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• Mark Hurd on the Customer Revolution: Oracle's Top 10 Insights

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Reprint of an article from Forbes Businesses that fail to focus on customer experience will hear a giant sucking sound from their vanishing profitability. Because in today’s dynamic global marketplace, consumers now hold the power in the buyer-seller equation, and sellers need to revamp their strategy for this new world order. The ability to relentlessly deliver connected, personalized and rewarding customer experiences is rapidly becoming one of the primary sources of competitive advantage in today’s dynamic global marketplace. And the inability or unwillingness to realize that the customer is a company’s most important asset will lead, inevitably, to decline and failure. Welcome to the lifecycle of customer experience, in which consumers explore, engage, shop, buy, ask, compare, complain, socialize, exchange, and more across multiple channels with the unconditional expectation that each of those interactions will be completed in an efficient and personalized manner however, wherever, and whenever the customer wants. While many niche companies are offering point solutions within that sprawling and complex spectrum of needs and requirements, businesses looking to deliver superb customer experiences are still left having to do multiple product evaluations, multiple contract negotiations, multiple test projects, multiple deployments, and–perhaps most annoying of all–multiple and never-ending integration projects to string together all those niche products from all those niche vendors. With its new suite of customer-experience solutions, Oracle believes it can help companies unravel these challenges and move at the speed of their customers, anticipating their needs and desires and creating enduring and profitable relationships. Those solutions span the full range of marketing, selling, commerce, service, listening/insights, and social and collaboration tools for employees. When Oracle launched its suite of Customer Experience solutions at a recent event in New York City, president Mark Hurd analyzed the customer experience revolution taking place and presented Oracle’s strategy for empowering companies to capitalize on this important market shift. From Hurd’s presentation and related materials, I’ve extracted a list of Hurd’s Top 10 Insights into the Customer Revolution. 1. Please Don’t Feed the Competitor’s Pipeline!After enduring a poor experience, 89% of consumers say they would immediately take their business to your competitor. (Except where noted, the source for these findings is the 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report including a survey commissioned by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in March 2012) and conducted by Harris Interactive.) 2. The Addressable Market Is Massive. Only 1% of consumers say their expectations were always met by their actual experiences. 3. They’re Willing to Pay More! In return for a great experience, 86% of consumers say they’ll pay up to 25% more. 4. The Social Media Microphone Is Always Live. After suffering through a poor experience, more than 25% of consumers said they posted a negative comment on Twitter or Facebook or other social media sites. Conversely, of those consumers who got a response after complaining, 22% posted positive comments about the company. 5.  The New Deal Is Never Done: Embrace the Entire Customer Lifecycle. An appropriately active and engaged relationship, says Hurd, extends across every step of the entire processs: need, research, select, purchase, receive, use, maintain, and recommend. 6. The 360-Degree Commitment. Customers want to do business with companies that actively and openly demonstrate the desire to establish strong and seamless connections across employees, the company, and the customer, says research firm Temkin Group in its report called “The CX Competencies.” 7. Understand the Emotional Drivers Behind Brand Love. What makes consumers fall in love with a brand? Among the top factors are friendly employees and customer reps (73%), easy access to information and support (55%), and personalized experiences, such as when companies know precisely what products or services customers have purchased in the past and what issues those customers have raised (36%). 8.  The Importance of Immediate Action. You’ve got one week to respond–and then the opportunity’s lost. If your company needs more than a week to answer a prospect’s question or request, most of those prospects will terminate the relationship. 9.  Want More Revenue, Less Churn, and More Referrals? Then improve the overall customer experience: Forrester’s research says that approach put an extra $900 million in the pockets of wireless service providers, $800 million for hotels, and $400 million for airlines. 10. The Formula for CX Success.  Hurd says it includes three elegantly interlaced factors: Connected Engagement, to personalize the experience; Actionable Insight, to maximize the engagement; and Optimized Execution, to deliver on the promise of value. RECOMMENDED READING: The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013 Wal-Mart, Amazon, eBay: Who’s the Speed King of Retail? Career Suicide and the CIO: 4 Deadly New Threats Memo to Marc Benioff: Social Is a Tool, Not an App

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• Pace Layering Comes Alive

  - by Tanu Sood

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick hosts the IT Leaders Editorial on a monthly basis. By now, readers of this column are quite familiar with Oracle AppAdvantage, a unified framework of middleware technologies, infrastructure and applications utilizing a pace layered approach to enterprise systems platforms. 1. Standardize and Consolidate core Enterprise Applications by removing invasive customizations, costly workarounds and the complexity that multiple instances creates. 2. Move business specific processes and applications to the Differentiate Layer, thus creating greater business agility with process extensions and best of breed applications managed by cross- application process orchestration. 3. The Innovate Layer contains all the business capabilities required for engagement, collaboration and intuitive decision making. This is the layer where innovation will occur, as people engage one another in a secure yet open and informed way. 4. Simplify IT by minimizing complexity, improving performance and lowering cost with secure, reliable and managed systems across the entire Enterprise. But what hasn’t been discussed is the pace layered architecture that Oracle AppAdvantage adopts. What is it, what are its origins and why is it relevant to enterprise scale applications and technologies? It’s actually a fascinating tale that spans the past 20 years and a basic understanding of it provides a wonderful context to what is evolving as the future of enterprise systems platforms. It all begins in 1994 with a book by noted architect Stewart Brand, of ’Whole Earth Catalog’ fame. In his 1994 book How Buildings Learn, Brand popularized the term ‘Shearing Layers’, arguing that any building is actually a hierarchy of pieces, each of which inherently changes at different rates. In 1997 he produced a 6 part BBC Series adapted from the book, in which Part 6 focuses on Shearing Layers. In this segment Brand begins to introduce the concept of ‘pace’. Brand further refined this idea in his subsequent book, The Clock of the Long Now, which began to link the concept of Shearing Layers to computing and introduced the term ‘pace layering’, where he proposes that: “An imperative emerges: an adaptive [system] has to allow slippage between the differently-paced systems … otherwise the slow systems block the flow of the quick ones and the quick ones tear up the slow ones with their constant change. Embedding the systems together may look efficient at first but over time it is the opposite and destructive as well.” In 2000, IBM architects Ian Simmonds and David Ing published a paper entitled A Shearing Layers Approach to Information Systems Development, which applied the concept of Shearing Layers to systems design and development. It argued that at the time systems were still too rigid; that they constrained organizations by their inability to adapt to changes. The findings in the Conclusions section are particularly striking: “Our starting motivation was that enterprises need to become more adaptive, and that an aspect of doing that is having adaptable computer systems. The challenge is then to optimize information systems development for change (high maintenance) rather than stability (low maintenance). Our response is to make it explicit within software engineering the notion of shearing layers, and explore it as the principle that systems should be built to be adaptable in response to the qualitatively different rates of change to which they will be subjected. This allows us to separate functions that should legitimately change relatively slowly and at significant cost from that which should be changeable often, quickly and cheaply.” The problem at the time of course was that this vision of adaptable systems was simply not possible within the confines of 1st generation ERP, which were conceived, designed and developed for standardization and compliance. It wasn’t until the maturity of open, standards based integration, and the middleware innovation that followed, that pace layering became an achievable goal. And Oracle is leading the way. Oracle’s AppAdvantage framework makes pace layering come alive by taking a strategic vision 20 years in the making and transforming it to a reality. It allows enterprises to retain and even optimize their existing ERP systems, while wrapping around those ERP systems three layers of capabilities that inherently adapt as needed, at a pace that’s optimal for the enterprise.

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• Vendors: Partners or Salespeople?

  - by BuckWoody

  I got a great e-mail from a friend that asked about how he could foster a better relationship with his vendors. So many times when you work with a vendor it’s more of a used-car sales experience than a partnership – but you can actually make your vendor more of a partner, as long as you both set some ground-rules at the start. Sit down with your vendor, and have a heart-to-heart talk with them, explain that they won’t win every time, but that you’re willing to work with them in an honest way on both sides. Here’s the advice I sent him verbatim. I hope this post generates lots of comments from both customers and vendors. I don’t expect that you’ve had a great experience with your Microsoft reps, but I happen to work with some of the best sales teams in the business, and our clients tell us that all the time. “The key to this relationship is to keep the audience really small. Ideally there should be one person from your side that is responsible for the relationship, and one from the vendor’s side. Each responsible person should have the authority to make decisions, and to bring in other folks as needed for a given topic, project or decision.   For Microsoft, this is called an “Account Manager” – they aren’t technical, they aren’t sales. They “own” a relationship with a company. They learn what the company does, who does it, and how. They are responsible to understand what the challenges in your company are. While they don’t know the bits and bytes of everything we sell, they know what each thing does, and who to talk to about it. I get a call from an Account Manager every week that has pre-digested an issue at an organization and says to me: “I need you to set up an architectural meeting with their technical staff to get a better read on how we can help with problem X.” I do that and then report back to the Account Manager what we learned.  All through this process there’s the atmosphere of a “team”, not a “sales opportunity” per se. I’ve even recommended that the firm use a rival product, and I’ve never gotten push-back on that decision from my Account Managers.   But that brings up an interesting point. Someone pays an Account Manager and pays me. They expect something in return. At some point, you have to buy something. Not every time, not every situation – sometimes it’s just helping you with what you already bought from us. But the point is that you can’t expect lots of love and never spend any money. That’s the way business works.   Finally, don’t view the vendor as someone with their hand in your pocket – somebody that’s just trying to sell you something and doesn’t care if they ever see you again – unless they deserve it. There are plenty of “love them and leave them” companies out there, and you may have even had this experience with us, but that isn’t the case in the firms I work with. In fact, my customers get a questionnaire that asks them that exact question. “How many times have you seen your account team? Did you like your interaction with them? Can they do better?” My raises, performance reviews and general standing in my group are based on the answers the company gives.  Ask your vendor if they measure their sales and support teams this way – if not, seek another vendor to partner with.   Partnering with someone is a big deal. It involves time and effort on your part, and on the vendor’s part. If either of you isn’t pulling your weight, it just won’t work. You have every right to expect them to treat you as a partner, and they have the same right for your side.” Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• What Can We Learn About Software Security by Going to the Gym

