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• BI&EPM in Focus June 2012

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  General News Thomas Kurian Discusses Oracle Exalytics, SAP HANA (replay | preso | press)  Accenture & Oracle Study: The Challenges of Corporate Financial Reporting  (link) Flash Demo: Oracle Hyperion Planning on Exalytics in the Public Sector (link) Flash Demo: OBIEE & Exalytics in Retail (link) Customers Italian Partner Alfa Sistemi implemented at Autovie Venete S.p.A. Integrates Business Intelligence and Performance Management to Improve Efficiency and Speed for Managing Public Works Projects (English version)  / Autovie Venete implementa un sistema integrato di Business Intelligence e Performance Management per migliorare l’efficienza e la tempestività dell’attività di Controlling di Commessa (Italian version). FANCL Gains 360-Degree View of Customers across Multiple Sales Channels, Reduces Reports by 75% Korea Yakult Improves Profit & Loss Analysis with Oracle Hyperion Planning and OBIEE Hill International Streamlines Forecasting, Improves Visibility into Project Productivity and Profitability Children’s Rights in Society Better Supports Organizational Mission with Advanced, Integrated, and Streamlined Business Intelligence Tools Profit: International utility Enel monitors the performance of global subsidiaries with Oracle Hyperion Applications (link) Profit: Charting a New Course: Korean Air gains altitude by leveraging its greatest asset: information (link)   Events June 12: Breaking Away from the Excel Add-In: Welcome to Hyperion Smart View 11.1.2.2 (link) June 13: Upgrading OBIEE 10g to 11g: Best Practices and Lessons Learned (performance architects) (link) June 14, The Netherlands: Strategies for Business Excellence, New Release of Oracle Hyperion EPM Suite (link) June 21: Comprehensive and Accurate Forecasting for Healthcare (link) June 26: What Exactly is Exalytics? (KPI Partners) (link) Webcast Replay: Is Your Company Able to Navigate Through Market Volatility? (link)  Webcast Replay: Is Hope and Email The Core of Your Reconciliation Process? (link) Webcast Replay: Troubleshooting EPM Reporting & Analysis 11.1.2.x  (link) Webcast Replay: Is your Organization Flying Blind when it comes to Understanding Profitability?  (link) Enterprise Performance Management Final Oracle EPM  Information Panel (CIP) survey on cost, profitability and performance reporting/scorecards is now OPEN (link) New on EPM Blog: What's Going on With IFRS? (link) How does Crystal Ball integrate with EPM Solutions? New collateral and demos on Crystal Ball Solution Factory!  (link) New Youtube Video: Business Case Analysis with Oracle Crystal Ball (link) Crystal Ball 11.1.2.2 is released! Grouped Assumptions in Sensitivity Charts, Data Filtering When Fitting Distributions and Parameter Edits When Fitting Distributions to name a few. Get full details from the online New Features Guide (link) New DRM Oracle-by-Examples now available (link) Support Blog: Hyperion Ledgerlink Sample Record and Windows 7: Now you see it, now you don’t  (link) Use Enterprise Manager FMW Control to Troubleshoot Oracle EPM 11.1.2 Family of Products (link) Business  Intelligence Whitepaper: Real-Time Operational Reporting for E-Business Suite via GoldenGate Replication to an Operational Data Store.  How Oracle enabled real-time operational reporting for its $20B services contract business with Golden Gate & OBIEE (link) KPI Partners ebook: Understanding Oracle BI Components and Repository Modeling Basics (link) “Getting Started with Oracle Endeca Information Discovery” video tutorials now available (link) Oracle BI Publisher Conversion Center: Convert from Crystal, Actuate, or Oracle Reports to Oracle BI Publisher (link) Oracle Fusion Applications: Monthly Partner Updates Webcast Replays to help BI partners understand how OBI, Essbase, BI-Apps and Fusion work together: More on Fusion CRM: Fusion Marketing More on Fusion CRM: Fusion CRM Sales Start-Up Packs and Expert Services for Implementation Partners Introducing the Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub Implementing Fusion Applications using Oracle's Composers Oracle Fusion Applications Co-Existence

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• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010

  - by Wayne

  Another SharePoint Server 2010 feature which cannot go unnoticed is the Access Services. Access Services is a service in SharePoint Server 2010 that allows administrators to view, edit, and configure a Microsoft access application within a Web Browser. Access Services settings support backup and recovery, regardless of whether there is a UI setting in Central Administration. However, backup and recovery only apply to service-level and administrative-level settings; end-user content from the Access application is not backed up as part of this process. Access Services has Windows PowerShell functionality that can be used to provide the service that uses settings from a previous backup; configure and manage macro and query setting; manage and configure session management; and configure all the global settings of the service. Key Benefits of SharePoint Server Access Services Easier Access to right tools: The enhanced, customizable Ribbon in Access 2010 makes it easy to uncover more commands so you can focus on the end product. The new Microsoft Office BackstageTM view is yet another feature that can help you easily analyze and document your database, share, publish, and customize your Access 2010 experience, all from one convenient location. Helps build database effortlessly and quickly: Out-of-the box templates and reusable components make Access Services the fastest, simplest database solution available. It helps find new pre-built templates which you can start using without customization or select templates created by your peers in the Access online community and customize them to meet your needs. It builds your databases with new modular components. New Application Parts enable you to add a set of common Access components, such as a table and form for task management, to your database in a few simple clicks. Database navigation is now simplified. It creates Navigation Forms and makes your frequently used forms and reports more accessible without writing any code or logic. Create Impactful forms and reports: Whether it's an inventory of your assets or customer sales database, Access 2010 brings the innovative tools you'd expect from Microsoft Office. Access Services easily spot trends and add emphasis to your data. It quickly create coordinating database forms and reports and bring the Web into your database. Obtain a centralized landing pad for your data: Access 2010 offers easy ways to bring your data together and help increase work quality. New technologies help break down barriers so you can share and work together on your databases, making you or your team more efficient and productive. Add automation and complex expressions: If you need a more robust database design, such as preventing record deletion if a specific condition is met or if you need to create calculations to forecast your budget, Access 2010 empowers you to be your own developer. The enhanced Expression Builder greatly simplifies your expression building experience with IntelliSense®. With the revamped Macro Designer, it's now even easier for you to add basic logic to your database. New Data Macros allow you to attach logic to your data, centralizing the logic on the table, not the objects that update your data. Key features of Access Services 2010 - Access database content through a Web browser: Newly added Access Services on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 enables you to make your databases available on the Web with new Web databases. Users without an Access client can open Web forms and reports via a browser and changes are automatically synchronized. - Simplify how you access the features you need: The Ribbon, improved in Access 2010, helps you access commands even more quickly by enabling you to customize or create your own tabs. The new Microsoft Office Backstage view replaces the traditional File menu to provide one central, organized location for all of your document management tasks. - Codeless navigation: Use professional looking web-like navigation forms to make frequently used forms and reports more accessible without writing any code or logic. - Easily reuse Access items in other databases: Use Application Parts to add pre-built Access components for common tasks to your database in a few simple clicks. You can also package common database components, such as data entry forms and reports for task management, and reuse them across your organization or other databases. - Simplified formatting: By using Office themes you can create coordinating professional forms and reports across your database. Simply select a familiar and great looking Office theme, or design your own, and apply it to your database. Newly created Access objects will automatically match your chosen theme.

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• Sneak Peak: Social Developer Program at JavaOne

  - by Mike Stiles

  By guest blogger Roland Smart We're just days away from what is gunning to be the most exciting installment of OpenWorld to date, so how about an exciting sneak peak at the very first Social Developer Program? If your first thought is, "What's a social developer?" you're not alone. It’s an emerging term and one we think will gain prominence as social experiences become more prevalent in enterprise applications. For those who keep an eye on the ever-evolving Facebook platform, you'll recall that they recently rebranded their PDC (preferred developer consultant) group as the PMD (preferred marketing developer), signaling the importance of development resources inside the marketing organization to unlock the potential of social. The marketing developer they're referring to could be considered a social developer in a broader context. While it's true social has really blossomed in the marketing context and CMOs are winning more and more technical resources, social is starting to work its way more deeply into the enterprise with the help of developers that work outside marketing. Developers, like the rest of us, have fallen in "like" with social functionality and are starting to imagine how social can transform enterprise applications in the way it has consumer-facing experiences. The thesis of my presentation is that social developers will take many pages from the marketing playbook as they apply social inside the enterprise. To support this argument, lets walk through a range of enterprise applications and explore how consumer-facing social experiences might be interpreted in this context. Here's one example of how a social experience could be integrated into a sales enablement application. As a marketer, I spend a great deal of time collaborating with my sales colleagues, so I have good insight into their working process. While at Involver, we grew our sales team quickly, and it became evident some of our processes broke with scale. For example, we used to have weekly team meetings at which we'd discuss what was working and what wasn't from a messaging perspective. One aspect of these sessions focused on "objections" and "responses," where the salespeople would walk through common objections to purchasing and share appropriate responses. We tried to map each context to best answers and we'd capture these on a wiki page. As our team grew, however, participation at scale just wasn't tenable, and our wiki pages quickly lost their freshness. Imagine giving salespeople a place where they could submit common objections and responses for their colleagues to see, sort, comment on, and vote on. What you'd get is an up-to-date and relevant repository of information. And, if you supported an application like this with a social graph, it would be possible to make good recommendations to individual sales people about the objections they'd likely hear based on vertical, product, region or other graph data. Taking it even further, you could build in a badging/game element to reward those salespeople who participate the most. Both these examples are based on proven models at work inside consumer-facing applications. If you want to learn about how HR, Operations, Product Development and Customer Support can leverage social experiences, you’re welcome to join us at JavaOne or join our Social Developer Community to find some of the presentations after OpenWorld.

