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The Customer Experience Imperative: A Game Changer for Brands

- by Jeri Kelley

By Anthony Lye, SVP, Cloud Applications Strategy, Oracle We know that customer experience has emerged as a primary differentiator for businesses today. I’ve talked a lot about the new age of the empowered consumer. At Oracle we’ve spent a lot of time developing technologies and practices that our customers can implement to greatly improve their customer experience strategies. Of course I’m biased, but I think that we have created a portfolio of the best solutions on the planet to help organizations deal with the challenges of providing great customer experiences. We’ve done this because we started to witness some trends over the last few years. As the average person began to utilize social and mobile technologies more frequently and products commoditized, customer experience truly remained the only sustainable differentiator for businesses.In fact, we have seen that customer experience is often driving the success or the failure of a product or a brand. And as end customers have become more vocal about their experiences with companies on social and mobile channels, they now have the power to decide which brands will win and which brands will lose. To address this customer experience imperative, I believe that business today must do three things really well:Connect with your customers. You have to connect with customers whenever, wherever and however they want. Organizations must provide a great experience on their existing channels— the call center, the brick and mortar store, the field sales organizations, the websites and social properties. Businesses must also be great at managing and delivering journeys on these channels, while quickly adapting to embrace the new channels that emerge. You have to understand mobile. You have to understand social. You have to understand kiosks. These are all new routes to market, new channels where your customers may or may not show up. You have to interact with them where they are. You have to present information in a way that's meaningful to them. As well as providing what we would call a multichannel experience. We have to recognize that customers may start their experience on one channel, but end it on a different channel. It’s important that an organization’s technology solutions enable, not just a multichannel strategy, but a strategy that can power new channels and create customer journeys that cross these channels.Get to know your customers. Next, companies need to get to know the customer as intimately as the customer will allow. Today most customer interactions are anonymous, but it’s important for brands to know which customers drive value. Customers want to provide feedback. They want to share their opinions, but they want to know that those opinions are being heard and acted upon. For this to occur, we need to know much more about the customer and then reward them for their loyalty and for their advocacy.Enable connections. The last thing is to enable people to connect or transact with your brand. We've got to make it really, really simple for customers to do business with us. We can't make them repeat the steps; we can't make them tell us their identity for the fifth time as they move between organizations. These silos can no longer sustain or deliver a good customer experience. It's extremely important that companies be where customers want them to be—that we create profitable journeys for us and for them.Organizations have to make sure that there is a single source of truth that defines the customer. We have to make sure that the technology applications that we rely on understand not just the dimensions of multichannel, but of cross-channel too. We have to enable social at the very core of the overall architecture. We have to use historical analytics, real-time decisioning as well as predictive analytics to help personalize and drive an experience. And these are all technologies that IT needs, that IT is familiar with, but needs to enable for the line of business that in turn can enable for the end customer. This means that we've got to make our solutions available to the customers in the cloud.In this new age of the empowered consumer, businesses have to focus on delivery mechanisms that reduce the overall TCO, while driving a rapid rate of innovation and a more rapid rate of deployment. At the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld, I’ll discuss these issues and more. I hope that you can join us for what promises to be an unforgettable experience.

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

- by user3002473

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

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CD/DVD drive not mounted when inserted with Disc of any kind

- by Cisco Sán

I just noticed that if a insert a CD or a DVD of any kind, the Drive will start spinning but it will not show the mounted disc. Before it used to ask me what to do with the media inserted. Now it doesn't even do that. I ran in the terminal this code: eject -n and it displays this: " eject: device is `/dev/sr0'" what can I do to get the functionality back on my drive. also ran this command: sudo mount -o ro,unhide,uid=1000 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom but in return i get this: " mount: mount point /mnt/cdrom does not exist" Running Ubuntu 11.10 HERE IS THE HISTORY UNTIL NOW thanks Waltinator: I ran the 'dmesg' but don't know what I'm looking for. Im a newbie on this. The same thing with the 'ls -rlt /var/log' command. Should I create the directory for the mount? at this point really don't know what to do. – Cisco Sán 7 hours ago Here are 3 lines from my dmesg after I successfully inserted a CD: [ 4804.416018] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present [ 8214.125450] ISdit ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3 [ 8214.136556] ISO 9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A The first line is a previous event, my wireless going online. The next 2 lines are a good result. The number in square brackets is "seconds since boot", the rest of the line is usually helpful. And no, you should NOT create the mount point. Let's try to get the automatic mounting to work. – waltinator 7 hours ago ok this are my last 3 lines on the 'dmesg' [ 18.130819] init: plymouth-stop pre-start process (1396) terminated with status 1 [ 28.780011] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present [ 505.632119] CE: hpet increased min_delta_ns to 20113 nsec – Cisco Sán 6 hours ago It looks like your CD/DVD drive is not connected to the data bus, and not causing an interrupt when you insert a platter. – waltinator 6 hours ago Try dmesg | grep -A8 CD-ROM which should show you what the system thought was available when it came up. – waltinator 6 hours ago here is my printout [0.774351] scsi 0:0:0:0: CD-ROM HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GSA-T40N A100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 [0.778117] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray [0.778122] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20 [0.778282] sr 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 [0.778340] sr 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 5 [0.780416] Freeing unused kernel memory: 984k freed [0.780732] Write protecting the kernel read-only data: 10240k [0.780986] Freeing unused kernel memory: 20k freed [0.786331] Freeing unused kernel memory: 1400k freed [0.804912] udevd[90]: starting version 173 [0.874178] r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 2.3LK-NAPI loaded [0.874208] r8169 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A - GSI 16 (level, low) - IRQ 16 OK, your system sees the drive. Can you open and close the tray with eject and eject -t? Run udevadm monitor while you insert a CD (type ^C when done) and see if you get "change" and "add" messages. – waltinator 6 hours ago ok, "eject" works perfectly "eject -t" does nothing. this is the message for "udevadm monitor": KERNEL[13771.009267] change /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sr0 (block) UDEV [13773.878887] change /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0 /block/sr0 (block) – Cisco Sán 6 hours ago sudo hwinfo --cdrom (the hwinfo package is installable through Software Center) describes my CD-ROM, try it. – waltinator 4 hours ago My read out from the "sudo hwinfo --cdrom" are the following: hal.1: read hal dataprocess 2753: arguments to dbus_move_error() were incorrect, assertion "(dest) == NULL || !dbus_error_is_set ((dest))" failed in file ../../dbus/dbus-errors.c line 280. This is normally a bug in some application using the D-Bus library. libhal.c 3483 : Error unsubscribing to signals, error=The name org.freedesktop.Hal was not provided by any .service files 22: SCSI 00.0: 10602 CD-ROM (DVD) [Created at block.247] Unique ID: KD9E.JgkxTS4hgl2 Parent ID: 3p2J.gdUMCD83e+E SysFS ID: /class/block/sr0 SysFS BusID: 0:0:0:0 SysFS Device Link: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0 Hardware Class: cdrom Model: "HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GSA-T40N" Vendor: "HL-DT-ST" Device: "DVD+-RW GSA-T40N" Revision: "A100" Driver: "ata_piix", "sr" Driver Modules: "ata_piix" Device File: /dev/sr0 (/dev/sg0) Device Files: /dev/sr0, /dev/scd0, /dev/disk/by-id/ata-HL-DT-ST_DVD+_-RW_GSA-T40N_K048BJ74257, /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1f.1-scsi-0:0:0:0, /dev/cdrom, /dev/cdrw, /dev/dvd, /dev/dvdrw Device Number: block 11:0 (char 21:0) Features: DVD Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown Attached to: #17 (IDE interface) Drive Speed: 31 Volume ID: "Movie" Publisher: "INTERVIDEO" Creation date: "20050424162207000" Thanks for the help. To Castro, hope this is what you meant and sorry for the comments..

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Disaster Recovery Discovery

- by Rodney Landrum

Last weekend I joined several of my IT staff on a mission to perform a DR test in our remote CoLo center in a large South East city of the US. Can I be more obtuse? The goal was simple for me as the sole DBA in a throng of Windows, Storage, Network and SAN admins – restore the databases and make them work. There were 4 applications that back ended to 7 SQL Server databases on 4 different SQL Server instances. We would maintain the original server names, but beyond that it was fair game. We had time to prepare so I was able to script out or otherwise automate the recovery process. I used sp_help_revlogin for three of the servers, a bit of a cheat actually because restoring the Master database on the target DR servers was the specified course of action according to the DR procedures ( the caveat “IF REQUIRED” left it open to interpretation. I really wanted to avoid the step of restoring Master for a number of reasons but mainly because I did not want to deal with issues starting SQL Services afterward. Having to account for the location of TempDB and the version conflicts of the resource DBs were just two of the battles I chose not to fight. Not to mention other system database location problems that might arise and prevent SQL from starting. I was going to have to restore all of the user databases anyway, so I would not really gain any benefit, outside of logins, for taking the time to restore the source Master database over the newly installed one on the fresh server. What I wanted was the ability to restore the Master database as a user database, call it Master_Mine, from a backup on the source system and then use that restored database to script the SQL Logins and passwords on the DR systems. While I did not attempt this on the trip, the thought stuck in my mind and this past week I succeeded at scripting user accounts and passwords using only a restored copy of the Master database. Granted there were several challenges to overcome. Also, as is usual for any work like this the usual disclaimers apply: This is not something that I would imagine Microsoft would condone or support and this was really only an experiment for me to learn if it was even possible. While I have tested the process with success, I do not know that I would use this technique in a documented procedure because future updates for SQL Server will render this technique non-functional. I thought at first, incorrectly of course, that I could use sp_help_revlogin on a restored copy of the master database I named Master_Mine. Since sp_help_revlogin uses system schema objects, sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals, this was not going to work because all results would come from the main Master database. To test this I added a SQL login via SSMS, backed up Master, restored it as Master_Mine, and then deleted the login. Even though the test account I created should presumably still be in the Master_Mine database, I should be able to get to it and script out its creation with its password hash so that I would not need to know the password, but any applications that stored that password would not have to be altered in the DR scenario. They would just work as expected. Once I realized that would not work I began looking deeper. Knowing that sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals are system views, their underlying code should be available with sp_helptext, right? They were. And this led me to discover the two tables sys.sysxlgns and sys.sysprivs, where the data I needed was stored. These tables existed in both the real Master and the restored copy, Master_Mine. I used this information to tweak the sp_help_revlogin stored procedure to use these tables instead to create the logins cursor used in sp_help_revlogin. For the password hash, sp_help_revlogin uses the function LoginProperty() which takes a user name and option ‘passwordhash’ to return the hash for the user. Unfortunately, it requires the login to exist in the Master database. This would not work. So another slight modification I had to make was to pull the password hash itself (pwdhash from sys.sysxlgns) into the logins cursor and comment out the section of sp_help_revlogin that uses LoginProperty. Instead, I pass the pwdhash value as the variable @PWD_varbinary to the sp_hexadecimal stored procedure which is also created by and used within the code provided by Microsoft in the link above for sp_help_revlogin. The final challenge: sys.sysxlgns and sys.server_principals are visible only within a Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) query window in SSMS or within SQLCDMD. To open a DAC connection you have to be logged in on the SQL Server itself, via RDP in my case, and you preface the server name in the query connection with ADMIN:, so that the server connection looks like ADMIN:ServerName. From there you can create the modified stored procedure in the restored copy of a Master database from a source system as whatever name you like, and then run the modified stored procedure. I named my new stored procedure usp_help_revlogin_MyMaster. Upon execution I was happy to see the logins and password hashes that I needed to apply from the source Master database without having to restore over the new Master system database and without the need to access the original server (assuming it was down due to whatever disaster put it in that state). You will note that I am not providing full code samples here of the modifications. I will say that it was a slight bit of work and anyone who needed to do this for whatever reason, could fairly easily roll their own solution with the information provided herein. My goal, as I said was to prove that this could be done and provide another option if required to ease the burden of getting SQL Servers up and available in an emergency situation where alternatives may be more challenging or otherwise unavailable.