  - by Nick Harrison

  There was a recent rash of car break-ins at the gym. Not an epidemic by any stretch, probably 4 or 5, but still... My gym used to allow you to hang your keys from a peg board at the front desk. This way you could come to the gym dressed to work out, lock your valuables in your car, and not have anything to worry about. Ignorance is bliss. The problem was that anyone who wanted to could go pick up your car keys, click the unlock button and find your car. Once there, they could rummage through your stuff and then walk back in and finish their workout as if nothing had happened. The people doing this were a little smatter then the average thief and would swipe some but not all of your cash leaving everything else in place. Most thieves would steal the whole car and be busted more quickly. The victims were unaware that anything had happened for several days. Fortunately, once the victims realized what had happened, the gym was still able to pull security tapes and find out who was misbehaving. All of the bad guys were busted, and everyone can now breathe a sigh of relieve. It is once again safe to go to the gym. Except there was still a fundamental problem. Putting your keys on a peg board by the front door is just asking for bad things to happen. One person got busted exploiting this security flaw. Others can still be exploiting it. In fact, others may well have been exploiting it and simply never got caught. How long would it take you to realize that $10 was missing from your wallet, if everything else was there? How would you even know when it went missing? Would you go to the front desk and even bother to ask them to review security tapes if you were only missing a small amount. Once highlighted, it is easy to see how commonly such vulnerability may have been exploited. So the gym did the very reasonable precaution of removing the peg board. To me the most shocking part of this story is the resulting uproar from gym members losing the convenient key peg. How dare they remove the trusted peg board? How can I work out now, I have to carry my keys from machine to machine? How can I enjoy my workout with this added inconvenience? This all happened a couple of weeks ago, and some people are still complaining. In light of the recent high profile hacking, there are a couple of parallels that can be drawn. Many web sites are riddled with vulnerabilities are crazy and easily exploitable as leaving your car keys by the front door while you work out. No one ever considered thanking the people who were swiping these keys for pointing out the vulnerability. Without a hesitation, they had their gym memberships revoked and are awaiting prosecution. The gym did recognize the vulnerability for what it is, and closed up that attack vector. What can we learn from this? Monitoring and logging will not prevent a crime but they will allow us to identify that a crime took place and may help track down who did it. Once we find a security weakness, we need to eliminate it. We may never identify and eliminate all security weaknesses, but we cannot allow well known vulnerabilities to persist in our system. In our case, we are not likely to meet resistance from end users. We are more likely to meet resistance from stake holders, product owners, keeper of schedules and budgets. We may meet resistance from integration partners, co workers, and third party vendors. Regardless of the source, we will see resistance, but the weakness needs to be dealt with. There is no need to glorify a cracker for bringing to light a security weakness. Regardless of their claimed motives, they are not heroes. There is also no point in wasting time defending weaknesses once they are identified. Deal with the weakness and move on. In may be embarrassing to find security weaknesses in our systems, but it is even more embarrassing to continue ignoring them. Even if it is unpopular, we need to seek out security weaknesses and eliminate them when we find them. http://www.sans.org has put together the Common Weakness Enumeration http://cwe.mitre.org/ which lists out common weaknesses. The site navigation takes a little getting used to, but there is a treasure trove here. Here is the detail page for SQL Injection. It clearly states how this can be exploited, in case anyone doubts that the weakness should be taken seriously, and more importantly how to mitigate the risk.

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• How customers view and interact with a company

  The Harvard Business Review article written by Rayport and Jaworski is aptly titled “Best Face Forward” because it sheds light on how customers view and interact with a company. In the past most business interaction between customers was performed in a face to face meeting where one party would present an item for sale and then the other would decide whether to purchase the item. In addition, if there was a problem with a purchased item then they would bring the item back to the person who sold the item for resolution. One of my earliest examples of witnessing this was when I was around 6 or 7 years old and I was allowed to spend the summer in Tennessee with my Grandparents. My Grandfather had just written a book about the local history of his town and was selling them to his friends and local bookstores. I still remember he offered to pay me a small commission for every book I helped him sell because I was carrying the books around for him. Every sale he made was face to face with his customers which allowed him to share his excitement for the book with everyone. In today’s modern world there is less and less human interaction as the use of computers and other technologies allow us to communicate within seconds even though both parties may be across the globe or just next door. That being said, customers view a company through multiple access points called faces that represent the ability to interact without actually seeing a human face. As a software engineer this is a good and a bad thing because direct human interaction and technology based interaction have both good and bad attributes based on the customer. How organizations coordinate business and IT functions, to provide quality service varies based on each individual business and the goals and directives put in place by its management. According to Rayport and Jaworski, the type of interaction used through a particular access point may lend itself to be people-dominate, machine-dominate, or a combination of both. The method by which a company communicates information through an access point is a strategic choice that relates costs and customer outcomes. To simplify this, the choice is based on what can give the customer the best experience interacting with the company when the cost of the interaction is also a factor. I personally see examples of this every day at work. The company website is machine-dominate with people updating and maintaining information, our groups department is people dominate because most of the customer interaction is done at the customers location and is backed up by machine based data sources, and our sales/member service department is a hybrid because employees work in tandem with machines in order for them to assist customers with signing up or any other issue they may have. The positive and negative aspects of human and machine interfaces are a key aspect in deciding which interface to use when allowing customers to access a company or a combination of the two. Rayport and Jaworski also used MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson preliminary catalog of human and machine strengths. He stated that humans outperform machines in judgment, pattern recognition, exception processing, insight, and creativity. I have found this to be true based on the example of how sales and member service reps at my company handle a multitude of questions and various situations with a lot of unknown variables. A machine interface could never effectively be able to handle these scenarios because there are too many variables to consider and would not have the built-in logic to process each customer’s claims and needs. In addition, he also stated that machines outperform humans in collecting, storing, transmitting and routine processing. An example of this would be my employer’s website. Customers can simply go online and purchase a product without even talking to a sales or member services representative. The information is then stored in a database so that the customer can always go back and review there order, and access their selected services. A human, no matter how smart they are would never be able to keep track of hundreds of thousands of customers let alone know what they purchased or how much they paid. In today’s technology driven economy every company must offer their customers multiple methods of accessibly in order to survive. The more of an opportunity a company has to create a positive experience for their customers, in my opinion, they more likely the customer will return to that company again. I have noticed this with my personal shopping habits and experiences. References Rayport, J., & Jaworski, B. (2004). Best Face Forward. Harvard Business Review, 82(12), 47-58. Retrieved from Business Source Complete database.

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• Real Time BI in the Real World

  - by tobin.gilman(at)oracle.com

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} One of my favorite BI offerings from Oracle is a solution called Oracle Real Time Decisions.  Whenever I mention this product in customer meetings, eyes light up.  There are some fascinating examples of customers using it to up-sell, cross-sell, increase customer retention, and reduce risk in real time, with off the charts return on investment. I plan to share some of those stories in a future blog.  In this post however, I want to share some far more common real time analytics use case scenarios that are being addressed with widely deployed Oracle BI and data integration technologies Not all real time BI applications require continuous learning, predictive modeling, and data mining.  Many simply require the ability to integrate, aggregate, and access information that is current (typically within in few minutes or a few seconds).  The use cases are infinite.  A few I've seen: ·         Purchasing agents need to match demand against available inventory ·         Manufacturing planners need to monitor current parts and material against scheduled build plans ·         Airline agents need to match ticket demand against flight schedules, ·         Human resources managers need to track the status of global hiring requisitions against current headcount authorizations...you get the idea. One way of doing this is to run reports or federated queries directly against transactional systems.  That approach can be viable if you only need to access simple data sets on rare occasions.  High volume and complex queries can quickly bog down performance of mission critical transactional systems.  There is an architecturally simple way of solving the problem, and it's being applied by real companies around the world to solve real needs in real time.    Cbeyond is an Atlanta, GA based  provider of voice, data and mobile business applications delivers.  They deliver real time information to its call center agents  as they are interacting with their customers. The data they need resides in production CRM and other transactional systems, but  instead or reporting directly off the those systems, data is first moved to an operational data store (ODS).  Rather than running data intensive, time consuming, and performance degrading batch ETL routines to populate the ODS, Cbeyond uses Oracle Golden Gate software to incrementally capture and move only the changed records from log files of the transactional systems every few minutes.  There is no impact on transactional system performance, and the information needed by call center representatives is up to date.  Oracle Business Intelligence software presents the information to services reps in a rich, visual, and highly interactive format. Avea is similar to Cbeyond.  They are a telecommunications company who integrates billing and customer information in an ODS that is accessed by their call center agents in real time using Oracle Golden Gate and Oracle Business Intelligence.  They've taken it a step further by using the ODS to feed a data warehouse.  The operational data store provides the current information needed by call center agents during "in flight" customer interactions.  The data warehouse is used for more sophisticated analysis of historical data.  For maximum performance, both the ODS and data warehouse run on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. These are practical illustrations of companies addressing real time reporting and analysis needs using established business intelligence/data warehousing methodologies and tools common to many IT departments.  If real time BI could benefit your organization, you may be already be closer than you thought to having the pieces in place to solving the problem.    Give us a shout if you are interested in learning more or if you have an interesting use or approach to real-time BI.

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• Microsoft BUILD 2013 Day 1&ndash;Keynote

  - by Tim Murphy

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/microsoft-build-2013-day-1ndashkeynote.aspx This one is going to be a little long because the keynote was jam-packed so bare with me. The keynote for the first day of BUILD 2013 was kicked off by Steve Balmer.  He made it very clear that Microsoft’s focus is on accelerating its time to market with products and product updates.  His quote was that “Rapid release” is the new norm.  He continued by showing off several new Lumias that have been buzzing around the internet for a while and announce that Sprint will now be carrying the HTC 8XT and Samsung ATIV. Balmer is known for repeating words or phrase for affect.  This time it was “Rapid release, rapid release” and “Touch, touch, touch, touch, touch, …”.  This was fun, but even more fun was when he announce that all attendees would receive an Acer Iconia 8” tablet. SCORE! The next subject Balmer focused on is new apps.  The three new ones were Flipboard, Facebook and NFL Fantasy Football.  I liked the first two because these are ones that people coming from other platforms are missing.  The NFL app is great just because it targets a demographic that can be fanatical.  If these types of apps keep coming than the missing app argument goes away. While many Negative Nancy’s are describing Windows 8.1 as Windows 180 Steve Balmer chose to call it a “refined blend” as in a coffee that has been improved with a new mix.  This includes more multi-tasking options and leveraging Bing straight throughout the entire ecosystem. He ended this first section by explaining that this will also bring more Bing development opportunities to the community. Steve Balmer was followed by Julie Larson-Green who spent her time on stage selling us on Windows 8 all over again from my point of view.  Something that I would not have thought was needed until I had listened to some other attendees who had a number of concerns and complaints.  She showed a number of new gestures that will come with Windows 8.1, and while they were cool I was left wondering if they really improved the experience.  I guess only time will tell. I did like the fact that it the UI implementation to bring up “All Apps” now mirrors that of Windows Phone.  The consistency is a big step forward that I hope to see continue.  The cool factor went up from there as she swiped content from a desktop (mega-tablet) to the XBox One.  This seamless experience I believe is what is really needed for any future platform to be relevant. I was much more enthused by the presentation of Antoine Leblond who humbled us by letting us know that there are 5k new API.  How that can be or how anyone would ever use all of them is another question.  His announcement was that the Visual Studio 2013 preview would be available today along with the Windows 8.1 bits.  One of the features of VS2013 that he demonstrated is the power consumption profiler.  With battery life being a key factor with consumer consumption devices this is a welcome addition. He didn’t limit his presentation to VS2013 features though.  He showed how the Store has been redesigned to enable better search and discoverability of apps and how Win 8.1 can perform multiple screen scales depending on the resolution of the device automatically.  The last feature he demoed was the real time video streaming API which he made sure we understood by attaching a Surface to a little robot.  Oh, but there was one more thing.  Antoine and Julie announce that all attendees would also be getting Surface Pros.  BONUS! How much more could there be?  Gurdeep Singh Pall was about to pile on.  He introduced us to Bing as a platform (BaaP?).  He said if they (Microsoft) could do something with and API that is good 3rd party developers can do something that is dynamite and showed us some of the tools they had produced.  These included natural user interface improvements such as voice commands that looked to put Siri to shame.  Add to that 3D, OCR and translation capabilities and the future looks to be full of opportunities. Balmer then came out to show us one last thing.  Project Spark is a game design environment that will be available for Windows 8.1, XBox 360 and XBox One.  All I can say is that if my kids get their hands on this they are going to be able to learn some of what dad does in a much more enjoyable way. At the end of it all I was both exhausted and energized by what I saw.  What could they have possibly left for the day 2 keynote?  I hear it will feature Scott Hanselman.  If that is right we are in for a treat.  See you there. del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2013,Windows 8.1,Winodws Phone,XAML,Keynote,Bing,Visual Studio 2013,Project Spark