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• How to build a great relationship with your colleagues

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} When you start new job, you worry about your performance, about being able to do what the manager asks you to do, but you also worry about the relations with your colleagues. How will you get along with them? What if they don’t like you? Have you ever felt you’re „the new guy” and your colleagues have already their own way of talking one to each other, their own jokes? It’s a common feeling and can actually become stressful. I am Norbert, Middleware Presales Intern in Hungary and I’ve been working within Oracle for only 1 month. Joining such a big company has been a challenge from many perspectives. One of them was adapting with the environment and getting to know all my colleagues. You know it’s quite difficult to introduce yourself, to try to liaise with them and find some common topics, so I felt very lucky and comfortable when my manager introduced me to all of my colleagues. It was easier to accommodate and we basically we had a starting point for our discussions. We started to talk about what my position means, for how many years they’ve been within Oracle, other Oracle related topics, but also more personal stuff like what they do after work. Having this opportunity of talking with all of them helped me introduce myself in a proper way and actually I told them many things about myself. Networking wasn’t my best skill, but these first days were really helpful from a network point of view. What else can you do to get along with your colleagues? One second thing I consider as being really helpful in networking is asking work-related questions. For instance, when you don’t know how to do something or don’t understand it, asking one of your colleagues will also help you to make a connection with him and you could easily continue the discussion with some other topics which are more personal. It’s a very effective strategy and in a company like Oracle people are very willing to help you with your tasks and perform at a high level. If you see your colleagues going to lunch, you should join them. It will help you become part of their community, finding out what’s new in their lives, you’ll, step-by-step, take part in their conversations and be up to date with the hot topics they talk about. One other opportunity of becoming part of your colleagues’ community are the internal events. Subscribing to the local free time activities mailing list is very useful for finding out information about when they’re going out and have a drink or attending all sorts of events. For instance, this is how I’ve found out about a party within Oracle that most of the employees here attend. It’s a wonderful opportunity for chatting and make a stronger connection to some of them. How important is attending these events? Think about how much time you spend at work. You’d like to enjoy your work and the environment, so getting along with your colleagues is a nice thing to have. I recently attended a corporate party whose purpose was to facilitate the interaction and communication between employees. It was a real success and we had a lot of fun, especially because it was a costume party.  All the fancy dresses and funny clothes we wore made the atmosphere really enjoyable. It was easy to liaise with colleague with whom I had never interacted with before. There was a friendly spirit among us, chatting about personal stuff and about various pleasant things. Working in an international company is not an easy thing because you interact with many people and they have different styles, but all these opportunities of informal interaction are a good way to adapt to the new working environment.

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• How to Waste Your Marketing Budget

  - by Mike Stiles

  Philosophers have long said if you find out where a man’s money is, you’ll know where his heart is. Find out where money in a marketing budget is allocated, and you’ll know how adaptive and ready that company is for the near future. Marketing spends are an investment. Not unlike buying stock, the money is placed in areas the marketer feels will yield the highest return. Good stock pickers know the lay of the land, the sectors, the companies, and trends. Likewise, good marketers should know the media available to them, their audience, what they like & want, what they want their marketing to achieve…and trends. So what are they doing? And how are they doing? A recent eTail report shows nearly half of retailers planned on focusing on SEO, SEM, and site research technologies in the coming months. On the surface, that’s smart. You want people to find you. And you’re willing to let the SEO tail wag the dog and dictate the quality (or lack thereof) of your content such as blogs to make that happen. So search is prioritized well ahead of social, multi-channel initiatives, email, even mobile - despite the undisputed explosive growth and adoption of it by the public. 13% of retailers plan to focus on online video in the next 3 months. 29% said they’d look at it in 6 months. Buying SEO trickery is easy. Attracting and holding an audience with wanted, relevant content…that’s the hard part. So marketers continue to kick the content can down the road. Pretty risky since content can draw and bind customers to you. Asked to look a year ahead, retailers started thinking about CRM systems, customer segmentation, and loyalty, (again well ahead of online video, social and site personalization). What these investors are missing is social is spreading across every function of the enterprise and will be a part of CRM, personalization, loyalty programs, etc. They’re using social for engagement but not for PR, customer service, and sales. Mistake. Allocations are being made seemingly blind to the trends. Even more peculiar are the results of an analysis Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins made. She looked at how much time people spend with media types and how marketers are investing in those media. 26% of media consumption is online, marketers spend 22% of their ad budgets there. 10% of media time is spent with mobile, but marketers are spending 1% of their ad budgets there. 7% of media time is spent with print, but (get this) marketers spend 25% of their ad budgets there. It’s like being on Superman’s Bizarro World. Mary adds that of the online spending, most goes to search while spends on content, even ad content, stayed flat. Stock pickers know to buy low and sell high. It means peering with info in hand into the likely future of a stock and making the investment in it before it peaks. Either marketers aren’t believing the data and trends they’re seeing, or they can’t convince higher-ups to acknowledge change and adjust their portfolios accordingly. Follow @mikestilesImage via stock.xchng

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

  - by dgreen

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

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• Come see us at JavaU at JavaOne!

  - by tmcginn

  In just a little under a month, JavaOne will be in full swing (no pun intended) and thousands of Java developers will gather to hear the latest Java news, immerse themselves in Java technology and learn some new things. This year, I am fortunate enough to be able to attend, along with my Java curriculum development colleagues Matt Heimer and Mike Williams. We start our week at JavaOne teaching a one-day session at JavaU on Sunday morning. If you have never attended a training session through JavaU, you should check it out. There are some terrific sessions this year, and it might help to justify your trip to JavaOne if you can say it was for training! This year I am teaching a one day session on Java SE 7 New Features - a great session for anyone interested in the specific details of what is new in Java SE 7. Matt is teaching a one-day session on Developing Portable Java EE applications with the Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1 API and Java Persistence 2.0 API  EJB, and Mike is doing a one-day session on developing Rich Client applications with Java SE 7 using Java FX 2. I asked Matt and Mike to tell me what developers can expect from their sessions. Matt: "My session will get you up to speed on everything you need to know to create portable Java EE 6 applications using EJB 3.1 and JPA 2. I am going to cover why everyone can benefit from using EJBs (and why developers should relearn them if they haven't looked at them for years). Students who attend my session will see JPA examples showcasing how to use relational databases in an enterprise applications without programming to JDBC and without writing SQL statements. EJB and JPA benefit from being paired together, so I will also show how transaction management is easier in a container. I encourage students to bring a laptop and code as they learn!" Mike: "My session covers how to develop a rich client application using Java FX 2. Starting with the basic concepts of JavaFX, students will see how a JavaFX application is built from its layout, to its controls, to its data structures. In addition, more advanced controls like charts, smart tables, and transitions will be added to the application. Finally, a quick review of JavaFX concurrency and data binding is included. Blended with the core concepts the session will include some of the latest JavaFX technology. This includes using Scene Builder to create a JavaFX UI and connecting your XML UI definition to Java code.  In addition, packaging of the JavaFX application will be covered with some examples of the new native packaging features." As I mentioned, my session covers the changes in the Java for SE 7, including the  language changes that were voted into Java SE 7 from Project Coin. I will also look at how you can take advantage if the the new I/O library (NIO.2) for writing applications that work with files, directories and file systems. We will also look at the changes in Asynchronous I/O that are a part of the changes in NIO/2. We will spend some time looking at the changes to the Java Virtual Machine as well, including support for dynamically typed languages (JSR-292). We will spend some time looking at the Java Concurrency enhancements (JSR-166), including the new Fork/Join framework. And we'll round out the day with a look at changes in Swing, XML and a number of smaller changes in the API's. And, if these topics aren't grabbing your interest, take a look at the other 10 sessions that range from topics on architecture to how to pass the Oracle Certified Programmer I and II exams. See you soon!

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• Books are Dead! Long Live the Books!

