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• "Why We Chose Fusion CRM" by Vikas Bhambri, Managing Partner, The Athene Group

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Vikas Bhambri, Managing Partner, The Athene Group This year The Athene Group (www.theathenegroup.com) celebrated our tenth anniversary. The company has accomplished a lot in ten years overcoming a number of hurdles and challenges to have grown organically to a 150+ person global company with offices in the US, UK, and India and customers in the US, Canada, and Europe. Now more than ever with the current global landscape from an economic and competitive standpoint it was vital that we make some changes to remain successful for the next ten years. There were two key initiatives that we discussed internally that would enable us to successfully accomplish this – collaboration and the concept of “insight to action”. With our existing Oracle CRM On Demand platform we had components of this but not the full depth and breadth that we were looking for. When we started to discuss Fusion CRM we immediately saw several next generation tools that would embrace these two objectives. For a consulting and development organization the collaboration required between business development and consulting delivery is as important as the collaboration required during the projects between the project delivery and account management teams. The Activity Streams functionality in Fusion CRM immediately addressed the communication of key discussion topics and exchanges around our clients. Of course when we saw the Oracle Social Network (which is part of our Fusion CRM roadmap) we were blown away. The combination OSN and our CRM is going to make us more effective as we discuss and work cohesively on client engagements – ensuring mutual success for both Athene and our clients. When we looked at “insight to action” we saw that we had a great platform when folks were at their desks, unfortunately a lot of our business development and consulting folks are on the road. The Fusion Mobile Sales and Fusion Outlook Desktop provide information to our teams when they are on the go. So that they can provide real-time information and react to real-time information provided by their peers. We are in the early stages of our transformative experience with Fusion CRM but we believe the platform along with our people and processes are going to help us achieve our goals in the future.

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• Do you want to be an ALM Consultant?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Northwest Cadence is looking for our next great consultant! At Northwest Cadence, we have created a work environment that emphasizes excellence, integrity, and out-of-the-box thinking.  Our customers have high expectations (rightfully so) and we wouldn’t have it any other way!   Northwest Cadence has some of the most exciting customers I have ever worked with and even though I have only been here just over a month I have already: Provided training/consulting for 3 government departments Created and taught courseware for delivering Scrum to teams within a high profile multinational company Started presenting Microsoft's ALM Engagement Program  So if you are interested in helping companies build better software more efficiently, then.. Enquire at [email protected] Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Consultant An ALM Consultant with a minimum of 8 years of relevant experience with Application Lifecycle Management, Visual Studio (including Visual Studio Team System) and software design is needed. Must provide thought leadership on best practices for enterprise architecture, understand the Microsoft technology solution stack, and have a thorough understanding of enterprise application integration. The ALM Practice Lead will play a central role in designing and implementing the overall ALM Practice strategy, including creating, updating, and delivering ALM courseware and consultancy engagements. This person will also provide project support, deliverables, and quality solutions on Visual Studio Team System that exceed client expectations. Engagements will vary and will involve providing expert training, consulting, mentoring, formulating technical strategies and policies and acting as a “trusted advisor” to customers and internal teams. Sound sense of business and technical strategy required. Strong interpersonal skills as well as solid strategic thinking are key. The ideal candidate will be capable of envisioning the solution based on the early client requirements, communicating the vision to both technical and business stakeholders, leading teams through implementation, as well as training, mentoring, and hands-on software development. The ideal candidate will demonstrate successful use of both agile and formal software development methods, enterprise application patterns, and effective leadership on prior projects. Job Requirements Minimum Education: Bachelor’s Degree (computer science, engineering, or math preferred). Locale / Travel: The Practice Lead position requires estimated 50% travel, most of which will be in the Continental US (a valid national Passport must be maintained).  This is a full time position and will be based in the Kirkland office. Preferred Education: Master’s Degree in Information Technology or Software Engineering; Premium Microsoft Certifications on .NET (MCSD) or MCPD or relevant experience; Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) or relevant experience. Minimum Experience and Skills: 7+ years experience with business information systems integration or custom business application design and development in a professional technology consulting, corporate MIS or software development environment. Essential Duties & Responsibilities: Provide training, consulting, and mentoring to organizations on topics that include Visual Studio Team System and ALM. Create content, including labs and demonstrations, to be delivered as training classes by Northwest Cadence employees. Lead development teams through the complete ALM and/or Visual Studio Team System solution. Be able to communicate in detail how a solution will integrate into the larger technical problem space for large, complex enterprises. Define technical solution requirements. Provide guidance to the customer and project team with respect to technical feasibility, complexity, and level of effort required to deliver a custom solution. Ensure that the solution is designed, developed and deployed in accordance with the agreed upon development work plan. Create and deliver weekly status reports of training and/or consulting progress. Engagement Responsibilities: · Provide a strong desire to provide thought leadership related to technology and to help grow the business. · Work effectively and professionally with employees at all levels of a customer’s organization. · Have strong verbal and written communication skills. · Have effective presentation, organizational and planning skills. · Have effective interpersonal skills and ability to work in a team environment. Enquire at [email protected]

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• SQL 2012 Licensing Thoughts

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The only thing more controversial than new Federal Tax plans is new Licensing plans from Microsoft.  In both cases, everyone calculates several numbers.  First, will I pay more or less under this plan?  Second, will my competition pay more or less than now?  Third, will <insert interesting person/company here> pay more or less?  Not that items 2 and 3 are meaningful, that is just how people think. Much like tax plans, the devil is in the details, so lets see how this looks.  Microsoft shows it here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/future-editions/sql2012-licensing.aspx First up is a switch from per-socket to per-core licensing.  Anyone who didn’t see something like this coming should rapidly search for a new line of work because you are not paying attention.  The explosion of multi-core processors has made SQL Server a bargain.  Microsoft is in business to make money and the old per-socket model was not going to do that going forward. Per-core licensing also simplifies virtualization licensing.  Physical Core = Virtual Core, at least for licensing.  Oversubscribe your processors, that’s your lookout.  You still pay for  what is exposed to the VM.  The cool part is you can seamlessly move physical and virtual workloads around and the licenses follow.  The catch is you have to have Software Assurance to make the licenses mobile.  Nice touch there. Let’s have a moment of silence for the late, unlamented, largely ignored Workgroup Edition.  To quote the Microsoft  FAQ:  “Standard becomes our sole edition for basic database needs”.  Considering I haven’t encountered a singe instance of SQL Server Workgroup Edition in the wild, I don’t think this will be all that controversial. As for pricing, it looks like a wash with current per-socket pricing based on four core sockets.  Interestingly, that is the minimum core count Microsoft proposes to swap to transition per-socket to per-core if you are on Software Assurance.  Reading the fine print shows that if you are using more, you will get more core licenses: From the licensing FAQ. 15. How do I migrate from processor licenses to core licenses?  What is the migration path? Licenses purchased with Software Assurance (SA) will upgrade to SQL Server 2012 at no additional cost. EA/EAP customers can continue buying processor licenses until your next renewal after June 30, 2012. At that time, processor licenses will be exchanged for core-based licenses sufficient to cover the cores in use by processor-licensed databases (minimum of 4 cores per processor for Standard and Enterprise, and minimum of 8 EE cores per processor for Datacenter). Looks like the folks who invested in the AMD 12-core chips will make out like bandits. Now, on to something new: SQL Server Business Intelligence Edition. Yep, finally a BI-specific SKU licensed for server+CAL configurations only.  Note that Enterprise Edition still supports the complete feature set; the BI Edition is intended for smaller shops who want to use the full BI feature set but without needing Enterprise Edition scale (or costs).  No, you don’t get ColumnStore, Compression, or Partitioning in the BI Edition.  Those are Enterprise scale features, ThankYouVeryMuch.  Then again, your starting licensing costs are about one sixth of an Enterprise Edition system (based on an 8 core server). The only part of the message I am missing is if the current Failover Licensing Policy will change.  Do we need to fully or partially license failover servers?  That is a detail I definitely want to know.