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• From Pocket to Instapaper

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  Some time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced-  1. iPad app still didn’t show many of the saved links. 2. ability to rename articles on iPad still wasn’t restored.I’ve posted the message into their forum. They did not show my comment on their forum( I would name it censorship, not moderation), but a few days ago I’ve received an email, recommending “try logging out of the app on your iPad, and back in again.” Their suggestion helped,  but I don’t understand, why it is not posted as a recommendation on their support site.So I decided to try InstAPaper on my iPad, Previously I’ve used it for Kindle. I never considered it before on iPad, because there were no free demo and I was very satisfied with RIL free and then RIL Pro. Currently InstAPaper cost $3, so the price is not an issue.I’ve checked that it has most of features that I am using(e.g. renaming, folders) and I am quite happy with it now. Actually I am using Pocket (or RIL free) for old bookmarks( I have 1000+ stored on my iPad) and for new bookmarks I am using InstAPaper.Having a solid experience with RIL/Pocket I’ve created a list of suggestions to Marco Arment to implement.1. Some pages stored in InstAPaper have removed essential sections of the text. E.g in many blogs comments are not stored in  InstAPaper. Some pages lost almost all of important links (e.g. http://www.lib.rus.ec/a/32416 -sorry, in Russian). RIL/Pocket has 2 modes to store offline- Web view and Article view. Web View includes all links/images of the original page, but it’s very reliable. Article view suppose to strip unrelated information, but often corrupts the content. I prefer to use offline Web view.InstAPaper should also support offline Web view, in case if stripped view removes important part of content.2.  Black full screen Saving on iPad Safari is very annoying. After user pressed a bookmark, the saving has some delay and then for a few seconds prevents from reading the text.Would be better to show as message on the top part(as in Pocket ). I am surprised, that  a full screen popup was  implemented recently as a desired feature. 3.There are no comments allowed on http://blog.instapaper.com/. I would prefer to post some of these notes as comments on http://blog.instapaper.com/ rather than write them in my blog and then send link to Marco.(I found recommendation how to add support of comments on tumblr at http://www.tumblr.com/help, but then realized that Marko was the lead developer ofTumblr.)4. Also there is no support forum. I understand that maintenance of the forum ican be a hassle, but stackexchange fSome time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced- orums can be referred on  http://www.instapaper.com/main/support page, i.e.http://webapps.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper  or http://apple.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper 5. Tags are more convenient than folders. i.e. an ability for the same article to have more than one tag. Also creating of new folders is not supported offline, which is an annoying limitation.6. I would like to have a narrow list - additionally to existing list modes have a subject only list or subject+site list to show more list items on a screen.7. Limit of 500 offline articles sounds quite big, but my RIL list exceeded 1000, so it could be a issue in the future.8. Search button on iPad version is visible, but doesn’t work- it forces to buy Premium subscription. I think, that it’s not correct. If the button in a paid version is visible and enabled, it should  provide  a working functionality, e.g. search in article names only. And leave full-text search for the premium support.9..Copy URL is an important operation and deserves to be in a first level of Action menu, rather than in Share sub-menu.I’ve also have comment re post http://www.marco.org/2011/04/28/removed-instapaper-free. Marco Arment  explained, why he doesn’t provide free version of Instapaper.  I believe that he is loosing essential part of his customers. When I decided which of iPad application to choose, I’ve selected RIL, because I was able to play with free version, and I liked it. I didn’t have a chance to compare RIL and InstAPaper on iPad, so I’ve bought  RIL pro. For a user there is no point to pay even $3 , if there are similar free product, that user can try and see, is it suitable for him/her.I’ve also played with Readability. It doesn’t have folders or tags(which is very important for me), but nicely supports full text search

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• Using Stored Procedures in SSIS

  - by dataintegration

  The SSIS Data Flow components: the source task and the destination task are the easiest way to transfer data in SSIS. Some data transactions do not fit this model, they are procedural tasks modeled as stored procedures. In this article we show how you can call stored procedures available in RSSBus ADO.NET Providers from SSIS. In this article we will use the CreateJob and the CreateBatch stored procedures available in RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for Salesforce, but the same steps can be used to call a stored procedure in any of our data providers. Step 1: Open Visual Studio and create a new Integration Services Project. Step 2: Add a new Data Flow Task to the Control Flow window. Step 3: Open the Data Flow Task and add a Script Component to the data flow pane. A dialog box will pop-up allowing you to select the Script Component Type: pick the source type as we will be outputting columns from our stored procedure. Step 4: Double click the Script Component to open the editor. Step 5: In the "Inputs and Outputs" settings, enter all the columns you want to output to the data flow. Ensure the correct data type has been set for each output. You can check the data type by selecting the output and then changing the "DataType" property from the property editor. In our example, we'll add the column JobID of type String. Step 6: Select the "Script" option in the left-hand pane and click the "Edit Script" button. This will open a new Visual Studio window with some boiler plate code in it. Step 7: In the CreateOutputRows() function you can add code that executes the stored procedures included with the Salesforce Component. In this example we will be using the CreateJob and CreateBatch stored procedures. You can find a list of the available stored procedures along with their inputs and outputs in the product help. //Configure the connection string to your credentials String connectionString = "Offline=False;user=myusername;password=mypassword;access token=mytoken;"; using (SalesforceConnection conn = new SalesforceConnection(connectionString)) { //Create the command to call the stored procedure CreateJob SalesforceCommand cmd = new SalesforceCommand("CreateJob", conn); cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; cmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("ObjectName", "Contact")); cmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("Action", "insert")); //Execute CreateJob //CreateBatch requires JobID as input so we store this value for later SalesforceDataReader rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader(); String JobID = ""; while (rdr.Read()) { JobID = (String)rdr["JobID"]; } //Create the command for CreateBatch, for this example we are adding two new rows SalesforceCommand batCmd = new SalesforceCommand("CreateBatch", conn); batCmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; batCmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("JobID", JobID)); batCmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("Aggregate", "<Contact><Row><FirstName>Bill</FirstName>" + "<LastName>White</LastName></Row><Row><FirstName>Bob</FirstName><LastName>Black</LastName></Row></Contact>")); //Execute CreateBatch SalesforceDataReader batRdr = batCmd.ExecuteReader(); } Step 7b: If you had specified output columns earlier, you can now add data into them using the UserComponent Output0Buffer. For example, we had set an output column called JobID of type String so now we can set a value for it. We will modify the DataReader that contains the output of CreateJob like so:. while (rdr.Read()) { Output0Buffer.AddRow(); JobID = (String)rdr["JobID"]; Output0Buffer.JobID = JobID; } Step 8: Note: You will need to modify the connection string to include your credentials. Also ensure that the System.Data.RSSBus.Salesforce assembly is referenced and include the following using statements to the top of the class: using System.Data; using System.Data.RSSBus.Salesforce; Step 9: Once you are done editing your script, save it, and close the window. Click OK in the Script Transformation window to go back to the main pane. Step 10: If had any outputs from the Script Component you can use them in your data flow. For example we will use a Flat File Destination. Configure the Flat File Destination to output the results to a file, and you should see the JobId in the file. Step 11: Your project should be ready to run.

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• Easiest, most fun way to program 2D games? Flash? XNA? Some other engine?

  - by Maxi

  Hi, this is a post detailing my search for the most enjoyable way for a hobbyist game programmer to sweeten his free time with making a game. My requirements: I looked at Flash first, I made a couple of small games but I'm doubtful of the performance. I would like to make a fairly large strategy game, with several hundred units fighting simultaneously, explosions and animations included. Also zoomable maps. I saw that Adobe has a new 3D API for Flash, but I don't know if that improves 2D performance aswell, I couldn't find anything related to that question on their MAX10 sessions. Would you say that Flash is a good technology for making large 2D games easily? I really like Actionscript, and I love how easy everything is in Flash. There are several engines available which make it even easier. I just do this for fun, and it would be even better if there were proper animation/particle editors available and if the engine I were to use, would be available for multiple platforms. (so more people can play my game once finished). I'd like to have it available on many mobile platforms aswell. (because I love touch input for some reason) I do know the XNA framework pretty well, but there are no good engines available for it, and it will only run on Windows, which is a huge turn off. Even bigger is, that you need to install the XNA redistributable each time you want to give the game to someone. If I use XNA, I would have to make all the tools myself, and I'd probably have to make them with WPF. (I'd love to make tools with Adobe AIR, but unfortunately the API's for image manipulation etc. are far worse in Flash, than they are in XNA/WPF.) Now, I'm aware that I could make my own engine that supports each of those platforms, but quite frankly, that would be too much work plowing through APIs. After all, I want to make a game, not an engine. So the question becomes: Is there maybe a cross platform (free or free to develop?) engine available that I could use for 2D development? I prefer: C#, Actionscript. I don't mind using c++ if the toolset is above average, but I highly doubt that there is something out there like that. Please prove me wrong :) So summary: I'd like to use Flash, but I don't know if it scales well enough. I'm not a scripter, I want some real APIs that I can work with inside a proper IDE. Just for information, I looked at several alternatives, I'm actually looking for a long time already. You'd help me a lot to make a decision finally. Feature-wise the Flatredball engine would be ideal. But I tried their tools, and quite frankly, they are horrible. Absolutely unusable, I'd need to make my own for sure. I didn't look at their API, but if their tools are so bad, I'm not inclined to look further. Unity3D. This one is quite nice, but I really don't need 3D, and it is quite ...a lot of work to learn. I also don't like that it is so expensive to use for different platforms and that I can only code for it through scripting. You have to buy each platform separately. The editor usability is average, the product overall is good enough for most purposes, but learning it myself would be overkill. Shiva 3D. It looks good enough, but again: I don't really need 3D. The editor usability is a little worse than Unity3D in my opinion and it wasn't clear to me how to start programming. I think it requires C++ for coding, so that's a negative too. I want to have fun, and c# is fun ;) SDL. Quite frankly, I'd still need to port to all those different SDL implementations. And I don't like OpenGL style programming, it's just plain ugly. And it needs c++, I know that there might be some wrappers available, but I don't like to use wrappers, because... Irrlicht. A lot of features, but support seems to be low and it is aimed at enthusiasts. C# bindings get dropped repeatedly. I'm not an engine enthusiast, I just want to make a game. I don't see this happening with Irrlicht. Ogre3D. Way too much work, it's just a graphics engine. Also no multiple platform support and c++. Torque2D. Costs something to use, and I didn't hear a lot of good things about support and documentation. Also costs extra for each platform.