  - by smisner

  We live in interesting times with regard to the availability of technical material. We have lots of free written material online in the form of vendor documentation online, forums, blogs, and Twitter. And we have written material that we can buy in the form of books, magazines, and training materials. Online videos and training – some free and some not free – are also an option. All of these formats are useful for one need or another. As an author, I pay particular attention to the demand for books, and for now I see no reason to stop authoring books. I assure you that I don’t get rich from the effort, and fortunately that is not my motivation. As someone who likes to refer to books frequently, I am still a big believer in books and have evidence from book sales that there are others like me. If I can do my part to help others learn about the technologies I work with, I will continue to produce content in a variety of formats, including books. (You can view a list of all of my books on the Publications page of my site and my online training videos at Pluralsight.) As a consumer of technical information, I prefer books because a book typically can get into a topic much more deeply than a blog post, and can provide more context than vendor documentation. It comes with a table of contents and a (hopefully accurate) index that helps me zero in on a topic of interest, and of course I can use the Search feature in digital form. Some people suggest that technology books are outdated as soon as they get published. I guess it depends on where you are with technology. Not everyone is able to upgrade to the latest and greatest version at release. I do assume, however, that the SQL Server 7.0 titles in my library have little value for me now, but I’m certain that the minute I discard the book, I’m going to want it for some reason! Meanwhile, as electronic books overtake physical books in sales, my husband is grateful that I can continue to build my collection digitally rather than physically as the books have a way of taking over significant square footage in our house! Blog posts, on the other hand, are useful for describing the scenarios that come up in real-life implementations that wouldn’t fit neatly into a book. As many years that I have working with the Microsoft BI stack, I still run into new problems that require creative thinking. Likewise, people who work with BI and other technologies that I use share what they learn through their blogs. Internet search engines help us find information in blogs that simply isn’t available anywhere else. Another great thing about blogs, also, is the connection to community and the dialog that can ensue between people with common interests. With the trend towards electronic formats for books, I imagine that we’ll see books continue to adapt to incorporate different forms of media and better ways to keep the information current. At the moment, I wish I had a better way to help readers with my last two Reporting Services books. In the case of the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Reporting Services Step by Step book, I have heard many cases of readers having problems with the sample database that shipped on CD – either the database was missing or it was corrupt. So I’ve provided a copy of the database on my site for download from http://datainspirations.com/uploads/rs2005sbsDW.zip. Then for the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 Reporting Services Step by Step book, we decided to avoid the database problem by using the AdventureWorks2008 samples that Microsoft published on Codeplex (although code samples are still available on CD). We had this silly idea that the URL for the download would remain constant, but it seems that expectation was ill-founded. Currently, the sample database is found at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37109 but I have no idea how long that will remain valid. My latest books (#9 and #10 which are milestones I never anticipated), Building Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 (McGraw Hill, 2011) and Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft Press, 2011), will not ship with a CD, but will provide all code samples for download at a site maintained by the respective publishers. I expect that the URLs for the downloads for the book will remain valid, but there are lots of references to other sites that can change or disappear over time. Does that mean authors shouldn’t make reference to such sites? Personally, I think the benefits to be gained from including links are greater than the risks of the links becoming invalid at some point. Do you think the time for technology books has come to an end? Is the delivery of books in electronic format enough to keep them alive? If technological barriers were no object, what would make a book more valuable to you than other formats through which you can obtain information?

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• Best way to store a large amount of game objects and update the ones onscreen

  - by user3002473

  Good afternoon guys! I'm a young beginner game developer working on my first large scale game project and I've run into a situation where I'm not quite sure what the best solution may be (if there is a lone solution). The question may be vague (if anyone can think of a better title after having read the question, please edit it) or broad but I'm not quite sure what to do and I thought it would help just to discuss the problem with people more educated in the field. Before we get started, here are some of the questions I've looked at for help in the past: Best way to keep track of game objects Elegant way to simulate large amounts of entities within a game world What is the most efficient container to store dynamic game objects in? I've also read articles about different data structures commonly used in games to store game objects such as this one about slot maps, but none of them are really what I'm looking for. Also, if it helps at all I'm using Python 3 to design the game. It has to be Python 3, if I could I would use C++ or Unityscript or something else, but I'm restricted to having to use Python 3. My game will be a form of side scroller shooter game. In said game the player will traverse large rooms with large amounts of enemies and other game objects to update (think some of the larger areas in Cave Story or Iji). The player obviously can't see the entire room all at once, so there is a viewport that follows the player around and renders only a selection of the room and the game objects that it contains. This is not a foreign concept. The part that's getting me confused has to do with how certain game objects are updated. Some of them are to be updated constantly, regardless of whether or not they can be seen. Other objects however are only to be updated when they are onscreen (for example, an enemy would only be updated to react to the player when it is onscreen or when it is in a certain range of the screen). Another problem is that game objects have to be easily referable by other game objects; something that happens in the player's update() method may affect another object in the world. Collision detection in games is always a serious problem. I need a way of containing the game objects such that it minimizes the number of cases when testing for collisions against one another. The final problem is that of creating and destroying game objects. I think this problem is pretty self explanatory. To store the game objects then I've considered a number of different methods. The original method I had was to simply store all the objects in a hash table by an id. This method was simple, and decently fast as it allows all the objects to be looked up in O(1) complexity, and also allows them to be deleted fairly easily. Hash collisions would not be a major problem; I wasn't originally planning on using computer generated ids to store the game objects I was going to rely on them all using ids given to them by the game designer (such names would be strings like 'Player' or 'EnemyWeapon4'), and even if I did use computer generated ids, if I used a decent hashing algorithm then the chances of collisions would be around 1 in 4 billion. The problem with using a hash table however is that it is inefficient in checking to see what objects are in range of the viewport. Considering the fact that certain game objects move (as well as the viewport itself), the only solution I could think of in order to only update objects that are in the viewport would be to iterate through every object in the hash table and check if it is in the viewport or not, updating only the ones that are in the valid area. This would be incredibly slow in scenarios where the amount of game objects exceeds 500, or even 200. The second solution was to store everything in a 2-d list. The world is partitioned up into cells (a tilemap essentially), where each cell or tile is the same size and is square. Each cell would contain a list of the game objects that are currently occupying it (each game object would be inserted into a cell depending on the center of the object's collision mask). A 2-d list would allow me to take the top-left and bottom-right corners of the viewport and easily grab a rectangular area of the grid containing only the cells containing entities that are in valid range to be updated. This method also solves the problem of collision detection; when I take an entity I can find the cell that it is currently in, then check only against entities in it's cell and the 8 cells around it. One problem with this system however is that it prohibits easy lookup of game objects. One solution I had would be to simultaneously keep a hash table that would contain all the positions of the objects in the 2-d list indexed by the id of said object. The major problem with a 2-d list is that it would need to be rebuilt every single game frame (along with the hash table of object positions), which may be a serious detriment to game speed. Both systems have ups and downs and seem to solve some of each other's problems, however using them both together doesn't seem like the best solution either. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, opinions or solutions on new data structures or better implementations of the existing data structures I have in mind, please post, any and all criticism and help is welcome. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Please don't close the question because it has a bad title, I'm just bad with names!

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• Converting LINQ to Twitter to Twitter API v1.1

  - by Joe Mayo

  Twitter recently updated their API to v1.1 (Current status: API v1.1). Naturally, LINQ to Twitter  needed to be updated too. This blog post outlines the changes made to LINQ to Twitter during this conversion and highlights important features that LINQ to Twitter developers will want to know. Overall Impact Generally speaking, Twitter API v1.1 is semantically very much the same as it’s predecessor. The base URL changed and so did a few resource segments, but the resources themselves are still intact. The good news is that LINQ to Twitter has always shielded the developer from this plumbing, so the entities, types, and filters didn’t change much at all.  The following sections describe what did  change. Authentication In Twitter API v1.0 authentication was not required for some resources, such as user timelines and search. However, that’s all changed because *all* queries must be authenticated in Twitter API v1.1. LINQ to Twitter has various types of authorizers you can use, supporting whatever OAuth options are available via Twitter.  You can see the LINQ to Twitter documentation, Securing Your Applications, for more info on OAuth support. The New Search One of the larger changes to the API was Search. To be more specific, the Search entity now contains a List<Status>, named Statuses, to hold results.  Additionally, any meta-data associated with the search is now in a property named SearchMetaData. The change to the Search entity and responses is the big change, but the good news is that your Search query syntax doesn’t change. Different Rate Limits The issue of rate limits itself is contentious, but this discussion is focused on the coding experience and I’ll leave the politics to those who prefer to engage in that activity. What’s important here is that both headers and resources have changed. You should review Twitter’s Rate Limit documentation to understand what the changes mean.  A quick explanation is that rate limits are applied individually to each resource in 15 minute time intervals. In LINQ to Twitter these changes surface on the Help entity, via HelpType.RateLimits. The RateLimits query has a Resources filter where you can specify a comma-separated list of categories to return rate limit info for.  The results materialize in the RateLimits dictionary, keyed on category. The Help entity also has a RateLimitsAuthorizationContext, holding the Access Token for the user performing queries – and to whom the rate limits apply. In addition to the new RateLimits query, there are new RateLimit headers that appear in the query response, whose HTTP header name is of the form X-Rate-Limit… which is different from the previous header name. LINQ to Twitter surfaces these headers via the existing properties of the TwitterContext instance. For anyone who retrieved rate limit information via the Headers property of TwitterContext, you should be aware of the new header names.  I haven’t done anything with Feature rate limit properties yet, but they appear to no longer be available – this will require more follow-up. Error Handling Twitter API v1.1 has a new format for Error Codes & Responses. LINQ to Twitter wraps these messages in the TwitterQueryException, which has been updated appropriately. The Message property of TwitterQueryException now reflects the Twitter error message, when available. There’s also a new ErrorCode that’s populated with the message error code. Parameters Most parameters stayed the same, but one of interest is Include Entities (different from LINQ to Twitter data object entities). Entities are metadata hanging off tweets, that provide start/end position in the tweet and other information for mentions, urls, hash tags, and media. Entities used to not be included unless you specified you wanted them. Now, in v1.1, entities are included by default for all APIs that return a Status.  If you were always setting IncludeEntities to true, then you won’t see a change. However, be aware that you’ll now be receiving additional data in your response from Twitter, which will explain a sudden increase in bandwidth utilization. This might or might not  matter to you  depending on the requirements of your application, but you should be aware of it. Everything Else There might be small changes here and there that I haven’t mentioned, but these were the ones you should be most aware of.  Streams didn’t change, but Twitter will be deprecating username/password authentication on public streams, in favor of OAuth, so you’ll be seeing me make that change some time in the future.  Also, Twitter will continue to evolve the API and you can expect that LINQ to Twitter will change accordingly. Summary The big changes to Twitter API were Authentication, Search, Rate Limits, and Error Handling. All API calls must be authenticated. You’ll need to change your code to read Search results differently, but the query is much the same as you use now. There’s a new RateLimits API, one of the Help queries.  Also, the new error messages are integrated into TwitterQueryException. Besides these changes, I expect  most others to be small or affect a smaller percentage of developers.  You can get the latest version of LINQ to Twitter from NuGet or visit the LINQ to Twitter download page at CodePlex.com.   @JoeMayo