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• Is a university education really worth it for a good programmer?

  - by Jon Purdy

  The title says it all, but here's the personal side of it: I've been doing design and programming for about as long as I can remember. If there's a programming problem, I can figure it out. (Though admittedly StackOverflow has allowed me to skip the figuring out and get straight to the doing in many instances.) I've made games, esoteric programming languages, and widgets and gizmos galore. I'm currently working on a general-purpose programming language. There's nothing I do better than programming. However, I'm just as passionate about design. Thus when I felt leaving high school that my design skills were lacking, I decided to attend university for New Media Design and Imaging, a digital design-related major. For a year, I diligently studied art and programmed in my free time. As the next year progressed, however, I was obligated to take fewer art and design classes and more technical classes. The trouble was of course that these classes were geared toward non-technical students, and were far beneath my skill level at the time. No amount of petitioning could overcome the institution's reluctance to allow me to test out of such classes, and the major offered no promise for any greater challenge in the future, so I took the extreme route: I switched into the technical equivalent of the major, New Media Interactive Development. A lot of my credits moved over into the new major, but many didn't. It would have been infeasible to switch to a more rigorous technical major such as Computer Science, and having tutored Computer Science students at every level here, I doubt I would be exposed to anything that I haven't already or won't eventually find out on my own, since I'm so involved in the field. I'm now on track to graduate perhaps a year later than I had planned, which puts a significant financial strain on my family and my future self. My schedule continues to be bogged down with classes that are wholly unnecessary for me to take. I'm being re-introduced to subjects that I've covered a thousand times over, simply because I've always been interested in it all. And though I succeed in avoiding the cynical and immature tactic of failing to complete work out of some undeserved sense of superiority, I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned by the lack of intellectual stimulation. Further, my school requires students to complete a number of quarters of co-op work experience proportional to their major. My original major required two quarters, but my current requires three, delaying my graduation even more. To top it all off, college is putting a severe strain on my relationship with my very close partner of a few years, so I've searched diligently for co-op jobs in my area, alas to no avail. I'm now in my third year, and approaching that point past which I can no longer handle this. Either I keep my head down, get a degree no matter what it takes, and try to get a job with a company that will pay me enough to do what I love that I can eventually pay off my loans; or I cut my losses now, move wherever there is work, and in six months start paying off what debt I've accumulated thus far. So the real question is: is a university education really more than just a formality? It's a big decision, and one I can't make lightly. I think this is the appropriate venue for this kind of question, and I hope it sticks around for the sake of others who might someday find themselves in similar situations. My heartfelt thanks for reading, and in advance for your help.

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• Data Security Through Structure, Procedures, Policies, and Governance

  Security Structure and Procedures One of the easiest ways to implement security is through the use of structure, in particular the structure in which data is stored. The preferred method for this through the use of User Roles, these Roles allow for specific access to be granted based on what role a user plays in relation to the data that they are manipulating. Typical data access actions are defined by the CRUD Principle. CRUD Principle: Create New Data Read Existing Data Update Existing Data Delete Existing Data Based on the actions assigned to a role assigned, User can manipulate data as they need to preform daily business operations.  An example of this can be seen in a hospital where doctors have been assigned Create, Read, Update, and Delete access to their patient’s prescriptions so that a doctor can prescribe and adjust any existing prescriptions as necessary. However, a nurse will only have Read access on the patient’s prescriptions so that they will know what medicines to give to the patients. If you notice, they do not have access to prescribe new prescriptions, update or delete existing prescriptions because only the patient’s doctor has access to preform those actions. With User Roles comes responsibility, companies need to constantly monitor data access to ensure that the proper roles have the most appropriate access levels to ensure users are not exposed to inappropriate data.  In addition this also protects rouge employees from gaining access to critical business information that could be destroyed, altered or stolen. It is important that all data access is monitored because of this threat. Security Governance Current Data Governance laws regarding security Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Sarbanes-Oxley Act Database Breach Notification Act The US Department of Health and Human Services defines HIIPAA as a Privacy Rule. This legislation protects the privacy of individually identifiable health information. Currently, HIPAA   sets the national standards for securing electronically protected health records. Additionally, its confidentiality provisions protect identifiable information being used to analyze patient safety events and improve patient safety. In 2002 after the wake of the Enron and World Com Financial scandals Senator Paul Sarbanes and Representative Michael Oxley lead the creation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This act administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dramatically altered corporate financial practices and data governance. In addition, it also set specific deadlines for compliance. The Sarbanes-Oxley is not a set of standard business rules and does not specify how a company should retain its records; In fact, this act outlines which pieces of data are to be stored as well as the storage duration. The Database Breach Notification Act requires companies, in the event of a data breach containing personally identifiable information, to notify all California residents whose information was stored on the compromised system at the time of the event, according to Gregory Manter. He further explains that this act is only California legislation. However, it does affect “any person or business that conducts business in California, and that owns or licenses computerized data that includes personal information,” regardless of where the compromised data is located.  This will force any business that maintains at least limited interactions with California residents will find themselves subject to the Act’s provisions. Security Policies All companies must work in accordance with the appropriate city, county, state, and federal laws. One way to ensure that a company is legally compliant is to enforce security policies that adhere to the appropriate legislation in their area or areas that they service. These types of polices need to be mandated by a company’s Security Officer. For smaller companies, these policies need to come from executives, Directors, and Owners.

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• Essential Links for the SharePoint Client Side Developer

  - by Mark Rackley

  Front End Developer? Client Side Developer? Middle Tier??? I’m covering all my bases.  Regardless, I’m sick and tired of Googling with Bing when I forget where information that I need often is located. I was getting ready to bookmark some of them when it hit me… “Hey Mark… (I don’t actually refer to myself in the third person), Why don’t you put the links in a blog so that it looks like you are being helpful!” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go back to some of my old blogs to remember how I did something. Seriously people, you need to start a blog, it’s the best way to remember how the frick you got something to work… and it looks like you are being helpful when in reality you are just forgetful.  So… where was I? Oh yeah.. essential information that I’ve needed from time to time when I was not using Visual Studio. All of this info has come in handy from time to time. Know about these things and keep them in your tool belt, it’s amazing the stuff you can accomplish with just knowing where to look. What Why SPServices Widely used library written by Marc Anderson used to call SharePoint Web Services with jQuery jQuery For SPServices and other cool stuff Easy Tabs Essential tool for quick page enhancements. This widely used too from Christophe Humbert groups multiple web parts into one tabbed display. Very quick and easy way to get oohs and ahs from End Users. Convert Calculated Columns to HTML Also from Christophe, I use this script all the time to convert html in my calculated columns to actually display as html and not with the tags. Unlocking the Mysteries of Data View Web Part XSL Tags This blog series from Marc Anderson makes it very easy to understand what’s going on with all those weird xsl tags in your data view web parts. Essential to make those things do what you want them to do. Creating Parent / Child list relationships (2007) Creating Parent / Child list relationships (2010) By far my most viewed blog posts (tens and tens of thousands).  I have posts for both 2007 and 2010 that walk you through automatically setting the lookup id on a list to its “parent”. Set SharePoint Form fields using Query String Variables Also widely read, this one walks you through taking a variable from your Query String and set a form field to that value.   Hmmm… I KNOW there are more, but I’m tired and drawing a blank.  I’ll try to add them when I remember them (or need them again and think “Oh, I forgot to add that one”) But it’s a start, and please feel free to add your own in the comments… So, it’s YOUR turn to be helpful. What little tip or trick do you find yourself using ALL the time that you think everyone should know about??

