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• Principles of Big Data By Jules J Berman, O&rsquo;Reilly Media Book Review

  - by Compudicted

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2013/11/04/principles-of-big-data-by-jules-j-berman-orsquoreilly-media.aspx A fantastic book! Must be part, if not yet, of the fundamentals of the Big Data as a field of science. Highly recommend to those who are into the Big Data practice. Yet, I confess this book is one of my best reads this year and for a number of reasons: The book is full of wisdom, intimate insight, historical facts and real life examples to how Big Data projects get conceived, operate and sadly, yes, sometimes die. But not only that, the book is most importantly is filled with valuable advice, accurate and even overwhelming amount of reference (from the positive side), and the author does not event stop there: there are numerous technical excerpts, links and examples allowing to quickly accomplish many daunting tasks or make you aware of what one needs to perform as a data practitioner (excuse my use of the word practitioner, I just did not find a better substitute to it to trying to reference all who face Big Data). Be aware that Jules Berman’s background is in medicine, naturally, this book discusses this subject a lot as it is very dear to the author’s heart I believe, this does not make this book any less significant however, quite the opposite, I trust if there is an area in science or practice where the biggest benefits can be ripped from Big Data projects it is indeed the medical science, let’s make Cancer history! On a personal note, for me as a database, BI professional it has helped to understand better the motives behind Big Data initiatives, their underwater rivers and high altitude winds that divert or propel them forward. Additionally, I was impressed by the depth and number of mining algorithms covered in it. I must tell this made me very curious and tempting to find out more about these indispensable attributes of Big Data so sure I will be trying stretching my wallet to acquire several books that go more in depth on several most popular of them. My favorite parts of the book, well, all of them actually, but especially chapter 9: Analysis, it is just very close to my heart. But the real reason is it let me see what I do with data from a different angle. And then the next - “Special Considerations”, they are just two logical parts. The writing language is of this book is very acceptable for all levels, I had no technical problem reading it in ebook format on my 8” tablet or a large screen monitor. If I would be asked to say at least something negative I have to state I had a feeling initially that the book’s first part reads like an academic material relaxing the reader as the book progresses forward. I admit I am impressed with Jules’ abilities to use several programming languages and OSS tools, bravo! And I agree, it is not too, too hard to grasp at least the principals of a modern programming language, which seems becomes a defacto knowledge standard item for any modern human being. So grab a copy of this book, read it end to end and make yourself shielded from making mistakes at any stage of your Big Data initiative, by the way this book also helps build better future Big Data projects. Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Program.

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• Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer – book review

  - by DigiMortal

     Agile development expects mind shift and developers are not the only ones who must be agile. Every chain is as strong as it’s weakest link and same goes also for development teams. Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer by Scott W. Ambler is book that calls also data professionals to be part of agile development. Often are DBA-s in situation where they are not part of application development and later they have to survive large set of applications that all use databases different way. Of course, only some of these applications are not problematic when looking what database server has to do to serve them. I have seen many applications that rape database servers because developers have no clue what is going on in database (~3K queries to database per web application request – have you seen something like this? I have…) Agile Database Techniques covers some object and database design technologies and gives suggestions to development teams about topics they need help or assistance by DBA-s. The book is also good reading for DBA-s who usually are not very strong in object technologies. You can take this book as bridge between these two worlds. I think teams that build object applications that use databases should buy this book and try at least one or two projects out with Ambler’s suggestions. Table of contents Foreword by Jon Kern. Foreword by Douglas K. Barry. Acknowledgments. Introduction. About the Author. Part One: Setting the Foundation. Chapter 1: The Agile Data Method. Chapter 2: From Use Cases to Databases — Real-World UML. Chapter 3: Data Modeling 101. Chapter 4: Data Normalization. Chapter 5: Class Normalization. Chapter 6: Relational Database Technology, Like It or Not. Chapter 7: The Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch. Chapter 8: Legacy Databases — Everything You Need to Know But Are Afraid to Deal With. Part Two: Evolutionary Database Development. Chapter 9: Vive L’ Évolution. Chapter 10: Agile Model-Driven Development (AMDD). Chapter 11: Test-Driven Development (TDD). Chapter 12: Database Refactoring. Chapter 13: Database Encapsulation Strategies. Chapter 14: Mapping Objects to Relational Databases. Chapter 15: Performance Tuning. Chapter 16: Tools for Evolutionary Database Development. Part Three: Practical Data-Oriented Development Techniques. Chapter 17: Implementing Concurrency Control. Chapter 18: Finding Objects in Relational Databases. Chapter 19: Implementing Referential Integrity and Shared Business Logic. Chapter 20: Implementing Security Access Control. Chapter 21: Implementing Reports. Chapter 22: Realistic XML. Part Four: Adopting Agile Database Techniques. Chapter 23: How You Can Become Agile. Chapter 24: Bringing Agility into Your Organization. Appendix: Database Refactoring Catalog. References and Suggested Reading. Index.

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• Making a Job Change That's Easy Why Not Try a Career Change

  - by david.talamelli

  A few nights ago I received a comment on one of our blog posts that reminded me of a statistic that I heard a while back. The statistic reflected the change in our views towards work and showed how while people in past generations would stay in one role for their working career - now with so much choice people not only change jobs often but also change careers 4-5 times in their working life. To differentiate between a job change and a career change: when I say job change this could be an IT Sales person moving from one IT Sales role to another IT Sales role. A Career change for example would be that same IT Sales person moving from IT Sales to something outside the scope of their industry - maybe to something like an Engineer or Scuba Dive Instructor. The reason for Career changes can be as varied as the people who make them. Someone's motivation could be to pursue a passion or maybe there is a change in their personal circumstances forcing the change or it could be any other number of reasons. I think it takes courage to make a Career change - it can be easy to stay in your comfort zone and do what you know, but to really push yourself sometimes you need to try something new, it is a matter of making that career transition as smooth as possible for yourself. The comment that was posted is here below (thanks Dean for the kind words they are appreciated). Hi David, I just wanted to let you know that I work for a company called Milestone Search in Melbourne, Victoria Australia. (www.mstone.com.au) We subscribe to your feed on a daily basis and find your blogs both interesting and insightful. Not to mention extremely entertaining. I wonder if you have missed out on getting in journalism as this seems to be something you'd be great at ?: ) Anyways back to my point about changing careers. This could be anything from going from I.T. to Journalism, Engineering to Teaching or any combination of career you can think of. I don't think there ever has been a time where we have had so many opportunities to do so many different things in our working life. While this idea sounds great in theory, putting it into practice would be much harder to do I think. First, in an increasingly competitive job market, employers tend to look for specialists in their field. You may want to make a change but your options may be limited by the number of employers willing to take a chance on someone new to an industry that will likely require a significant investment in time to get brought up to speed. Also, using myself as an example if I was given the opportunity to move into Journalism/Communication/Marketing career from my career as an IT Recruiter - realistically I would have to take a significant pay cut to make this change as my current salary reflects the expertise I have in my current career. I would not immediately be up to speed moving into a new career and would not be able to justify a similar salary. Yes there are transferable skills in any career change, but even though you may have transferable skills you must realise that you will also have a large amount of learning to do which would take time. These are two initial hurdles that I immediately think of, there may be more but nothing is insurmountable. If you work out what you want to do with your working career whatever that may be, you then need to just need to work out the steps to get to your end goal. This is where utilising the power of your networks and using Social Media can come in handy. If you are interested in working somewhere why not proactively take the opportunity to research the industry or company - find out who it is you need to speak to and get in touch with them. We spend so much time working, we should enjoy the work we do and not be afraid to try new things. Waiting for your dream job to fall into your lap or be handed to you on a silver platter is not likely going to happen, so if there is something you do want to do, work out a plan to make it happen and chase after it. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

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• Having Fun with Coding4Fun&rsquo;s Windows Phone 7 Controls