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Which of these algorithms is best for my goal?

- by JonathonG

I have created a program that restricts the mouse to a certain region based on a black/white bitmap. The program is 100% functional as-is, but uses an inaccurate, albeit fast, algorithm for repositioning the mouse when it strays outside the area. Currently, when the mouse moves outside the area, basically what happens is this: A line is drawn between a pre-defined static point inside the region and the mouse's new position. The point where that line intersects the edge of the allowed area is found. The mouse is moved to that point. This works, but only works perfectly for a perfect circle with the pre-defined point set in the exact center. Unfortunately, this will never be the case. The application will be used with a variety of rectangles and irregular, amorphous shapes. On such shapes, the point where the line drawn intersects the edge will usually not be the closest point on the shape to the mouse. I need to create a new algorithm that finds the closest point to the mouse's new position on the edge of the allowed area. I have several ideas about this, but I am not sure of their validity, in that they may have far too much overhead. While I am not asking for code, it might help to know that I am using Objective C / Cocoa, developing for OS X, as I feel the language being used might affect the efficiency of potential methods. My ideas are: Using a bit of trigonometry to project lines would work, but that would require some kind of intense algorithm to test every point on every line until it found the edge of the region... That seems too resource intensive since there could be something like 200 lines that would have each have to have as many as 200 pixels checked for black/white.... Using something like an A* pathing algorithm to find the shortest path to a black pixel; however, A* seems resource intensive, even though I could probably restrict it to only checking roughly in one direction. It also seems like it will take more time and effort than I have available to spend on this small portion of the much larger project I am working on, correct me if I am wrong and it would not be a significant amount of code (100 lines or around there). Mapping the border of the region before the application begins running the event tap loop. I think I could accomplish this by using my current line-based algorithm to find an edge point and then initiating an algorithm that checks all 8 pixels around that pixel, finds the next border pixel in one direction, and continues to do this until it comes back to the starting pixel. I could then store that data in an array to be used for the entire duration of the program, and have the mouse re-positioning method check the array for the closest pixel on the border to the mouse target position. That last method would presumably execute it's initial border mapping fairly quickly. (It would only have to map between 2,000 and 8,000 pixels, which means 8,000 to 64,000 checked, and I could even permanently store the data to make launching faster.) However, I am uncertain as to how much overhead it would take to scan through that array for the shortest distance for every single mouse move event... I suppose there could be a shortcut to restrict the number of elements in the array that will be checked to a variable number starting with the intersecting point on the line (from my original algorithm), and raise/lower that number to experiment with the overhead/accuracy tradeoff. Please let me know if I am over thinking this and there is an easier way that will work just fine, or which of these methods would be able to execute something like 30 times per second to keep mouse movement smooth, or if you have a better/faster method. I've posted relevant parts of my code below for reference, and included an example of what the area might look like. (I check for color value against a loaded bitmap that is black/white.) // // This part of my code runs every single time the mouse moves. // CGPoint point = CGEventGetLocation(event); float tX = point.x; float tY = point.y; if( is_in_area(tX,tY, mouse_mask)){ // target is inside O.K. area, do nothing }else{ CGPoint target; //point inside restricted region: float iX = 600; // inside x float iY = 500; // inside y // delta to midpoint between iX,iY and tX,tY float dX; float dY; float accuracy = .5; //accuracy to loop until reached do { dX = (tX-iX)/2; dY = (tY-iY)/2; if(is_in_area((tX-dX),(tY-dY),mouse_mask)){ iX += dX; iY += dY; } else { tX -= dX; tY -= dY; } } while (abs(dX)>accuracy || abs(dY)>accuracy); target = CGPointMake(roundf(tX), roundf(tY)); CGDisplayMoveCursorToPoint(CGMainDisplayID(),target); } Here is "is_in_area(int x, int y)" : bool is_in_area(NSInteger x, NSInteger y, NSBitmapImageRep *mouse_mask){ NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; NSUInteger pixel[4]; [mouse_mask getPixel:pixel atX:x y:y]; if(pixel[0]!= 0){ [pool release]; return false; } [pool release]; return true; }

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Session Report - Modern Software Development Anti-Patterns

- by Janice J. Heiss

In this standing-room-only session, building upon his 2011 JavaOne Rock Star “Diabolical Developer” session, Martijn Verburg, this time along with Ben Evans, identified and explored common “anti-patterns” – ways of doing things that keep developers from doing their best work. They emphasized the importance of social interaction and team communication, along with identifying certain psychological pitfalls that lead developers astray. Their emphasis was less on technical coding errors and more how to function well and to keep one’s focus on what really matters. They are the authors of the highly regarded The Well-Grounded Java Developer and are both movers and shakers in the London JUG community and on the Java Community Process. The large room was packed as they gave a fast-moving, witty presentation with lots of laughs and personal anecdotes. Below are a few of the anti-patterns they discussed.Anti-Pattern One: Conference-Driven DeliveryThe theme here is the belief that “Real pros hack code and write their slides minutes before their talks.” Their response to this anti-pattern is an expression popular in the military – PPPPPP, which stands for, “Proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”“Communication is very important – probably more important than the code you write,” claimed Verburg. “The more you speak in front of large groups of people the easier it gets, but it’s always important to do dry runs, to present to smaller groups. And important to be members of user groups where you can give presentations. It’s a great place to practice speaking skills; to gain new skills; get new contacts, to network.”They encouraged attendees to record themselves and listen to themselves giving a presentation. They advised them to start with a spouse or friends if need be. Learning to communicate to a group, they argued, is essential to being a successful developer. The emphasis here is that software development is a team activity and good, clear, accessible communication is essential to the functioning of software teams. Anti-Pattern Two: Mortgage-Driven Development The main theme here was that, in a period of worldwide recession and economic stagnation, people are concerned about keeping their jobs. So there is a tendency for developers to treat knowledge as power and not share what they know about their systems with their colleagues, so when it comes time to fix a problem in production, they will be the only one who knows how to fix it – and will have made themselves an indispensable cog in a machine so you cannot be fired. So developers avoid documentation at all costs, or if documentation is required, put it on a USB chip and lock it in a lock box. As in the first anti-pattern, the idea here is that communicating well with your colleagues is essential and documentation is a key part of this. Social interactions are essential. Both Verburg and Evans insisted that increasingly, year by year, successful software development is more about communication than the technical aspects of the craft. Developers who understand this are the ones who will have the most success. Anti-Pattern Three: Distracted by Shiny – Always Use the Latest Technology to Stay AheadThe temptation here is to pick out some obscure framework, try a bit of Scala, HTML5, and Clojure, and always use the latest technology and upgrade to the latest point release of everything. Don’t worry if something works poorly because you are ahead of the curve. Verburg and Evans insisted that there need to be sound reasons for everything a developer does. Developers should not bring in something simply because for some reason they just feel like it or because it’s new. They recommended a site run by a developer named Matt Raible with excellent comparison spread sheets regarding Web frameworks and other apps. They praised it as a useful tool to help developers in their decision-making processes. They pointed out that good developers sometimes make bad choices out of boredom, to add shiny things to their CV, out of frustration with existing processes, or just from a lack of understanding. They pointed out that some code may stay in a business system for 15 or 20 years, but not all code is created equal and some may change after 3 or 6 months. Developers need to know where the code they are contributing fits in. What is its likely lifespan? Anti-Pattern Four: Design-Driven Design The anti-pattern: If you want to impress your colleagues and bosses, use design patents left, right, and center – MVC, Session Facades, SOA, etc. Or the UML modeling suite from IBM, back in the day… Generate super fast code. And the more jargon you can talk when in the vicinity of the manager the better.Verburg shared a true story about a time when he was interviewing a guy for a job and asked him what his previous work was. The interviewee said that he essentially took patterns and uses an approved book of Enterprise Architecture Patterns and applied them. Verburg was dumbstruck that someone could have a job in which they took patterns from a book and applied them. He pointed out that the idea that design is a separate activity is simply wrong. He repeated a saying that he uses, “You should pay your junior developers for the lines of code they write and the things they add; you should pay your senior developers for what they take away.”He explained that by encouraging people to take things away, the code base gets simpler and reflects the actual business use cases developers are trying to solve, as opposed to the framework that is being imposed. He told another true story about a project to decommission a very long system. 98% of the code was decommissioned and people got a nice bonus. But the 2% remained on the mainframe so the 98% reduction in code resulted in zero reduction in costs, because the entire mainframe was needed to run the 2% that was left. There is an incentive to get rid of source code and subsystems when they are no longer needed. The session continued with several more anti-patterns that were equally insightful.