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• perl comparing 2 data file as array 2D for finding match one to one [migrated]

  - by roman serpa

  I'm doing a program that uses combinations of variables ( combiData.txt 63 rows x different number of columns) for analysing a data table ( j1j2_1.csv, 1000filas x 19 columns ) , to choose how many times each combination is repeated in data table and which rows come from (for instance, tableData[row][4]). I have tried to compile it , however I get the following message : Use of uninitialized value $val in numeric eq (==) at rowInData.pl line 34. Use of reference "ARRAY(0x1a2eae4)" as array index at rowInData.pl line 56. Use of reference "ARRAY(0x1a1334c)" as array index at rowInData.pl line 56. Use of uninitialized value in subtraction (-) at rowInData.pl line 56. Modification of non-creatable array value attempted, subscript -1 at rowInData.pl line 56. nothing This is my code: #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my $line_match; my $countTrue; open (FILE1, "<combiData.txt") or die "can't open file text1.txt\n"; my @tableCombi; while(<FILE1>) { my @row = split(' ', $_); push(@tableCombi, \@row); } close FILE1 || die $!; open (FILE2, "<j1j2_1.csv") or die "can't open file text1.txt\n"; my @tableData; while(<FILE2>) { my @row2 = split(/\s*,\s*/, $_); push(@tableData, \@row2); } close FILE2 || die $!; #function transform combiData.txt variable (position ) to the real value that i have to find in the data table. sub trueVal($){ my ($val) = $_[0]; if($val == 7){ return ('nonsynonymous_SNV'); } elsif( $val == 14) { return '1'; } elsif( $val == 15) { return '1';} elsif( $val == 16) { return '1'; } elsif( $val == 17) { return '1'; } elsif( $val == 18) { return '1';} elsif( $val == 19) { return '1';} else { print 'nothing'; } } #function IntToStr ( ) , i'm not sure if it is necessary) that transforms $ to strings , to use the function <eq> in the third loop for the array of combinations compared with the data array . sub IntToStr { return "$_[0]"; } for my $combi (@tableCombi) { $line_match = 0; for my $sheetData (@tableData) { $countTrue=0; for my $cell ( @$combi) { #my $temp =\$tableCombi[$combi][$cell] ; #if ( trueVal($tableCombi[$combi][$cell] ) eq $tableData[$sheetData][ $tableCombi[$combi][$cell] - 1 ] ){ #if ( IntToStr(trueVal($$temp )) eq IntToStr( $tableData[$sheetData][ $$temp-1] ) ){ if ( IntToStr(trueVal($tableCombi[$combi][$cell]) ) eq IntToStr($tableData[$sheetData][ $tableCombi[$combi][$cell] -1]) ){ $countTrue++;} if ($countTrue==@$combi){ $line_match++; #if ($line_match < 50){ print $tableData[$sheetData][4]." "; #} } } } print $line_match." \n"; }

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• Java EE @ No Fluff Just Stuff Tour

  - by reza_rahman

  If you work in the US and still don't know what the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Tour is, you are doing yourself a very serious disfavor. NFJS is by far the cheapest and most effective way to stay up to date through some world class speakers and talks. This is most certainly true for US enterprise Java developers in particular. Following the US cultural tradition of old-fashioned roadshows, NFJS is basically a set program of speakers and topics offered at major US cities year round. Many now famous world class technology speakers can trace their humble roots to NFJS. Via NFJS you basically get to have amazing training without paying for an expensive venue, lodging or travel. The events are usually on the weekends so you don't need to even skip work if you want (a great feature for consultants on tight budgets and deadlines). I am proud to share with you that I recently joined the NFJS troupe. My hope is that this will help solve the lingering problem of effectively spreading the Java EE message here in the US. For NFJS I hope my joining will help beef up perhaps much desired Java content. In any case, simply being accepted into this legendary program is an honor I could have perhaps only dreamed of a few years ago. I am very grateful to Jay Zimmerman for seeing the value in me and the Java EE content. The current speaker line-up consists of the likes of Neal Ford, Venkat Subramaniam, Nathaniel Schutta, Tim Berglund and many other great speakers. I actually had my tour debut on April 4-5 with the NFJS New York Software Symposium - basically a short train commute away from my home office. The show is traditionally one of the smaller ones and it was not that bad for a start. I look forward to doing a few more in the coming months (more on that a bit later). I had four talks back to back (really my most favorite four at the moment). The first one was a talk on JMS 2 - some of you might already know JMS is one of my most favored Java EE APIs. The slides for the talk are posted below: What’s New in Java Message Service 2 from Reza Rahman The next talk I delivered was my Cargo Tracker/Java EE + DDD talk. This talk basically overviews DDD and describes how DDD maps to Java EE using code examples/demos from the Cargo Tracker Java EE Blue Prints project. Applied Domain-Driven Design Blue Prints for Java EE from Reza Rahman The third talk I delivered was our flagship Java EE 7/8 talk. As you may know, currently the talk is basically about Java EE 7. I'll probably slowly evolve this talk to gradually transform it into a Java EE 8 talk as we move forward (I'll blog about that separately shortly). The following is the slide deck for the talk: JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond from Reza Rahman My last talk for the show was my JavaScript+Java EE 7 talk. This talk is basically about aligning EE 7 with the emerging JavaScript ecosystem (specifically AngularJS). The slide deck for the talk is here: JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients Using Java EE 7 from Reza Rahman Unsurprisingly this talk was well-attended. The demo application code is posted on GitHub. The code should be a helpful resource if this development model is something that interests you. Do let me know if you need help with it but the instructions should be fairly self-explanatory. My next NFJS show is the Central Ohio Software Symposium in Columbus on June 6-8 (sorry for the late notice - it's been a really crazy few weeks). Here's my tour schedule so far, I'll keep you up-to-date as the tour goes forward: June 6 - 8, Columbus Ohio. June 24 - 27, Denver Colorado (UberConf) - my most extensive agenda on the tour so far. July 18 - 20, Austin Texas. I hope you'll take this opportunity to get some updates on Java EE as well as the other awesome content on the tour?

