can we stream the data without needing enough free memory to hold the serialized objects. I am looking for a way to get a Stream from SQL server that can then be passed to bin.Serialize() so avoiding keeping all the data in my processes memory. Likewise for reading the data back... Some more background. This is part of a complex numerical processing system that processes data in near real time looking for equipment problems etc, the serialization is done to allow a restart when there is a problem with data quality from a data feed etc. (We store the data feeds and can rerun them after the operator has edited out bad values.) Therefore we serialize the object a lot more often then we de-serialize them. The objects we are serializing include very large arrays mostly of doubles as well as a lot of small “more normal” objects. We are pushing the memory limit on a 32 bit system and make the garage collector work very hard. (Effects are being made elsewhere in the system to improve this, e.g. reusing large arrays rather then create new arrays.) Often the serialization of the state is the last straw that courses an out of memory exception; our peak memory usage is while this serialization is being done. I think we get large memory pool fragmentation when we de-serialize the object, I expect there are also other problem with large memory pool fragmentation given the size of the arrays. (This has not yet been investigated, as the person that first looked at this is a numerical processing expert, not a memory management expert.) Are customers use a mix of Sql Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 and we would rather not have different code paths for each version of Sql Server if possible. We can have many active models at a time (in different process, across many machines), each model can have many saved states. Hence the saved state is stored in a database blob rather then a file. As the spread of saving the state is important, I would rather not serialize the object to a file, and then put the file in a BLOB one block at a time. Other related questions I have asked How to Stream data from/to SQL Server BLOB fields? Is there a SqlFileStream like class that works with Sql Server 2005?

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