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Not getting desired results with SSAO implementation

- by user1294203

After having implemented deferred rendering, I tried my luck with a SSAO implementation using this Tutorial. Unfortunately, I'm not getting anything that looks like SSAO, you can see my result below. You can see there is some weird pattern forming and there is no occlusion shading where there needs to be (i.e. in between the objects and on the ground). The shaders I implemented follow: #VS #version 330 core uniform mat4 invProjMatrix; layout(location = 0) in vec3 in_Position; layout(location = 2) in vec2 in_TexCoord; noperspective out vec2 pass_TexCoord; smooth out vec3 viewRay; void main(void){ pass_TexCoord = in_TexCoord; viewRay = (invProjMatrix * vec4(in_Position, 1.0)).xyz; gl_Position = vec4(in_Position, 1.0); } #FS #version 330 core uniform sampler2D DepthMap; uniform sampler2D NormalMap; uniform sampler2D noise; uniform vec2 projAB; uniform ivec3 noiseScale_kernelSize; uniform vec3 kernel[16]; uniform float RADIUS; uniform mat4 projectionMatrix; noperspective in vec2 pass_TexCoord; smooth in vec3 viewRay; layout(location = 0) out float out_AO; vec3 CalcPosition(void){ float depth = texture(DepthMap, pass_TexCoord).r; float linearDepth = projAB.y / (depth - projAB.x); vec3 ray = normalize(viewRay); ray = ray / ray.z; return linearDepth * ray; } mat3 CalcRMatrix(vec3 normal, vec2 texcoord){ ivec2 noiseScale = noiseScale_kernelSize.xy; vec3 rvec = texture(noise, texcoord * noiseScale).xyz; vec3 tangent = normalize(rvec - normal * dot(rvec, normal)); vec3 bitangent = cross(normal, tangent); return mat3(tangent, bitangent, normal); } void main(void){ vec2 TexCoord = pass_TexCoord; vec3 Position = CalcPosition(); vec3 Normal = normalize(texture(NormalMap, TexCoord).xyz); mat3 RotationMatrix = CalcRMatrix(Normal, TexCoord); int kernelSize = noiseScale_kernelSize.z; float occlusion = 0.0; for(int i = 0; i < kernelSize; i++){ // Get sample position vec3 sample = RotationMatrix * kernel[i]; sample = sample * RADIUS + Position; // Project and bias sample position to get its texture coordinates vec4 offset = projectionMatrix * vec4(sample, 1.0); offset.xy /= offset.w; offset.xy = offset.xy * 0.5 + 0.5; // Get sample depth float sample_depth = texture(DepthMap, offset.xy).r; float linearDepth = projAB.y / (sample_depth - projAB.x); if(abs(Position.z - linearDepth ) < RADIUS){ occlusion += (linearDepth <= sample.z) ? 1.0 : 0.0; } } out_AO = 1.0 - (occlusion / kernelSize); } I draw a full screen quad and pass Depth and Normal textures. Normals are in RGBA16F with the alpha channel reserved for the AO factor in the blur pass. I store depth in a non linear Depth buffer (32F) and recover the linear depth using: float linearDepth = projAB.y / (depth - projAB.x); where projAB.y is calculated as: and projAB.x as: These are derived from the glm::perspective(gluperspective) matrix. z_n and z_f are the near and far clip distance. As described in the link I posted on the top, the method creates samples in a hemisphere with higher distribution close to the center. It then uses random vectors from a texture to rotate the hemisphere randomly around the Z direction and finally orients it along the normal at the given pixel. Since the result is noisy, a blur pass follows the SSAO pass. Anyway, my position reconstruction doesn't seem to be wrong since I also tried doing the same but with the position passed from a texture instead of being reconstructed. I also tried playing with the Radius, noise texture size and number of samples and with different kinds of texture formats, with no luck. For some reason when changing the Radius, nothing changes. Does anyone have any suggestions? What could be going wrong?

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Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 3 of 3–Clrizr)

- by ToString(theory);

Welcome back! In the first two posts in this series, I covered some of the awesome features in CSS precompilers such as SASS and LESS, as well as how to get an initial project setup up and running in ASP.Net MVC 4. In this post, I will cover an actual advanced example of using LESS in a project, and show some of the great productivity features we gain from its usage. Introduction In the first post, I mentioned two subjects that I will be using in this example – constants, and color functions. I’ve always enjoyed using online color scheme utilities such as Adobe Kuler or Color Scheme Designer to come up with a scheme based off of one primary color. Using these tools, and requesting a complementary scheme you can get a couple of shades of your primary color, and a couple of shades of a complementary/accent color to display. Because there is no way in regular css to do color operations or store variables, there was no way to accomplish something like defining a primary color, and have a site theme cascade off of that. However with tools such as LESS, that impossibility becomes a reality! So, if you haven’t guessed it by now, this post is on the creation of a plugin/module/less file to drop into your project, plugin one color, and have your primary theme cascade from it. I only went through the trouble of creating a module for getting Complementary colors. However, it wouldn’t be too much trouble to go through other options such as Triad or Monochromatic to get a module that you could use off of that. Step 1 – Analysis I decided to mimic Adobe Kuler’s Complementary theme algorithm as I liked its simplicity and aesthetics. Color Scheme Designer is great, but I do believe it can give you too many color options, which can lead to chaos and overload. The first thing I had to check was if the complementary values for the color schemes were actually hues rotated by 180 degrees at all times – they aren’t. Apparently Adobe applies some variance to the complementary colors to get colors that are actually more aesthetically appealing to users. So, I opened up Excel and began to plot complementary hues based on rotation in increments of 10: Long story short, I completed the same calculations for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. For Hue, I only had to record the Complementary hue values, however for saturation and lightness, I had to record the values for ALL of the shades. Since the functions were too complicated to put into LESS since they aren’t constant/linear, but rather interval functions, I instead opted to extrapolate the HSL values using the trendline function for each major interval, onto intervals of spacing 1. For example, using the hue extraction, I got the following values: Interval Function 0-60 60-140 140-270 270-360 Saturation and Lightness were much worse, but in the end, I finally had functions for all of the intervals, and then went the route of just grabbing each shades value in intervals of 1. Step 2 – Mapping I declared variable names for each of these sections as something that shouldn’t ever conflict with a variable someone would define in their own file. After I had each of the values, I extracted the values and put them into files of their own for hue variables, saturation variables, and lightness variables… Example: /*HUE CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-hue-source-0deg: 133.43;@clrizr-hue-source-1deg: 135.601;@clrizr-hue-source-2deg: 137.772;@clrizr-hue-source-3deg: 139.943;@clrizr-hue-source-4deg: 142.114;.../*SATURATION CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-saturation-s2SV0px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV1px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV2px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV3px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV4px: 0;.../*LIGHTNESS CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-lightness-s2LV0px: 30;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV1px: 31;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV2px: 32;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV3px: 33;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV4px: 34;... In the end, I have 973 lines of mapping/conversion from source HSL to shade HSL for two extra primary shades, and two complementary shades. The last bit of the work was the file to compose each of the shades from these mappings. Step 3 – Clrizr Mapper The final step was the hardest to overcome as I was still trying to understand LESS to its fullest extent. Imports As mentioned previously, I had separated the HSL mappings into different files, so the first necessary step is to import those for use into the Clrizr plugin: @import url("hue.less");@import url("saturation.less");@import url("lightness.less"); Extract Component Values For Each Shade Next, I extracted the necessary information for each shade HSL before shade composition: @clrizr-input-saturation: 1px+floor(saturation(@clrizr-input))-1;@clrizr-input-lightness: 1px+floor(lightness(@clrizr-input))-1; @clrizr-complementary-hue: formatstring("clrizr-hue-source-{0}", ceil(hue(@clrizr-input))); @clrizr-primary-2-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s2SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-primary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-c1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation); @clrizr-primary-2-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s2LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-c1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness); Here, you can see a couple of odd things… On the first line, I am using operations to add units to the saturation and lightness. This is due to some limitations in the operations that would give me saturation or lightness in %, which can’t be in a variable name. So, I use first add 1px to it, which casts the result of the following functions as px instead of %, and then at the end, I remove that pixel. You can also see here the formatstring method which is exactly what it sounds like – something like String.Format(string str, params object[] obj). Get Primary & Complementary Shades Now that I have components for each of the different shades, I can now compose them into each of their pieces. For this, I use the @@ operator which will look for a variable with the name specified in a string, and then call that variable: @clrizr-primary-2: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-2-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-2-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-1-lightness);@clrizr-primary: @clrizr-input;@clrizr-complementary-1: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, @@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-2: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, saturation(@clrizr-input), lightness(@clrizr-input)); That’s is it, for the most part. These variables now hold the theme for the one input color – @clrizr-input. However, I have one last addition… Perceptive Luminance Well, after I got the colors, I decided I wanted to also get the best font color that would go on top of it. Black or white depending on light or dark color. Now I couldn’t just go with checking the lightness, as that is half the story. You see, the human eye doesn’t see ALL colors equally well but rather has more cells for interpreting green light compared to blue or red. So, using the ratio, we can calculate the perceptive luminance of each of the shades, and get the font color that best matches it! @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-2)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-2)))/255)*255; @clrizr-col-font-on-primary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2); Conclusion That’s it! I have posted a project on clrizr.codePlex.com for this, and included a testing page for you to test out how it works. Feel free to use it in your own project, and if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them here as a comment, or on the contact page!