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• First Impressions of a MacBook (from a PC guy)

  - by dgreen

  Disclaimer: I've been a PC guy my entire working career. I'd probably characterize myself as a power user. Never afraid to bust out the console line. But working with a Mac is totally foreign to me. So for those Mac guys who are curious, this is how your world appears from the outside to a computer literate person :)My Macbook Air has arrived! And it's a thing of beauty:First, the specs: 13" MacBook Air, 2.0GHz Core i7 processor. Upgraded to 8GB of RAM for an additional $100, SSD flash storage  = 256GB. The plan is ultimately to use this baby for some iOS development but also some decent lifting in Windows with Visual Studio. Done a lot of reading  and between VMWare Fusion, Parallels and Bootcamp...I'm going to go with VMWare Fusion for $49.99And now my impressions (please re-read disclaimer before proceeding!):I open the box and am trying to understand exactly how the magsafe connector works (and how to disconnect it).  Why does it have two socket outlet plugs? Who knows.  I feel like Hansel in Zoolander. The files are "in" the computer.Stuck in my external hard drive (usb). So how do I get to the files? To the Googles!Argh...it can't read my external NTFS drive. Fat32 can't support field over 4GB…problematic since some of my existing VMWare image files are much larger than 4GB. Didn't see this coming.Three year old loves iPhoto. Super easy to use. Don't even know what I'm doing but I've already (accidentally) discovered the image filtering options. Fun stuff.First thing I downloaded ever => Chrome. I need something to ground me, something familiar. My token, if you will (sorry, gratuitous Inception joke).Ok, I get it… Finder == windows explorer. But where is my hierarchical structure? I miss the tree :(On that note, yeah…how do I see what "path" my files reside in? I'm afraid to know the answer. You know what scares more though…this notion of a smart folder. Feel like the godfather - just get the job done, I don't care how you handle it, I don't want to know...just get it done. What the hell is AirDrop?Mail…just worked. Still in shock that they have a free client for yahoo mail (please no yahoo jokes).mail -> deleting a message takes 5 seconds. Have they heard of async?"Command" key instead of "Control" ok, then what the $%&^! is the control key for then"aliases" == shortcuts I thinkI don't see the file system. And I'm scared. All these things I'm downloading…these .dmg files (bad name) where are they going? Can't seem to delete when they're doneUgh...realized need to buy a mini-to-vga adaptor if I want to use my external monitor ($13 on ebay, $39 in apple store).Windows docking is trickiest for me…this notion of detached windows with a menu bar at the top. I don't like this paradigm, it's confusing. But maybe because I've been using Windows for too long.Evernote, Dropbox desktop clients seem almost identical…few quirks here and there I need to get used to.iTunes is still a bit gross. In a weird way it's actually worse on a Mac if thats possible. This is not the MacBook's fault…this is a software design issue. Overall: UI will take some getting used to. Can't decide if this represents the future and I'm stuck in the past…or this is the past and I've been spoiled by the future (which would be Windows…don't be hating I happen to be very productive in Win7)  So there you go - my 90 minute first impression of the MacBook universe.

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• Partner Webcast - Focus on Oracle Data Profiling and Data Quality 11g

  - by lukasz.romaszewski(at)oracle.com

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:RO;} Partner Webcast Focus on Oracle Data Profiling and Data Quality 11g February 24th, 12am  CET   Oracle offers an integrated suite Data Quality software architected to discover and correct today's data quality problems and establish a platform prepared for tomorrow's yet unknown data challenges. Oracle Data Profiling provides data investigation, discovery, and profiling in support of quality, migration, integration, stewardship, and governance initiatives. It includes a broad range of features that expand upon basic profiling, including automated monitoring, business-rule validation, and trend analysis. Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator provides cleansing, standardization, matching, address validation, location enrichment, and linking functions for global customer data and operational business data. It ensures that data adheres to established standards that are adaptable to fit each organization's specific needs.  Both single - and double - byte data are processed in local languages to provide a unique and centralized view of customers, products and services.   During this in-person briefing, Data Integration Solution Specialists will be providing a technical overview and a walkthrough.   Agenda ·         Oracle Data Integration Strategy overview ·         A focus on Oracle Data Profiling and Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator: o   Oracle Data Profiling o   Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator o   Live demoo   Q&A Delivery Format  This FREE online LIVE eSeminar will be delivered over the Web and Conference Call. Registrations   received less than 24hours  prior to start time may not receive confirmation to attend. To register , click here. For any questions please contact [email protected]. 

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• 2D Tile Based Collision Detection

  - by MrPlosion1243

  There are a lot of topics about this and it seems each one addresses a different problem, this topic does the same. I was looking into tile collision detection and found this where David Gouveia explains a great way to get around the person's problem by separating the two axis. So I implemented the solution and it all worked perfectly from all the testes I through at it. Then I implemented more advanced platforming physics and the collision detection broke down. Unfortunately I have not been able to get it to work again which is where you guys come in :)! I will present the code first: public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { if(Input.GetKeyDown(Keys.A)) { velocity.X -= moveAcceleration; } else if(Input.GetKeyDown(Keys.D)) { velocity.X += moveAcceleration; } if(Input.GetKeyDown(Keys.Space)) { if((onGround && isPressable) || (!onGround && airTime <= maxAirTime && isPressable)) { onGround = false; airTime += (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; velocity.Y = initialJumpVelocity * (1.0f - (float)Math.Pow(airTime / maxAirTime, Math.PI)); } } else if(Input.GetKeyReleased(Keys.Space)) { isPressable = false; } if(onGround) { velocity.X *= groundDrag; velocity.Y = 0.0f; } else { velocity.X *= airDrag; velocity.Y += gravityAcceleration; } velocity.Y = MathHelper.Clamp(velocity.Y, -maxFallSpeed, maxFallSpeed); velocity.X = MathHelper.Clamp(velocity.X, -maxMoveSpeed, maxMoveSpeed); position += velocity * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; position = new Vector2((float)Math.Round(position.X), (float)Math.Round(position.Y)); if(Math.Round(velocity.X) != 0.0f) { HandleCollisions2(Direction.Horizontal); } if(Math.Round(velocity.Y) != 0.0f) { HandleCollisions2(Direction.Vertical); } } private void HandleCollisions2(Direction direction) { int topTile = (int)Math.Floor((float)Bounds.Top / Tile.PixelTileSize); int bottomTile = (int)Math.Ceiling((float)Bounds.Bottom / Tile.PixelTileSize) - 1; int leftTile = (int)Math.Floor((float)Bounds.Left / Tile.PixelTileSize); int rightTile = (int)Math.Ceiling((float)Bounds.Right / Tile.PixelTileSize) - 1; for(int x = leftTile; x <= rightTile; x++) { for(int y = topTile; y <= bottomTile; y++) { Rectangle tileBounds = new Rectangle(x * Tile.PixelTileSize, y * Tile.PixelTileSize, Tile.PixelTileSize, Tile.PixelTileSize); Vector2 depth; if(Tile.IsSolid(x, y) && Intersects(tileBounds, direction, out depth)) { if(direction == Direction.Horizontal) { position.X += depth.X; } else { onGround = true; isPressable = true; airTime = 0.0f; position.Y += depth.Y; } } } } } From the code you can see when velocity.X is not equal to zero the HandleCollisions() Method is called along the horizontal axis and likewise for the vertical axis. When velocity.X is not equal to zero and velocity.Y is equal to zero it works fine. When velocity.Y is not equal to zero and velocity.X is equal to zero everything also works fine. However when both axis are not equal to zero that's when it doesn't work and I don't know why. I basically teleport to the left side of a tile when both axis are not equal to zero and there is a air block next to me. Hopefully someone can see the problem with this because I sure don't as far as I'm aware nothing has even changed from what I'm doing to what the linked post's solution is doing. Thanks.