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• 7 Steps To Cut Recruiting Costs & Drive Exceptional Business Results

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  By Steve Viarengo, Vice President Product Management, Oracle Taleo Cloud Services  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In good times, trimming operational costs is an ongoing goal. In tough times, it’s a necessity. In both good times and bad, however, recruiting occurs. Growth increases headcount in good times, and opportunistic or replacement hiring occurs in slow business cycles. By employing creative recruiting strategies in tandem with the latest technology developments, you can reduce recruiting costs while driving exceptional business results. Here are some critical areas to focus on. 1.  Target Direct Cost Savings Total recruiting process expenses are the sum of external costs plus internal labor costs. Most organizations can reduce recruiting expenses with direct cost savings. While additional savings on indirect costs can be realized from process improvement and efficiency gains, there are direct cost savings and benefits readily available in three broad areas: sourcing, assessments, and green recruiting. 2. Sourcing: Reduce Agency Costs Agency search firm fees can amount to 35 percent of a new employee’s annual base salary. Typically taken from the hiring department budget, these fees may not be visible to HR. By relying on internal mobility programs, referrals, candidate pipelines, and corporate career Websites, organizations can reduce or eliminate this agency spend. And when you do have to pay third-party agency fees, you can optimize the value you receive by collaborating with agencies to identify referred candidates, ensure access to candidate data and history, and receive automatic notifications and correspondence. 3. Sourcing: Reduce Advertising Costs You can realize significant cost reductions by placing all job positions on your corporate career Website. This will allow you to reap a substantial number of candidates at minimal cost compared to job boards and other sourcing options. 4.  Sourcing: Internal Talent Pool Internal talent pools provide a way to reduce sourcing and advertising costs while delivering improved productivity and retention. Internal redeployment reduces costs and ramp-up time while increasing retention and employee satisfaction. 5.  Sourcing: External Talent Pool Strategic recruiting requires identifying and matching people with a given set of skills to a particular job while efficiently allocating sourcing expenditures. By using an e-recruiting system (which drives external talent pool management) with a candidate relationship database, you can automate prescreening and candidate matching while communicating with targeted candidates. Candidate relationship management can lower sourcing costs by marketing new job opportunities to candidates sourced in the past. By mining the talent pool in this fashion, you eliminate the need to source a new pool of candidates for each new requisition. Managing and mining the corporate candidate database can reduce the sourcing cost per candidate by as much as 50 percent. 6.  Assessments: Reduce Turnover Costs By taking advantage of assessments during the recruitment process, you can achieve a range of benefits, including better productivity, superior candidate performance, and lower turnover (providing considerable savings). Assessments also save recruiter and hiring manager time by focusing on a short list of qualified candidates. Hired for fit, such candidates tend to stay with the organization and produce quality work—ultimately driving revenue.  7. Green Recruiting: Reduce Paper and Processing Costs You can reduce recruiting costs by automating the process—and making it green. A paperless process informs candidates that you’re dedicated to green recruiting. It also leads to direct cost savings. E-recruiting reduces energy use and pollution associated with manufacturing, transporting, and recycling paper products. And process automation saves energy in mailing, storage, handling, filing, and reporting tasks. Direct cost savings come from reduced paperwork related to résumés, advertising, and onboarding. Improving the recruiting process through sourcing, assessments, and green recruiting not only saves costs. It also positions the company to improve the talent base during the recession while retaining the ability to grow appropriately in recovery. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• EM CLI, diving in and beyond!

  - by Maureen Byrne

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Doing more in less time… Isn’t that what we all strive to do? With this in mind, I put together two screen watches on Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c command line interface, or EM CLI as it is also known. There is a wealth of information on any topic that you choose to read about, from manual pages to coding documents…might I even say blog posts? In our busy lives it is so nice to just sit back with a short video, watch and learn enough to dive in. Doing more in less time, is the essence of EM CLI. It enables you to script fundamental and complex administrative tasks in an elegant way, thanks to the Jython scripting language. Repetitive tasks can be scripted and reused again and again. Sure, a Graphical User Interface provides a more intuitive step by step approach to tasks, and it provides a way of quickly becoming familiar with a product and its many features, and it is definitely the way to go when viewing performance data and historical trending…but for repetitive and complex tasks, scripting is the way to go! Lets us take the everyday task of creating an administrator. Using EM CLI in interactive mode the command could look like this.. emcli>create_user(name='jan.doe', type='EXTERNAL_USER') This command creates an administrator called jan.doe which is an externally authenticated user, possibly LDAP or SSO, defined by the EXTERNAL_USER tag. The create_user procedure takes many arguments; see the documentation for more information. Now, where EM CLI really shines and shows power is in creating multiple users. Regardless of the number, tens or thousands, the effort is the same. With the use of a standard programming construct, a loop, you can place your create_user() procedure within it. Using a loop allows you to iterate through a previously created list, creating new users until the list is complete. Using EM CLI in Script mode, your Jython loop would look something like this… for user in list_of_users:       create_user(name=user, expire=’true’, password=’welcome123’) This Jython code snippet iterates through a previously defined list of names, list_of_users, and iterates through the list, taking each name, user in this case, and creates an administrator sets the password to welcome123, but forces the user to reset it when they first login. This is only one of over four hundred procedures created to expose Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c functionality in a powerful and programmatic way. It is a few months since we released EM CLI with scripting option. We are seeing many users adapt to this fun and powerful way of using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. What are the first steps? Watch these screen watches, and dive in. The first screen watch steps you through where and how to download and install and how to run your first few commands. The Second screen watch steps you through a few scripts. Next time, I am going to show you the basic building blocks to writing a Jython script to perform Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c administrative tasks. Join this growing group of EM CLI users…. Dive in! Normal 0 false 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• ROracle support for TimesTen In-Memory Database

  - by Sherry LaMonica

  Today's guest post comes from Jason Feldhaus, a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the TimesTen Database organization at Oracle.  He shares with us a sample session using ROracle with the TimesTen In-Memory database.  Beginning in version 1.1-4, ROracle includes support for the Oracle Times Ten In-Memory Database, version 11.2.2. TimesTen is a relational database providing very fast and high throughput through its memory-centric architecture.  TimesTen is designed for low latency, high-volume data, and event and transaction management. A TimesTen database resides entirely in memory, so no disk I/O is required for transactions and query operations. TimesTen is used in applications requiring very fast and predictable response time, such as real-time financial services trading applications and large web applications. TimesTen can be used as the database of record or as a relational cache database to Oracle Database. ROracle provides an interface between R and the database, providing the rich functionality of the R statistical programming environment using the SQL query language. ROracle uses the OCI libraries to handle database connections, providing much better performance than standard ODBC.The latest ROracle enhancements include: Support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Support for Date-Time using R's POSIXct/POSIXlt data types RAW, BLOB and BFILE data type support Option to specify number of rows per fetch operation Option to prefetch LOB data Break support using Ctrl-C Statement caching support Times Ten 11.2.2 contains enhanced support for analytics workloads and complex queries: Analytic functions: AVG, SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, DENSE_RANK, RANK, ROW_NUMBER, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Analytic clauses: OVER PARTITION BY and OVER ORDER BY Multidimensional grouping operators: Grouping clauses: GROUP BY CUBE, GROUP BY ROLLUP, GROUP BY GROUPING SETS Grouping functions: GROUP, GROUPING_ID, GROUP_ID WITH clause, which allows repeated references to a named subquery block Aggregate expressions over DISTINCT expressions General expressions that return a character string in the source or a pattern within the LIKE predicate Ability to order nulls first or last in a sort result (NULLS FIRST or NULLS LAST in the ORDER BY clause) Note: Some functionality is only available with Oracle Exalytics, refer to the TimesTen product licensing document for details. Connecting to TimesTen is easy with ROracle. Simply install and load the ROracle package and load the driver. > install.packages("ROracle") > library(ROracle) Loading required package: DBI > drv <- dbDriver("Oracle") Once the ROracle package is installed, create a database connection object and connect to a TimesTen direct driver DSN as the OS user. > conn <- dbConnect(drv, username ="", password="", dbname = "localhost/SampleDb_1122:timesten_direct") You have the option to report the server type - Oracle or TimesTen? > print (paste ("Server type =", dbGetInfo (conn)$serverType)) [1] "Server type = TimesTen IMDB" To create tables in the database using R data frame objects, use the function dbWriteTable. In the following example we write the built-in iris data frame to TimesTen. The iris data set is a small example data set containing 150 rows and 5 columns. We include it here not to highlight performance, but so users can easily run this example in their R session. > dbWriteTable (conn, "IRIS", iris, overwrite=TRUE, ora.number=FALSE) [1] TRUE Verify that the newly created IRIS table is available in the database. To list the available tables and table columns in the database, use dbListTables and dbListFields, respectively. > dbListTables (conn) [1] "IRIS" > dbListFields (conn, "IRIS") [1] "SEPAL.LENGTH" "SEPAL.WIDTH" "PETAL.LENGTH" "PETAL.WIDTH" "SPECIES" To retrieve a summary of the data from the database we need to save the results to a local object. The following call saves the results of the query as a local R object, iris.summary. The ROracle function dbGetQuery is used to execute an arbitrary SQL statement against the database. When connected to TimesTen, the SQL statement is processed completely within main memory for the fastest response time. > iris.summary <- dbGetQuery(conn, 'SELECT SPECIES, AVG ("SEPAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_SLENGTH, AVG ("SEPAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_SWIDTH, AVG ("PETAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_PLENGTH, AVG ("PETAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_PWIDTH FROM IRIS GROUP BY ROLLUP (SPECIES)') > iris.summary SPECIES AVG_SLENGTH AVG_SWIDTH AVG_PLENGTH AVG_PWIDTH 1 setosa 5.006000 3.428000 1.462 0.246000 2 versicolor 5.936000 2.770000 4.260 1.326000 3 virginica 6.588000 2.974000 5.552 2.026000 4 <NA> 5.843333 3.057333 3.758 1.199333 Finally, disconnect from the TimesTen Database. > dbCommit (conn) [1] TRUE > dbDisconnect (conn) [1] TRUE We encourage you download Oracle software for evaluation from the Oracle Technology Network. See these links for our software: Times Ten In-Memory Database,  ROracle.  As always, we welcome comments and questions on the TimesTen and  Oracle R technical forums.