  - by mbcrump

  I’m a big believer in having a hobby project as you can probably tell from the first sentence in my “personal webpage using Silverlight” article. One of my current hobby projects is to re-do my current WP7 application in the marketplace. I knew up front that I needed a “Loading” animation and a better “About” box. After starting to develop my own, I noticed a great set of WP7 controls by Coding4Fun and decided to use them in my new application. Before I go any further they are FREE and Open-Source. It is really simple to get started, just go to the CodePlex site and click the download button. After you have downloaded it then extract it to a Folder and you will have 4 DLL files. They are listed below: Now create a Windows Phone 7 Project and add references to the DLL’s by right clicking on the References folder and clicking “Add references”.   After adding the references, we can get started. I needed a ProgressOverlay animation or “Loading Screen” while my RSS feed is downloading. Basically, you just need to add the following namespace to whatever page you want the control on: xmlns:Controls="clr-namespace:Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls;assembly=Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls" And then the code inside your Grid or wherever you want the Loading screen placed. <Controls:ProgressOverlay Name="progressOverlay" > <Controls:ProgressOverlay.Content> <TextBlock>Loading</TextBlock> </Controls:ProgressOverlay.Content> </Controls:ProgressOverlay> Bam, you now have a great looking loading screen. Of course inside the ProgressOverlay, you may want to add a Visibility property to turn it off after your data loads if you are using MVVM or similar pattern.   Next up, I needed a nice clean “About Box” that looks good but is also functional. Meaning, if they click on my twitter name, web or email to launch the appropriate task. Again, this is only a few lines of code: var p = new AboutPrompt(); p.VersionNumber = "2.0"; p.Show("Michael Crump", "@mbcrump", "[email protected]", @"http://michaelcrump.net"); A nice clean “About” box with just a few lines of code! I’m all for code that I don’t have to write. It also comes with a pretty sweet InputPrompt for grabbing info from a user: The code for this is also very simple: InputPrompt input = new InputPrompt(); input.Completed += (s, e) => { MessageBox.Show(e.Result.ToString()); }; input.Title = "Input Box"; input.Message = "What does a \"Developer Large\" T-Shirt Mean? "; input.Show(); I also enjoyed the PhoneHelper that allows you to get data out of the WMAppManifest File very easy. So for example if I wanted the Version info from the WMAppManifest file. I could write one line and get it. PhoneHelper.GetAppAttribute("Version") Of course you would want to make sure you add the following using statement: using Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls.Data; You can’t have all these cool controls without a great set of Converters. The included BooleanToVisibility converter will convert a Boolean to and from a Visibility value. This is excellent when using something like a CheckBox to display a TextBox when its checked. See the example below: The code is below: <phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources> <Converters:BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key="BooleanToVisibilityConverter"/> </phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources> <CheckBox x:Name="checkBox"/> <TextBlock Text="Display Text" Visibility="{Binding ElementName=checkBox, Path=IsChecked, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter} }"/> That’s not all the goodies included. They also provide a RoundedButton, TimePicker and several other converters. The documentation is great and I would recommend you give them a shot if you need any of this functionality. Btw, thank Brian Peek for his awesome work on Coding4Fun!  Subscribe to my feed

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• “I could use a little help here” or “I can do it myself, thank you” for Cloud Projects

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure allows you to write code in languages within the .NET stack, you can use Java, C++, PHP, NodeJS and others. Code is code - other than keeping things stateless, using a Web or Worker Role in Azure is not all that different from working with an on-premises system. However…. Working in a scalable, component-based stateless architecture that can use federated security is not all that common for many developers. Some are used to owning the server, scaling up, and state-full paradigms that have a single security domain. Making the transition whilst trying to create a new software application or even port a previous one can be daunting. Sure, we have absolutely tons of free training, kits, videos, online books and more to learn on your own, but some things like architecture can be pivotal as you move along. So the question is, should you just strike out on your own for a Cloud project, or get Microsoft Consulting Services or another partner to work with you on your first one? I use a few decision points to help guide the projects I assist in. Note: I’m a huge fan of having help that ends up giving you training and leaves you in charge. If you do engage with someone to help you, make sure you keep this clear and take more and more ownership yourself as the project progresses. How much time do you have? Usually the first thing I ask is about the timeline for the project. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are, if you have a short window to get things done it’s better to get help - especially if this is your first cloud project. Having someone that knows the platform well can save you amazing amounts of time. If you have longer, then start with the training in the link above and once you feel confident, jump in. How complex is the project? If there are a lot of moving parts, it’s best to engage a partner. The reason is that certain interactions - particularly things like Service Bus or Data Integration  - can be quite different than what you may have encountered before. How many people do you have? I have a “pizza rule” about projects I’ve used in my career - if it takes over two pizzas to feed everyone on the project, it’s too big and will fail. That being said, one developer and a one-week deadline does not a good project make, usually. It’s best to have at least one architect (or someone in that role) guiding the project along, and at least two developers to work on a cloud project. That’s a generalization of course, since I’ve seen great software on Azure with one developer writing code all by herself, but for more complex projects, more (to a point) is better. The nice thing about bringing on a partner is that you don’t have to hire them full time - they help you and then they go away. How critical is the project? There’s no shame in using some help. If the platform is new, if the project is large and complex, and if it is critical to the business, you should engage a partner. That’s regardless of Cloud or anything else - get some help. You don’t want to hit your company’s bottom line in a negative way, but you have to innovate and get them a competitive advantage. Do your research, make sure the partner is qualified to help you, and get it done. Don’t let these questions scare you off. There are lots of projects you can implement on Windows and SQL Azure with nothing other than the Software Development Kit (SDK) that you get for free with Windows Azure. And assistance comes in many forms - sometimes just phone support, a friend you can ask. Microsoft Consulting Services or any of our great partners. You can get help on just the architecture piece or have them show you how to write the code. They’ll get involved as little or as much as you like.

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• Today's Links (6/29/2011)

  - by Bob Rhubart

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

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• The Next Wave of PeopleSoft Capabilities for the Staffing Industry Is Here

  - by Mark Rosenberg

  With the release of PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 in January this year, we introduced substantial new capabilities for our Staffing Industry customers. Through a co-development project with Infosys Limited, we have enriched Oracle's PeopleSoft Staffing Solution with new tools aimed at accelerating and improving the quality of job order fulfillment, increasing branch recruiter productivity, and driving profitable growth. Staffing industry firms succeed based on their ability to rapidly, cost-effectively, and continually fill their pipelines with new clients and job orders, recruit the best talent, and match orders with talent. Pressure to execute in each of these functional areas is even more acute on staffing firms as contingent labor becomes a more substantial and permanent part of the workforce mix. In an industry that creates value through speedy execution, there is little room for manual, inefficient processes and brittle, custom integrations, which throttle profitability and growth. The latest wave of investment in the PeopleSoft Staffing Solution focuses on generating efficiency and flexibility for our customers. Simplicity To operate profitably and continue growing, a Staffing enterprise needs its client management, recruiting, order fulfillment, and other processes to function in harmony. Most importantly, they need to be simple for recruiters, branch managers, and applicants to access and understand. The latest PeopleSoft Staffing Solution set of enhancements includes numerous automated defaulting mechanisms and information-rich dashboard pagelets that even a new employee can learn quickly. Pending Applicant, Agenda management, Search, and other pagelets are just a few of the newest, easy-to-use tools that not only aggregate and summarize information, but also provide instant access to applicants, tasks, and key reports for branch staff. Productivity The leading firms in the Staffing industry are those that can more efficiently orchestrate large numbers of candidates, clients, and orders than their competitors can. PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 delivers productivity boosters that Staffing firms can leverage to streamline tasks and processes for competitive advantage. For example, we enhanced the Recruiting Funnel, which manages the candidate on-boarding process, with a highly interactive user interface. It integrates disparate Staffing business processes and exploits new PeopleTools technologies to offer a superior on-boarding user experience. Automated creation of agenda items and assignment tasks for each candidate minimizes setup and organizes assignment steps for the on-boarding process. Mass updates of tasks and instant access to the candidate overview page (which we also expanded), candidate event status, event counts, and other key data enable recruiters to better serve clients and candidates. Lower TCO Constructing and maintaining an efficient yet flexible labor supply chain can be complicated, let alone expensive. Traditionally, Staffing firms have been challenged in controlling their technology cost of ownership because connecting candidate and client-facing tools involved building and integrating custom applications and technologies and managing staff turnover, placing heavy demands on IT and support staff. With PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2, there are two major enhancements that aggressively tackle these challenges. First, we added another integration framework to enable cost-effective linking of the Staffing firm’s PeopleSoft applications and its job board distributors. (The first PeopleSoft 9.1 Feature Pack released in March 2011 delivered an integration framework to connect to resume parsing providers.) Second, we introduced the teaming concept to enable work to be partitioned to groups, as well as individuals. These two capabilities, combined with a host of others, position Staffing firms to configure and grow their businesses without growing their IT and overhead expenditures. For our Staffing Industry customers, PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 is loaded with high-value tools aimed at enabling and sustaining a flexible labor supply chain. For more information, contact [email protected] or [email protected].