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• Gartner PCC: A Shovel & Some Ah-Ha's

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  When Gartner Vice President and leading analyst Whit Andrews kicked off the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit on Monday, March 12 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL by bringing a shovel to the stage, eyebrows raised and a few thoughts went through my head. Either this guy plans to go help the construction workers outside construct that new pool at the Gaylord or he took a wrong turn and is at the wrong conference. Oh and how did he get that shovel through airport security? As Whit explained more his objective became more clear…take everything anyone has ever told you about portals and throw it out the window, as portals have evolved and times they are most certainly changing. The future Web is here, available not only on browsers but also via a broad spectrum of access points, including automobiles, consumer electronics and more and more mobile devices. Not merely prevalent, the future Web is also multimedia-driven and operates in real time, driven by mobility, social media, streaming video and other dynamic services. Applications and user experiences are in the midst of an evolution — from the early, simple mobile Web models to today’s Web 2.0 mobile apps and, ultimately, to a world of predominantly Web apps. Additionally, cloud services will forever change how portals and user experience are designed, built, delivered, sourced and managed. So what does this mean for you? Today’s organizations need software that will enable them to not just do their jobs, but to do it in a way that is familiar and easy for them.  What does this mean for IT? Use software and technology as an enabler, not as a roadblock. Overall, we had a great week in Orlando learning about how to improve the user experience, manage content explosion, launch social initiatives, transition to mobile environments and understand cloud and SaaS options.  We had some great conversations throughout the conference and at the Oracle booth. Lots of demonstrations were given of Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Social Network. And as Christie mentioned earlier this week, our Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for WebCenter Loren Weinberg presented on the topic of customer engagement and talked about how organization’s relationships with their customers have fundamentally changed today and the resulting impact that has on their priorities.  Loren also talked about the importance of customer engagement, why that matters now more than ever, and what you can do to help your company or organization succeed in this new world. The question asked in every keynote and session was a simple one: What is your “ah-ha” moment? I personally had quite a few, some of which I’ve captured below. 70% of internal social initiatives eventually fail. By 2014, refusing to communicate with consumers via social media will be as harmful as ignoring emails/phone calls is today. Customer engagement = multi-channel + social & interactive + personal & relevant + optimized. If people choose to talk about your product/company/service, it's because it's remarkable. -- Seth Godin's keynote (one of the highlights of the conference!) The Web will become the primary method used for delivering content and applications to mobile devices. By 2015, 20% of smart phone users worldwide will conduct commerce using context-enriched services on a weekly basis.  86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. 6 P's of Quality User Experience. Product. Enabled by: People, Patterns, Process, Profit, Priorities. Did you attend the Gartner Summit? What were your ah-ha moments?

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• Run Oracle E-Business Suite Period Close Diagnostic

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document Be Proactive & Save Time—Use the Period Close Diagnostic During the Month Have you ever closed your books at the end of the month and, due to problems with your Oracle E-Business Suite Period Close, you found yourself working all night or all weekend to resolve your issues? You can avoid issues by running the Oracle E-Business Suite Period Close Diagnostics throughout the month, prior to closing Oracle Financial Assets, General Ledger, Payables, and/or Receivables. You can identify issues that will interfere with your period close early, preventing last minute fire drills. Correct your errors or, if you need Oracle Support’s assistance, attach the output to a service request for faster resolution by the support engineer. Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics are included in your Oracle Premier Support agreement at no extra charge. They are proactive, easy to use, tools provided by Oracle Support to ease the gathering and analyzing of information from your E-Business Suite, specific to an existing issue or setup. Formatted output displays the information gathered, the findings of the analysis, and the appropriate actions to take if necessary. These tools are designed for both the functional and technical user, providing no EBS administration features, so you can safely assign this responsibility to users who are not administrators. A good place to start with the Support Diagnostics is the install patch Note 167000.1. Everything you need is in this patch and you install it on top of your E-Business Suite. If you are on EBS 12.0.6 or below, Oracle delivers the diagnostic tests in a standard Oracle patch and you apply it using the adpatch utility. If you are on EBS release 12.1.1 or above, your diagnostics are already there. Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics: Prevent Issues—resolving configuration and data issues that would cause processes to fail Identify Issues Quickly—resolving problems without the need to contact Oracle Support Reduce Resolution Time—minimizing the time spent to resolve an issue by increasing support engineer efficiency In the example below, you will see how to run the EBS Period Close Diagnostic step-by-step using an SQLGL Period Closing Activity Test. This allows you to check throughout the month to identify and resolve any issue that might prevent closing the period in the General Ledger on schedule.   Click the Select Application button. Select your Application. In this example, we will use the Period Close test. Scroll down to Period Close Place a check mark in the Period Closing box in the Select column. Click the Execute button at the bottom of the page Input the parameters. Click the Submit button Click the Refresh button, until the Status of the test changes from “In Progress” to “Completed” Click the icon under, View Report to view the test results   The report will complete successfully or show completed with errors. The report will show where the error is located, what the error is, and what action(s) to take for resolution. Remember, if you need to work with Oracle Support to resolve your issue, attach the report to your Service Request so the engineer can start working the issue. Completed with errors Completed successfully with no errors If you have questions, please ask in the E-Business Suite Category’s Diagnostic Tools Community. You may find the answer waiting for you in a prior community discussion or in one of the resources posted by an Oracle Support moderator. Oracle’s Period Close Diagnostic, and the other E-Business Suite Diagnostics, save you time and help keep you on schedule. If you run the Period Close Diagnostic throughout the month, you can identify issues to resolve and get help, if needed. When opening a Service Request, attaching the output from the diagnostic report, speeds resolution. With the issues resolved ahead of time, your Period Close should complete without errors. Avoiding the unexpected, helps to close your books on time and without late nights or working through your weekend. Recommended Reads E-Business Suite Diagnostics Period / Year End Close [ID 402237.1] lists all of the Closing Period Diagnostic Tests. I highly recommend that customers execute these tests prior to closing a period. The period closing tests listed in this document help you identify known issues that prevent a successful period close. Use these tests prior to closing a period. To learn about all the available EBS Diagnostics, please review the E-Business Suite Diagnostics Overview [ID 342459.1].

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• To SYNC or not to SYNC – Part 4