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• Insurers Pushed to Transform Their Business

  - by Calvin Glenn

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

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• SSAS: Utility to export SQL code from your cube's Data Source View (DSV)

  - by DrJohn

  When you are working on a cube, particularly in a multi-person team, it is sometimes necessary to review what changes that have been done to the SQL queries in the cube's data source view (DSV). This can be a problem as the SQL editor in the DSV is not the best interface to review code. Now of course you can cut and paste the SQL into SSMS, but you have to do each query one-by-one. What is worse your DBA is unlikely to have BIDS installed, so you will have to manually export all the SQL yourself and send him the files. To make it easy to get hold of the SQL in a Data Source View, I developed a C# utility which connects to an OLAP database and uses Analysis Services Management Objects (AMO) to obtain and export all the SQL to a series of files. The added benefit of this approach is that these SQL files can be placed under source code control which means the DBA can easily compare one version with another. The Trick When I came to implement this utility, I quickly found that the AMO API does not give direct access to anything useful about the tables in the data source view. Iterating through the DSVs and tables is easy, but getting to the SQL proved to be much harder. My Google searches returned little of value, so I took a look at the idea of using the XmlDom to open the DSV’s XML and obtaining the SQL from that. This is when the breakthrough happened. Inspecting the DSV’s XML I saw the things I was interested in were called TableType DbTableName FriendlyName QueryDefinition Searching Google for FriendlyName returned this page: Programming AMO Fundamental Objects which hinted at the fact that I could use something called ExtendedProperties to obtain these XML attributes. This simplified my code tremendously to make the implementation almost trivial. So here is my code with appropriate comments. The full solution can be downloaded from here: ExportCubeDsvSQL.zip   using System;using System.Data;using System.IO;using Microsoft.AnalysisServices; ... class code removed for clarity// connect to the OLAP server Server olapServer = new Server();olapServer.Connect(config.olapServerName);if (olapServer != null){ // connected to server ok, so obtain reference to the OLAP databaseDatabase olapDatabase = olapServer.Databases.FindByName(config.olapDatabaseName);if (olapDatabase != null){ Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Succesfully connected to '{0}' on '{1}'",   config.olapDatabaseName,   config.olapServerName));// export SQL from each data source view (usually only one, but can be many!)foreach (DataSourceView dsv in olapDatabase.DataSourceViews){ Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Exporting SQL from DSV '{0}'", dsv.Name));// for each table in the DSV, export the SQL in a fileforeach (DataTable dt in dsv.Schema.Tables){ Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Exporting SQL from table '{0}'", dt.TableName)); // get name of the table in the DSV// use the FriendlyName as the user inputs this and therefore has control of itstring queryName = dt.ExtendedProperties["FriendlyName"].ToString().Replace(" ", "_");string sqlFilePath = Path.Combine(targetDir.FullName, queryName + ".sql"); // delete the sql file if it exists... file deletion code removed for clarity// write out the SQL to a fileif (dt.ExtendedProperties["TableType"].ToString() == "View"){ File.WriteAllText(sqlFilePath, dt.ExtendedProperties["QueryDefinition"].ToString());}if (dt.ExtendedProperties["TableType"].ToString() == "Table"){ File.WriteAllText(sqlFilePath, dt.ExtendedProperties["DbTableName"].ToString()); } } } Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Successfully written out SQL scripts to '{0}'", targetDir.FullName)); } }   Of course, if you are following industry best practice, you should be basing your cube on a series of views. This will mean that this utility will be of limited practical value unless of course you are inheriting a project and want to check if someone did the implementation correctly.

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• Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise, Part I

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Jon Chorley, Oracle's Chief Sustainability Officer & Vice President, SCM Product Strategy During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems. In my next post, I will share examples of companies that have made that shift and talk more about the distributed orchestration process.

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• links for 2010-12-23

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Oracle VM Virtualbox 4.0 extension packs (Wim Coekaerts Blog) Wim Coekaerts describes the the new extension pack in Oracle VM Virtualbox 4.0 and how it's different from 3.2 and earlier releases. (tags: oracle otn virtualization virtualbox) Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: Creating OES SM instances on 64 bit systems "I've already opened a bug on this against OES 10gR3 CP5, but in case anyone else runs into it before it gets fixed I wanted to blog it too. (NOTE: CP5 is when official support was introduced for running OES on a 64 bit system with a 64 bit JVM)" - Chris Johnson (tags: oracle otn fusionmiddleware security) Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control: Shared loader directory, RAC and WebLogic Clustering "RAC is optional. Even the load balancer is optional. The feed from the agents also goes to the load balancer on a different port and it is routed to the available management server. In normal case, this is ok." - Porus Homi Havewala (tags: WebLogic oracle otn grid clustering) Magic Web Doctor: Thought Process on Upgrading WebLogic Server to 11g "Upgrading to new versions can be challenging task, but it's done for linear scalability, continuous enhanced availability, efficient manageability and automatic/dynamic infrastructure provisioning at a low cost." - Chintan Patel (tags: oracle otn weblogic upgrading) InfoQ: Using a Service Bus to Connect the Supply Chain Peter Paul van de Beek presents a case study of using a service bus in a supply channel connecting a wholesale supplier with hundreds of retailers, the overall context and challenges faced – including the integration of POS software coming from different software providers-, the solution chosen and its implementation, how it worked out and the lessons learned along the way. (tags: ping.fm) Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0 is released! - The Fat Bloke Sings The Fat Bloke spreads the news and shares some screenshots.  (tags: oracle otn virtualization virtualbox) Leaks on Wikis: "Corporations...You're Next!" Oracle Desktop Virtualization Can Help. (Oracle's Virtualization Blog) "So what can you do to guard against these types of breaches where there is no outsider (or even insider) intrusion to detect per se, but rather someone with malicious intent is physically walking out the door with data that they are otherwise allowed to access in their daily work?" - Adam Hawley (tags: oracle otn virtualization security) OTN ArchBeat Podcast Guest Roster As the OTN ArchBeat Podcast enters its third year, it's time to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of the guests who have participated in ArchBeat programs. Check out this who's who of ArchBeat podcast panelists, with links to their respective interviews and more. (tags: oracle otn oracleace podcast archbeat) Show Notes: Architects in the Cloud (ArchBeat) Now available! Part 2 (of 4) of the ArchBeat interview with Stephen G. Bennett and Archie Reed, the authors of "Silver Clouds, Dark Linings: A Concise Guide to Cloud Computing." (tags: oracle otn podcast cloud) A Cautionary Tale About Multi-Source JNDI Configuration (Scott Nelson's Portal Productivity Ponderings) "I ran into this issue after reading that p13nDataSource and cgDataSource-NonXA should not be configured as multi-source. There were some issues changing them to use the basic JDBC connection string and when rolling back to the bad configuration the server went 'Boom.'" - Scott Nelson (tags: weblogic jdbc oracle jndi)

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• How to Mentor a Junior Developer

  - by Josh Johnson

  This title is a little broad but I may need to give a little background before I can ask my question properly. I know that similar questions have been asked here already. But in my case I'm not asking if I should be mentoring someone or if the person is a good fit for being a software developer. That is not my place to judge. I have not been asked outright, but it is apparent that myself and other fellow senior developers are to mentor the new developers that start here. I have no problem with this whatsoever and, in many cases, it lends me a fresh perspective on things and I end up learning in the process. Also, I remember how beneficial it was in the beginning of my career when someone would take some time to teach me something. When I say "new developer" they could be anywhere from fresh out of college to having a year or two of experience. Recently and in the past we've had people start here who seem to have an attitude toward development/programming which is different from mine and hard for me to reconcile; they seem to extract just enough information to get the task done but not really learn from it. I find myself going over and over the same issues with them. I understand that part of this could be a personality thing, but I feel it's my job to do my best and sort of push them out of the nest while they're under my wing, so to speak. How can I impart just enough information so that they will learn but not give so much as to solve the problem for them? Or perhaps: What's the proper response to questions that are designed to take the path of least resistance and, in essence, force them to learn instead of take the easy way out? These questions are probably more general teaching questions and don't have that much to do specifically with software development. Note: I do not get a say in what tasks they are working on. Management doles the task out and it could be anything from a very simple bug fix to starting an entire application by themselves. While this is not ideal by any means and obviously presents its own gauntlet of challenges, I feel it's a topic best left for another question. So the best I can do is help them with the problem at hand and try to help them break it down into simpler problems and also check their commit logs and point out mistakes that they made. My main objectives are to: Help them out and give them the tools they need to start becoming more self-reliant. Steer them in the right direction and break bad development habits early on. Lessen the amount of time I spend with them (the personality type described above seems to need much more one-on-one time and does not do well over IM or email. While that's generally fine, I can't always stop what I'm working on, break my stride, and help them debug an error on a moments notice; I have my own projects that need to get done).