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• SQL SERVER – Top 10 “Ease of Use” Features of expressor Studio

  - by pinaldave

  expressor Studio is new data integration platform that is being marketed as the most easy to use tool of its kind.  But “easy to use” can be a relative term – an expert can find a very complex system easy, but a beginner might be stumped.  A recent article online discussed exactly what makes expressor Studio so easy use, and here is my view on this subject. Simple Installation There is one pop-up for one .exe file, and nothing more.  You can’t get much simpler than this.  It is also in the familiar Windows design, so there should be no surprises. No 3rd party software dependency Have you ever tried to download software, only to be slowed down by the need to download a compatible system to run the program, and another to read the user manual, and so on?  expressor Studio was designed specifically to avoid this problem. Microsoft Office Like Ribbon Bar and Menus As mentioned before, everything is in the familiar Windows design, from the pop up windows to the tool bars and menus.  There should be no learning curve for using this program, or even simply trying to navigate around a new system. General Development Design Interface This software has been designed to be simple and straightforward.  Projects can be arranged in a simple “tree” design, that is totally collapsible and can easy be added to or “trimmed” with a click of a button.  It was meant to be logical and easy to follow. Integrated Contextual Help This is a fancy way of saying that you can practically yell “help!” if you do get stuck on something.  Solving a problem is as simple as highlighting and hitting F1 for contextual help. Visual Indicators and Messages Wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly where something has gone wrong before trying to complete a project.  expressor Studio has a built in system to catch mistakes and highlight them in a bright color, flash a warning message, and even disable functions before you can continue – and possibly lose hours of work. Property Inputs and Selectors Every operator will have a list of requirements that need to be filled in.  But don’t worry; you won’t have to make stuff up to fill in the boxes.  Each one will have a drop-down menu with options to choose from – but not too many as to be confusing. Connection Wizards Configuring connections can be the hardest part of a project.  But not with the expressor Studioconnection wizard.  A familiar, Windows-style menu will walk you through connections so quickly you’ll forget what trouble it used to be. Templates With large, complex projects, a majority of your time is often spent simply setting up the files and inputting data.  But expressor Studio allows you to create one file and then save it as a template, saving you hours of boring data input. Extension Manager Let’s say that you need a little more functionality or some new features on your program. A lot of software requires you to download complex plug-ins that need to be decompressed and installed.  However, expressor Studio has extended its system to an Extension Manager, which allows for quick and easy installation of the functionality you need, without the need to download and decompress. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

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• Do NOT Change "Copy Local” project references to false, unless understand subsequences.

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  To optimize performance of visual studio build I've found multiple recommendations to change CopyLocal property for dependent dlls to false,e.g. From http://stackoverflow.com/questions/690033/best-practices-for-large-solutions-in-visual-studio-2008 CopyLocal? For sure turn this offhttp://stackoverflow.com/questions/280751/what-is-the-best-practice-for-copy-local-and-with-project-referencesAlways set the Copy Local property to false and enforce this via a custom msbuild stephttp://codebetter.com/patricksmacchia/2007/06/20/benefit-from-the-c-and-vb-net-compilers-perf/BenefitBenefitMy advice is to always set ‘Copy Local’ to falseSome time ago we've tried to change the setting to false, and found that it causes problem for deployment of top-level projects.Recently I've followed the suggestion and changed the settings for middle-level projects. It didn't cause immediate issues, but I was warned by Readify Consultant Colin Savage about possible errors during deploymentsI haven't undone the changes immediately and we found a few issues during testing.There are many scenarios, when you need to have Copy Local’ left to True.The concerns are highlighted in some stack overflow answers, but they have small number of votes.Top-level projects:  set copy local = true.First of all, it doesn't work correctly for top-level projects, i.e. executables or web sites.As pointed in the answer http://stackoverflow.com/a/6529461/52277for all the references in the one at the top set copy local = true.Alternatively you have to change output directory as it's described in http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-framework/partitioning-your-code-base-through-.net-assemblies-and-visual-studio-projects/If you set ‘ Copy Local = false’, VS will, unless you tell it otherwise, place each assembly alone in its own .\bin\Debugdirectory. Because of this, you will need to configure VS to place assemblies together in the same directory. To do so, for each VS project, go to VS > Project Properties > Build tab > Output path, and set the Ouput path to ..\bin\Debugfor debug configuration, and ..\bin\Release for release configuration.Second-level  dependencies:  set copy local = true.Another example when copylocal =false fails on run-time, is when top level assembly doesn't directly referenced one of indirect dependencies.E..g. Top-level assembly A has reference to assembly B with copylocal =true, but assembly B has reference to assembly C with copylocal =false. Most likely assembly C will be missing on runtime and will cause errors E.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/602765/when-should-copy-local-be-set-to-true-and-when-should-it-not?lq=1Copy local is important for deployment scenarios and tools. As a general rule you should use CopyLocal=True and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/602765/when-should-copy-local-be-set-to-true-and-when-should-it-not?lq=1 Unfortunately there are some quirks and CopyLocal won't necessary work as expected for assembly references in secondary assemblies structured as shown below.MainApp.exe MyLibrary.dll ThirdPartyLibrary.dll (if in the GAC CopyLocal won't copy to MainApp bin folder)This makes xcopy deployments difficult . .Reflection called DLLs  dependencies:  set copy local = true.E.g user can see error "ISystem.Reflection.ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information."The fix for the issue is recommended in http://stackoverflow.com/a/6200173/52277"I solved this issue by setting the Copy Local attribute of my project's references to true."In general, the problems with investigation of deployment issues may overweight the benefits of reduced build time. Setting the Copy Local to false without considering deployment issues is not a good idea.

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• Drupal Modules for SEO & Content

  - by Aditi

  When we talk about Drupal SEO, there are two things to consider one is about the relevant SEO practices and about appropriate Drupal Modules available. Optimizing your website for search engines is one of the most important aspect of launching & promoting your website especially if ranking matters to you. Understanding SEO For starters, you have begin with Keyword research and then optimize your content according to your findings by tagging, meta tags etc, Drupal modules once installed help you manage a lot of such parameters. Identifying the target keywords Using the Page Title and Token modules PathAuto configuration <H1> heading tags Optimizing Drupal’s default robots.txt file Etc. While Drupal gives you a lot of ability to make your website content worthy & search engine friendly it is important for you to make sure you are not crossing the line or you could get penalized. Modules Overview Drupal Power is at its best when you have these modules & great brain working together. The basic SEO improvements can be achieved easily with the modules enlisted below, but you can win magical rankings if you use them logically & wisely. Understanding your keyword competition & enhancing your content is the basic key to success and ofcourse the modules: Pathauto Automatically create search enging friendly readable URLS from tokens. A token is a piece of data from content, say the author’s username, or the content’s title. For example mysite.com/an-article, rather than mysite.com/node/114 for every node you make. NodeWords Amazingly useful drupal module that allows you to create custom meta tags and descriptions for your nodes, which gives you the ability to target specific keywords and phrases. Page Title Enables you to set an alternative title for the <title></title> tags and for the <h1></h1> tags on a node. Global Redirect Manage content duplication, 301 redirects, and URL validation with this small, but powerful module. Taxonomy manager Make large additions, or changes to taxonomy very easy. This module provides a powerful interface for managing taxonomies. A vocabulary gets displayed in a dynamic tree view, where parent terms can be expanded to list their nested child terms or can be collapsed. robotstxt A robots.txt file is vital for ensuring that search engine spiders don’t index the unwanted areas of your site. This Drupal module gives you the ability to manage your robots.txt file through the CMS admin. xmlsitemap An XML Sitemap lets the search engines index your website content. This module helps in generating and maintaining a complete sitemap for your website and gives you control over exactly which parts of the site you want to be included in the index. It even gives you the ability to automatically submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and Windows Live every time you update a node or at specific interval. Node Import This module allows you to import a set of nodes from a Comma Seperated Values (CSV) or Tab Seperated Values (TSV) text file. Makes it easy to import hundreds-thousands of csv rows and you get to tie up these rows to CCK fields (or locations), and it can file it under the right taxonomy hierarchy. This is Super life saver module.