  - by AshishRay

  This is Part 4 of a multi-part blog article where we are discussing various aspects of setting up Data Guard synchronous redo transport (SYNC). In Part 1 of this article, I debunked the myth that Data Guard SYNC is similar to a two-phase commit operation. In Part 2, I discussed the various ways that network latency may or may not impact a Data Guard SYNC configuration. In Part 3, I talked in details regarding why Data Guard SYNC is a good thing, and the distance implications you have to keep in mind. In this final article of the series, I will talk about how you can nicely complement Data Guard SYNC with the ability to failover in seconds. Wait - Did I Say “Seconds”? Did I just say that some customers do Data Guard failover in seconds? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Data Guard has an automatic failover capability, aptly called Fast-Start Failover. Initially available with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 for Data Guard SYNC transport mode (and enhanced in Oracle Database 11g to support Data Guard ASYNC transport mode), this capability, managed by Data Guard Broker, lets your Data Guard configuration automatically failover to a designated standby database. Yes, this means no human intervention is required to do the failover. This process is controlled by a low footprint Data Guard Broker client called Observer, which makes sure that the primary database and the designated standby database are behaving like good kids. If something bad were to happen to the primary database, the Observer, after a configurable threshold period, tells that standby, “Your time has come, you are the chosen one!” The standby dutifully follows the Observer directives by assuming the role of the new primary database. The DBA or the Sys Admin doesn’t need to be involved. And - in case you are following this discussion very closely, and are wondering … “Hmmm … what if the old primary is not really dead, but just network isolated from the Observer or the standby - won’t this lead to a split-brain situation?” The answer is No - It Doesn’t. With respect to why-it-doesn’t, I am sure there are some smart DBAs in the audience who can explain the technical reasons. Otherwise - that will be the material for a future blog post. So - this combination of SYNC and Fast-Start Failover is the nirvana of lights-out, integrated HA and DR, as practiced by some of our advanced customers. They have observed failover times (with no data loss) ranging from single-digit seconds to tens of seconds. With this, they support operations in industry verticals such as manufacturing, retail, telecom, Internet, etc. that have the most demanding availability requirements. One of our leading customers with massive cloud deployment initiatives tells us that they know about server failures only after Data Guard has automatically completed the failover process and the app is back up and running! Needless to mention, Data Guard Broker has the integration hooks for interfaces such as JDBC and OCI, or even for custom apps, to ensure the application gets automatically rerouted to the new primary database after the database level failover completes. Net Net? To sum up this multi-part blog article, Data Guard with SYNC redo transport mode, plus Fast-Start Failover, gives you the ideal triple-combo - that is, it gives you the assurance that for critical outages, you can failover your Oracle databases: very fast without human intervention, and without losing any data. In short, it takes the element of risk out of critical IT operations. It does require you to be more careful with your network and systems planning, but as far as HA is concerned, the benefits outweigh the investment costs. So, this is what we in the MAA Development Team believe in. What do you think? How has your deployment experience been? We look forward to hearing from you!

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• How would I handle input with a Game Component?

  - by Aufziehvogel

  I am currently having problems from finding my way into the component-oriented XNA design. I read an overview over the general design pattern and googled a lot of XNA examples. However, they seem to be right on the opposite site. In the general design pattern, an object (my current player) is passed to InputComponent::update(Player). This means the class will know what to do and how this will affect the game (e.g. move person vs. scroll text in a menu). Yet, in XNA GameComponent::update(GameTime) is called automatically without a reference to the current player. The only XNA examples I found built some sort of higher-level Keyboard engine into the game component like this: class InputComponent: GameComponent { public void keyReleased(Keys); public void keyPressed(Keys); public bool keyDown(Keys); public void override update(GameTime gameTime) { // compare previous state with current state and // determine if released, pressed, down or nothing } } Some others went a bit further making it possible to use a Service Locator by a design like this: interface IInputComponent { public void downwardsMovement(Keys); public void upwardsMovement(Keys); public bool pausedGame(Keys); // determine which keys pressed and what that means // can be done for different inputs in different implementations public void override update(GameTime); } Yet, then I am wondering if it is possible to design an input class to resolve all possible situations. Like in a menu a mouse click can mean "click that button", but in game play it can mean "shoot that weapon". So if I am using such a modular design with game components for input, how much logic is to be put into the InputComponent / KeyboardComponent / GamepadComponent and where is the rest handled? What I had in mind, when I heard about Game Components and Service Locator in XNA was something like this: use Game Components to run the InputHandler automatically in the loop use Service Locator to be able to switch input at runtime (i.e. let player choose if he wants to use a gamepad or a keyboard; or which shall be player 1 and which player 2). However, now I cannot see how this can be done. First code example does not seem flexible enough, as on a game pad you could require some combination of buttons for something that is possible on keyboard with only one button or with the mouse) The second code example seems really hard to implement, because the InputComponent has to know in which context we are currently. Moreover, you could imagine your application to be multi-layered and let the key-stroke go through all layers to the bottom-layer which requires a different behaviour than the InputComponent would have guessed from the top-layer. The general design pattern with passing the Player to update() does not have a representation in XNA and I also cannot see how and where to decide which class should be passed to update(). At most time of course the player, but sometimes there could be menu items you have to or can click I see that the question in general is already dealt with here, but probably from a more elobate point-of-view. At least, I am not smart enough in game development to understand it. I am searching for a rather code-based example directly for XNA. And the answer there leaves (a noob like) me still alone in how the object that should receive the detected event is chosen. Like if I have a key-up event, should it go to the text box or to the player?

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• Code refactoring with Visual Studio 2010 Part-4

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  I have been writing few post with code refactoring features in Visual Studio 2010. This post also will be part of series and this post will be last of the series. In this post I am going explain two features 1) Encapsulate Field and 2) Extract Interface. Let’s explore both features in details. Encapsulate Field: This is a nice code refactoring feature provides by Visual Studio 2010. With help of this feature we can create properties from the existing private field of the class. Let’s take a simple example of Customer Class. In that I there are two private field called firstName and lastName. Below is the code for the class. public class Customer { private string firstName; private string lastName; public string Address { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } } Now lets encapsulate first field firstName with Encapsulate feature. So first select that field and goto refactor menu in Visual Studio 2010 and click on Encapsulate Field. Once you click that a dialog box will appear like following. Now once you click OK a preview dialog box will open as we have selected preview reference changes. I think its a good options to check that option to preview code that is being changed by IDE itself. Dialog will look like following. Once you click apply it create a new property called FirstName. Same way I have done for the lastName and now my customer class code look like following. public class Customer { private string firstName; public string FirstName { get { return firstName; } set { firstName = value; } } private string lastName; public string LastName { get { return lastName; } set { lastName = value; } } public string Address { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } } So you can see that its very easy to create properties with existing fields and you don’t have to change anything there in code it will change all the stuff itself. Extract Interface: When you are writing software prototype and You don’t know the future implementation of that then its a good practice to use interface there. I am going to explain here that How we can extract interface from the existing code without writing a single line of code with the help of code refactoring feature of Visual Studio 2010. For that I have create a Simple Repository class called CustomerRepository with three methods like following. public class CustomerRespository { public void Add() { // Some code to add customer } public void Update() { //some code to update customer } public void Delete() { //some code delete customer } } In above class there are three method Add,Update and Delete where we are going to implement some code for each one. Now I want to create a interface which I can use for my other entities in project. So let’s create a interface from the above class with the help of Visual Studio 2010. So first select class and goto refactor menu and click Extract Interface. It will open up dialog box like following. Here I have selected all the method for interface and Once I click OK then it will create a new file called ICustomerRespository where it has created a interface. Just like following. Here is a code for that interface. using System; namespace CodeRefractoring { interface ICustomerRespository { void Add(); void Delete(); void Update(); } } Now let's see the code for the our class. It will also changed like following to implement the interface. public class CustomerRespository : ICustomerRespository { public void Add() { // Some code to add customer } public void Update() { //some code to update customer } public void Delete() { //some code delete customer } } Isn't that great we have created a interface and implemented it without writing a single line of code. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more.. Till that Happy Programming.

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• Calculating for leap year [migrated]

  - by Bradley Bauer

  I've written this program using Java in Eclipse. I was able to utilize a formula I found that I explained in the commented out section. Using the for loop I can iterate through each month of the year, which I feel good about in that code, it seems clean and smooth to me. Maybe I could give the variables full names to make everything more readable but I'm just using the formula in its basic essence :) Well my problem is it doesn't calculate correctly for years like 2008... Leap Years. I know that if (year % 400 == 0 || (year % 4 == 0 && year % 100 != 0)) then we have a leap year. Maybe if the year is a leap year I need to subtract a certain amount of days from a certain month. Any solutions, or some direction would be great thanks :) package exercises; public class E28 { /* * Display the first days of each month * Enter the year * Enter first day of the year * * h = (q + (26 * (m + 1)) / 10 + k + k/4 + j/4 + 5j) % 7 * * h is the day of the week (0: Saturday, 1: Sunday ......) * q is the day of the month * m is the month (3: March 4: April.... January and Feburary are 13 and 14) * j is the century (year / 100) * k is the year of the century (year %100) * */ public static void main(String[] args) { java.util.Scanner input = new java.util.Scanner(System.in); System.out.print("Enter the year: "); int year = input.nextInt(); int j = year / 100; // Find century for formula int k = year % 100; // Find year of century for formula // Loop iterates 12 times. Guess why. for (int i = 1, m = i; i <= 12; i++) { // Make m = i. So loop processes formula once for each month if (m == 1 || m == 2) m += 12; // Formula requires that Jan and Feb are represented as 13 and 14 else m = i; // if not jan or feb, then set m to i int h = (1 + (26 * (m + 1)) / 10 + k + k/4 + j/4 + 5 * j) % 7; // Formula created by a really smart man somewhere // I let the control variable i steer the direction of the formual's m value String day; if (h == 0) day = "Saturday"; else if (h == 1) day = "Sunday"; else if (h == 2) day = "Monday"; else if (h == 3) day = "Tuesday"; else if (h == 4) day = "Wednesday"; else if (h == 5) day = "Thursday"; else day = "Friday"; switch (m) { case 13: System.out.println("January 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 14: System.out.println("Feburary 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 3: System.out.println("March 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 4: System.out.println("April 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 5: System.out.println("May 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 6: System.out.println("June 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 7: System.out.println("July 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 8: System.out.println("August 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 9: System.out.println("September 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 10: System.out.println("October 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 11: System.out.println("November 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 12: System.out.println("December 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; } } } }

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• OpenWorld: Our (Road) Maps are Looking Good!