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• What's wrong with this turn to face algorithm?

  - by Chan

  I implement a torpedo object that chases a rotating planet. Specifically, it will turn toward the planet each update. Initially my implement was: void move() { vector3<float> to_target = target - get_position(); to_target.normalize(); position += (to_target * speed); } which works perfectly for torpedo that is a solid sphere. Now my torpedo is actually a model, which has a forward vector, so using this method looks odd because it doesn't actually turn toward but jump toward. So I revised it a bit to get, double get_rotation_angle(vector3<float> u, vector3<float> v) const { u.normalize(); v.normalize(); double cosine_theta = u.dot(v); // domain of arccosine is [-1, 1] if (cosine_theta > 1) { cosine_theta = 1; } if (cosine_theta < -1) { cosine_theta = -1; } return math3d::to_degree(acos(cosine_theta)); } vector3<float> get_rotation_axis(vector3<float> u, vector3<float> v) const { u.normalize(); v.normalize(); // fix linear case if (u == v || u == -v) { v[0] += 0.05; v[1] += 0.0; v[2] += 0.05; v.normalize(); } vector3<float> axis = u.cross(v); return axis.normal(); } void turn_to_face() { vector3<float> to_target = (target - position); vector3<float> axis = get_rotation_axis(get_forward(), to_target); double angle = get_rotation_angle(get_forward(), to_target); double distance = math3d::distance(position, target); gl_matrix_mode(GL_MODELVIEW); gl_push_matrix(); { gl_load_identity(); gl_translate_f(position.get_x(), position.get_y(), position.get_z()); gl_rotate_f(angle, axis.get_x(), axis.get_y(), axis.get_z()); gl_get_float_v(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, OM); } gl_pop_matrix(); move(); } void move() { vector3<float> to_target = target - get_position(); to_target.normalize(); position += (get_forward() * speed); } The logic is simple, I find the rotation axis by cross product, the angle to rotate by dot product, then turn toward the target position each update. Unfortunately, it looks extremely odds since the rotation happens too fast that it always turns back and forth. The forward vector for torpedo is from the ModelView matrix, the third column A: MODELVIEW MATRIX -------------------------------------------------- R U A T -------------------------------------------------- 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 -------------------------------------------------- Any suggestion or idea would be greatly appreciated.

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• How do you report out user research results?

  - by user12277104

  A couple weeks ago, one of my mentees asked to meet, because she wanted my advice on how to report out user research results. She had just conducted her first usability test for her new employer, and was getting to the point where she wanted to put together some slides, but she didn't want them to be boring. She wanted to talk with me about what to present and how best to present results to stakeholders. While I couldn't meet for another week, thanks to slideshare, I could quickly point her in the direction that my in-person advice would have led her. First, I'd put together a panel for the February 2012 New Hampshire UPA monthly meeting that we then repeated for the 2012 Boston UPA annual conference. In this panel, I described my reporting techniques, as did six of my colleagues -- two of whom work for companies smaller than mine, and four of whom are independent consultants. Before taking questions, we each presented for 3 to 5 minutes on how we presented research results. The differences were really interesting. For example, when do you really NEED a long, written report (as opposed to an email, spreadsheet, or slide deck with callouts)? When you are reporting your test results to the FDA -- that makes sense. in this presentation, I describe two modes of reporting results that I use.  Second, I'd been a participant in the CUE-9 study. CUE stands for Comparative Usability Evaluation, and this was the 9th of these studies that Rolf Molich had designed. Originally, the studies were designed to show the variability in evaluation methods practitioners use to evaluate websites and applications. Of course, using methods and tasks of their own choosing, the results were wildly different. However, in this 9th study, the tasks were the same, the participants were the same, and the problem severity scale was the same, so how would the results of the 19 practitioners compare? Still wildly variable. But for the purposes of this discussion, it gave me a work product that was not proprietary to the company I work for -- a usability test report that I could share publicly. This was the way I'd been reporting results since 2005, and pretty much what I still do, when time allows.  That said, I have been continuing to evolve my methods and reporting techniques, and sometimes, there is no time to create that kind of report -- the team can't wait the days that it takes to take screen shots, go through my notes, refer back to recordings, and write it all up. So in those cases, I use bullet points in email, talk through the findings with stakeholders in a 1-hour meeting, and then post the take-aways on a wiki page. There are other requirements for that kind of reporting to work -- for example, the stakeholders need to attend each of the sessions, and the sessions can't take more than a day to complete, but you get the idea: there is no one "right" way to report out results. If the method of reporting you are using is giving your stakeholders the information they need, in a time frame in which it is useful, and in a format that meets their needs (FDA report or bullet points on a wiki), then that's the "right" way to report your results. 

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• Hyper-V Live Migration across Sites!

  - by Ryan Roussel

  One of the great sessions I sat in on at Tech Ed this week was stretching a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V  Failover Cluster across sites.  With this ability, you could actually implement a Hyper-V cluster where you could migrate or even Live Migrate VMs across sites.   With this area’s propensity for Hurricanes, this will be a very popular topic for me over the next few months. While this technology is possible today, it’s also very complicated and can be very expensive to implement.    First your WAN connection has to support the ability to trunk your VLAN across both sites in order to Live Migrate.  This means you can’t use a Layer 3 routed connection like MPLS.  It has to be a Metro Ethernet connection or "Dark Fiber”.  Dark Fiber is unused Fiber already in the ground that can be leased from  various providers. Both of these connections would allow you to trunk layer 2 across your WAN.  Cisco does have the ability to trunk layer 2 across a routed connection by muxing the traffic but this is only available in their Nexus product line which has a very steep price tag.   If you are stuck with MPLS or the like and Nexus switching is not a realistic possibility, you will have to implement a multi-subnet cluster in which case Live Migration won’t be possible.  However you can still failover VMs to the remote site with some planning and manual intervention.  The consideration here is that the VMs will be on a different subnet once migrated, so you will have to change the IP addressing of your VMs.  This also has ramifications with DNS and Name resolution to control your down time.  DHCP with Reservations for your VMs is the preferred method to achieve the IP changes as this will automate that part of the process.   Secondly, you will have to have  a mechanism to replicate your storage across both sites.  Many SAN vendors natively support hardware based synchronous and asynchronous replication.  Some even support cluster shared volumes which were introduced in 2008 R2.   If your SANs do not support this natively, there are alternative file based replication products either software based like Double Take or hardware appliance like EMC.  Be sure to check with your vendor on the support of Disk majority if you’re replicating your quorum disk between SANs.   The last consideration is the ability to maintain quorum for your cluster.  If your replication provider does not support Disk Majority through replication, you will have to explore Node Majority with File Share Witness.  This will affect your design as a 3 node cluster with 1 node at the remote site and FSW at the production site would not have the ability to maintain quorum if the production site was lost. MS best practice for this would be to implement an even node cluster with 2 nodes at  each site and the FSW at a third site.   And there you have it.  While some considerations and research goes into implementing this solution, even a multi-subnet solution would be invaluable to organizations in the implementations of “warm” DR sites.