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• Oracle Database 12 c Training and Certification: What’s in it for Me?

  - by KJones

  Oracle Database 12c has officially launched! Through Oracle University, our expert instructors can introduce you to the features and functions of this new Oracle Database 12c product. Through training courses and certification exam prep seminars, you can build up your database knowledge and apply this knowledge to advance your career. Already an Oracle Database Expert? Why Oracle Database 12c Training is still a Good Idea Oracle is the industry leader for database technology and takes the release of new products very seriously. We continue to listen to customer needs and add features and functionality to address those needs. Oracle Database 12c is no exception. The following areas have been greatly enhanced and should be considered for your additional training or certification: • Database for Cloud Computing • Compression and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) • Improved Performance & Scalability • Extreme Availability • Security Defense in Depth • Manageability Oracle Certified Database Administrators Reap Career Rewards Becoming an expert user of database technology through Oracle University's certification program widens your skill set to demonstrate your expertise implementing the most advanced database technology available. By doing so, you'll make yourself a more marketable employee and candidate in the job market.  Reasons to Become an Oracle Certified Database Administrator of Oracle Database 12c: • The new Oracle Database 12c certifications emphasize more advanced skills that align with industry standards, resulting in an even more valuable credential for customers and partners. • The Oracle Certified Associate (OCA) for Oracle Database 12c centers upon certification objectives that measure IT professionals' day-to-day skills, along with your ability to manage challenges. • Building upon all of the competencies incorporated into Oracle's Database 12c OCA certification, the Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) for Oracle Database 12c certification includes advanced knowledge and skills required of top-performing database administrators. • The Oracle Certified Master (OCM) for Oracle Database 12c - a very challenging and elite top-level certification - certifies the most highly skilled and experienced database experts. • Oracle offers 12c upgrade paths for existing Oracle Certified Professionals (OCP) and Oracle Certified Masters (OCM). Database 12c Training and Certification: Built with Your Input When creating Oracle Database 12c training courses and certifications, we wanted to know which tasks are most important in a DBA's day-to-day work. Instead of assuming what those tasks might be, we decided to develop a job task analysis survey for DBAs. The response rate from DBAs from around the world was overwhelming! The survey focused on the following key database areas: • DBA Core Essentials • Database Storage • High Availability • Scalability • Networking • Security • Very Large Database Administration • Distributed Databases After conducting this survey, we took this specific feedback and used it to help mold the new Oracle Database 12c training and certification curriculum. The benefit to you? You now have access to Oracle Database 12c courses and certification exams that were created with your specific on-the-job tasks in mind. Explore Oracle Database 12c Training & Certification Today Investing in Oracle Database 12c training courses and certifications will help you develop a great deal of knowledge, experience and expertise. Explore our portfolio of offerings to determine which skills you need as a DBA to get up-to-speed on Oracle Database 12c technology. Questions or comments about the new Oracle Database 12c offerings? Let us know in the comments below. - Diana Gray, Principle Curriculum Product Manager and Raza Siddiqui, Senior Principle Curriculum Product Manager

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• Silverlight Cream for January 26, 2011 -- #1036

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this all-submittal Issue: XamlNinja, Kevin Dockx, Steve Wortham, Andrea Boschin, Mick Norman, Colin Eberhardt, and Rudi Grobler(-2-, -3-, -4-, -5-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Getting an invalid cross-thread exception in Silverlight?" Kevin Dockx WP7: "WP7 Contrib – the last messenger" XamlNinja ISO: "How many files are too many files for isolated storage?" Mick Norman Shoutouts: Telerik announced a free WP7 Webinars series that you probably don't want to miss: Join Us for the Special Free Windows Phone 7 Webinars Series. Guest lecturers - Shawn Wildermuth and Mark Arteaga From SilverlightCream.com: WP7 Contrib – the last messenger XamlNinja has a great post up extending Laurent's IMessenger to deal with a tricky issue of trying to fire a message from one VM to another even if the 2nd VM isn't alive yet... oh, and this is in WP7Contrib, so go grab it! Getting an invalid cross-thread exception in Silverlight? Kevin Dockx has a solution to a problem we've all had... the 'invalid cross-thread exception' ... and the solution is even for those of us trying to do this in a VM... cool and easy solution, Kevin! Mastering Storyboards One Mistake at a Time Steve Wortham is back with a tutorial with a great title :) ... check out the progression from one success to another in this picture/title viewer ... don't miss the very end where he has the control rolled up into a CaptionedImageHyperlink, and a link to download it! Windows Phone 7 - Part #2: Your First Application Andrea Boschin has part 2 of his SilverlightShow WP7 series up. Lots of good intro material here on the manifest file and app.xaml ... he even gets into the ApplicationBar, phone orientation, and the Metro theme. How many files are too many files for isolated storage? Mick Norman alerted me to his blog early this morning, and this is his latest post... interesting tests of how many files are too many for ISO on your WP7... and I have to admit... he's stuffing a boatload of them out there in these tests! ... great info Mick! and thanks for the links. A Navigator Control For Visiblox Time Series Charts Colin Eberhardt's latest post is about creating an interactive navigator for large time series datasets in Visiblox charts.... check the images at the top of the post, and it'll be obvious :) ... very cool stuff. MVVM Frameworks with WP7 support Rudi Grobler has been very busy and if you check the dates, these posts are all in a day or two! This first highlights two contenders for MVVM on WP7: Caliburn and MVVMLight... both well-supported... quick intro to each followed by good links out to the author's sites Reading barcodes from your WP7 device Rudi Grobler also has a cool post up on reading barcodes with your WP7... he's using the ZXing Barcode Scanning Library, and makes quick work of the job. Taking Sterling for a Test-Drive Rudi Grobler has a quick intro to Sterlink, Jeremy Likness' ISO database for Silverlight up... quickly taking care of writing and reading back data. SQLite on WP7 After his discussion of Sterling, Rudi Grobler is now demonstrating the use of SQLite that has been ported to WP7. Check out his demo code... looks pretty easy to use. Hacking the WP7 Camera (The basics) Rudi Grobler's latest post is on getting direct access to the camera on WP7... be sure to do all the downloads and check out the external links he has. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Restyling RadDataPager for WPF and Silverlight

    A small but powerful control has joined the great family of Telerik XAML controls with the recent release. RadDataPager is a result of an increasing demand from our customers who needed to work with large amounts of server data presented in small portions at the client side.  The primary goal was to make a powerful data paging control to be used in any scenarios requiring getting and presenting portions of data. How good is RadDataPager in working with paged data you can see in Rossen's announcement. Yet being a XAML control it challenged us with making one more visually appealing and highly customizable control. It offers a slick look in all available WPF/Silverlight Telerik themes:     As you can see the default design is targeting mainly business scenarios. At the same time being an example for a truly lookless XAML control RadDataPager allows restyling with minimal efforts this way widening the possible range of applications.  Lets see what we can doo with a few lines of XAML : <Style x:Key="buttonStyle" TargetType="ButtonBase" > <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="ButtonBase"> <Grid Width="40" Background="Black"> <Ellipse StrokeThickness="2" VerticalAlignment="Center" Width="15" Height="15" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Fill="Gray" /> <Ellipse Visibility="{Binding IsCurrent, Converter={StaticResource VisibilityConverter}}" VerticalAlignment="Center" Height="16" Fill="White" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Width="16"/> </Grid> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> ... <telerik:RadDataPager NumericButtonStyle="{StaticResource buttonStyle}" ... And the result: The IPhone-style-thing bellow the RadCoverFlow is actually our RadDataPager.       With a few more lines of XAML we may get  almost any imaginable look of the pager control including the fascinating result demonstrated in the short video on the top.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Welcome to the SOA &amp; E2.0 Partner Community Forum