  - by Tony Berk

  Wow, only one (or two) days down at Oracle OpenWorld! Are you on overload yet? I'm still trying to figure out how to be in 3 sessions at the same time... I guess everyone needs to prioritize! There was a lot to see in Monday's sessions, especially some great forward-looking roadmap sessions. In case you aren't here or you decided to go to other sessions, this is my quick summary of what I could capture from a couple of the roadmaps: In the Fusion CRM Strategy and Roadmap session, Anthony Lye provided an overview of the Fusion CRM strategy including the key design principles of 3 E's: Easy, Effective and Efficient. After an overview of how Oracle has deployed Fusion CRM internally to 25,000 users worldwide, Anthony discussed the features coming in the next release, the releases in the next 12 months and beyond. I can't detail too much since you haven't read Oracle's Safe Harbor statement, but check out Fusion Tap and look for new features and added functionality for sales prediction, marketing, social and integration with a number of the key Customer Experience products.  In the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Vision and Roadmap session, Chris Hamilton presented the focus areas for the RightNow product. As a result of the large increase in development resources after the acquisition, the RightNow CX team is planning a lot of enhancements to the functionality, infrastructure and integrations. As a key piece of the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) strategy, RightNow will be integrated with Oracle Social Network, Oracle Commerce (ATG and Endeca), Oracle Knowledge, Oracle Policy Automation and, of course, further integration with Fusion Sales and Marketing. Look forward to seeing more on the Virtual Assistant, Smart Interaction Hub and Mobility. In addition to the roadmaps, I was looking forward to hearing from Oracle CRM customers. So, I sat in on two great Siebel customer panels: The Maximizing User Adoption Rates for Siebel Sales and Siebel Partner Relationship Management panel consisted of speakers from CSL Behring, McKesson and Intuit. It was great to get an overview of implementations for both B2B and B2C companies. It was great hearing that all of these companies have more than 1,000 sales users (Intuit has 4,000) and how the 360 degree view of the customer in Siebel is helping these customers improve their customers' experience (CX). They are all great examples of centralized implementations which have standardized processes across the globe and across business units.  Waste Management, Farmers Insurance and the US Citizenship & Immigration Services presented in the Driving Great Customer Experiences with Siebel Service Applications session. Talk about serving large customer bases! Is it possible that Farmers with only 10 million households is the smallest of these 3? All of them provided great examples of how they are improving the customer experience (CX) including 60-70% improvements in efficiency or reducing the number of applications the customer service reps (CSRs) need to use from 10 to 1 (Waste Management) and context aware call transfers to avoid the caller explaining their issue 3 times (USCIS). So that's my wrap up of only 4 sessions from Monday. In between sessions, I stopped by the Oracle DEMOgrounds and CRM Pavilion to visit with a group of great partners and see the products and partner integrations in action. Don't miss a recap of Mark Hurd's Keynote. I can't believe there were another 40+ sessions covering CRM, Fusion, Cloud, etc. that I missed today! Anyone else see any great sessions?

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• AI to move custom-shaped spaceships (shape affecting movement behaviour)

  - by kaoD

  I'm designing a networked turn based 3D-6DOF space fleet combat strategy game which relies heavily on ship customization. Let me explain the game a bit, since you need to know a bit about it to set the question. What I aim for is the ability to create your own fleet of ships with custom shapes and attached modules (propellers, tractor beams...) which would give advantages and disadvantages to each ship, so you have lots of different fleet distributions. E.g., long ship with two propellers at the side would let the ship spin around that plane easily, bigger ships would move slowly unless you place lots of propellers at the back (therefore spending more "construction" points and energy when moving, and it will only move fast towards that direction.) I plan to balance all the game around this feature. The game would revolve around two phases: orders and combat phase. During the orders phase, you command the different ships. When all players finish the order phase, the combat phase begins and the ship orders get resolved in real-time for some time, then the action pauses and there's a new orders phase. The problem comes when I think about player input. To move a ship, you need to turn on or off different propellers if you want to steer, travel forward, brake, rotate in place... These propellers don't have to work at their whole power, so you can achieve more movement combinations with less propellers. I think this approach is a bit boring. The player doesn't want to fiddle with motors or anything, you just want to MOVE and KILL. The way I intend the player to give orders to these ships is by a destination and a rotation, and then the AI would calculate the correct propeller power to achive that movement and rotation. Propulsion doesn't have to be the same throught the entire turn calculation (after the orders have been given) so it would be cool if the ships reacted as they move, adjusting the power of the propellers for their needs dynamically, but it may be too hard to implement and it's not really needed for the game to work. In both cases, how would that AI decide which propellers to activate for the best (or at least not worst) trajectory to be achieved? I though about some approaches: Learning AI: The ship types would learn about their movement by trial and error, adjusting their behaviour with more uses, and finally becoming "smart". I don't want to get involved THAT far in AI coding, and I think it can be frustrating for the player (even if you can let it learn without playing.) Pre-calculated timestep movement: Upon ship creation, ALL possible movements are calculated for each propeller configuration and power for a given delta-time. Memory intensive, ugly, bad. Pre-calculated trajectories: The same as above but not for each delta-time but the whole trajectory, which would then be fitted as much as possible. Requires a fixed propeller configuration for the whole combat phase and is still memory intensive, ugly and bad. Continuous brute forcing: The AI continously checks ALL possible propeller configurations throughout the entire combat phase, precalculates a few time steps and decides which is the best one based on that. Con: what's good now might not be that good later, and it's too CPU intensive, ugly, and bad too. Single brute forcing: Same as above, but only brute forcing at the beginning of the simulation, so it needs constant propeller configuration throughout the entire combat phase. Coninuous angle check: This is not a full movement method, but maybe a way to discard "stupid" propeller configurations. Given the current propeller's normal vector and the final one, you can approximate the power needed for the propeller based on the angle. You must do this continuously throughout the whole combat phase. I figured this one out recently so I didn't put in too much thought. A priori, it has the "what's good now might not be that good later" drawback too, and it doesn't care about the other propellers which may act together to make a better propelling configuration. I'm really stuck here. Any ideas?

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• Grub2 : Windows 7 can't boot installing with Ubuntu 10.04 on different hard drive

  - by dellphi

  I use a dual boot with two hard disks and two OS is Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7. Windows 7 installed on the first disk, first partition. Grub is installed on a second hard disk MBR, and Ubuntu installed on an extended partition on a second hard drive. When I select Windows 7 on the Grub menu, the HDD lamp lights up briefly and then black screen on the monitor, with the status of the keyboard is still functioning. Until now (with the default boot from first HDD), I have to press F12 to get into the Grub to run Linux on a second HDD. ================ fdisk -l ================================ dellph1@dellph1-desktop:~$ fdisk -l omitting empty partition (5) Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00087dec Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 23104 185582848+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 23105 121601 791177122 5 Extended /dev/sda5 36107 74408 307660783+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda6 74409 100081 206218341 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda7 100082 121601 172859368+ 7 HPFS/NTFS Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x6d43dfb2 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 10030 80560066 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 * 1 5560 44657601 83 Linux /dev/sdb6 5560 9387 30736384 83 Linux /dev/sdb7 9387 10030 5164032 82 Linux swap / Solaris dellph1@dellph1-desktop:~$ ================= grub.cfg ================== # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # It is automatically generated by /usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig using templates from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then load_env fi set default="0" if [ ${prev_saved_entry} ]; then set saved_entry=${prev_saved_entry} save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z ${boot_once} ]; then saved_entry=${chosen} save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n ${have_grubenv} ]; then if [ -z ${boot_once} ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=1024x768 insmod gfxterm insmod vbe if terminal_output gfxterm ; then true ; else # For backward compatibility with versions of terminal.mod that don't # understand terminal_output terminal gfxterm fi fi insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 set locale_dir=($root)/boot/grub/locale set lang=en insmod gettext if [ ${recordfail} = 1 ]; then set timeout=-1 else set timeout=5 fi END /etc/grub.d/00_header BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 insmod jpeg if background_image /usr/share/backgrounds/CurlsbyCandy.jpg ; then set color_normal=white/black set color_highlight=black/light-gray else set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray fi END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-24-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-24-generic root=UUID=2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 ro splash vga=795 quiet splash nomodeset video=uvesafb:mode_option=1280x1024-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-24-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-24-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 echo 'Loading Linux 2.6.32-24-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-24-generic root=UUID=2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 ro single splash vga=795 echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-24-generic } END /etc/grub.d/10_linux BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)" { insmod ntfs set root='(hd0,1)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 5cac2139ac210f58 chainloader +1 } END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_multisystem Ajout de MultiSystem MULTISYSTEM MENU menuentry "PLoP Boot Manager" { linux16 /boot/plpbt } menuentry "Smart Boot Manager" { search --set -f /boot/sbootmgr.dsk linux16 /boot/memdisk initrd16 /boot/sbootmgr.dsk } FIN MULTISYSTEM MENU END /etc/grub.d/40_multisystem ================================================ I want to keep the Grub on the second HDD. I have been using the Startup Manager, Boot Manager and Grub Customizer, and this problem still unsolved. The easiest thing that I can possibly do is to install Grub on first HDD, but I was curious and maybe someone can help.