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The True Cost of a Solution

- by D'Arcy Lussier

I had a Twitter chat recently with someone suggesting Oracle and SQL Server were losing out to OSS (Open Source Software) in the enterprise due to their issues with scaling or being too generic (one size fits all). I challenged that a bit, as my experience with enterprise sized clients has been different – adverse to OSS but receptive to an established vendor. The response I got was: Found it easier to influence change by showing how X can’t solve our problems or X is extremely costly to scale. Money talks. I think this is definitely the right approach for anyone pitching an alternate or alien technology as part of a solution: identify the issue, identify the solution, then present pros and cons including a cost/benefit analysis. What can happen though is we get tunnel vision and don’t present a full view of the costs associated with a solution. An “Acura”te Example (I’m so clever…) This is my dream vehicle, a Crystal Black Pearl coloured Acura MDX with the SH-AWD package! We’re a family of 4 (5 if my daughters ever get their wish of adding a dog), and I’ve always wanted a luxury type of vehicle, so this is a perfect replacement in a few years when our Rav 4 has hit the 8 – 10 year mark. MSRP – $62,890 But as we all know, that’s not *really* the cost of the vehicle. There’s taxes and fees added on, there’s the extended warranty if I choose to purchase it, there’s the finance rate that needs to be factored in… MSRP – $62,890 Taxes – $7,546 Warranty - $2,500 SubTotal – $72,936 Finance Charge – $ 1094.04 Grand Total – $74,030 Well! Glad we did that exercise – we discovered an extra $11k added on to the MSRP! Well now we have our true price…or do we? Lifetime of the Vehicle I’m expecting to have this vehicle for 7 – 10 years. While the hard cost of the vehicle is known and dealt with, the costs to run and maintain the vehicle are on top of this. I did some research, and here’s what I’ve found: Fuel and Mileage Gas prices are high as it is for regular fuel, but getting into an MDX will require that I *only* purchase premium fuel, which comes at a premium price. I need to expect my bill at the pump to be higher. Comparing the MDX to my 2007 Rav4 also shows I’ll be gassing up more often. The Rav4 has a city MPG of 21, while the MDX plummets to 16! The MDX does have a bigger fuel tank though, so all in all the number of times I hit the pumps might even out. Still, I estimate I’ll be spending approximately $8000 – $10000 more on gas over a 10 year period than my current Rav4. Service Options Limited Although I have options with my Toyota here in Winnipeg (we have 4 Toyota dealerships), I do go to my original dealer for any service work. Still, I like the fact that I have options. However, there’s only one Acura dealership in all of Winnipeg! So if, for whatever reason, I’m not satisfied with the level of service I’m stuck. Non Warranty Service Work Also let’s not forget that there’s a bulk of work required every year that is *not* covered under warranty – oil changes, tire rotations, brake pads, etc. I expect I’ll need to get new tires at the 5 years mark as well, which can easily be $1200 – $1500 (I just paid $1000 for new tires for the Rav4 and we’re at the 5 year mark). Now these aren’t going to be *new* costs that I’m not used to from our existing vehicles, but they should still be factored in. I’d budget $500/year, or $5000 over the 10 years I’ll own the vehicle. Final Assessment So let’s re-assess the true cost of my dream MDX: MSRP $62,890 Taxes $7,546 Warranty $2,500 Finance Charge $1094 Gas $10,000 Service Work $5000 Grand Total $89,030 So now I have a better idea of 10 year cost overall, and I’ve identified some concerns with local service availability. And there’s now much more to consider over the original $62,890 price tag. Tying This Back to Technology Solutions The process that we just went through is no different than what organizations do when considering implementing a new system, technology, or technology based solution, within their environments. It’s easy to tout the short term cost savings of particular product/platform/technology in a vacuum. But its when you consider the wider impact that the true cost comes into play. Let’s create a scenario: A company is not happy with its current data reporting suite. An employee suggests moving to an open source solution. The selling points are: - Because its open source its free - The organization would have access to the source code so they could alter it however they wished - It provided features not available with the current reporting suite At first this sounds great to the management and executive, but then they start asking some questions and uncover more information: - The OSS product is built on a technology not used anywhere within the organization - There are no vendors offering product support for the OSS product - The OSS product requires a specific server platform to operate on, one that’s not standard in the organization All of a sudden, the true cost of implementing this solution is starting to become clearer. The company might save money on licensing costs, but their training costs would increase significantly – developers would need to learn how to develop in the technology the OSS solution was built on, IT staff must learn how to set up and maintain a new server platform within their existing infrastructure, and if a problem was found there was no vendor to contact for support. The true cost of implementing a “free” OSS solution is actually spinning up a project to implement it within the organization – no small cost. And that’s just the short-term cost. Now the organization must ensure they maintain trained staff who can make changes to the OSS reporting solution and IT staff that will stay knowledgeable in the new server platform. If those skills are very niche, then higher labour costs could be incurred if those people are hard to find or if trained employees use that knowledge as leverage for higher pay. Maybe a vendor exists that will contract out support, but then there are those costs to consider as well. And let’s not forget end-user training – in our example, anyone that runs reports will need to be trained on how to use the new system. Here’s the Point We still tend to look at software in an “off the shelf” kind of way. It’s very easy to say “oh, this product is better than vendor x’s product – and its free because its OSS!” but the reality is that implementing any new technology within an organization has a cost regardless of the retail price of the product. Training, integration, support – these are real costs that impact an organization and span multiple departments. Whether you’re pitching an improved business process, a new system, or a new technology, you need to consider the bigger picture costs of implementation. What you define as success (in our example, having better reporting functionality) might not be what others define as success if implementing your solution causes them issues. A true enterprise solution needs to consider the entire enterprise.

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Is Data Science “Science”?

- by BuckWoody

I hold the term “science” in very high esteem. I grew up on the Space Coast in Florida, and eventually worked at the Kennedy Space Center, surrounded by very intelligent people who worked in various scientific fields. Recently a new term has entered the computing dialog – “Data Scientist”. Since it’s not a standard term, it has a lot of definitions, and in fact has been disputed as a correct term. After all, the reasoning goes, if there’s no such thing as “Data Science” then how can there be a Data Scientist? This argument has been made before, albeit with a different term – “Computer Science”. In Peter Denning’s excellent article “Is Computer Science Science” (April 2005/Vol. 48, No. 4 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM) there are many points that separate “science” from “engineering” and even “art”. I won’t repeat the content of that article here (I recommend you read it on your own) but will leverage the points he makes there. Definition of Science To ask the question “is data science ‘science’” then we need to start with a definition of terms. Various references put the definition into the same basic areas: Study of the physical world Systematic and/or disciplined study of a subject area ...and then they include the things studied, the bodies of knowledge and so on. The word itself comes from Latin, and means merely “to know” or “to study to know”. Greek divides knowledge further into “truth” (episteme), and practical use or effects (tekhne). Normally computing falls into the second realm. Definition of Data Science And now a more controversial definition: Data Science. This term is so new and perhaps so niche that the major dictionaries haven’t yet picked it up (my OED reference is older – can’t afford to pop for the online registration at present). Researching the term's general use I created an amalgam of the definitions this way: “Studying and applying mathematical and other techniques to derive information from complex data sets.” Using this definition, data science certainly seems to be science - it's learning about and studying some object or area using systematic methods. But implicit within the definition is the word “application”, which makes the process more akin to engineering or even technology than science. In fact, I find that using these techniques – and data itself – part of science, not science itself. I leave out the concept of studying data patterns or algorithms as part of this discipline. That is actually a domain I see within research, mathematics or computer science. That of course is a type of science, but does not seek for practical applications. As part of the argument against calling it “Data Science”, some point to the scientific method of creating a hypothesis, testing with controls, testing results against the hypothesis, and documenting for repeatability. These are not steps that we often take in working with data. We normally start with a question, and fit patterns and algorithms to predict outcomes and find correlations. In this way Data Science is more akin to statistics (and in fact makes heavy use of them) in the process rather than starting with an assumption and following on with it. So, is Data Science “Science”? I’m uncertain – and I’m uncertain it matters. Even if we are facing rampant “title inflation” these days (does anyone introduce themselves as a secretary or supervisor anymore?) I can tolerate the term at least from the intent that we use data to study problems across a wide spectrum, rather than restricting it to a single domain. And I also understand those who have worked hard to achieve the very honorable title of “scientist” who have issues with those who borrow the term without asking. What do you think? Science, or not? Does it matter?

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Airline mess - what a journey

- by Mike Dietrich

What a day, what a journey ... Flew this noon from Munich to Zuerich for catch my ongoing flight to San Francisco with Swiss. And that day did start very well as Lufthansa messed up the connection flight by 42 minutes for a 35 minute flight. And as I was obviously the only passenger connection to San Francisco nobody picked me up at the airplane to bring me directly to my connection as Swiss did for the 8 passengers connection to Miami. So I missed my flight. What a start - and many thanks to Lufthansa. I was not the only one missing a connection as Lufthansa/Swiss had canceled the flight before due to "technical problems". In Zuerich Swiss did rebook me via Frankfurt with Lufthansa to board a United Airlines flight to San Francisco. "Ouch" I thought. I had my share of experience with United already as they've messed up my luggage on the way to San Francisco some years ago and it took them five (!!!) days to fly my bag over and deliver it. But actually it was the only option today. So I said "Yes". A big mistake as I've learned later on. The Frankfurt flight was delayed as well "due to a late incoming aircraft". But there was plenty of time. And I went to the Swiss counter at the gate and let them check if my baggage is on that flight to Frankfurt. They've said "Yes". Boarding the plane with a delay of 45 minutes (the typical Lufthansa delay these days) I spotted my Rimowa trolley right next to the plane on the airfield. So I was sure that it will be send to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt I went to the United counter once it did open - had to go through the passport check they do for US flights as well - and they've said "Yes, your luggage is with us". Well ... Arriving in San Francisco with just a bit of a some minutes delay and a very fast immigration procedure I saw the first bags with Priority tags getting pushed to the baggage claim - but mine was not there. I did wait ... and wait ... and wait. Well, thanks United, you did it again!!! I flew twice in the past years United Airlines - and in both cases they've messed up my luggage on the way to San Francisco. How lovely is that ... Now the real fun started again as the lady at the "Lost and Found" counter for luggage spotted my luggage in her system in Zuerich - and told me it's supposed to be sent with LH1191 to Frankfurt on Sept 27. But this was yesterday in Europe - it's already Sept 28 - and I saw my luggage in front of the airplane. So I'd suppose it's in Frankfurt already. But what could she do? Nothing but doing the awful paperwork. And "No Mr Dietrich, we don't call international numbers". Thank you, United. Next time I'll try to get a contract for a US land line in advance. They can't even tell you which plane will bring your luggage. It may be tomorrow with UA flight arriving around 4pm in SFO. I'm looking forward to some hours in the wonderful United Airlines call center waiting line. Last time I did spend 60-90 minutes every day until I got my luggage. If it takes again that long then OOW will be over by then. I love airline travel - and especially with United Airlines. And by the way ... they gave us these nice fancy packages during the flight: That looks good - what's in that box??? Yes, really ... a bag of potato chips. Pure fat - very healthy. I doubt that I'll ever fly United Airlines again!!!

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Black Screen: How to set Projection/View Matrix