  - by Jürgen Kress

  With more than 200 registrations the SOA & E2.0 Partner Community Forum is a huge success!   Conference program Is available online: http://tinyurl.com/soaforumagenda Agenda Tuesday March 15th 2011 12:15 Welcome & Introduction – Hans Blaas & Jürgen Kress, Oracle 12:30 Oracle Middleware Strategy and Information on Application Grid and Exalogic - Andrew Sutherland, Oracle 13:15 Managing Online Customer, Partner and Employee Engagement Oracle E2.0 Solutions - Andrew Gilboy, Oracle 14:00 Coffee Break 14:30 Partner SOA/ BPM Reference Case – Leon Smiers, Capgemini 15:15 Partner WebCenter/ UCM Reference Case – Vikram Setia, Infomentum 16.00 Break 16.30 SOA and BPM 11gR1 PS3 Update – David Shaffer 17:00 Why specialization is important for Partners – Nick Kritikos, Hans Blaas & Jürgen Kress 17:45 Social Event   Wednesday March 16th 2011 09.00 Welcome & Introduction Day II 09.15 Breakout sessions Round 1 SOA Suite 11g PS3 & OSB Importance of ADF & Jdeveloper SOA Security IDM WebCenter PS3, Whats New E2.0 Sales Plays 10.30 Break 10.45 Breakout sessions Round 2 WebCenter PS3, Whats New Applications Management Enterprise Manager and Amberpoint ADF/WebCenter 11g integration with BPM Suite 11g Importance of ADF & Jdeveloper JCAPS & OC4J migration opportunities for service business 12.00 Lunch 13.00 Breakout sessions Round 3 BPM 11g, Whats New Universal Content Management! 11g SOA Security IDM E2.0 Surrounding Products: ATG, Documaker, Primavera Middleware Industry Value Propositions & Sales Plays 14.30 Break 14.45 Fusion Applications, Rajan Krishnan, Oracle 15.30 SOA & E2.0 Summary & Closing, Hans Blaas & Jürgen Kress, Oracle 15.45 Finish & Departure 16:00 Bus departure   Capgemini Nederland BV Papendorpseweg 100 3500 GN Utrecht The Netherlands Tel: +31 30 689 00 00 For a detailed routedescription by car or public transport please visit: http://www.nl.capgemini.com/pdf/Papendorp_UK.pdf Hotel In case you have not booked your hotel yet, please make your own hotel reservation. You can book your hotel room at the 'Hotel Vianen' at a special rate, by using the Oracle booking code: DDG VIA-GF41422. One night package € 110,- for a single room, including breakfast. Kindly secure your hotel room as soon as possible. The number of rooms is limited! Hotel Vianen Prins Bernhardstraat 75 4132 XE Vianen [email protected] The Netherlands [email protected] Arrival on 14th of March and staying at Hotel Vianen. On 15th of March we have arranged a transfer from Hotel Vianen to the Capgemini Offices. The bus is parked in front of the hotel and will leave at 10.15AM (UTC/GMT+1). Logistics Pass with barcode At your arrival you will receive a pass with a barcode. This pass will give you access to the conference building and the different floors within the building. Please make sure to hand in your pass at the registration desk at the end of the day. Arrival by plane Transfer from Schiphol Airport to Capgemini on 15th of March will be arranged by Oracle. A hostess will be welcoming you at the Meeting Point at Schiphol Airport (this is a red and white large cubicle situated next to Delifrance) The buses will depart from Schiphol Airport at 09.00AM, 09.45AM and 10.30AM (UTC/GMT+1).     For future SOA Partner Community Forums  become a member for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA Partner Community Forum,Community,SOA Partner Community,Utrecht 03.2011,OPN,Oracle,Jürgen Kress

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• How SQL Server 2014 impacts Red Gate’s SQL Compare

  - by Michelle Taylor

  SQL Compare 10.7 successfully connects to SQL Server 2014, but it doesn’t yet cover the SQL Server 2014 features which would require us to make major changes to SQL Compare to support. In this post I’m going to talk about the SQL Server 2014 features we’ve already begun supporting, and which ones we’re working on for the next release of SQL Compare (v11). From SQL Compare’s perspective, the new memory-optimized table functionality (some might know it as ‘Hekaton’) has been the most important change. It can’t be described as its own object type, but the new functionality is split across two existing object types (three if you count indexes), as it also comes with native stored procedures and inline indexes. Along with connectivity support, the SQL Compare team has already implemented the first part of the puzzle – inline specification of indexes. These are essential for memory-optimized tables because it’s not possible to alter the memory optimized table’s structure, and so indexes can’t be added after the fact without dropping the table. Books Online  shows this in more detail in the table_index and column_index clauses of http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174979(v=sql.120).aspx. SQL Compare 10.7 currently supports reading the new inline index specification from script folders and source control repositories, and will write out inline indexes where it’s necessary to do so (i.e. in UDDTs or when attempting to write projects compatible with the SSDT database project format). However, memory-optimized tables themselves are not yet supported in 10.7. The team is actively working on making them available in the v11 release with full support later in the year, and in a beta version before that. Fortunately, SQL Compare already has some ways of handling tables that have to be dropped and created rather than altered, which are being adapted to handle this new kind of table. Because it’s one of the largest new database engine features, there’s an equally large Books Online section on memory-optimized tables, but for us the most important parts of the documentation are the normal table features that are changed or unsupported and the new syntax found in the T-SQL reference pages. We are treating SQL Compare’s support of Natively Compiled Stored Procedures as a separate unit of work, which will be available in a subsequent beta and also feed into the v11 release. This new type of stored procedure is designed to work with memory-optimized tables to maintain the performance improvements gained by them – but you can still also access memory-optimized tables from normal stored procedures and ad-hoc queries. To us, they’re essentially a limited-syntax stored procedure with a few extra options in the create statement, embodied in the updated CREATE PROCEDURE documentation and with the detailed limitations. They should be easier to handle than memory-optimized tables simply because the handling of stored procedures is less sensitive to dropping the object than the handling of tables. However, both share an incompatibility with DDL triggers and Event Notifications which mean we’ll need to temporarily disable these during the specific deployment operations that involve them – don’t worry, we’ll supply a warning if this is the case so that you can check your auditing arrangements can handle the situation. There are also a handful of other improvements in SQL Server 2014 which affect SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare that are not connected to memory optimized tables. The largest of these are the improvements to columnstore indexes, with the capability to create clustered columnstore indexes and update columnstore tables through them – for more detail, take a look at the new syntax reference. There’s also a new index option for better compression of columnstores (COLUMNSTORE_ARCHIVE) and a new statistics option for incremental per-partition statistics, plus the 90 compatibility level is being retired. We’re planning to finish up these small clean-up features last, and be ready to release SQL Compare 11 with full SQL 2014 support early in Q3 this year. For a more thorough overview of what’s new in SQL Server 2014, Books Online’s What’s New section is a good place to start (although almost all the changes in this version are in the Database Engine).