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• OpenGL 3 and the Radeon HD 4850x2

  - by rotard

  A while ago, I picked up a copy of the OpenGL SuperBible fifth edition and slowly and painfully started teaching myself OpenGL the 3.3 way, after having been used to the 1.0 way from school way back when. Making things more challenging, I am primarily a .NET developer, so I was working in Mono with the OpenTK OpenGL wrapper. On my laptop, I put together a program that let the user walk around a simple landscape using a couple shaders that implemented per-vertex coloring and lighting and texture mapping. Everything was working brilliantly until I ran the same program on my desktop. Disaster! Nothing would render! I have chopped my program down to the point where the camera sits near the origin, pointing at the origin, and renders a square (technically, a triangle fan). The quad renders perfectly on my laptop, coloring, lighting, texturing and all, but the desktop renders a small distorted non-square quadrilateral that is colored incorrectly, not affected by the lights, and not textured. I suspect the graphics card is at fault, because I get the same result whether I am booted into Ubuntu 10.10 or Win XP. I did find that if I pare the vertex shader down to ONLY outputting the positional data and the fragment shader to ONLY outputting a solid color (white) the quad renders correctly. But as SOON as I start passing in color data (whether or not I use it in the fragment shader) the output from the vertex shader is distorted again. The shaders follow. I left the pre-existing code in, but commented out so you can get an idea what I was trying to do. I'm a noob at glsl so the code could probably be a lot better. My laptop is an old lenovo T61p with a Centrino (Core 2) Duo and an nVidia Quadro graphics card running Ubuntu 10.10 My desktop has an i7 with a Radeon HD 4850 x2 (single card, dual GPU) from Saphire dual booting into Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows XP. The problem occurs in both XP and Ubuntu. Can anyone see something wrong that I am missing? What is "special" about my HD 4850x2? string vertexShaderSource = @" #version 330 precision highp float; uniform mat4 projection_matrix; uniform mat4 modelview_matrix; //uniform mat4 normal_matrix; //uniform mat4 cmv_matrix; //Camera modelview. Light sources are transformed by this matrix. //uniform vec3 ambient_color; //uniform vec3 diffuse_color; //uniform vec3 diffuse_direction; in vec4 in_position; in vec4 in_color; //in vec3 in_normal; //in vec3 in_tex_coords; out vec4 varyingColor; //out vec3 varyingTexCoords; void main(void) { //Get surface normal in eye coordinates //vec4 vEyeNormal = normal_matrix * vec4(in_normal, 0); //Get vertex position in eye coordinates //vec4 vPosition4 = modelview_matrix * vec4(in_position, 0); //vec3 vPosition3 = vPosition4.xyz / vPosition4.w; //Get vector to light source in eye coordinates //vec3 lightVecNormalized = normalize(diffuse_direction); //vec3 vLightDir = normalize((cmv_matrix * vec4(lightVecNormalized, 0)).xyz); //Dot product gives us diffuse intensity //float diff = max(0.0, dot(vEyeNormal.xyz, vLightDir.xyz)); //Multiply intensity by diffuse color, force alpha to 1.0 //varyingColor.xyz = in_color * diff * diffuse_color.xyz; varyingColor = in_color; //varyingTexCoords = in_tex_coords; gl_Position = projection_matrix * modelview_matrix * in_position; }"; string fragmentShaderSource = @" #version 330 //#extension GL_EXT_gpu_shader4 : enable precision highp float; //uniform sampler2DArray colorMap; //in vec4 varyingColor; //in vec3 varyingTexCoords; out vec4 out_frag_color; void main(void) { out_frag_color = vec4(1,1,1,1); //out_frag_color = varyingColor; //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture(colorMap, varyingTexCoords.st); //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture(colorMap, vec3(varyingTexCoords.st, 0)); //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture2DArray(colorMap, varyingTexCoords); }"; Note that in this code the color data is accepted but not actually used. The geometry is outputted the same (wrong) whether the fragment shader uses varyingColor or not. Only if I comment out the line varyingColor = in_color; does the geometry output correctly. Originally the shaders took in vec3 inputs, I only modified them to take vec4s while troubleshooting.

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; YourKit Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  The YourKit (v7.0.5) profiler is interesting in terms of price (79€ single place license, 409€ + 1 year support and upgrades) and feature set. You do get a performance and memory profiler in one package for which you normally need also to pay extra from the other vendors. As an interesting side note the profiler UI is written in Java because they do also sell Java profilers with the same feature set. To get all methods of a VS startup you need first to configure it to include System* in the profiled methods and you need to configure * to measure wall clock time. By default it does record only CPU times which allows you to optimize CPU hungry operations. But you will never see a Thread.Sleep(10000) in the profiler blocking the UI in this mode. It can profile as all others processes started from within the profiler but it can also profile the next or all started processes. As usual it can profile in sampling and tracing mode. But since it is a memory profiler as well it does by default also record all object allocations > 1MB. With allocation recording enabled VS2012 did crash but without allocation recording there were no problems. The CPU tab contains the time line of the application and when you click in the graph you the call stacks of all threads at this time. This is really a nice feature. When you select a time region you the CPU Usage estimation for this time window. I have seen many applications consuming 100% CPU only because they did create garbage like crazy. For this is the Garbage Collection tab interesting in conjunction with a time range. This view is like the CPU table only that the CPU graph (green) is missing. All relevant information except for GCs/s is already visible in the CPU tab. Very handy to pinpoint excessive GC or CPU bound issues. The Threads tab does show the thread names and their lifetime. This is useful to see thread interactions or which thread is hottest in terms of CPU consumption. On the CPU tab the call tree does exist in a merged and thread specific view. When you click on a method you get below a list of all called methods. There you can sort for methods with a high own time which are worth optimizing. In the Method List you can select which scope you want to see. Back Traces are the methods which did call you. Callees ist the list of methods called directly or indirectly by your method as a flat list. This is not a call stack but still very useful to see which methods were slow so you can see the “root” cause quite quickly without the need to click trough long call stacks. The last view Merged Calles is a call stacked view of the previous view. This does help a lot to understand did call each method at run time. You would get the same view with a debugger for one call invocation but here you get the full statistics (invocation count) as well. Since YourKit is also a memory profiler you can directly see which objects you have on your managed heap and which objects do hold most of your precious memory. You can in in the Object Explorer view also examine the contents of your objects (strings or whatsoever) to get a better understanding which objects where potentially allocating this stuff.   YourKit is a very easy to use combined memory and performance profiler in one product. The unbeatable single license price makes it very attractive to straightly buy it. Although it is a Java UI it is very responsive and the memory consumption is considerably lower compared to dotTrace and ANTS profiler. What I do really like is to start the YourKit ui and then start the processes I want to profile as usual. There is no need to alter your own application code to be able to inject a profiler into your new started processes. For performance and memory profiling you can simply select the process you want to investigate from the list of started processes. That's the way I like to use profilers. Just get out of the way and let the application run without any special preparations.   Next: Telerik JustTrace

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• Impressions and Reactions from Alliance 2012

  - by user739873

  Alliance 2012 has come to a conclusion.  What strikes me about every Alliance conference is the amazing amount of collaboration and cooperation I see across higher education in the sharing of best practices around the entire Oracle PeopleSoft software suite, not just the student information system (Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions).  In addition to the vibrant U.S. organization, it's gratifying to see the growth in the international attendance again this year, with an EMEA HEUG organizing to complement the existing groups in the Netherlands, South Africa, and the U.K.  Their first meeting is planned for London in October, and I suspect they'll be surprised at the amount of interest and attendance. In my discussions with higher education IT and functional leadership at Alliance there were a number of instances where concern was expressed about Oracle's commitment to higher education as an industry, primarily because of a lack of perceived innovation in the applications that Oracle develops for this market. Here I think perception and reality are far apart, and I'd like to explain why I believe this to be true. First let me start with what I think drives this perception. Predominately it's in two areas. The first area is the user interface, both for students and faculty that interact with the system as "customers", and for those employees of the institution (faculty, staff, and sometimes students as well) that use the system in some kind of administrative role. Because the UI hasn't changed all that much from the PeopleSoft days, individuals perceive this as a dead product with little innovation and therefore Oracle isn't investing. The second area is around the integration of the higher education suite of applications (PeopleSoft Campus Solutions) and the rest of the Oracle software assets. Whether grown organically or acquired, there is an impressive array of middleware and other software products that could be leveraged much more significantly by the higher education applications than is currently the case today. This is also perceived as lack of investment. Let me address these two points.  First the UI.  More is being done here than ever before, and the PAG and other groups where this was discussed at Alliance 2012 were more numerous than I've seen in any past meeting. Whether it's Oracle development leveraging web services or some extremely early but very promising work leveraging the recent Endeca acquisition (see some cool examples here) there are a lot of resources aimed at this issue.  There are also some amazing prototypes being developed by our UX (user experience team) that will eventually make their way into the higher education applications realm - they had an impressive setup at Alliance.  Hopefully many of you that attended found this group. If not, the senior leader for that team Jeremy Ashley will be a significant contributor of content to our summer Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington in June. In the area of integration with other elements of the Oracle stack, this is also an area of focus for the company and my team.  We're making this a priority especially in the areas of identity management and security, leveraging WebCenter more effectively for content, imaging, and mobility, and driving towards the ultimate objective of WebLogic Suite as our platform for SOA, links to learning management systems (SAIP), and content. There is also much work around business intelligence centering on OBI applications. But at the end of the day we get enormous value from the HEUG (higher education user group) and the various subgroups formed as a part of this community that help us align and prioritize our investments, whether it's around better integration with other Oracle products or integration with partner offerings.  It's one of the healthiest, mutually beneficial relationships between customers and an Education IT concern that exists on the globe. And I can't avoid mentioning that this kind of relationship between higher education and the corporate IT community that can truly address the problems of efficiency and effectiveness, institutional excellence (which starts with IT) and student success.  It's not (in my opinion) going to be solved through community source - cost and complexity only increase in that model and in the end higher education doesn't ultimately focus on core competencies: educating, developing, and researching.  While I agree with some of what Michael A. McRobbie wrote in his EDUCAUSE Review article (Information Technology: A View from Both Sides of the President’s Desk), I take strong issue with his assertion that the "the IT marketplace is just the opposite of long-term stability...."  Sure there has been healthy, creative destruction in the past 2-3 decades, but this has had the effect of, in the aggregate, benefiting education with greater efficiency, more innovation and increased stability as larger, more financially secure firms acquire and develop integrated solutions. Cole