- by Lisa

I have a Windows Phone 8 C#/XAML with DirectX component project. I'm rendering some particles, but each particle is a rectangle versus a square (as I've set the vertices to be positions equally offset from each other). I used an Identity matrix in the view and projection matrix. I decided to add the windows aspect ratio to prevent the rectangles. But now I get a black screen. None of the particles are rendered now. I don't know what's wrong with my matrices. Can anyone see the problem? These are the default matrices in Microsoft's project example. View Matrix: XMVECTOR eye = XMVectorSet(0.0f, 0.7f, 1.5f, 0.0f); XMVECTOR at = XMVectorSet(0.0f, -0.1f, 0.0f, 0.0f); XMVECTOR up = XMVectorSet(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); XMStoreFloat4x4(&m_constantBufferData.view, XMMatrixTranspose(XMMatrixLookAtRH(eye, at, up))); Projection Matrix: void CubeRenderer::CreateWindowSizeDependentResources() { Direct3DBase::CreateWindowSizeDependentResources(); float aspectRatio = m_windowBounds.Width / m_windowBounds.Height; float fovAngleY = 70.0f * XM_PI / 180.0f; if (aspectRatio < 1.0f) { fovAngleY /= aspectRatio; } XMStoreFloat4x4(&m_constantBufferData.projection, XMMatrixTranspose(XMMatrixPerspectiveFovRH(fovAngleY, aspectRatio, 0.01f, 100.0f))); } I've tried modifying them to use cocos2dx's WP8 example. XMMATRIX identityMatrix = XMMatrixIdentity(); float fovy = 60.0f; float aspect = m_windowBounds.Width / m_windowBounds.Height; float zNear = 0.1f; float zFar = 100.0f; float xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax; ymax = zNear * tanf(fovy * XM_PI / 360); ymin = -ymax; xmin = ymin * aspect; xmax = ymax * aspect; XMMATRIX tmpMatrix = XMMatrixPerspectiveOffCenterRH(xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax, zNear, zFar); XMMATRIX projectionMatrix = XMMatrixMultiply(tmpMatrix, identityMatrix); // View Matrix float fEyeX = m_windowBounds.Width * 0.5f; float fEyeY = m_windowBounds.Height * 0.5f; float fEyeZ = m_windowBounds.Height / 1.1566f; float fLookAtX = m_windowBounds.Width * 0.5f; float fLookAtY = m_windowBounds.Height * 0.5f; float fLookAtZ = 0.0f; float fUpX = 0.0f; float fUpY = 1.0f; float fUpZ = 0.0f; XMMATRIX tmpMatrix2 = XMMatrixLookAtRH(XMVectorSet(fEyeX,fEyeY,fEyeZ,0.f), XMVectorSet(fLookAtX,fLookAtY,fLookAtZ,0.f), XMVectorSet(fUpX,fUpY,fUpZ,0.f)); XMMATRIX viewMatrix = XMMatrixMultiply(tmpMatrix2, identityMatrix); XMStoreFloat4x4(&m_constantBufferData.view, viewMatrix); Vertex Shader cbuffer ModelViewProjectionConstantBuffer : register(b0) { //matrix model; matrix view; matrix projection; }; struct VertexInputType { float4 position : POSITION; float2 tex : TEXCOORD0; float4 color : COLOR; }; struct PixelInputType { float4 position : SV_POSITION; float2 tex : TEXCOORD0; float4 color : COLOR; }; PixelInputType main(VertexInputType input) { PixelInputType output; // Change the position vector to be 4 units for proper matrix calculations. input.position.w = 1.0f; //===================================== // TODO: ADDED for testing input.position.z = 0.0f; //===================================== // Calculate the position of the vertex against the world, view, and projection matrices. //output.position = mul(input.position, model); output.position = mul(input.position, view); output.position = mul(output.position, projection); // Store the texture coordinates for the pixel shader. output.tex = input.tex; // Store the particle color for the pixel shader. output.color = input.color; return output; } Before I render the shader, I set the view/projection matrices into the constant buffer void ParticleRenderer::SetShaderParameters() { ViewProjectionConstantBuffer* dataPtr; D3D11_MAPPED_SUBRESOURCE mappedResource; DX::ThrowIfFailed(m_d3dContext->Map(m_constantBuffer.Get(), 0, D3D11_MAP_WRITE_DISCARD, 0, &mappedResource)); dataPtr = (ViewProjectionConstantBuffer*)mappedResource.pData; dataPtr->view = m_constantBufferData.view; dataPtr->projection = m_constantBufferData.projection; m_d3dContext->Unmap(m_constantBuffer.Get(), 0); // Now set the constant buffer in the vertex shader with the updated values. m_d3dContext->VSSetConstantBuffers(0, 1, m_constantBuffer.GetAddressOf() ); // Set shader texture resource in the pixel shader. m_d3dContext->PSSetShaderResources(0, 1, &m_textureView); } Nothing, black screen... I tried so many different look at, eye, and up vectors. I tried transposing the matrices. I've set the particle center position to always be (0, 0, 0), I tried different positions too, just to make sure they're not being rendered offscreen.

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BI Applications overview

- by sv744

Welcome to Oracle BI applications blog! This blog will talk about various features, general roadmap, description of functionality and implementation steps related to Oracle BI applications. In the first post we start with an overview of the BI apps and will delve deeper into some of the topics below in the upcoming weeks and months. If there are other topics you would like us to talk about, pl feel free to provide feedback on that. The Oracle BI applications are a set of pre-built applications that enable pervasive BI by providing role-based insight for each functional area, including sales, service, marketing, contact center, finance, supplier/supply chain, HR/workforce, and executive management. For example, Sales Analytics includes role-based applications for sales executives, sales management, as well as front-line sales reps, each of whom have different needs. The applications integrate and transform data from a range of enterprise sources—including Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others—into actionable intelligence for each business function and user role. This blog starts with the key benefits and characteristics of Oracle BI applications. In a series of subsequent blogs, each of these points will be explained in detail. Why BI apps? Demonstrate the value of BI to a business user, show reports / dashboards / model that can answer their business questions as part of the sales cycle. Demonstrate technical feasibility of BI project and significantly lower risk and improve success Build Vs Buy benefit Don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Help consolidate disparate systems Data integration in M&A situations Insulate BI consumers from changes in the OLTP Present OLTP data and highlight issues of poor data / missing data – and improve data quality and accuracy Prebuilt Integrations BI apps support prebuilt integrations against leading ERP sources: Fusion Applications, E- Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, SAP Co-developed with inputs from functional experts in BI and Applications teams. Out of the box dimensional model to source model mappings Multi source and Multi Instance support Rich Data Model BI apps have a very rich dimensionsal data model built over 10 years that incorporates best practises from BI modeling perspective as well as reflect the source system complexities Thanks for reading a long post, and be on the lookout for future posts. We will look forward to your valuable feedback on these topics as well as suggestions on what other topics would you like us to cover. I Conformed dimensional model across all business subject areas allows cross functional reporting, e.g. customer / supplier 360 Over 360 fact tables across 7 product areas CRM – 145, SCM – 47, Financials – 28, Procurement – 20, HCM – 27, Projects – 18, Campus Solutions – 21, PLM - 56 Supported by 300 physical dimensions Support for extensive calendars; Gregorian, enterprise and ledger based Conformed data model and metrics for real time vs warehouse based reporting Multi-tenant enabled Extensive BI related transformations BI apps ETL and data integration support various transformations required for dimensional models and reporting requirements. All these have been distilled into common patterns and abstracted logic which can be readily reused across different modules Slowly Changing Dimension support Hierarchy flattening support Row / Column Hybrid Hierarchy Flattening As Is vs. As Was hierarchy support Currency Conversion :- Support for 3 corporate, CRM, ledger and transaction currencies UOM conversion Internationalization / Localization Dynamic Data translations Code standardization (Domains) Historical Snapshots Cycle and process lifecycle computations Balance Facts Equalization of GL accounting chartfields/segments Standardized values for categorizing GL accounts Reconciliation between GL and subledgers to track accounted/transferred/posted transactions to GL Materialization of data only available through costly and complex APIs e.g. Fusion Payroll, EBS / Fusion Accruals Complex event Interpretation of source data – E.g. o What constitutes a transfer o Deriving supervisors via position hierarchy o Deriving primary assignment in PSFT o Categorizing and transposition to measures of Payroll Balances to specific metrics to support side by side comparison of measures of for example Fixed Salary, Variable Salary, Tax, Bonus, Overtime Payments. o Counting of Events – E.g. converting events to fact counters so that for example the number of hires can easily be added up and compared alongside the total transfers and terminations. Multi pass processing of multiple sources e.g. headcount, salary, promotion, performance to allow side to side comparison. Adding value to data to aid analysis through banding, additional domain classifications and groupings to allow higher level analytical reporting and data discovery Calculation of complex measures examples: o COGs, DSO, DPO, Inventory turns etc o Transfers within a Hierarchy or out of / into a hierarchy relative to view point in hierarchy. Configurability and Extensibility support BI apps offer support for extensibility for various entities as automated extensibility or part of extension methodology Key Flex fields and Descriptive Flex support Extensible attribute support (JDE) Conformed Domains ETL Architecture BI apps offer a modular adapter architecture which allows support of multiple product lines into a single conformed model Multi Source Multi Technology Orchestration – creates load plan taking into account task dependencies and customers deployment to generate a plan based on a customers of multiple complex etl tasks Plan optimization allowing parallel ETL tasks Oracle: Bit map indexes and partition management High availability support Follow the sun support. TCO BI apps support several utilities / capabilities that help with overall total cost of ownership and ensure a rapid implementation Improved cost of ownership – lower cost to deploy On-going support for new versions of the source application Task based setups flows Data Lineage Functional setup performed in Web UI by Functional person Configuration Test to Production support Security BI apps support both data and object security enabling implementations to quickly configure the application as per the reporting security needs Fine grain object security at report / dashboard and presentation catalog level Data Security integration with source systems Extensible to support external data security rules Extensive Set of KPIs Over 7000 base and derived metrics across all modules Time series calculations (YoY, % growth etc) Common Currency and UOM reporting Cross subject area KPIs (analyzing HR vs GL data, drill from GL to AP/AR, etc) Prebuilt reports and dashboards 3000+ prebuilt reports supporting a large number of industries Hundreds of role based dashboards Dynamic currency conversion at dashboard level Highly tuned Performance The BI apps have been tuned over the years for both a very performant ETL and dashboard performance. The applications use best practises and advanced database features to enable the best possible performance. Optimized data model for BI and analytic queries Prebuilt aggregates& the ability for customers to create their own aggregates easily on warehouse facts allows for scalable end user performance Incremental extracts and loads Incremental Aggregate build Automatic table index and statistics management Parallel ETL loads Source system deletes handling Low latency extract with Golden Gate Micro ETL support Bitmap Indexes Partitioning support Modularized deployment, start small and add other subject areas seamlessly Source Specfic Staging and Real Time Schema Support for source specific operational reporting schema for EBS, PSFT, Siebel and JDE Application Integrations The BI apps also allow for integration with source systems as well as other applications that provide value add through BI and enable BI consumption during operational decision making Embedded dashboards for Fusion, EBS and Siebel applications Action Link support Marketing Segmentation Sales Predictor Dashboard Territory Management External Integrations The BI apps data integration choices include support for loading extenral data External data enrichment choices : UNSPSC, Item class etc. Extensible Spend Classification Broad Deployment Choices Exalytics support Databases : Oracle, Exadata, Teradata, DB2, MSSQL ETL tool of choice : ODI (coming), Informatica Extensible and Customizable Extensible architecture and Methodology to add custom and external content Upgradable across releases

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ADF version of "Modern" dialog windows

- by Martin Deh

It is no surprise with the popularity of the i-devices (iphone, ipad), that many of the iOS UI based LnF (look and feel) would start to inspire web designers to incorporate the same LnF into their web sites. Take for example, a normal dialog popup. In the iOS world, the LnF becomes a bit more elegant by add just a simple element as a "floating" close button: In this blog post, I will describe how this can be accomplished using OOTB ADF components and CSS3 style elements. There are two ways that this can be achieved. The easiest way is to simply replace the default image, which looks like this, and adjust the af|panelWindow:close-icon-style skin selector. Using this simple technique, you can come up with this: The CSS code to produce this effect is pretty straight forward: af|panelWindow.test::close-icon-style{ background-image: url("../popClose.gif"); line-height: 10px; position: absolute; right: -10px; top: -10px; height:38px; width:38px; outline:none; } You can see from the CSS, the position of the region, which holds the image, is relocated based on the position based attributes. Also, the addition of the "outline" attribute removes the border that is visible in Chrome and IE. The second example, is based on not having an image to produce the close button. Like the previous sample, I will use the OOTB panelWindow. However, this time I will use a OOTB commandButton to replace the image. The construct of the components looks like this: The commandButton is positioned first in the hierarchy making the re-positioning easier. The commandButton will also need a style class assigned to it (i.e. closeButton), which will allow for the positioning and the over-riding of the default skin attributes of a default button. In addition, the closeIconVisible property is set to false, since the default icon is no longer needed. Once this is done, the rest is in the CSS. Here is the sample that I created that was used for an actual customer POC: The CSS code for the button: af|commandButton.closeButton, af|commandButton.closeButton af|commandButton:text-only{ line-height: 10px; position: absolute; right: -10px; top: -10px; -webkit-border-radius: 70px; -moz-border-radius: 70px; -ms-border-radius: 70px; border-radius: 70px; background-image:none; border:#828c95 1px solid; background-color:black; font-weight: bold; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; color:white; height:30px; width:30px; outline:none; } The CSS uses the border radius to create the round effect on the button (in IE 8, since border-radius is not supported, this will only work with some added code). Also, I add the box-shadow attribute to the panelWindow style class to give it a nice shadowing effect.