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• Removing Barriers to Create Effective Data Models

  After years of creating and maintaining data models, I have started to notice common barriers that decrease the accuracy and usefulness of models. In my opinion, the main causes of these barriers are the lack of knowledge and communication from within a company. The lack of knowledge in regards to data models or data modeling can take many forms. Company Culture Knowledge Whether documented or undocumented, existing business rules of a company can affect how data is modeled. For example, if a company only allows 1 assigned person per customer to be able to manipulate a customer’s record then then a data model that includes an associated table that joins customers and employee’s would be unneeded because that would allow for the possibility of multiple employees to handle a customer because of the potential for a many to many relationship between Customers and Employees. Technical Knowledge Depending on the data modeler’s proficiency in modeling data they can inadvertently cause issues and/or complications with a design without even noticing. It is important that companies share data modeling responsibilities so that the models are developed from multiple perspectives of a system, company and the original problem.  In addition, the tools that a company selects to create data models can also affect the accuracy of the model if designer are not familiar with the tools or the tools are too complex to use for the designer. Existing System Knowledge In order for a data modeler to model data for an existing system so that new changes can be applied to a system then they need to at least know the basic concepts of a system so that they can work within it. This will promote reusability of data and prevent the chance of duplicating data. Project Knowledge This should be pretty obvious, but it is very hard to create an accurate data model without knowing what data needs to be modeled. I have always found it strange that I have been asked to start modeling data prior to a client formalizing any requirements. Usually when this happens I have to make several iterations to a model, and the client still does not know exactly what they want.  In addition additional issues can arise when certain stakeholders of a project are not consulted prior to the design or after the project is over because it can cause miss understandings and confusion by the end user as well as possibly not solving the original problem for which a project is intended to solve. One common thread between each type of knowledge is that they can all be avoided through the use of good communication. For example, if a modeler is new to a company then they should ask older employees about any business specific rules that may be documented or undocumented that must be applied to projects in general. Furthermore, if a modeler is not really familiar with a specific data modeling software then they need to speak up and ask for help form other employees or their manager. This will not only help the modeler in the project, but also help them in future projects that they do for the company. Additionally, if a project is not clearly defined prior to a data modeler being assigned the modeling project then it is their responsibility to communicate with the other stakeholders to clarify any part of a project that is unclear so that the data model that is created is accurately aligned with a project.

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• Nominations now open for the Oracle FMW Excellence Awards 2014

  - by Greg Jensen

  2014 Oracle Excellence Award NominationsWho Is the Innovative Leader for Identity Management? •    Is your organization leveraging one of Oracle’s Identity and Access Management solutions in your production environment?•    Are you a leading edge organization that has adopted a forward thinking approach to Identity and Access Management processes across the organization?•    Are you ready to promote and highlight the success of your deployment to your peers? •    Would you a chance to win FREE registration to Oracle OpenWorld 2014? Oracle is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the 2014 Oracle Excellence Awards: Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation.  The Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation honor organizations using Oracle Fusion Middleware to deliver unique business value.  This year, the awards will recognize customers across nine distinct categories, including Identity and Access Management.  Oracle customers, who feel they are pioneers in their implementation of at least one of the Oracle Identity and Access Management offerings in a production environment or active deployment, should submit a nomination.  If submitted by June 20th, 2014, you will have a chance to win a FREE registration to Oracle OpenWorld 2014 (September 28 - October 2) in San Francisco, CA.  Top customers will be showcased at Oracle OpenWorld and featured in Oracle publications.   The  Identity and Access Management Nomination Form Additional benefits to nomineesNominating your organization opens additional opportunities to partner with Oracle such as:•    Promotion of your Customer Success StoriesProvides a platform for you to share the success of your initiatives and programs to peer groups raising the overall visibility of your team and your organization as a leader in security•    Social Media promotion (Video, Blog & Podcast)Reach the masses of Oracle’s customers through sharing of success stories, or customer created blog content that highlights the advanced thought leadership role in security with co-authored articles on Oracle Blog page that reaches close to 100,000 subscribers. There are numerous options to promote activities on Facebook, Twitter and co-branded activities using Video and Audio. •    Live speaking opportunities to your peersAs a technology leader within your organization, you can represent your organization at Oracle sponsored events (online, in person or webcasts) to help share the success of your organizations efforts building out your team/organization brand and success. •    Invitation to the IDM Architect ForumOracle is able to invite the right customers into the IDM Architect Forum which is an invite only group of customers that meet monthly to hear technology driven presentations from their own peers (not from Oracle) on today’s trends.  If you want to hear privately what some of the most successful companies in every industry are doing about security, this is the forum to be in. All presentations are private and remain within the forum, and only members can see take advantage of the lessons gained from these meetings.  To date, there are 125 members. There are many more advantages to partnering with Oracle, however, it can start with the simple nomination form for Identity and Access Management category of the 2014 Oracle Excellence Award Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• Be the surgeon

  - by Rob Farley

  It’s a phrase I use often, especially when teaching, and I wish I had realised the concept years earlier. (And of course, fits with this month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic, hosted by Argenis Fernandez) When I’m sick enough to go to the doctor, I see a GP. I used to typically see the same guy, but he’s moved on now. However, when he has been able to roughly identify the area of the problem, I get referred to a specialist, sometimes a surgeon. Being a surgeon requires a refined set of skills. It’s why they often don’t like to be called “Doctor”, and prefer the traditional “Mister” (the history is that the doctor used to make the diagnosis, and then hand the patient over to the person who didn’t have a doctorate, but rather was an expert cutter, typically from a background in butchering). But if you ask the surgeon about the pain you have in your leg sometimes, you’ll get told to ask your GP. It’s not that your surgeon isn’t interested – they just don’t know the answer. IT is the same now. That wasn’t something that I really understood when I got out of university. I knew there was a lot to know about IT – I’d just done an honours degree in it. But I also knew that I’d done well in just about all my subjects, and felt like I had a handle on everything. I got into developing, and still felt that having a good level of understanding about every aspect of IT was a good thing. This got me through for the first six or seven years of my career. But then I started to realise that I couldn’t compete. I’d moved into management, and was spending my days running projects, rather than writing code. The kids were getting older. I’d had a bad back injury (ask anyone with chronic pain how it affects  your ability to concentrate, retain information, etc). But most of all, IT was getting larger. I knew kids without lives who knew more than I did. And I felt like I could easily identify people who were better than me in whatever area I could think of. Except writing queries (this was before I discovered technical communities, and people like Paul White and Dave Ballantyne). And so I figured I’d specialise. I wish I’d done it years earlier. Now, I can tell you plenty of people who are better than me at any area you can pick. But there are also more people who might consider listing me in some of their lists too. If I’d stayed the GP, I’d be stuck in management, and finding that there were better managers than me too. If you’re reading this, SQL could well be your thing. But it might not be either. Your thing might not even be in IT. Find out, and then see if you can be a world-beater at it. But it gets even better, because you can find other people to complement the things that you’re not so good at. My company, LobsterPot Solutions, has six people in it at the moment. I’ve hand-picked those six people, along with the one who quit. The great thing about it is that I’ve been able to pick people who don’t necessarily specialise in the same way as me. I don’t write their T-SQL for them – generally they’re good enough at that themselves. But I’m on-hand if needed. Consider Roger Noble, for example. He’s doing stuff in HTML5 and jQuery that I could never dream of doing to create an amazing HTML5 version of PivotViewer. Or Ashley Sewell, a guy who does project management far better than I do. I could go on. My team is brilliant, and I love them to bits. We’re all surgeons, and when we work together, I like to think we’re pretty good! @rob_farley