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• WEBLOGIC 12C HANDS-ON BOOTCAMP

  - by agallego

    Oracle PartnerNetwork | Account | Feedback   JOIN THE ORACLE WEBLOGIC PARTNER COMMUNITY AND ATTEND A WEBLOGIC 12C HANDS-ON BOOTCAMP Dear partner As a valued partner we would like to invite you for the WebLogic Partner Community and our WebLogic 12c hands-on Bootcamps – free of charge! Please first login at http://partner.oracle.com and then visit: WebLogic Partner Community. (If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center). The goal of the WebLogic Partner Community is to provide you with the latest information on Oracle's offerings and to facilitate the exchange of experience within community members. Register Now FREE Assessment vouchers to become certified and WebLogic Server 12c 200 new Features and Training Connect and Network   WebLogic Blogs   WebLogic on Facebook   WebLogic on LinkedIn   WebLogic on Twitter   WebLogic on Oracle Mix WebLogic 12c hands-on Workshops We offer free3 days hands-on WebLogic 12c workshops for Oracle partners who want to become Application Grid Specialized: Register Here! Country Date Location Registration   Germany  3-5 April 2012 Oracle Düsseldorf Click here   France  24-26 April 2012 Oracle Colombes Click here   Spain 08-10 May 2012  Oracle Madrid  Click here   Netherlands  22-24 May 2012  Oracle Amsterdam  Click here   United Kingdom  06-08 June 2012  Oracle Reading  Click here   Italy  19-21 June 2012  Oracle Cinisello Balsamo  Click here   Portugal  10-12 July 2012  Oracle Lisbon  Click here Skill requirements Attendees need to have the following skills as this is required by the product-set and to make sure they get the most out of the training: Basic knowledge in Java and JavaEE Understanding the Application Server concept Basic knowledge in older releases of WebLogic Server would be beneficial Member of WebLogic Partner Community for registration please vist http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea Hardware requirements Every participant works on his own notebook. The minimal hardware requirements are: 4Gb physical RAM (we will boot the image with 2Gb RAM)  dual core CPU 15 GB HD Software requirements Please install Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.8 Follow-up and certification  With the workshop registration you agree to the following next steps Follow-up training attend and pass the Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist Registration For details and registration please visit Register Here Free WebLogic Certification (Free assessment voucher to become certified) For all WebLogic experts, we offer free vouchers worth $195 for the Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist assessment. To demonstrate your WebLogic knowledge you first have to pass the free online assessment Oracle Application Grid PreSales Specialist. For free vouchers, please send an e-mail with the screenshot of your Oracle Application Grid PreSales certirficate to [email protected] including your Name, Company, E-mail and Country. Note: This offer is limited to partners from Europe Middle East and Africa. Partners from other countries please contact your Oracle partner manager. WebLogic Specialization To become specialized in Application Grid, please make sure that you access the: Application Grid Specialization Guide Application Grid Specialization Checklist If you have any questions please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Key New Capabilities Java EE 6 and Developer Productivity Simplified Deployment and Management with Virtualization Integrated Traffic Management Enhanced High Availability and Disaster Recovery Much Higher Performance For more information please visit: Presentation from the WebLogic 12c launch Technical Presentation from the WebLogic 12c launch WebLogic OTN Website WebLogic 12c Virtual Conference Environment WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea (OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Best regards, Jürgen Kress WebLogic Partner Adoption EMEA Tel. +49 89 1430 1479 E-Mail: [email protected]   Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact PBC | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States Your privacy is important to us. You can login to your account to update your e-mail subscriptions or you can opt-out of all Oracle Marketing e-mails at any time. Please note that opting-out of Marketing communications does not affect your receipt of important business communications related to your current relationship with Oracle such as Security Updates, Event Registration notices, Account Management and Support/Service communications.

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• JPRT: A Build & Test System

  - by kto

  DRAFT A while back I did a little blogging on a system called JPRT, the hardware used and a summary on my java.net weblog. This is an update on the JPRT system. JPRT ("JDK Putback Reliablity Testing", but ignore what the letters stand for, I change what they mean every day, just to annoy people :\^) is a build and test system for the JDK, or any source base that has been configured for JPRT. As I mentioned in the above blog, JPRT is a major modification to a system called PRT that the HotSpot VM development team has been using for many years, very successfully I might add. Keeping the source base always buildable and reliable is the first step in the 12 steps of dealing with your product quality... or was the 12 steps from Alcoholics Anonymous... oh well, anyway, it's the first of many steps. ;\^) Internally when we make changes to any part of the JDK, there are certain procedures we are required to perform prior to any putback or commit of the changes. The procedures often vary from team to team, depending on many factors, such as whether native code is changed, or if the change could impact other areas of the JDK. But a common requirement is a verification that the source base with the changes (and merged with the very latest source base) will build on many of not all 8 platforms, and a full 'from scratch' build, not an incremental build, which can hide full build problems. The testing needed varies, depending on what has been changed. Anyone that was worked on a project where multiple engineers or groups are submitting changes to a shared source base knows how disruptive a 'bad commit' can be on everyone. How many times have you heard: "So And So made a bunch of changes and now I can't build!". But multiply the number of platforms by 8, and make all the platforms old and antiquated OS versions with bizarre system setup requirements and you have a pretty complicated situation (see http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/build/README-builds.html). We don't tolerate bad commits, but our enforcement is somewhat lacking, usually it's an 'after the fact' correction. Luckily the Source Code Management system we use (another antique called TeamWare) allows for a tree of repositories and 'bad commits' are usually isolated to a small team. Punishment to date has been pretty drastic, the Queen of Hearts in 'Alice in Wonderland' said 'Off With Their Heads', well trust me, you don't want to be the engineer doing a 'bad commit' to the JDK. With JPRT, hopefully this will become a thing of the past, not that we have had many 'bad commits' to the master source base, in general the teams doing the integrations know how important their jobs are and they rarely make 'bad commits'. So for these JDK integrators, maybe what JPRT does is keep them from chewing their finger nails at night. ;\^) Over the years each of the teams have accumulated sets of machines they use for building, or they use some of the shared machines available to all of us. But the hunt for build machines is just part of the job, or has been. And although the issues with consistency of the build machines hasn't been a horrible problem, often you never know if the Solaris build machine you are using has all the right patches, or if the Linux machine has the right service pack, or if the Windows machine has it's latest updates. Hopefully the JPRT system can solve this problem. When we ship the binary JDK bits, it is SO very important that the build machines are correct, and we know how difficult it is to get them setup. Sure, if you need to debug a JDK problem that only shows up on Windows XP or Solaris 9, you'll still need to hunt down a machine, but not as a regular everyday occurance. I'm a big fan of a regular nightly build and test system, constantly verifying that a source base builds and tests out. There are many examples of automated build/tests, some that trigger on any change to the source base, some that just run every night. Some provide a protection gateway to the 'golden' source base which only gets changes that the nightly process has verified are good. The JPRT (and PRT) system is meant to guard the source base before anything is sent to it, guarding all source bases from the evil developer, well maybe 'evil' isn't the right word, I haven't met many 'evil' developers, more like 'error prone' developers. ;\^) Humm, come to think about it, I may be one from time to time. :\^{ But the point is that by spreading the build up over a set of machines, and getting the turnaround down to under an hour, it becomes realistic to completely build on all platforms and test it, on every putback. We have the technology, we can build and rebuild and rebuild, and it will be better than it was before, ha ha... Anybody remember the Six Million Dollar Man? Man, I gotta get out more often.. Anyway, now the nightly build and test can become a 'fetch the latest JPRT build bits' and start extensive testing (the testing not done by JPRT, or the platforms not tested by JPRT). Is it Open Source? No, not yet. Would you like to be? Let me know. Or is it more important that you have the ability to use such a system for JDK changes? So enough blabbering on about this JPRT system, tell me what you think. And let me know if you want to hear more about it or not. Stay tuned for the next episode, same Bloody Bat time, same Bloody Bat channel. ;\^) -kto

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• Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in NetBeans IDE

  - by Geertjan

  When you need to connect to Amazon Web Services, NetBeans IDE gives you a nice start. You can drag and drop the "itemSearch" service into a Java source file and then various Amazon files are generated for you. From there, you need to do a little bit of work because the request to Amazon needs to be signed before it can be used. Here are some references and places that got me started: http://associates-amazon.s3.amazonaws.com/signed-requests/helper/index.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSGettingStartedGuide/AWSCredentials.html https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/flex/advertising/api/sign-in.html You definitely need to sign up to the Amazon Associates program and also register/create an Access Key ID, which will also get you a Secret Key, as well. Here's a simple Main class that I created that hooks into the generated RestConnection/RestResponse code created by NetBeans IDE: public static void main(String[] args) {    try {        String searchIndex = "Books";        String keywords = "Romeo and Juliet";        RestResponse result = AmazonAssociatesService.itemSearch(searchIndex, keywords);        String dataAsString = result.getDataAsString();        int start = dataAsString.indexOf("<Author>")+8;        int end = dataAsString.indexOf("</Author>");        System.out.println(dataAsString.substring(start,end));    } catch (Exception ex) {        ex.printStackTrace();    }} Then I deleted the generated properties file and the authenticator and changed the generated AmazonAssociatesService.java file to the following: public class AmazonAssociatesService {    private static void sleep(long millis) {        try {            Thread.sleep(millis);        } catch (Throwable th) {        }    }    public static RestResponse itemSearch(String searchIndex, String keywords) throws IOException {        SignedRequestsHelper helper;        RestConnection conn = null;        Map queryMap = new HashMap();        queryMap.put("Service", "AWSECommerceService");        queryMap.put("AssociateTag", "myAssociateTag");        queryMap.put("AWSAccessKeyId", "myAccessKeyId");        queryMap.put("Operation", "ItemSearch");        queryMap.put("SearchIndex", searchIndex);        queryMap.put("Keywords", keywords);        try {            helper = SignedRequestsHelper.getInstance(                    "ecs.amazonaws.com",                    "myAccessKeyId",                    "mySecretKey");            String sign = helper.sign(queryMap);            conn = new RestConnection(sign);        } catch (IllegalArgumentException | UnsupportedEncodingException | NoSuchAlgorithmException | InvalidKeyException ex) {        }        sleep(1000);        return conn.get(null);    }} Finally, I copied this class into my application, which you can see is referred to above: http://code.google.com/p/amazon-product-advertising-api-sample/source/browse/src/com/amazon/advertising/api/sample/SignedRequestsHelper.java Here's the completed app, mostly generated via the drag/drop shown at the start, but slightly edited as shown above: That's all, now everything works as you'd expect.