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JavaDay Taipei 2014 Trip Report

- by reza_rahman

JavaDay Taipei 2014 was held at the Taipei International Convention Center on August 1st. Organized by Oracle University, it is one of the largest Java developer events in Taiwan. This was another successful year for JavaDay Taipei with a fully sold out venue packed with youthful, energetic developers (this was my second time at the event and I have already been invited to speak again next year!). In addition to Oracle speakers like me, Steve Chin and Naveen Asrani, the event also featured a bevy of local speakers including Taipei Java community leaders. Topics included Java SE, Java EE, JavaFX, cloud and Big Data. It was my pleasure and privilege to present one of the opening keynotes for the event. I presented my session on Java EE titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". I covered the changes in Java EE 7 as well as what's coming in Java EE 8. I demoed the Cargo Tracker Java EE BluePrints. I also briefly talked about Adopt-a-JSR for Java EE 8. The slides for the keynote are below (click here to download and view the actual PDF): It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files. No worries, just click here to download the PDF file. In the afternoon I did my JavaScript + Java EE 7 talk titled "Using JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients with Java EE 7". This talk is basically about aligning EE 7 with the emerging JavaScript ecosystem (specifically AngularJS). The talk was completely packed. The slide deck for the talk is here: JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients Using Java EE 7 from Reza Rahman The demo application code is posted on GitHub. The code should be a helpful resource if this development model is something that interests you. Do let me know if you need help with it but the instructions should be fairly self-explanatory. I am delivering this material at JavaOne 2014 as a two-hour tutorial. This should give me a little more bandwidth to dig a little deeper, especially on the JavaScript end. I finished off Java Day Taipei with my talk titled "Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE" (this was the last session of the conference). The talk covers an interesting gap that there is surprisingly little material on out there. The talk has three parts -- a birds-eye view of the NoSQL landscape, how to use NoSQL via a JPA centric facade using EclipseLink NoSQL, Hibernate OGM, DataNucleus, Kundera, Easy-Cassandra, etc and how to use NoSQL native APIs in Java EE via CDI. The slides for the talk are here: Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE from Reza Rahman The JPA based demo is available here, while the CDI based demo is available here. Both demos use MongoDB as the data store. Do let me know if you need help getting the demos up and running. After the event the Oracle University folks hosted a reception in the evening which was very well attended by organizers, speakers and local Java community leaders. I am extremely saddened by the fact that this otherwise excellent trip was scarred by terrible tragedy. After the conference I joined a few folks for a hike on the Maokong Mountain on Saturday. The group included friends in the Taiwanese Java community including Ian and Robbie Cheng. Without warning, fatal tragedy struck on a remote part of the trail. Despite best efforts by us, the excellent Taiwanese Emergency Rescue Team and World class Taiwanese physicians we were unable to save our friend Robbie Cheng's life. Robbie was just thirty-four years old and is survived by his younger brother, mother and father. Being the father of a young child myself, I can only imagine the deep sorrow that this senseless loss unleashes. Robbie was a key member of the Taiwanese Java community and a Java Evangelist at Sun at one point. Ironically the only picture I was able to take of the trail was mere moments before tragedy. I thought I should place him in that picture in profoundly respectful memoriam: Perhaps there is some solace in the fact that there is something inherently honorable in living a bright life, dying young and meeting one's end on a beautiful remote mountain trail few venture to behold let alone attempt to ascend in a long and tired lifetime. Perhaps I'd even say it's a fate I would not entirely regret facing if it were my own. With that thought in mind it seems appropriate to me to quote some lyrics from the song "Runes to My Memory" by legendary Swedish heavy metal band Amon Amarth idealizing a fallen Viking warrior cut down in his prime: "Here I lie on wet sand I will not make it home I clench my sword in my hand Say farewell to those I love When I am dead Lay me in a mound Place my weapons by my side For the journey to Hall up high When I am dead Lay me in a mound Raise a stone for all to see Runes carved to my memory" I submit my deepest condolences to Robbie's family and hope my next trip to Taiwan ends in a less somber note.

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

- by David Swanger

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

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HTG Explains: Should You Buy Extended Warranties?

- by Chris Hoffman

Buy something at an electronics store and you’ll be confronted by a pushy salesperson who insists you need an extended warranty. You’ll also see extended warranties pushed hard when shopping online. But are they worth it? There’s a reason stores push extended warranties so hard. They’re almost always pure profit for the store involved. An electronics store may live on razor-thin product margins and make big profits on extended warranties and overpriced HDMI cables. You’re Already Getting Multiple Warranties First, back up. The product you’re buying already includes a warranty. In fact, you’re probably getting several different types of warranties. Store Return and Exchange: Most electronics stores allow you to return a malfunctioning product within the first 15 or 30 days and they’ll provide you with a new one. The exact period of time will vary from store to store. If you walk out of the store with a defective product and have to swap it for a new one within the first few weeks, this should be easy. Manufacturer Warranty: A device’s manufacturer — whether the device is a laptop, a television, or a graphics card — offers their own warranty period. The manufacturer warranty covers you after the store refuses to take the product back and exchange it. The length of this warranty depends on the type of product. For example, a cheap laptop may only offer a one-year manufacturer warranty, while a more expensive laptop may offer a two-year warranty. Credit Card Warranty Extension: Many credit cards offer free extended warranties on products you buy with that credit card. Credit card companies will often give you an additional year of warranty. For example, if you buy a laptop with a two year warranty and it fails in the third year, you could then contact your credit card company and they’d cover the cost of fixing or replacing it. Check your credit card’s benefits and fine print for more information. Why Extended Warranties Are Bad You’re already getting a fairly long warranty period, especially if you have a credit card that offers you a free extended warranty — these are fairly common. If the product you get is a “lemon” and has a manufacturing error, it will likely fail pretty soon — well within your warranty period. The extended warranty matters after all your other warranties are exhausted. In the case of a laptop with a two-year warranty that you purchase with a credit card giving you a one-year warranty extension, your extended warranty will kick in three years after you purchase the laptop. In that many years, your current laptop will likely feel pretty old and laptops that are as good — or better — will likely be pretty cheap. If it’s a television, better television displays will be available at a lower price point. You’ll either want to upgrade to a newer model or you’ll be able to buy a new, just-as-good product for very cheap. You’ll only have to pay out-of-pocket if your device fails after the normal warranty period — in over two or three years for typical laptops purchased with a decent credit card. Save the money you would have spent on the warranty and put it towards a future upgrade. How Much Do Extended Warranties Cost? Let’s look at an example from a typical pushy retail outlet, Best Buy. We went to Best Buy’s website and found a pretty standard $600 Samsung laptop. This laptop comes with a one-year warranty period. If purchased with a fairly common credit card, you can easily get a two-year warranty period on this laptop without spending an additional penny. (Yes, such credit cards are available with no yearly fees.) During the check-out process, Best Buy tries to sell you a Geek Squad “Accidental Protection Plan.” To get an additional year of Best Buy’s extended warranty, you’d have to pay $324.98 for a “3-Year Accidental Protection Plan”. You’d basically be paying more than half the price of your laptop for an additional year of warranty — remember, the standard warranties would cover you anyway for the first two years. If this laptop did break sometime between two and three years from now, we wouldn’t be surprised if you could purchase a comparable laptop for about $325 anyway. And, if you don’t need to replace it, you’ve saved that money. Best Buy would object that this isn’t a standard extended warranty. It’s a supercharged warranty plan that will also provide coverage if you spill something on your laptop or drop it and break it. You just have to ask yourself a question. What are the odds that you’ll drop your laptop or spill something on it? They’re probably pretty low if you’re a typical human being. Is it worth spending more than half the price of the laptop just in case you’ll make an uncommon mistake? Probably not. There may be occasional exceptions to this — some Apple users swear by Apple’s AppleCare, for example — but you should generally avoid buying these things. There’s a reason stores are so pushy about extended warranties, and it’s not because they want to help protect you. It’s because they’re making lots of profit from these plans, and they’re making so much profit because they’re not a good deal for customers. Image Credit: Philip Taylor on Flickr

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Taking the Plunge - or Dipping Your Toe - into the Fluffy IAM Cloud by Paul Dhanjal (Simeio Solutions)