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• AccelerometerInput XNA GameComponent

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Bad accelerometer controls kill otherwise good games. I decided to try to do something about it. So I create an XNA GameComponent called AccelerometerInput. It’s still a beta project but you are welcome to try it, use it, modify it, etc. I’m releasing under the terms of the Microsoft Public License. Important info: First, it only supports tilt-style controls currently. I have not implemented motion-style controls yet (and make no promises as to when I might find time to do so). Second, I commented it heavily so that you can (hopefully) understand what it is doing. Please read the comments and examine the sample game for a usage overview. There are configurable parameters which I encourage you to make use of (both by modifying the default values where your testing shows it to be appropriate and also by implementing a calibration mechanism in your game that lets the user adjust those configurable values based on his or her own circumstances). Third, even with this code, accelerometer controls are still a fairly advanced topic area; you will likely find nothing but disappointment if you simply plunk this into some project without testing it on a device (or preferably on several devices). Fourth, if you do try this code and find that something doesn’t work as expected on your phone, please let me know as I want to improve it and can only do so with your help. Let me know what phone model it is, what you tried doing, what you expected, and what result you had instead. I may or may not be able to incorporate it into the code, but I can let others know at the very least so that they can make appropriate modifications to their games (I’m hopeful that all phones are reasonably similar in their workings and require, at most, a slight calibration change, but I simply don’t know). Fifth, although I’ll do my best to answer any questions you may have about it, I’m very busy with a number of things currently so it might take a little while. Please look through the code and examine the comments and sample game first before asking any questions. It’s likely that the answer is in there. If not, or if you just aren’t really sure, ask away. Sixth, there are differences between a portrait-mode game and a landscape mode game (specifically in the appropriate default tilt adjustment for toward the user/away from the user calculations). This is documented and the default is set for landscape. If you use this for a portrait game, make the appropriate change (look for the TODO: comment in AccelerometerInput.cs). Seventh, no provision whatsoever is made for disabling screen locking. It is up to you to implement that and to take appropriate measures to detect when the user has been idle for too long and timeout the game. That code is very game-specific. If you have questions about such matters, consult the relevant MSDN documentation and, if you still have questions, visit the App Hub forums and ask there. I answer questions there a lot and so I may even stumble across your question and answer it. But that’s a much better forum than the comments section here for questions of that sort so I would appreciate it if you asked idle detection-related questions there (or on some other suitable site that you may be more familiar and comfortable with). Eighth, this is an XNA GameComponent intended for XNA-based games on WP7. A sufficiently knowledgeable Silverlight developer should have no problem adapting it for use in a Silverlight game or app. I may create a Silverlight version at some point myself. Right now I do not have the time, unfortunately. Ok. Without further ado: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/AccelerometerInput.zip Have a great St. Patrick’s Day!

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• SQL SERVER – Finding Different ColumnName From Almost Identitical Tables

  - by pinaldave

  I have mentioned earlier on this blog that I love social media – Facebook and Twitter. I receive so many interesting questions that sometimes I wonder how come I never faced them in my real life scenario. Well, let us see one of the similar situation. Here is one of the questions which I received on my social media handle. “Pinal, I have a large database. I did not develop this database but I have inherited this database. In our database we have many tables but all the tables are in pairs. We have one archive table and one current table. Now here is interesting situation. For a while due to some reason our organization has stopped paying attention to archive data. We did not archive anything for a while. If this was not enough we  even changed the schema of current table but did not change the corresponding archive table. This is now becoming a huge huge problem. We know for sure that in current table we have added few column but we do not know which ones. Is there any way we can figure out what are the new column added in the current table and does not exist in the archive tables? We cannot use any third party tool. Would you please guide us?” Well here is the interesting example of how we can use sys.column catalogue views and get the details of the newly added column. I have previously written about EXCEPT over here which is very similar to MINUS of Oracle. In following example we are going to create two tables. One of the tables has extra column. In our resultset we will get the name of the extra column as we are comparing the catalogue view of the column name. USE AdventureWorks2012 GO CREATE TABLE ArchiveTable (ID INT, Col1 VARCHAR(10), Col2 VARCHAR(100), Col3 VARCHAR(100)); CREATE TABLE CurrentTable (ID INT, Col1 VARCHAR(10), Col2 VARCHAR(100), Col3 VARCHAR(100), ExtraCol INT); GO -- Columns in ArchiveTable but not in CurrentTable SELECT name ColumnName FROM sys.columns WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'ArchiveTable' EXCEPT SELECT name ColumnName FROM sys.columns WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'CurrentTable' GO -- Columns in CurrentTable but not in ArchiveTable SELECT name ColumnName FROM sys.columns WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'CurrentTable' EXCEPT SELECT name ColumnName FROM sys.columns WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'ArchiveTable' GO DROP TABLE ArchiveTable; DROP TABLE CurrentTable; GO The above query will return us following result. I hope this solves the problems. It is not the most elegant solution ever possible but it works. Here is the puzzle back to you – what native T-SQL solution would you have provided in this situation? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL System Table, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Webcast Q&A: Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the third webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter", where customer Sean Mattson from HDS and Rob Vandenberg from Oracle Partner Lingotek shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Hitachi Data System’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Sean Mattson, Hitachi Data Systems  Q: Did you run into any issues in the deployment of the platform?A: There were some challenges, we were one of the first enterprise ‘on premise’ installations for Lingotek and our WebCenter platform also has a lot of custom features.  There were a lot of iterations and back and forth working with Lingotek at first.  We both helped each other, learned a lot and in the end managed to resolve all issues and roll out a very compelling solution for HDS. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Being able to manage and govern the content lifecycle globally and centrally and at the same time enabling the field to update, review and publish the incremental content changes without a lot of touchpoints has helped us streamline and simplify the entire publishing process. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: I wouldn't say resistance as much as skepticism that we could actually deploy an automated and self publishing solution.  Even if a solution is great, adoption of a new process can be a challenge and we are still pursuing our adoption targets.  One of the most important aspects is to include lots of training and support materials and offer as much helpdesk type support as needed to get the field self sufficient and confident in the capabilities of the system.  Rob Vandenberg, Lingotek  Q: Are there any limitations regarding supported languages such as support for French Canadian and Indian languages?A: Lingotek supports all language pairs. Including right to left languages and double byte languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean Q: Is the Lingotek solution integrated with the new 11g release of WebCenter Sites? A: Yes! In fact, Lingotek is the first OVI partner for Oracle WebCenter Sites  Q: Can translation memories help to improve the accuracy of machine translation?A: One of the greatest long term strategic benefits of using Lingotek is the accumulation of translation memories, or past human translations. These TMs can be used to "train" statistical machine translation engines to have higher and higher quality. This virtuous cycle is ongoing and will consistently improve both machine and human translations.  Q: We have existing translation memories from previous work with our translation service provider. Can they be easily imported in to the Lingotek solution for re-use? Q: Yes, Lingotek is standards compliant. We support TM import in both the TMX and XLIFF formats. Q: If we use Lingotek as a service to do our professional translation and also use the Lingotek software solution, do we get the translation memories to give us a means of just translating future adds and changes ourselves? A: Yes, all the data is yours, always. Lingotek can provide both the integrated translation software as well as the professional translation services. All the content and translation memories are yours. Q: Can you give us an example of where community translation has proved to be successful?A: The key word here is community. If you have a community that cares about you, your content, and the rest of the community, then community translation can work for you. We've seen effective use cases in Product User Groups content, Support Communities, and other types of User Generated content, like wikis and blogs.   If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!   Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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