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• July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 22 (sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats)

  - by Tamarick Hill

  The sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats Dynamic Management Function is used to return information about the fragmentation levels, page counts, depth, number of levels, record counts, etc. about the indexes on your database instance. One row is returned for each level in a given index, which we will discuss more later. The function takes a total of 5 input parameters which are (1) database_id, (2) object_id, (3) index_id, (4) partition_number, and (5) the mode of the scan level that you would like to run. Let’s use this function with our AdventureWorks2012 database to better illustrate the information it provides. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL) As you can see from the result set, there is a lot of beneficial information returned from this DMF. The first couple of columns in the result set (database_id, object_id, index_id, partition_number, index_type_desc, alloc_unit_type_desc) are either self-explanatory or have been explained in our previous blog sessions so I will not go into detail about these at this time. The next column in the result set is the index_depth which represents how deep the index goes. For example, If we have a large index that contains 1 root page, 3 intermediate levels, and 1 leaf level, our index depth would be 5. The next column is the index_level which refers to what level (of the depth) a particular row is referring to. Next is probably one of the most beneficial columns in this result set, which is the avg_fragmentation_in_percent. This column shows you how fragmented a particular level of an index may be. Many people use this column within their index maintenance jobs to dynamically determine whether they should do REORG’s or full REBUILD’s of a given index. The fragment count represents the number of fragments in a leaf level while the avg_fragment_size_in_pages represents the number of pages in a fragment. The page_count column tells you how many pages are in a particular index level. From my result set above, you see the the remaining columns all have NULL values. This is because I did not specify a ‘mode’ in my query and as a result it used the ‘LIMITED’ mode by default. The LIMITED mode is meant to be lightweight so it does collect information for every column in the result set. I will re-run my query again using the ‘DETAILED’ mode and you will see we now have results for these rows. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL, ‘DETAILED’)   From the remaining columns, you see we get even more detailed information such as how many records are in a particular index level (record_count). We have a column for ghost_record_count which represents the number of records that have been marked for deletion, but have not physically been removed by the background ghost cleanup process. We later see information on the MIN, MAX, and AVG record size in bytes. The forwarded_record_count column refers to records that have been updated and now no longer fit within the row on the page anymore and thus have to be moved. A forwarded record is left in the original location with a pointer to the new location. The last column in the result set is the compressed_page_count column which tells you how many pages in your index have been compressed. This is a very powerful DMF that returns good information about the current indexes in your system. However, based on the mode you select, it could be a very resource intensive function so be careful with how you use it. For more information on this Dynamic Management Function, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188917.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

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• Multiplayer / Networking options for a 2D game with physics

  - by lahmas

  Summary: My 50% finished 2D sidescroller with Box2D as physics engine should have multiplayer support in the final version. However, the current code is just a singleplayer game. What should I do now? And more important, how should I implement multiplayer and combine it with singleplayer? Is it a bad idea to code the singleplayer mode separated from multiplayer mode (like Notch did it with Minecraft)? The performance in singleplayer should be as good as possible (Simulating physics with using a loopback server to implement singleplayer mode would be a problem there) Full background / questions: I'm working on a relatively large 2D game project in C++, with physics as a core element of it. (I use Box2D for that) The finished game should have full multiplayer support, however I made the mistake that I didn't plan the networking part properly and basically worked on a singleplayer game until now. I thought that multiplayer support could be added to the almost finished singleplayer game in a relatively easy and clear way, but apparently, from what I have read this is wrong. I even read that a multiplayer game should be programmed as one from the beginning, with the singleplayer mode actually just consisting of hosting an invisible local server and connecting to it via loopback. (I found out that most FPS game engines do it that way, an example would be Source) So here I am, with my half finished 2D sidescroller game, and I don't really know how to go on. Simply continueing to work on the singleplayer / client seems useless to me now, as I'd have to recode and refactor even more later. First, a general question to anybody who possibly found himself in a situation like this: How should I proceed? Then, the more specific one - I have been trying to find out how I can approach the networking part for my game: (Possible solutions:) Invisible / loopback server for singleplayer This would have the advantage that there basically is no difference between singleplayer and multiplayer mode. Not much additional code would be needed. A big disadvantage: Performance and other limitations in singleplayer. There would be two physics simulations running. One for the client and one for the loopback server. Even if you work around by providing a direct path for the data from the loopback server, through direct communcation by the threads for example, the singleplayer would be limited. This is a problem because people should be allowed to play around with masses of objects at once. Separated singleplayer / Multiplayer mode There would be no server involved in singleplayer mode. I'm not really sure how this would work. But at least I think that there would be a lot of additional work, because all of the singleplayer features would have to be re-implemented or glued to multiplayer mode. Multiplayer mode as a module for singleplayer This is merely a quick thought I had. Multiplayer could consist of a singleplayer game, with an additional networking module loaded and connected to a server, which sends and receives data and updates the singleplayer world. In the retrospective, I regret not having planned the multiplayer mode earlier. I'm really stuck at this point and I hope that somebody here is able to help me!

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• Silverlight Cream for December 12, 2010 -- #1008

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Samuel Jack, Alfred Astort(-2-), Nokola(-2-), Avi Pilosof, Chris Klug, Pete Brown, Laurent Bugnion(-2-), and Jaime Rodriguez(-2-, -3-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight" Chris Klug WP7: "Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter" Jaime Rodriguez Training: "Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Koen Zwikstra announced the availability of the first Silverlight Spy 4 Preview 1 Gavin Wignall announced the Launch of Festive game built with Silverlight 4, hosted on Azure ... free to play. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act Michael Washington has an interesting take on writing a blog post with this 'play' version of Silverlight View Models and Expression Blend with a heaping dose of Behaviors added in for flavoring. Build a Windows Phone Game in 3 days – Day 1 Samuel Jack is attempting to build a WP7 game in 3 days including downloading the tools and an XNA book... interesting to see where he's headed wth this venture. 4 of 10 - Make sure your finger can hit the target and text is legible Continuing with a series of tips from the folks reviewing apps for the marketplace via Alfred Astort is this number 4 -- touch target size and legible text. 5 of 10 - Give feedback on touch and progress within your UI Alfred Astort's number 5 is also up, and continues the touch discussion with this tip about giving the user feedback on their touch. Fantasia Painter Released for Windows Phone 7 + Tips Nokola took the release of his Fantasia Painter on WP& as an opportunity not only to blog about the fact that we can go buy it, but has a blog full of hints and tips that he gathered while working on it. Games for Windows Phone 7 Resources: Reducing Load Times, RPG Kit; Other Nokola also blogged about the release of the new games education pack, and gives up the cursor he uses in his videos after being asked... The simplest way to do design-time ViewModels with MVVM and Blend. Avi Pilosof attacks the design-time ViewModel issue in Blend with a 'no code' solution. Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight Chris Klug is talking about sharing resources and styles across a large Silverlight project... near and dear to my heart at this moment. Dynamically Generating Controls in WPF and Silverlight Pete Brown has a post up that's generated some interest... creating controls at runtime... and he's demonstrating several different ways for both Silverlight and WPF #twitter for Windows Phone 7 protips (#wp7) Laurent Bugnion was posting these great tips for Twitter for WP7 and rolled all 16 of them up into a blog post... check them and the app out... Increasing touch surface (#wp7dev) Laurent Bugnion's most current post should be of great interest to WP7 devs... providing more touch surface for your user's fat fingers, err, I mean their fat fingerings :) ... great information and samples ... and interesting it is a fail point as listed by Alfred Astort above. Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter This material from Jaime Rodriguez actually hit prior to his Firestarter presentation, but should be required reading for anyone doing a WP7 app... great Performance tips from the trenches... slide deck, cheat-sheet, and code. UpdateSourceTrigger on Windows Phone data bindings Another post from Jaime Rodriguez actually went through a couple revisions already.. how about a WP7 TextBox that fires notifications to the ViewModel when the text changes? ... would you like a behavior with that? Details on the Push Notification app limits Jaime Rodriguez has yet another required reading post up on Push Notification limits ... what it really entails and how you can be a good WP7 citizen by the way you program your app. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Delegation of Solaris Zone Administration