- by Greg Jensen

In our last three posts, we’ve examined the revolution that’s occurring today in identity and access management (IAM). We looked at the business drivers behind the growth of cloud-based IAM, the shortcomings of the old, last-century IAM models, and the new opportunities that federation, identity hubs and other new cloud capabilities can provide by changing the way you interact with everyone who does business with you. In this, our final post in the series, we’ll cover the key things you, the enterprise architect, should keep in mind when considering moving IAM to the cloud. Invariably, what starts the consideration process is a burning business need: a compliance requirement, security vulnerability or belt-tightening edict. Many on the business side view IAM as the “silver bullet” – and for good reason. You can almost always devise a solution using some aspect of IAM. The most critical question to ask first when using IAM to address the business need is, simply: is my solution complete? Typically, “business” is not focused on the big picture. Understandably, they’re focused instead on the need at hand: Can we be HIPAA compliant in 6 months? Can we tighten our new hire, employee transfer and termination processes? What can we do to prevent another password breach? Can we reduce our service center costs by the end of next quarter? The business may not be focused on the complete set of services offered by IAM but rather a single aspect or two. But it is the job – indeed the duty – of the enterprise architect to ensure that all aspects are being met. It’s like remodeling a house but failing to consider the impact on the foundation, the furnace or the zoning or setback requirements. While the homeowners may not be thinking of such things, the architect, of course, must. At Simeio Solutions, the way we ensure that all aspects are being taken into account – to expose any gaps or weaknesses – is to assess our client’s IAM capabilities against a five-step maturity model ranging from “ad hoc” to “optimized.” The model we use is similar to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. It’s based upon some simple criteria, which can provide a visual representation of how well our clients fair when evaluated against four core categories: · Program Governance · Access Management (e.g., Single Sign-On) · Identity and Access Governance (e.g., Identity Intelligence) · Enterprise Security (e.g., DLP and SIEM) Often our clients believe they have a solution with all the bases covered, but the model exposes the gaps or weaknesses. The gaps are ideal opportunities for the cloud to enter into the conversation. The complete process is straightforward: 1. Look at the big picture, not just the immediate need – what is our roadmap and how does this solution fit? 2. Determine where you stand with respect to the four core areas – what are the gaps? 3. Decide how to cover the gaps – what role can the cloud play? Returning to our home remodeling analogy, at some point, if gaps or weaknesses are discovered when evaluating the complete impact of the proposed remodel – if the existing foundation wouldn’t support the new addition, for example – the owners need to decide if it’s time to move to a new house instead of trying to remodel the old one. However, with IAM it’s not an either-or proposition – i.e., either move to the cloud or fix the existing infrastructure. It’s possible to use new cloud technologies just to cover the gaps. Many of our clients start their migration to the cloud this way, dipping in their toe instead of taking the plunge all at once. Because our cloud services offering is based on the Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite, we can offer a tremendous amount of flexibility in this regard. The Oracle platform is not a collection of point solutions, but rather a complete, integrated, best-of-breed suite. Yet it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. You can choose just the features and capabilities you need using a pay-as-you-go model, incrementally turning on and off services as needed. Better still, all the other capabilities are there, at the ready, whenever you need them. Spooling up these cloud-only services takes just a fraction of the time it would take a typical organization to deploy internally. SLAs in the cloud may be higher than on premise, too. And by using a suite of software that’s complete and integrated, you can dramatically lower cost and complexity. If your in-house solution cannot be migrated to the cloud, you might consider using hardware appliances such as Simeio’s Cloud Interceptor to extend your enterprise out into the network. You might also consider using Expert Managed Services. Cost is usually the key factor – not just development costs but also operational sustainment costs. Talent or resourcing issues often come into play when thinking about sustaining a program. Expert Managed Services such as those we offer at Simeio can address those concerns head on. In a cloud offering, identity and access services lend to the new paradigms described in my previous posts. Most importantly, it allows us all to focus on what we're meant to do – provide value, lower costs and increase security to our respective organizations. It’s that magic “silver bullet” that business knew you had all along. If you’d like to talk more, you can find us at simeiosolutions.com.

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What's My Problem? What's Your Problem?

- by Jacek Ziabicki

Software installers are not made for building demo environments. I can say this much after 12 years (on and off) of supporting my fellow sales consultants with environments for software demonstrations. When we release software, we include installation programs and procedures that are designed for use by our clients – to build a production environment and a limited number of testing, training and development environments. Different Objectives Your priorities when building an environment for client use vs. building a demo environment are very different. In a production environment, security, stability, and performance concerns are paramount. These environments are built on a specific server and rarely, if ever, moved to a different server or different network address. There is typically just one application running on a particular server (physical or virtual). Once built, the environment will be used for months or years at a time. Because of security considerations, the installation program wants to make these environments very specific to the organization using the software and the use case, encoding a fully qualified name of the server, or even the IP address on the network, in the configuration. So you either go through the installation procedure for each environment, or learn how to clone and reconfigure the software as a separate instance to build all your non-production environments. This may not matter much if the installation is as simple as clicking on the Setup program. But for enterprise applications, you have a number of configuration settings that you need to get just right – so whether you are installing from scratch or reconfiguring an existing installation, this requires both time and expertise in the particular piece of software. If you need a setup of several applications that are integrated to talk to one another, it is a whole new level of complexity. Now you need the expertise in all of the applications involved (plus the supporting technology products), and in addition to making each application work, you also have to configure the integration endpoints. Each application needs the URLs and credentials to call the integration layer, and the integration must be able to call each application. Then you have to make sure that each app has the right data so a business process initiated in one application can continue in the next. And, you will need to check that each application has the correct version and patch level for the integration to work. When building demo environments, your #1 concern is agility. If you can get away with a small number of long-running environments, you are lucky. More likely, you may get a request for a dedicated environment for a demonstration that is two weeks away: how quickly can you make this available so we still have the time to build the client-specific data? We are running a hands-on workshop next month, and we’ll need 15 instances of application X environment so each student can have a separate server for the exercises. We cannot connect to our data center from the client site, the client’s security policy won’t allow our VPN to go through – so we need a portable environment that we can bring with us. Our consultants need to be able to work at the hotel, airport, and the airplane, so we really want an environment that can run on a laptop. The client will need two playpen environments running in the cloud, accessible from their network, for a series of workshops that start two weeks from now. We have seen all of these scenarios and more. Here you would be much better served by a generic installation that would be easy to clone. Welcome to the Wonder Machine The reason I started this blog is to share a particular design of a demo environment, a special way to install software, that can address the above requirements, even for integrated setups. This design was created by a team at Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit, and we are using this setup for most of our demo environments. In a bout of modesty we called it the Wonder Machine. Over the next few posts – think of it as a novel in parts – I will tell you about the big idea, how it was implemented and what you can do with it. After we have laid down the groundwork, I would like to share some tips and tricks for users of our Wonder Machine implementation, as well as things I am learning about building portable, cloneable environments. The Wonder Machine is by no means a closed specification, it is under active development! I am hoping this blog will be of interest to two groups of readers – the users of the Wonder Machine we have built at Oracle Utilities, who want to get the most out of their demo environments and be able to reconfigure it to their needs – and to people who need to build environments for demonstration, testing, training, development and would like to make them cloneable and portable to maximize the reuse of their effort. Surely we are not the only ones facing this problem? If you can think of a better way to solve it, or if you can help us improve on our concept, I will appreciate your comments!

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Speakers, Please Check Your Time

- by AjarnMark

Woodrow Wilson was once asked how long it would take him to prepare for a 10 minute speech. He replied "Two weeks". He was then asked how long it would take for a 1 hour speech. "One week", he replied. 2 hour speech? "I'm ready right now," he replied. Whether that is a true story or an urban legend, I don’t really know, but either way, it is a poignant reminder for all speakers, and particularly apropos this week leading up to the PASS Community Summit. (Cross-posted to the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter blog #PASSProfDev.) What’s the point of that story? Simply this…if you have plenty of time to do your presentation, you don’t need to prepare much because it is easy to throw in more and more material to stretch out to your allotted time. But if you are on a tight time constraint, then it will take significant preparation to distill your talk down to only the essential points. I have attended seven of the last eight North American Summit events, and every one of them has been fantastic. The speakers are great, the material is timely and relevant, and the networking opportunities are awesome. And every year, there is one little thing that just bugs me…speakers going over their allotted time. Why does it bother me so? Well, if you look at a typical schedule for a Summit, you’ll see that there are six or more sessions going on at the same time, and only 15 minutes to move from one to another. If you’re trying to maximize your training dollar by attending something during every session time slot, and you don’t want to be the last guy trying to squeeze into the middle of the row, then those 15 minutes can be critical. All the more so if you need to stop and use the bathroom or if you have to hike to the opposite end of the convention center. It is really a bad position to find yourself having to choose between learning the last key points of Speaker A who is going over time, and getting over to Speaker B on time so you don’t miss her key opening remarks. And frankly, I think it is just rude. Yes, the speakers are the function, after all they are bringing the content that the rest of us are paying to learn. But it is also an honor to be given the opportunity to speak at a conference like this, and no one speaker is so important that the conference would be a disaster without him. Speakers know when they submit their abstract, long before the conference, how much time they will have. It has been the same pattern at the Summit for at least the last eight years. Program Sessions are 75 minutes long. Some speakers who have a good track record, and meet other qualifying criteria, are extended an invitation to present a Spotlight Session which is 90 minutes (a 20% increase). So there really is no excuse. It’s not like you were promised a 2-hour segment and then discovered when you got here that it was only 75 minutes. In fact, it’s not like PASS advertised 90-minute sessions for everyone and then a select few were cut back to only 75. As a speaker, you know well before you get here which type of session you are doing and how long it is, so as a professional, you should plan accordingly. Now you might think that this only happens to rookies, but I’ll tell you that some of the worst offenders are big-name veterans who draw huge attendance numbers for their sessions. Some attendees blow this off as, “Hey, it’s so-and-so, and I’d stay here for hours and listen to him/her talk.” To which I would reply, “Then they should have submitted for a pre- or post-conference day-long seminar instead, but don’t try to squeeze your day-long talk into a 90-minute session.” Now I don’t really believe that these speakers are being malicious or just selfishly trying to extend their time in the spotlight. I think that most of them are merely being undisciplined and did not trim their presentation sufficiently, or allowed themselves to get off-track (often in a generous attempt to help someone in the audience with a question or problem that really should have been noted for further discussion after the session). So here is my recommendation…my plea, even. TRIM THE FAT! Now. Before it’s too late. Before you even get on the airplane, take a long, hard look at your presentation and eliminate some of the points that you originally thought you had to make, but in reality are not truly crucial to your main topic. Delete a few slides. Test your demos and have them already scripted rather than typing them during your talk. It is better to cut out too much and end up with plenty of time at the end for Questions & Answers. And you can always keep some notes on the stuff that you cut out so that you could fill it back in at the end as bonus material if you really do end up with a whole bunch of time on your hands. But I don’t think you will. And if you do, that will look even better to the audience as it will look like you’re giving them something extra that not every audience gets. And they will thank you for that.