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• Soft lockup after upgrade - cannot install from live CD

  - by nbm

  I dual-boot MacIntel Core 2 duo. nVidia graphics. Ran upgrade from ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 (64 bit). On restart ran into {numbers} Bug: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s! [swapper/0:1] Tried loading earlier kernel: same problem Tried re-installing ubuntu from a liveCD that has worked in the past: version 13.04. Same problem. Tried re-partitioning hard drive using Mac OS X disk utility and then installing ubuntu 14.04LTS from liveCD. Same problem. Not possible to verify liveCD disk (creates same "soft lockup" bug.) Tried installing from the liveCD with version 13.04 that I know works (that's how I got Ubuntu on this machine in the first place.) Same problem. I know this is not a hardware problem as OS X works just fine, I am using it right now on the same machine. I have been using various versions of Ubuntu for 2 years. Things I cannot do: Open a terminal Verify CD image Start ubuntu from CD (same soft lockup problem) This problem is similar to some other questions, none of which have been satisfactorily answered: Ubuntu 14.04 soft lockup on Vostro 3500 Cannot do fresh install of Ubuntu 13.04 while booting from DVD: "soft lockup" bug Live CD stalls when installing Ubuntu 13.10 UPDATE 6/11/14: Following some much-appreciated advice from bain (see below) I burned a 12.04LTS disk and started with kernel parameters: noapic, no1apic, acpi=off, nomodeset, elevator=deadline, and clocksource=jiffies. With all of these parameters I was able to load the 12.04LTS CD ("Try without installing"). It worked fine. However, as soon as I tried to install Ubuntu from the CD, my wired ethernet (eth0) connection would hang. There are already various askubuntu questions and bug reports about this problem, none of which had answers for me. (E.g., dhclient eth0 does nothing, none of the various reset commands does anything, manually setting IP &etc does nothing. I could reliably kill the ethernet connection by clicking "install ubuntu" every single time.) I could go ahead and install 12.04 without an internet connection, but the install would freeze after mostly completing (I tried several times.) There were some relevant error messages in the details of the install output script that, IIRC, had to do with searching for missing files and not being able to access eth0 (internet) to get them. To be honest I gave up at that point and I'm not sure I wrote those down. If I find some notes I will post them. At this point I no longer have Ubuntu on my system. I wiped the partitions and am using exclusively OS X. I am leaving this question in case it helps anyone else with similar problems. I love open source and I love Linux, and the next machine I get I will probably just build from Arch. At the moment I miss repositories and a lot of other things about Ubuntu, but the OS X terminal is 'nix, I can pretty much use all the open source apps I like, and while I am not a fan of the Apple software it gets the job done for me. Unlike Ubuntu, which can't even install. I realize this isn't necessarily a place for a soapbox speech, but when I first installed 12.04 several years ago there were already people in the community complaining that Canonical was going too "commercial". But I loved it. Several years later and all I've seen is Canonical adding more not-so-useful bells and whistles to Ubuntu while continually failing to fix basic problems on upgrades. With a dual-boot (and sometimes triple-boot) system it always took me some tweaking to get an upgrade to work, and to some extent that is okay. But at this point I feel like Canonical ought to just put a price tag on Ubuntu. All I see is more commercialism and advertising and product tie-ins, and ongoing problems do not get fixed. I am a big fan of open-source, not-for profit enterprise. I am also a big fan of for-profit enterprise, which certainly has its place and usefulness. I am not a fan of companies who pretend to be in favor of open source but really are just out to make a buck, and IMNSHO that is what Canonical has become. This is a great community and I wish you all the best, but my next install of Linux will not be Ubuntu.

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• Why bother writing an Windows 8 app?

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  So you want to know more about development for Window 8. Great! There are lots of reasons you should be excited about this. Since I don’t know why YOU are interested in this, I’ll make a list of reasons people can choose from. (as a side note: whenever I talk about Win8 development I am referring to the Metro Style / WinRt side of things. Apps for the ‘classic’ desktop side of Win8 on Intel are business as usual…) So… Why would you care about making an app for Windows 8? 1. It’s cool. Let’s not beat around the bush: if you like development for a hobby then you’ll love to work on this new platform. You can create apps in a relative short time (short time as in compared to writing a new CRM system) and that makes it great for a hobby product. 2. You’ll stand out. Hey, we all need an ego boost every now and then. We all need to feel special. So if you can manage to be one of the first to have you app in the Store then you’ll likely to be noticed. Just close your eyes for a moment and image you standing in a bar. It’s crowded, and then you casually say “Oh yeah, I just had my app certified and it’s in the Win8 store now”. People will stop talking, will offer you drinks and beautiful women / gorgeous man / furry creatures from Alpha Centauri (whatever your preferences are) will propose. Or maybe not. Anyway…. 3. Make some cash! IDC predicts there will be about 350,000,000 Windows 8 licenses sold in the next year. Think about that number. 350,000,000. And they all have access to the Store. Where you’re app will be. With one little click they can select it, download and somehow magically $1.00 or $2.00 from their bank account is transferred to yours. Now, I am not saying that all of those people will download and buy your app but what if only 1% of them did? Remember: there aren’t that many apps available yet….. 4. Learn. Creating new small apps is a great way to learn new stuff. Yes, you could read about it (on this blog for instance) but the only way to learn something is to do it. So be prepared for the future and learn something new by doing it.Write an app! Now! 5. The biggie (for me at least): it’s fun. Even if you remove the points above it’s still fun to write for these devices and this platform. Now some of you will say : “But why not write a great app for IOS or Android?” I think this is a valid question. Of course the novelty of the platform wears out and points 2 and 3 from above list will not be as relevant as it is today. But still 1 4 and 5 remain. And don’t forget: if you already work on the Microsoft platform it’s not that hard to learn this new Win8 stuff. If you have done some XAML development (be it WPF or Silverlight) you are almost there in becoming a good Win8 developer. So you’ll be more productive much sooner than when you have to learn Objective C or Java. Even if you’re a HTML / Javascript developer (I say developer here, not designer) you’ll be up to speed on Win8 development pretty soon. Yes, you, that funky Web Developer who lives and breathes HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript / Node.Js / JQuery: you too can be a Win8 developer. A first class Win8 developer! So.. Download the stuff you need from http://dev.windows.com install Windows 8 and Visual Studio 12 and by the time you’re ready I’ll be working on the next article: how to do all this? Happy coding!

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• Documentation Changes in Solaris 11.1

  - by alanc

  One of the first places you can see Solaris 11.1 changes are in the docs, which have now been posted in the Solaris 11.1 Library on docs.oracle.com. I spent a good deal of time reviewing documentation for this release, and thought some would be interesting to blog about, but didn't review all the changes (not by a long shot), and am not going to cover all the changes here, so there's plenty left for you to discover on your own. Just comparing the Solaris 11.1 Library list of docs against the Solaris 11 list will show a lot of reorganization and refactoring of the doc set, especially in the system administration guides. Hopefully the new break down will make it easier to get straight to the sections you need when a task is at hand. Packaging System Unfortunately, the excellent in-depth guide for how to build packages for the new Image Packaging System (IPS) in Solaris 11 wasn't done in time to make the initial Solaris 11 doc set. An interim version was published shortly after release, in PDF form on the OTN IPS page. For Solaris 11.1 it was included in the doc set, as Packaging and Delivering Software With the Image Packaging System in Oracle Solaris 11.1, so should be easier to find, and easier to share links to specific pages the HTML version. Beyond just how to build a package, it includes details on how Solaris is packaged, and how package updates work, which may be useful to all system administrators who deal with Solaris 11 upgrades & installations. The Adding and Updating Oracle Solaris 11.1 Software Packages was also extended, including new sections on Relaxing Version Constraints Specified by Incorporations and Locking Packages to a Specified Version that may be of interest to those who want to keep the Solaris 11 versions of certain packages when they upgrade, such as the couple of packages that had functionality removed by an (unusual for an update release) End of Feature process in the 11.1 release. Also added in this release is a document containing the lists of all the packages in each of the major package groups in Solaris 11.1 (solaris-desktop, solaris-large-server, and solaris-small-server). While you can simply get the contents of those groups from the package repository, either via the web interface or the pkg command line, the documentation puts them in handy tables for easier side-by-side comparison, or viewing the lists before you've installed the system to pick which one you want to initially install. X Window System We've not had good X11 coverage in the online Solaris docs in a while, mostly relying on the man pages, and upstream X.Org docs. In this release, we've integrated some X coverage into the Solaris 11.1 Desktop Adminstrator's Guide, including sections on installing fonts for fontconfig or legacy X11 clients, X server configuration, and setting up remote access via X11 or VNC. Of course we continue to work on improving the docs, including a lot of contributions to the upstream docs all OS'es share (more about that another time). Security One of the things Oracle likes to do for its products is to publish security guides for administrators & developers to know how to build systems that meet their security needs. For Solaris, we started this with Solaris 11, providing a guide for sysadmins to find where the security relevant configuration options were documented. The Solaris 11.1 Security Guidelines extend this to cover new security features, such as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Read-Only Zones, as well as adding additional guidelines for existing features, such as how to limit the size of tmpfs filesystems, to avoid users driving the system into swap thrashing situations. For developers, the corresponding document is the Developer's Guide to Oracle Solaris 11 Security, which has been the source for years for documentation of security-relevant Solaris API's such as PAM, GSS-API, and the Solaris Cryptographic Framework. For Solaris 11.1, a new appendix was added to start providing Secure Coding Guidelines for Developers, leveraging the CERT Secure Coding Standards and OWASP guidelines to provide the base recommendations for common programming languages and their standard API's. Solaris specific secure programming guidance was added via links to other documentation in the product doc set. In parallel, we updated the Solaris C Libary Functions security considerations list with details of Solaris 11 enhancements such as FD_CLOEXEC flags, additional *at() functions, and new stdio functions such as asprintf() and getline(). A number of code examples throughout the Solaris 11.1 doc set were updated to follow these recommendations, changing unbounded strcpy() calls to strlcpy(), sprintf() to snprintf(), etc. so that developers following our examples start out with safer code. The Writing Device Drivers guide even had the appendix updated to list which of these utility functions, like snprintf() and strlcpy(), are now available via the Kernel DDI. Little Things Of course all the big new features got documented, and some major efforts were put into refactoring and renovation, but there were also a lot of smaller things that got fixed as well in the nearly a year between the Solaris 11 and 11.1 doc releases - again too many to list here, but a random sampling of the ones I know about & found interesting or useful: The Privileges section of the DTrace Guide now gives users a pointer to find out how to set up DTrace privileges for non-global zones and what limitations are in place there. A new section on Recommended iSCSI Configuration Practices was added to the iSCSI configuration section when it moved into the SAN Configuration and Multipathing administration guide. The Managing System Power Services section contains an expanded explanation of the various tunables for power management in Solaris 11.1. The sample dcmd sources in /usr/demo/mdb were updated to include ::help output, so that developers like myself who follow the examples don't forget to include it (until a helpful code reviewer pointed it out while reviewing the mdb module changes for Xorg 1.12). The README file in that directory was updated to show the correct paths for installing both kernel & userspace modules, including the 64-bit variants.