  - by darrenm

  In Solaris 11 'Zone Delegation' is a built in feature. The Zones system now uses finegrained RBAC authorisations to allow delegation of management of distinct zones, rather than all zones which is what the 'Zone Management' RBAC profile did in Solaris 10.The data for this can be stored with the Zone or you could also create RBAC profiles (that can even be stored in NIS or LDAP) for granting access to specific lists of Zones to administrators.For example lets say we have zones named zoneA through zoneF and we have three admins alice, bob, carl.  We want to grant a subset of the zone management to each of them.We could do that either by adding the admin resource to the appropriate zones via zonecfg(1M) or we could do something like this with RBAC data directly: First lets look at an example of storing the data with the zone. # zonecfg -z zoneA zonecfg:zoneA> add admin zonecfg:zoneA> set user=alice zonecfg:zoneA> set auths=manage zonecfg:zoneA> end zonecfg:zoneA> commit zonecfg:zoneA> exit Now lets look at the alternate method of storing this directly in the RBAC database, but we will show all our admins and zones for this example: # usermod -P +Zone Management -A +solaris.zone.manage/zoneA alice # usermod -A +solaris.zone.login/zoneB alice # usermod -P +Zone Management-A +solaris.zone.manage/zoneB bob # usermod -A +solaris.zone.manage/zoneC bob # usermod -P +Zone Management-A +solaris.zone.manage/zoneC carl # usermod -A +solaris.zone.manage/zoneD carl # usermod -A +solaris.zone.manage/zoneE carl # usermod -A +solaris.zone.manage/zoneF carl In the above alice can only manage zoneA, bob can manage zoneB and zoneC and carl can manage zoneC through zoneF.  The user alice can also login on the console to zoneB but she can't do the operations that require the solaris.zone.manage authorisation on it.Or if you have a large number of zones and/or admins or you just want to provide a layer of abstraction you can collect the authorisation lists into an RBAC profile and grant that to the admins, for example lets great an RBAC profile for the things that alice and carl can do. # profiles -p 'Zone Group 1' profiles:Zone Group 1> set desc="Zone Group 1" profiles:Zone Group 1> add profile="Zone Management" profiles:Zone Group 1> add auths=solaris.zone.manage/zoneA profiles:Zone Group 1> add auths=solaris.zone.login/zoneB profiles:Zone Group 1> commit profiles:Zone Group 1> exit # profiles -p 'Zone Group 3' profiles:Zone Group 1> set desc="Zone Group 3" profiles:Zone Group 1> add profile="Zone Management" profiles:Zone Group 1> add auths=solaris.zone.manage/zoneD profiles:Zone Group 1> add auths=solaris.zone.manage/zoneE profiles:Zone Group 1> add auths=solaris.zone.manage/zoneF profiles:Zone Group 1> commit profiles:Zone Group 1> exit Now instead of granting carl  and aliace the 'Zone Management' profile and the authorisations directly we can just give them the appropriate profile. # usermod -P +'Zone Group 3' carl # usermod -P +'Zone Group 1' alice If we wanted to store the profile data and the profiles granted to the users in LDAP just add '-S ldap' to the profiles and usermod commands. For a documentation overview see the description of the "admin" resource in zonecfg(1M), profiles(1) and usermod(1M)

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• Why Haven’t NFC Payments Taken Off?

  - by David Dorf

  With the EMV 2015 milestone approaching rapidly, there’s been renewed interest in smartcards, those credit cards with an embedded computer chip.  Back in 1996 I was working for a vendor helping Visa introduce a stored-value smartcard to the US.  Visa Cash was debuted at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and I firmly believed it was the beginning of a cashless society.  (I later worked on MasterCard’s system called Mondex, from the UK, which debuted the following year in Manhattan). But since you don’t have a Visa Cash card in your wallet, it’s obvious the project never took off.  It was convenient for consumers, faster for merchants, and more cost-effective for banks, so why did it fail?  All emerging payment systems suffer from the chicken-and-egg dilemma.  Consumers won’t carry the cards if few merchants accept them, and merchants won’t install the terminals if few consumers have cards. Today’s emerging payment providers are in a similar pickle.  There has to be enough value for all three constituents – consumers, merchants, banks – to change the status quo.  And it’s not enough to exceed the value, it’s got to be a leap in value, because people generally resist change.  ATMs and transit cards are great examples of this, and airline kiosks and self-checkout systems are to a lesser extent. Although Google Wallet and ISIS, the two leading NFC payment platforms in the US, have shown strong commitment, there’s been very little traction.  Yes, I can load my credit card number into my phone then tap to pay, but what was the incremental value over swiping my old card?  For it to be a leap in value, it has to offer more than just payment, which I can do very easily today.  The other two ingredients are thought to be loyalty programs and digital coupons, but neither Google nor ISIS really did them well. Of course a large portion of the mobile phone market doesn’t even support NFC thanks to Apple, and since it’s not in their best interest that situation is unlikely to change.  Another issue is getting access to the “secure element,” the chip inside the phone where accounts numbers can be held securely.  Telco providers and handset manufacturers own that area, and they’re not willing to share with banks.  (Host Card Emulation, which has been endorsed by MasterCard and Visa, might be a solution.) Square recently gave up on its wallet, and MCX (the group of retailers trying to create a mobile payment platform) is very slow out of the gate.  That leaves PayPal and a slew of smaller companies trying to introduce easier ways to pay. But is it really so cumbersome to carry and swipe (soon to insert) a credit card?  Aren’t there more important problems to solve in the retail customer experience?  Maybe Apple will come up with some novel way to use iBeacons and fingerprint identification to make payments, but for now I think we need to focus on upgrading to Chip-and-PIN and tightening security.  In the meantime, NFC payments will continue to struggle.

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• Four New Java Champions

  - by Tori Wieldt

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

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• The New Social Developer Community: a Q&A

  - by Mike Stiles

  In our last blog, we introduced the opportunities that lie ahead for social developers as social applications reach across every aspect and function of the enterprise. Leading the upcoming JavaOne Social Developer Program October 2 at the San Francisco Hilton is Roland Smart, VP of Social Marketing at Oracle. I got to ask Roland a few of the questions an existing or budding social developer might want to know as social extends beyond interacting with friends and marketing and into the enterprise. Why is it smart for developers to specialize as social developers? What opportunities lie in the immediate future that’s making this a critical, in-demand position? Social has changed the way we interact with brands and with each other across the web. As we acclimate to a new social paradigm we also look to extend its benefits into new areas of our lives. The workplace is a logical next step, and we're starting to see social interactions more and more in this context. But unlocking the value of social interactions requires technical expertise and knowledge of developing social apps that tap into the social graph. Developers focused on integrating social experiences into enterprise applications must be familiar with popular social APIs and must understand how to build enterprise social graphs of their own. These developers are part of an emerging community of social developers and are key to socially enabling the enterprise. Facebook rebranded their Preferred Developer Consultant Group (PDC) and the Preferred Marketing Developers (PMD) to underscore the fact developers are required inside marketing organizations to unlock the full potential of their platform. While this trend is starting on the marketing side with marketing developers, this is just an extension of the social developer concept that will ultimately drive social across the enterprise. What are some of the various ways social will be making its way into every area of enterprise organizations? How will it be utilized and what kinds of applications are going to be needed to facilitate and maximize these changes? Check out Oracle’s vision for the social-enabled enterprise. It’s a high-level overview of how social will impact across the enterprise. For example: HR can leverage social in recruiting and retentionSales can leverage social as a prospecting toolMarketing can use social to gain market insightCustomer support can use social to leverage community support to improve customer satisfaction while reducing service costOperations can leverage social improve systems That’s only the beginning. Once sleeves get rolled up and social developers and innovators get to work, still more social functions will no doubt emerge. What makes Java one of, if not the most viable platform on which to build these new enterprise social applications? Java is certainly one of the best platforms on which to build social experiences because there’s such a large existing community of Java developers. This means you can affordably recruit talent, and it's possible to effectively solicit advice from the community through various means, including our new Social Developer Community. Beyond that, there are already some great proof points Java is the best platform for creating social experiences at scale. Consider LinkedIn and Twitter. Tell us more about the benefits of collaboration and more about what the Oracle Social Developer Community is. What opportunities does that offer up and what are some of the ways developers can actively participate in and benefit from that community? Much has been written about the overall benefits of collaborating with other developers. Those include an opportunity to introduce yourself to the community of social developers, foster a reputation, establish an expertise, contribute to the advancement of the space, get feedback, experiment with the latest concepts, and gain inspiration. In short, collaboration is a tool that must be applied properly within a framework to get the most value out of it. The OSDC is a place where social developers can congregate to discuss the opportunities/challenges of building social integrations into their applications. What “needs” will this community have? We don't know yet. But we wanted to create a forum where we can engage and understand what social developers are thinking about, excited about, struggling with, etc. The OSDL can then step in if we can help remove barriers and add value in a serious and committed way so Oracle can help drive practice development.