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• Would this be a good web application architecture?

  - by Gustav Bertram

  My problem Our MVC based framework does not allow us to cache only part of our output. Ideally we want to cahce static and semi-static bits, and run dynamic bits. In addition, we need to consider data caching that reacts to database changes. My idea The concept I came up with was to represent a page as a tree of XML fragment objects. (I say XML, but I mean XHTML). Some of the fragments are dynamic, and can pull their data directly from models or other sources, but most of the fragments are static scaffolding. If a subtree of fragments is completely static, then I imagine that they could unfold into pure XML that would then be cached as the text representation of their parent element. This process would ideally continue until we are left with a root element that contains all of the static XML, and has a couple of dynamic XML fragments that are resolved and attached to the relevant nodes of the XML tree just before the page is displayed. In addition to separating content into dynamic and static fragments, some fragments could be dynamic and cached. A simple expiry time which propagates up through the XML fragment tree would indicate that a specific fragment should periodically be refreshed. A newspaper section or front page does not need to be updated each second. Minutes or sometimes even longer is sufficient. Other fragments would be dynamic and uncached. Typically too many articles are viewed for them to be cached - the cache would overflow. Some individual articles may be cached if they are extremely popular. Functional notes The folding mechanism could be to be smart enough to judge when it would be more profitable to fold a dynamic cached fragment and propagate the expiry date to the parent fragment, or to keep it separate and simple attach to the XML tree when resolving the page. If some dynamic cached fragments are associated to database objects through mechanisms like a globally unique content id, then changes to the database could trigger changes to the output cache. If fragments store the identifiers of parent fragments, then they could trigger a refolding process that would then include the updated data. A set of pure XML with an ordered array of fragment objects (that each store the identifying information of the node to which they should be attached), can be resolved in a fairly simple way by walking the XML tree, and merging the data from the fragments. Because it is not necessary to parse and construct the entire tree in memory before attaching nodes, processing should be fairly fast. The identifiers of each fragment would be a combination of relevant identity data and the type of fragment object. Cached parent fragments would contain references to these identifiers, in order to then either pull them from the fragment cache, or to run their code. The controller's responsibility is reduced to making changes to the database, and telling the root XML fragment object to render itself. The Question My question has two parts: Is this a good design? Are there any obvious flaws I'm missing? Has somebody else thought of this before? References? Is there an existing alternative that I should consider? A cool templating engine maybe?

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• lvm disappeared after disc replacement on raid10

  - by user142295

  here my problem: I am running ubuntu 12.04 on a raid10 (4 disks), on top of which I installed an lvm with two volume groups (one for /, one for /home). The layout of the disks are as follows: Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0003f3b6 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 481949 240943+ 83 Linux /dev/sda2 481950 2910640634 1455079342+ fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sda3 2910640635 2930272064 9815715 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sdb: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00069785 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 63 2910158684 1455079311 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sdb2 2910158685 2930272064 10056690 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sdc: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 63 2910158684 1455079311 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sdc2 2910158685 2930272064 10056690 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sdd: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000f14de Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdd1 63 2910158684 1455079311 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sdd2 2910158685 2930272064 10056690 82 Linux swap / Solaris The first disk (/dev/sda) contains the /boot partition on /dev/sda1. I use grub2 to boot the system off this partition. On top of this raid10 I installed two volume groups, one for /, one for /home. This system worked well, I even exchanged two disks during the last two years. It always worked. But not this time. For the first time, /dev/sda broke. I do not know if this is an issue – I know I would have struggled anyways to overcome the problem with /boot installed on that disk and grub2 installed on the mbr of /dev/sda. Anyways, I did what I always did: start knoppix fire up the raid sudo mdadm --examine -scan which returns ARRAY /dev/md127 UUID=0dbf4558:1a943464:132783e8:19cdff95 start it up sudo mdadm --assemble /dev/md127 fail the failing disk (smart event) sudo mdadm /dev/md127 --fail /dev/sda2 remove the failing disk sudo mdadm /dev/md127 --remove /dev/sda2 stop the raid sudo mdadm -S /dev/md127 take out the disk replace it with a new one create the same partitions as on the failling one add it to the raid sudo mdadm --assemble /dev/md127 sudo mdadm /dev/md127 --add /dev/sda2 wait 4 hours All looks fine: cat /proc/mdstat returns: Personalities : [raid10] md127 : active raid10 sda2[0] sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1] 2910158464 blocks 64K chunks 2 near-copies [4/4] [UUUU] unused devices: <none> and sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md127 returns /dev/md127: Version : 0.90 Creation Time : Wed Jun 10 13:08:46 2009 Raid Level : raid10 Array Size : 2910158464 (2775.34 GiB 2980.00 GB) Used Dev Size : 1455079232 (1387.67 GiB 1490.00 GB) Raid Devices : 4 Total Devices : 4 Preferred Minor : 127 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Thu Mar 21 16:27:40 2013 State : clean Active Devices : 4 Working Devices : 4 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Layout : near=2 Chunk Size : 64K UUID : 0dbf4558:1a943464:132783e8:19cdff95 (local to host Microknoppix) Events : 0.4824680 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 2 0 active sync /dev/sda2 1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1 2 8 33 2 active sync /dev/sdc1 3 8 49 3 active sync /dev/sdd1 However, there is no trace of the volume groups. Rebooting into knoppix does not help Restarting the old system (I actually replugged and re-added the failing disk for that – the system begins to start, but then fails to see the / partition – no wonder if the volume group is gone) does not help. sudo vgscan, sudo vgdisplay, sudo lvs, sudo lvdisplay, sudo vgscan –mknodes all returned No volume groups found. I am completely at a loss. Can anyone tell me if and how I can recover my data? Thanks in advance!

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• "Guiding" a Domain Expert to Retire from Programming

  - by James Kolpack

  I've got a friend who does IT at a local non-profit where they're using a custom web application which is no longer supported by the company who built it. (out of business, support was too expensive, I'm not sure...) Development on this app started around 10+ years ago so the technologies being harnessed are pretty out of date now - classic asp using vbscript and SQL Server 2000. The application domain is in the realm of government bookkeeping - so even though the development team is long gone, there are often new requirements of this software. Enter the... The domain expert. This is an middle aged accounting whiz without much (or any?) prior development experience. He studied the pages, code and queries and learned how to ape the style of the original team which, believe me, is mediocre at best. He's very clever and very tenacious but has no experience in software beyond what he's picked up from this app. Otherwise, he's a pleasant guy to talk to and definitely knows his domain. My friend in IT, and probably his superiors in the company, want him out of the code. They view him as wasting his expertise on coding tasks he shouldn't be doing. My friend got me involved with a few small contracts which I handled without much problem - other than somewhat of a communication barrier with the domain expert. He explained the requirements very quickly, assuming prior knowledge of the domain which I do not have. This is partially his normal style, and I think maybe a bit of resentment from my involvement. So, I think he feels like the owner of the code and has entrenched himself in a development position. So... his coding technique. One of his latest endeavors was to make a page that only he could reach (theoretically - the security model for the system is wretched) where he can enter a raw SQL query, run it, and save the query to run again later. A report that I worked on had been originally implemented by him using 6 distinct queries, 3 or 4 temp tables to coordinate the data between the queries, and the final result obtained by importing the data from the final query into Access and doing a pivot and some formatting. It worked - well, some of the results were incorrect - but at what a cost! (I implemented the report in a single query with at least 1/10th the amount of code.) He edits code in notepad. He doesn't seem to know about online reference material for the languages. I recently read an article on Dr. Dobbs titled "What Makes Bad Programmers Different" - and instantly thought of our domain expert. From the article: Their code is large, messy, and bug laden. They have very superficial knowledge of their problem domain and their tools. Their code has a lot of copy/paste and they have very little interest in techniques that reduce it. The fail to account for edge cases, while inefficiently dealing with the general case. They never have time to comment their code or break it into smaller pieces. Empirical evidence plays no little role in their decisions. 5.5 out of 6. My friend is wanting me to argue the case to their management - specifically, I got this email from their manager to respond to: ...Also, I need to talk to you about what effect there is from Domain Expert continuing to make edits to the live environment. If that is a problem for you I need to know so I can have his access blocked. Some examples would help. In my opinion, from a technical standpoint, it's dangerous to have him making changes without any oversight. On the other hand, I'm just doing one-off contracts at this point and don't have much desire to get involved deeply enough that I'm essentially arguing as one of the Bobs from Office Space. I'd like to help my friend out - but I feel like I'm getting in the middle of a political battle. More importantly - if I do get involved and suggest that his editing privileges be removed, it needs to be handled carefully so that doesn't feel belittled. He is beyond a doubt the foremost expert on this system. I'm hoping this is familiar territory for some other stackechangers, because I'm feeling a little bewildered. How should I respond? Should I argue that he shouldn't be allowed to touch the code? Should I phrase it as "no single developer, no matter how experienced, should be working on production code unchecked"? Should I argue to keep him involved with the code, but with a review process? Should I say "glad I could help, but uh, I'm busy now!" Other options? Thanks a bunch!