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• Using Unity – Part 4

  - by nmarun

  In this part, I’ll be discussing about constructor and property or setter injection. I’ve created a new class – Product3: 1: public class Product3 : IProduct 2: { 3: public string Name { get; set; } 4: [Dependency] 5: public IDistributor Distributor { get; set; } 6: public ILogger Logger { get; set; } 7:  8: public Product3(ILogger logger) 9: { 10: Logger = logger; 11: Name = "Product 1"; 12: } 13:  14: public string WriteProductDetails() 15: { 16: StringBuilder productDetails = new StringBuilder(); 17: productDetails.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", Name); 18: productDetails.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", Logger.WriteLog()); 19: productDetails.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", Distributor.WriteDistributorDetails()); 20: return productDetails.ToString(); 21: } 22: } This version has a property of type IDistributor and takes a constructor parameter of type ILogger. The IDistributor property has a Dependency attribute (Microsoft.Practices.Unity namespace) applied to it. IDistributor and its implementation are shown below: 1: public interface IDistributor 2: { 3: string WriteDistributorDetails(); 4: } 5:  6: public class Distributor : IDistributor 7: { 8: public List<string> DistributorNames = new List<string>(); 9:  10: public Distributor() 11: { 12: DistributorNames.Add("Distributor1"); 13: DistributorNames.Add("Distributor2"); 14: DistributorNames.Add("Distributor3"); 15: DistributorNames.Add("Distributor4"); 16: } 17: public string WriteDistributorDetails() 18: { 19: StringBuilder distributors = new StringBuilder(); 20: for (int i = 0; i < DistributorNames.Count; i++) 21: { 22: distributors.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", DistributorNames[i]); 23: } 24: return distributors.ToString(); 25: } 26: } ILogger and the FileLogger have the following definition: 1: public interface ILogger 2: { 3: string WriteLog(); 4: } 5:  6: public class FileLogger : ILogger 7: { 8: public string WriteLog() 9: { 10: return string.Format("Type: {0}", GetType()); 11: } 12: } The Unity container creates an instance of the dependent class (the Distributor class) within the scope of the target object (an instance of Product3 class that will be called by doing a Resolve<IProduct>() in the calling code) and assign this dependent object to the attributed property of the target object. To add to it, property injection is a form of optional injection of dependent objects.The dependent object instance is generated before the container returns the target object. Unlike constructor injection, you must apply the appropriate attribute in the target class to initiate property injection. Let’s see how to change the config file to make this work. The first step is to add all the type aliases: 1: <typeAlias alias="Product3" type="ProductModel.Product3, ProductModel"/> 2: <typeAlias alias="ILogger" type="ProductModel.ILogger, ProductModel"/> 3: <typeAlias alias="FileLogger" type="ProductModel.FileLogger, ProductModel"/> 4: <typeAlias alias="IDistributor" type="ProductModel.IDistributor, ProductModel"/> 5: <typeAlias alias="Distributor" type="ProductModel.Distributor, ProductModel"/> Now define mappings for these aliases: 1: <type type="ILogger" mapTo="FileLogger" /> 2: <type type="IDistributor" mapTo="Distributor" /> Next step is to define the constructor and property injection in the config file: 1: <type type="IProduct" mapTo="Product3" name="ComplexProduct"> 2: <typeConfig extensionType="Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration.TypeInjectionElement, Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration"> 3: <constructor> 4: <param name="logger" parameterType="ILogger" /> 5: </constructor> 6: <property name="Distributor" propertyType="IDistributor"> 7: <dependency /> 8: </property> 9: </typeConfig> 10: </type> There you see a constructor element that tells there’s a property named ‘logger’ that is of type ILogger. By default, the type of ILogger gets resolved to type FileLogger. There’s also a property named ‘Distributor’ which is of type IDistributor and which will get resolved to type Distributor. On the calling side, I’ve added a new button, whose click event does the following: 1: protected void InjectionButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: unityContainer.RegisterType<IProduct, Product3>(); 4: IProduct product3 = unityContainer.Resolve<IProduct>(); 5: productDetailsLabel.Text = product3.WriteProductDetails(); 6: } This renders the following output: This completes the part for constructor and property injection. In the next blog, I’ll talk about Arrays and Generics. Please see the code used here.

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• Why Executives Need Enterprise Project Portfolio Management: 3 Key Considerations to Drive Value Across the Organization

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif";} By: Guy Barlow, Oracle Primavera Industry Strategy Director Over the last few years there has been a tremendous shift – some would say tectonic in nature – that has brought project management to the forefront of executive attention. Many factors have been driving this growing awareness, most notably, the global financial crisis, heightened regulatory environments and a need to more effectively operationalize corporate strategy. Executives in India are no exception. In fact, given the phenomenal rate of progress of the country, top of mind for all executives (whether in finance, operations, IT, etc.) is the need to build capacity, ramp-up production and ensure that the right resources are in place to capture growth opportunities. This applies across all industries from asset-intensive – like oil & gas, utilities and mining – to traditional manufacturing and the public sector, including services-based sectors such as the financial, telecom and life sciences segments are also part of the mix. However, compounding matters is a complex, interplay between projects – big and small, complex and simple – as companies expand and grow both domestically and internationally. So, having a standardized, enterprise wide solution for project portfolio management is natural. Failing to do so is akin to having two ERP systems, one to manage “large” invoices and one to manage “small” invoices. It makes no sense and provides no enterprise wide visibility. Therefore, it is imperative for executives to understand the full range of their business commitments, the benefit to the company, current performance and associated course corrections if needed. Irrespective of industry and regardless of the use case (e.g., building a power plant, launching a new financial service or developing a new automobile) company leaders need to approach the value of enterprise project portfolio management via 3 critical areas: 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif";} 1. Greater Financial Discipline – Improve financial rigor and results through better governance and control is an imperative given today’s financial uncertainty and greater investment scrutiny. For example, as India plans a US$1 trillion investment in the country’s infrastructure how do companies ensure costs are managed? How do you control cash flow? Can you easily report this to stakeholders? 2. Improved Operational Excellence – Increase efficiency and reduce costs through robust collaboration and integration. Upwards of 66% of cost variances are driven by poor supplier collaboration. As you execute initiatives do you have visibility into the performance of your supply base? How are they integrated into the broader program plan? 3. Enhanced Risk Mitigation – Manage and react to uncertainty through improved transparency and contingency planning. What happens if you’re faced with a skills shortage? How do you plan and account for geo-political or weather related events? In summary, projects are not just the delivery of a product or service to a customer inside a predetermined schedule; they often form a contractual and even moral obligation to shareholders and stakeholders alike. Hence the intimate connection between executives and projects, with the latter providing executives with the platform to demonstrate that their organization has the capabilities and competencies needed to meet and, whenever possible, exceed their customer commitments. Effectively developing and operationalizing corporate strategy is the hallmark of successful executives and enterprise project and portfolio management allows them to achieve this goal. Article was first published for Manage India, an e-newsletter, PMI India.

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• CS, SE, HCI, Information Science, Please recommendation for further education of the former performing art manager seeking career in IT industries? [on hold]

  - by Baek Seungjoo

  IT specialists there J Thank you very much for your collective efforts here, and I got huge help reading your professional comments and advices on each questions I have searched so far! This time, I would like to ask for your practical advices or recommendation on what I am struggling on at this moment. I am currently seeking higher education for my career transition from performing art manager and director to “IT software and/or service development and management specialist”. However, as this field is quite new to me, and there are lots of different work positions, I have no idea which grad major I better pursue in order to get qualification. Of course I know this question could sounds wired as it is kind of personal choice. But my lack of understanding on how IT software companies work in general, your practical and experience-based advice will be great help to me, who spent more than two months of self-research on net. OK. Before my question, here is my plan and history, which are quite different from those currently in IT industry I think… 1) Target Firstly, get career transition into IT service or products companies and get experiences. Eventually, pursue IT entrepreneurship in combination with my arts and cultural production and business expertise. 2) Background Career: performing arts director and manager in theatre-based scale opera and musical Art education in youth BA in literature and Chinese studies (Art & Humanities) MA in Cultural & Creative Industries (Art & Humanities) – dissertation with focus on digital prosumption and the lived experience of the prosumer. (a qualitative research on the agents in the digital world) 2) Personally Huge interest in IT hardware and software, and their trend. Skills to build up, repair, tune PCs -of course this is no more than personal hobby, but shows my interests in this field. 4) Problem Encounter a question “So, what do you think you can contribute practically in this position”. This question turn me down everytime I go through job interviews, and I decided more education in the relevant area. Here are my questions. 1) In terms of work positions in IT software companies, I wonder if I can put the comparison of what “Artists” is to “Arts Manager or Director” is what “Developer” is to “Product Manager”. (Of course, this stereotypical division of Artist-Art Manager is out of sense because the domain overlaps to some extent, and is blurring at least in my field, and they are in different contexts, but just speaking easily.) Normally, artist comes with special arts educations, and they live in their own world of artistic inspiration and creation, and they feel alive in practice and on stages. Meanwhile, from the point of staging and managing productions, the role of art manager is critical as well. Our role cares how the production appeals to the audience in effective way, how to make profit and future sustainable management through that, how to set up future strategy in consideration of the external conditions such as political and social circumstances, audience trend and level, other production trends from on-going and historical perspectives, how and what the production make voice to the society from political, economic, humanitarian stances. So, we need keen eyes on economic, political, and societal environment, have to understand human-being and their desires, must know how to make presentation and attract investors, must have sense in managing and fighting over the limited financial resource, how to extend networking and so on. It is common that the two agents create productions in collaboration (normally not in that ideal way but in conflict and fight though J ). So, we need to know each other’s expertise to some extent, for better production. What are the work positions in IT software industries equivalent to the role of “art manager” in performing arts? From my view, considering developers come with special education in the world of computer science, software engineering, or others (self-education sometimes), and they express themselves with the arts of coding, computer languages on the black screen, and make sort of their artistic production online to the audience, I guess there might be someone who collaborate with developers in creating, managing, and launching IT services or products. 2) Which education among CS, SE, HCI, Information Science, is needed for those seeking such work position? Especially for person like me. (At this moment, Information Science has the highest possibility to get in, since I lack Calculus and Math in undergrad educaiton. But please let me know irrespective of this concern, I think there are ways to back it up if CS or SE education needed in my case) 3) Which field between Information Science and HCI can be more practical background regarding job hungting? And which of them have more demands in job market? AS I checked, HCI is more close to CS than IS in its focus of study area. Thank you very much for your patience reading such a long inquiry, and I appreciate to your efforts in advance. Have a nice day in this beautiful summer.

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