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• SQL SERVER – How to Ignore Columnstore Index Usage in Query

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier I wrote about SQL SERVER – Fundamentals of Columnstore Index and very first question I received in email was as following. “We are using SQL Server 2012 CTP3 and so far so good. In our data warehouse solution we have created 1 non-clustered columnstore index on our large fact table. We have very unique situation but your article did not cover it. We are running few queries on our fact table which is working very efficiently but there is one query which earlier was running very fine but after creating this non-clustered columnstore index this query is running very slow. We dropped the columnstore index and suddenly this one query is running fast but other queries which were benefited by this columnstore index it is running slow. Any workaround in this situation?” In summary the question in simple words “How can we ignore using columnstore index in selective queries?” Very interesting question – you can use I can understand there may be the cases when columnstore index is not ideal and needs to be ignored the same. You can use the query hint IGNORE_NONCLUSTERED_COLUMNSTORE_INDEX to ignore the columnstore index. SQL Server Engine will use any other index which is best after ignoring the columnstore index. Here is the quick script to prove the same. We will first create sample database and then create columnstore index on the same. Once columnstore index is created we will write simple query. This query will use columnstore index. We will then show the usage of the query hint. USE AdventureWorks GO -- Create New Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail]( [SalesOrderID] [int] NOT NULL, [SalesOrderDetailID] [int] NOT NULL, [CarrierTrackingNumber] [nvarchar](25) NULL, [OrderQty] [smallint] NOT NULL, [ProductID] [int] NOT NULL, [SpecialOfferID] [int] NOT NULL, [UnitPrice] [money] NOT NULL, [UnitPriceDiscount] [money] NOT NULL, [LineTotal] [numeric](38, 6) NOT NULL, [rowguid] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL, [ModifiedDate] [datetime] NOT NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Create clustered index CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [CL_MySalesOrderDetail] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] ( [SalesOrderDetailID]) GO -- Create Sample Data Table -- WARNING: This Query may run upto 2-10 minutes based on your systems resources INSERT INTO [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] SELECT S1.* FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail S1 GO 100 -- Create ColumnStore Index CREATE NONCLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [MySalesOrderDetail] (UnitPrice, OrderQty, ProductID) GO Now we have created columnstore index so if we run following query it will use for sure the same index. -- Select Table with regular Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO We can specify Query Hint IGNORE_NONCLUSTERED_COLUMNSTORE_INDEX as described in following query and it will not use columnstore index. -- Select Table with regular Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID OPTION (IGNORE_NONCLUSTERED_COLUMNSTORE_INDEX) GO Let us clean up the database. -- Cleanup DROP INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GO TRUNCATE TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO DROP TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO Again, make sure that you use hint sparingly and understanding the proper implication of the same. Make sure that you test it with and without hint and select the best option after review of your administrator. Here is the question for you – have you started to use SQL Server 2012 for your validation and development (not on production)? It will be interesting to know the answer. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Best Practices for Handing over Legacy Code

  - by PersonalNexus

  In a couple of months a colleague will be moving on to a new project and I will be inheriting one of his projects. To prepare, I have already ordered Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code. But this books as well as most questions on legacy code I found so far are concerned with the case of inheriting code as-is. But in this case I actually have access to the original developer and we do have some time for an orderly hand-over. Some background on the piece of code I will be inheriting: It's functioning: There are no known bugs, but as performance requirements keep going up, some optimizations will become necessary in the not too distant future. Undocumented: There is pretty much zero documentation at the method and class level. What the code is supposed to do at a higher level, though, is well-understood, because I have been writing against its API (as a black-box) for years. Only higher-level integration tests: There are only integration tests testing proper interaction with other components via the API (again, black-box). Very low-level, optimized for speed: Because this code is central to an entire system of applications, a lot of it has been optimized several times over the years and is extremely low-level (one part has its own memory manager for certain structs/records). Concurrent and lock-free: While I am very familiar with concurrent and lock-free programming and have actually contributed a few pieces to this code, this adds another layer of complexity. Large codebase: This particular project is more than ten thousand lines of code, so there is no way I will be able to have everything explained to me. Written in Delphi: I'm just going to put this out there, although I don't believe the language to be germane to the question, as I believe this type of problem to be language-agnostic. I was wondering how the time until his departure would best be spent. Here are a couple of ideas: Get everything to build on my machine: Even though everything should be checked into source code control, who hasn't forgotten to check in a file once in a while, so this should probably be the first order of business. More tests: While I would like more class-level unit tests so that when I will be making changes, any bugs I introduce can be caught early on, the code as it is now is not testable (huge classes, long methods, too many mutual dependencies). What to document: I think for starters it would be best to focus documentation on those areas in the code that would otherwise be difficult to understand e.g. because of their low-level/highly optimized nature. I am afraid there are a couple of things in there that might look ugly and in need of refactoring/rewriting, but are actually optimizations that have been out in there for a good reason that I might miss (cf. Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part I) How to document: I think some class diagrams of the architecture and sequence diagrams of critical functions accompanied by some prose would be best. Who to document: I was wondering what would be better, to have him write the documentation or have him explain it to me, so I can write the documentation. I am afraid, that things that are obvious to him but not me would otherwise not be covered properly. Refactoring using pair-programming: This might not be possible to do due to time constraints, but maybe I could refactor some of his code to make it more maintainable while he was still around to provide input on why things are the way they are. Please comment on and add to this. Since there isn't enough time to do all of this, I am particularly interested in how you would prioritize.

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• Is there a low carbon future for the retail industry?

  - by user801960

  Recently Oracle published a report in conjunction with The Future Laboratory and a global panel of experts to highlight the issue of energy use in modern industry and the serious need to reduce carbon emissions radically by 2050.  Emissions must be cut by 80-95% below the levels in 1990 – but what can the retail industry do to keep up with this? There are three key aspects to the retail industry where carbon emissions can be cut:  manufacturing, transport and IT.  Manufacturing Naturally, manufacturing is going to be a big area where businesses across all industries will be forced to make considerable savings in carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution.  Many retailers of all sizes will use third party factories and will have little control over specific environmental impacts from the factory, but retailers can reduce environmental impact at the factories by managing orders more efficiently – better planning for stock requirements means economies of scale both in terms of finance and the environment. The John Lewis Partnership has made detailed commitments to reducing manufacturing and packaging waste on both its own-brand products and products it sources from third party suppliers. It aims to divert 95 percent of its operational waste from landfill by 2013, which is a huge logistics challenge.  The John Lewis Partnership’s website provides a large amount of information on its responsibilities towards the environment. Transport Similarly to manufacturing, tightening up on logistical planning for stock distribution will make savings on carbon emissions from haulage.  More accurate supply and demand analysis will mean less stock re-allocation after initial distribution, and better warehouse management will mean more efficient stock distribution.  UK grocery retailer Morrisons has introduced double-decked trailers to its haulage fleet and adjusted distribution logistics accordingly to reduce the number of kilometers travelled by the fleet.  Morrisons measures route planning efficiency in terms of cases moved per kilometre and has, over the last two years, increased the number of cases per kilometre by 12.7%.  See Morrisons Corporate Responsibility report for more information. IT IT infrastructure is often initially overlooked by businesses when considering environmental efficiency.  Datacentres and web servers often need to run 24/7 to handle both consumer orders and internal logistics, and this both requires a lot of energy and puts out a lot of heat.  Many businesses are lowering environmental impact by reducing IT system fragmentation in their offices, while an increasing number of businesses are outsourcing their datacenters to cloud-based services.  Using centralised datacenters reduces the power usage at smaller offices, while using cloud based services means the datacenters can be based in a more environmentally friendly location.  For example, Facebook is opening a massive datacentre in Sweden – close to the Arctic Circle – to reduce the need for artificial cooling methods.  In addition, moving to a cloud-based solution makes IT services more easily scaleable, reducing redundant IT systems that would still use energy.  In store, the UK’s Carbon Trust reports that on average, lighting accounts for 25% of a retailer’s electricity costs, and for grocery retailers, up to 50% of their electricity bill comes from refrigeration units.  On a smaller scale, retailers can invest in greener technologies in store and in their offices.  The report concludes that widely shared objectives of energy security, reduced emissions and continued economic growth are dependent on the development of a smart grid capable of delivering energy efficiency and demand response, as well as integrating renewable and variable sources of energy. The report is available to download from http://emeapressoffice.oracle.com/imagelibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetailsID=1766I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the report.   

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