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• What Counts for A DBA - Logic

  - by drsql

  "There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who will always wonder why there are only two items in my list and those who will figured it out the first time they saw this very old joke."  Those readers who will give up immediately and get frustrated with me for not explaining it to them are not likely going to be great technical professionals of any sort, much less a programmer or administrator who will be constantly dealing with the common failures that make up a DBA's day.  Many of these people will stare at this like a dog staring at a traffic signal and still have no more idea of how to decipher the riddle. Without explanation they will give up, call the joke "stupid" and, feeling quite superior, walk away indignantly to their job likely flipping patties of meat-by-product. As a data professional or any programmer who has strayed  to this very data-oriented blog, you would, if you are worth your weight in air, either have recognized immediately what was going on, or felt a bit ignorant.  Your friends are chuckling over the joke, but why is it funny? Unfortunately you left your smartphone at home on the dresser because you were up late last night programming and were running late to work (again), so you will either have to fake a laugh or figure it out.  Digging through the joke, you figure out that the word "two" is the most important part, since initially the joke mentioned 10. Hmm, why did they spell out two, but not ten? Maybe 10 could be interpreted a different way?  As a DBA, this sort of logic comes into play every day, and sometimes it doesn't involve nerdy riddles or Star Wars folklore.  When you turn on your computer and get the dreaded blue screen of death, you don't immediately cry to the help desk and sit on your thumbs and whine about not being able to work. Do that and your co-workers will question your nerd-hood; I know I certainly would. You figure out the problem, and when you have it narrowed down, you call the help desk and tell them what the problem is, usually having to explain that yes, you did in fact try to reboot before calling.  Of course, sometimes humility does come in to play when you reach the end of your abilities, but the ‘end of abilities’ is not something any of us recognize readily. It is handy to have the ability to use logic to solve uncommon problems: It becomes especially useful when you are trying to solve a data-related problem such as a query performance issue, and the way that you approach things will tell your coworkers a great deal about your abilities.  The novice is likely to immediately take the approach of  trying to add more indexes or blaming the hardware. As you become more and more experienced, it becomes increasingly obvious that performance issues are a very complex topic. A query may be slow for a myriad of reasons, from concurrency issues, a poor query plan because of a parameter value (like parameter sniffing,) poor coding standards, or just because it is a complex query that is going to be slow sometimes. Some queries that you will deal with may have twenty joins and hundreds of search criteria, and it can take a lot of thought to determine what is going on.  You can usually figure out the problem to almost any query by using basic knowledge of how joins and queries work, together with the help of such things as the query plan, profiler or monitoring tools.  It is not unlikely that it can take a full day’s work to understand some queries, breaking them down into smaller queries to find a very tiny problem. Not every time will you actually find the problem, and it is part of the process to occasionally admit that the problem is random, and everything works fine now.  Sometimes, it is necessary to realize that a problem is outside of your current knowledge, and admit temporary defeat: You can, at least, narrow down the source of the problem by looking logically at all of the possible solutions. By doing this, you can satisfy your curiosity and learn more about what the actual problem was. For example, in the joke, had you never been exposed to the concept of binary numbers, there is no way you could have known that binary - 10 = decimal - 2, but you could have logically come to the conclusion that 10 must not mean ten in the context of the joke, and at that point you are that much closer to getting the joke and at least won't feel so ignorant.

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• Making it GREAT! Oracle Partners Building Apps Workshop with UX and ADF in UK

  - by ultan o'broin

  Yes, making is what it's all about. This time, Oracle Partners in the UK were making great looking usable apps with the Oracle Applications Development Framework (ADF) and user experience (UX) toolkit. And what an energy-packed and productive event at the Oracle UK, Thames Valley Park, location it was. Partners learned the fundamentals of enterprise applications UX, why it's important, all about visual design, how to wireframe designs, and then how to build their already-proven designs in ADF. There was a whole day on mobile apps, learning about mobile design principles, free mobile UX and ADF resources from Oracle, and then trying it out. The workshop wrapped up with the latest Release 7 simplified UIs, Mobilytics, and other innovations from Oracle, and a live demo of a very neat ADF Mobile Android app built by an Oracle contractor. And, what a fun two days both Grant Ronald of ADF and myself had in running the workshop with such a great audience, too! I particularly enjoyed the wireframing and visual design sessions interaction; and seeing some outstanding work done by partners. Of note from the UK workshop were innovative design features not seen before and made me all the happier that developers were bringing their own ideas from the consumer IT world of mobility, simplicity, and social to the world of work apps in a smart way within an enterprise methodology too.  Partner wireframe exercise. Applying mobile design principles and UX design patterns means you've already productively making great usable apps! Next, over to Oracle ADF Mobile with it! One simple example from the design of a mobile field service app was that participants immediately saw how the UX and device functionality of the super UK-based app Hailo app could influence their designs (the London cabbie influence maybe?), as well as how we all use maps, cameras, barcode scanners and microphones on our phones could be used in work. And, of course, ADF Mobile has the device integration solutions there too! I wonder will U.S. workshops in Silicon Valley see an Uber UX influence (LOL)! That we also had partners experienced with Oracle Forms who could now offer a roadmap from Forms to Simplified UI and Mobile using ADF, and do it through through the cloud, really made this particular workshop go "ZING!" for me. Many thanks to the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) team for organizing this event with us, and to the representatives of the Oracle Partners that showed and participated so well. That's what I love out this outreach. It's a two-way, solid value-add for all. Interested? Why would partners and developers with ADF skills sign up for this workshop? Here's why: Learn to use the Oracle Applications User Experience design patterns as the usability building blocks for applications development in Oracle Application Development Framework. The workshop enables attendees to build modern and visually compelling desktop and mobile applications that look and behave like Oracle Cloud Applications, and that can co-exist with partner integrations, new, or existing applications deployments. Partners learn to offer customers and clients more than just coded functionality; instead they can provide a complete user experience with a roadmap for continued ROI from applications that also creating more business and attracts the kudos and respect from other makers of apps as they're wowed by the results. So, if you're a partner and interested in attending one of these workshops and benefitting from such learning, as well as having a platform to show off some of your own work, stay well tuned to your OPN channels, to this blog, to the VoX blog, and to the @usableapps Twitter account too. Can't wait? For developers and partners, some key mobile resources to explore now Oracle ADF Mobile UX Patterns and Components Wiki Oracle ADF Academy (Mobile) Oracle ADF Insider Essentials Oracle Applications Mobile User Experience Design Patterns and Guidance

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• Internet of Things Becoming Reality

  - by kristin.jellison

  The Internet of Things is not just on the radar—it’s becoming a reality. A globally connected continuum of devices and objects will unleash untold possibilities for businesses and the people they touch. But the “things” are only a small part of a much larger, integrated architecture. A great example of this comes from the healthcare industry. Imagine an expectant mother who needs to watch her blood pressure. She lives in a mountain village 100 miles away from medical attention. Luckily, she can use a small “wearable” device to monitor her status and wirelessly transmit the information to a healthcare hub in her village. Now, say the healthcare hub identifies that the expectant mother’s blood pressure is dangerously high. It sends a real-time alert to the patient’s wearable device, advising her to contact her doctor. It also pushes an alert with the patient’s historical data to the doctor’s tablet PC. He inserts a smart security card into the tablet to verify his identity. This ensures that only the right people have access to the patient’s data. Then, comparing the new data with the patient’s medical history, the doctor decides she needs urgent medical attention. GPS tracking devices on ambulances in the field identify and dispatch the closest one available. An alert also goes to the closest hospital with the necessary facilities. It sends real-time information on her condition directly from the ambulance. So when she arrives, they already have a treatment plan in place to ensure she gets the right care. The Internet of Things makes a huge difference for the patient. She receives personalized and responsive healthcare. But this technology also helps the businesses involved. The healthcare provider achieves a competitive advantage in its services. The hospital benefits from cost savings through more accurate treatment and better application of services. All of this, in turn, translates into savings on insurance claims. This is an ideal scenario for the Internet of Things—when all the devices integrate easily and when the relevant organizations have all the right systems in place. But in reality, that can be difficult to achieve. Core design principles are required to make the whole system work. Open standards allow these systems to talk to each other. Integrated security protects personal, financial, commercial and regulatory information. A reliable and highly available systems infrastructure is necessary to keep these systems running 24/7. If this system were just made up of separate components, it would be prohibitively complex and expensive for almost any organization. The solution is integration, and Oracle is leading the way. We’re developing converged solutions, not just from device to datacenter, but across devices, utilizing the Java platform, and through data acquisition and management, integration, analytics, security and decision-making. The Internet of Things (IoT) requires the predictable action and interaction of a potentially endless number of components. It’s in that convergence that the true value of the Internet of Things emerges. Partners who take the comprehensive view and choose to engage with the Internet of Things as a fully integrated platform stand to gain the most from the Internet of Things’ many opportunities. To discover what else Oracle is doing to connect the world, read about Oracle’s Internet of Things Platform. Learn how you can get involved as a partner by checking out the Oracle Java Knowledge Zone. Best regards, David Hicks

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