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VNIC - New feature of AK8 - Working with VNICs

- by Steve Tunstall

One of the important new features of the AK8 code is the ability to use multiple IP addresses on the same physical network port. This feature is called VNICs, or Virtual NICs. This allows us to no longer "burn" a whole port in a cluster when one cluster peer owns a network port. Traditionally, we have had to leave Net0 empty on controller 2, because it was used for managing controller 1. Vise-versa for Net1 on Controller 1. Then, if you have data going over 10GigE ports, you probably only had half of your ports running at any given time, and the partner 10GigE port on the other controller just sat there, doing nothing, unless the first controller went down. What a waste. Those days are over. I want to thank and give a big shout-out to our good partner, OnX Enterprise Solutions, for allowing me to come into their lab and play around with their 7320 to do this demo. They let me make a big mess of their lab for the day as I played around with VNICs. If you're looking for a partner who knows Oracle well and can also piece together a solution from multiple vendors to get you what you need, OnX is a good choice. If you would like to talk to your local OnX rep, you can contact Scott Gill at [email protected] and he can point you in the right direction for your area. Here we go: Here is what your Datalinks window looks like BEFORE you upgrade to AK8. Here's what the same screen looks like after you upgrade. See the new box? So here is my current network setup. I have my 4 physical interfaces setup each with an IP address. If I ping them, no problems. So I can ping 180, 181, 251, and 252. However, if I try to ping 240, it does not work, as the 240 address is not being used by any of these interfaces, right?Let's change that. Here, I'm going to make a new Datalink by clicking the Datalink "Plus sign" button. I will check the VNIC box and tell it to use igb2, even though another interface is already using it. Now, I will create a new Interface, and choose "v_dl2" for it's datalink. My new network screen looks like this. A few things to take note of here. First, when I click the "igb2" device, it only highlights dl2 and int2. It does not highlight v_dl2 or v_int2.I think it should, but OK, it looks like VNICs don't highlight when you click the device. Second, note how the underscore character in v_dl2 and v_int2 do not seem to show on this screen. You can see it plainly if you go in and edit them, but from here it looks like a space instead of an underscore. Just a cosmetic bug, but something to be aware of. Now, if I click the VNIC datalink "v_dl2", on the other hand, it DOES highlight the device it belongs to, as it should. Seen here: Note that it did not, however, highlight int2 with it, even though int2 is connected to igb2. That's because we clicked v_dl2, which int2 has nothing to do with. So I'm OK with that. So let's try pinging 240 now. Of course, it works great. So I now make another VNIC, and call it v_dl3 using igb3, and v_int3 with an address of 241. I then setup three shares, using ports 251, 240, and 241.Remember that IP 251 and 240 both are using the same physical port of igb2, and IP 241 is using port igb3. Next, I copy a folder full of stuff over to all three shares at the same time. I have analytics going so I can see the traffic. My top chart is showing the logical interfaces, and the bottom chart is showing the physical ports.Sure enough, look at the igb2 and vnic1 interfaces. They equal the traffic going over the igb2 physical port on the second chart. VNIC2, on the other hand, gets igb3 all to itself. This would work the same way with 10Gig or Infiniband ports. You can now have multiple IP addresses and even completely different subnets sharing the same physical ports. You may need to make route table entries for that. This allows us to use all of the ports you paid for with no more waste. Very, very cool. One small "bug" I found when doing this. It's really not a bug, it was designed to do this when VNICs were not around. But now that we have NVIC capability, they should probably change this. I've alerted the engineering team about this and they're looking into it, so perhaps it will be fixed in a later code. Here it is. Remember when we made the new VNIC datalink, I specifically said to click on the "Plus Sign" button to create it? I don't always do that. I really like to use the drag-and-drop method to create my datalinks in the network screen.HOWEVER, if you were to do that for building a VNIC, it will mess you up a little. Watch this. Here, I'm dragging igb3 over to make a new datalink. igb3 is already being used by dl3, but I'm going to make this a VNIC, so who cares, right? Well, the ZFSSA does not KNOW you are going to make it a VNIC, now does it? So... it works as designed and REMOVES the igb3 device from the current dl3 datalink in the background. See how it's now missing? At the same time, the dl3 datalink choice is missing from my list of possible VNICs for me to choose from!!!! Hey!!! I wanted to pick dl3. Why isn't it on the list??? Well, it can't be on this list because dl3 no longer has a device associated with it. Bummer for you. When you click cancel, the device is still missing from dl3. The fix is easy. Just edit dl3 by clicking the pencil button, do absolutely nothing, and click "Apply". The device will magically come back. Now, make the VNIC datalink by clicking the "Plus Sign" button. Sure enough, once you check the VNIC box, dl3 is a valid choice. No problem. That's it for now. Have fun with VNICs.

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iOS Support with Windows Azure Mobile Services – now with Push Notifications

- by ScottGu

A few weeks ago I posted about a number of improvements to Windows Azure Mobile Services. One of these was the addition of an Objective-C client SDK that allows iOS developers to easily use Mobile Services for data and authentication. Today I'm excited to announce a number of improvement to our iOS SDK and, most significantly, our new support for Push Notifications via APNS (Apple Push Notification Services). This makes it incredibly easy to fire push notifications to your iOS users from Windows Azure Mobile Service scripts. Push Notifications via APNS We've provided two complete tutorials that take you step-by-step through the provisioning and setup process to enable your Windows Azure Mobile Service application with APNS (Apple Push Notification Services), including all of the steps required to configure your application for push in the Apple iOS provisioning portal: Getting started with Push Notifications - iOS Push notifications to users by using Mobile Services - iOS Once you've configured your application in the Apple iOS provisioning portal and uploaded the APNS push certificate to the Apple provisioning portal, it's just a matter of uploading your APNS push certificate to Mobile Services using the Windows Azure admin portal: Clicking the “upload” within the “Push” tab of your Mobile Service allows you to browse your local file-system and locate/upload your exported certificate. As part of this you can also select whether you want to use the sandbox (dev) or production (prod) Apple service: Now, the code to send a push notification to your clients from within a Windows Azure Mobile Service is as easy as the code below: push.apns.send(deviceToken, { alert: 'Toast: A new Mobile Services task.', sound: 'default' }); This will cause Windows Azure Mobile Services to connect to APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) and send a notification to the iOS device you specified via the deviceToken: Check out our reference documentation for full details on how to use the new Windows Azure Mobile Services apns object to send your push notifications. Feedback Scripts An important part of working with any PNS (Push Notification Service) is handling feedback for expired device tokens and channels. This typically happens when your application is uninstalled from a particular device and can no longer receive your notifications. With Windows Notification Services you get an instant response from the HTTP server. Apple’s Notification Services works in a slightly different way and provides an additional endpoint you can connect to poll for a list of expired tokens. As with all of the capabilities we integrate with Mobile Services, our goal is to allow developers to focus more on building their app and less on building infrastructure to support their ideas. Therefore we knew we had to provide a simple way for developers to integrate feedback from APNS on a regular basis. This week’s update now includes a new screen in the portal that allows you to optionally provide a script to process your APNS feedback – and it will be executed by Mobile Services on an ongoing basis: This script is invoked periodically while your service is active. To poll the feedback endpoint you can simply call the apns object's getFeedback method from within this script: push.apns.getFeedback({ success: function(results) { // results is an array of objects with a deviceToken and time properties } }); This returns you a list of invalid tokens that can now be removed from your database. iOS Client SDK improvements Over the last month we've continued to work with a number of iOS advisors to make improvements to our Objective-C SDK. The SDK is being developed under an open source license (Apache 2.0) and is available on github. Many of the improvements are behind the scenes to improve performance and memory usage. However, one of the biggest improvements to our iOS Client API is the addition of an even easier login method. Below is the Objective-C code you can now write to invoke it: [client loginWithProvider:@"twitter" onController:self animated:YES completion:^(MSUser *user, NSError *error) { // if no error, you are now logged in via twitter }]; This code will automatically present and dismiss our login view controller as a modal dialog on the specified controller. This does all the hard work for you and makes login via Twitter, Google, Facebook and Microsoft Account identities just a single line of code. My colleague Josh just posted a short video demonstrating these new features which I'd recommend checking out: Summary The above features are all now live in production and are available to use immediately. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using Mobile Services today. Visit the Windows Azure Mobile Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with Mobile Services. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Efficient way to render tile-based map in Java

- by Lucius

Some time ago I posted here because I was having some memory issues with a game I'm working on. That has been pretty much solved thanks to some suggestions here, so I decided to come back with another problem I'm having. Basically, I feel that too much of the CPU is being used when rendering the map. I have a Core i5-2500 processor and when running the game, the CPU usage is about 35% - and I can't accept that that's just how it has to be. This is how I'm going about rendering the map: I have the X and Y coordinates of the player, so I'm not drawing the whole map, just the visible portion of it; The number of visible tiles on screen varies according to the resolution chosen by the player (the CPU usage is 35% here when playing at a resolution of 1440x900); If the tile is "empty", I just skip drawing it (this didn't visibly lower the CPU usage, but reduced the drawing time in about 20ms); The map is composed of 5 layers - for more details; The tiles are 32x32 pixels; And just to be on the safe side, I'll post the code for drawing the game here, although it's as messy and unreadable as it can be T_T (I'll try to make it a little readable) private void drawGame(Graphics2D g2d){ //Width and Height of the visible portion of the map (not of the screen) int visionWidht = visibleCols * TILE_SIZE; int visionHeight = visibleRows * TILE_SIZE; //Since the map can be smaller than the screen, I center it just to be sure int xAdjust = (getWidth() - visionWidht) / 2; int yAdjust = (getHeight() - visionHeight) / 2; //This "deducedX" thing is to move the map a few pixels horizontally, since the player moves by pixels and not full tiles int playerDrawX = listOfCharacters.get(0).getX(); int deducedX = 0; if (listOfCharacters.get(0).currentCol() - visibleCols / 2 >= 0) { playerDrawX = visibleCols / 2 * TILE_SIZE; map_draw_col = listOfCharacters.get(0).currentCol() - visibleCols / 2; deducedX = listOfCharacters.get(0).getXCol(); } //"deducedY" is the same deal as "deducedX", but vertically int playerDrawY = listOfCharacters.get(0).getY(); int deducedY = 0; if (listOfCharacters.get(0).currentRow() - visibleRows / 2 >= 0) { playerDrawY = visibleRows / 2 * TILE_SIZE; map_draw_row = listOfCharacters.get(0).currentRow() - visibleRows / 2; deducedY = listOfCharacters.get(0).getYRow(); } int max_cols = visibleCols + map_draw_col; if (max_cols >= map.getCols()) { max_cols = map.getCols() - 1; deducedX = 0; map_draw_col = max_cols - visibleCols + 1; playerDrawX = listOfCharacters.get(0).getX() - map_draw_col * TILE_SIZE; } int max_rows = visibleRows + map_draw_row; if (max_rows >= map.getRows()) { max_rows = map.getRows() - 1; deducedY = 0; map_draw_row = max_rows - visibleRows + 1; playerDrawY = listOfCharacters.get(0).getY() - map_draw_row * TILE_SIZE; } //map_draw_row and map_draw_col representes the coordinate of the upper left tile on the screen //iterate through all the tiles on screen and draw them - this is what consumes most of the CPU for (int col = map_draw_col; col <= max_cols; col++) { for (int row = map_draw_row; row <= max_rows; row++) { Tile[] tiles = map.getTiles(col, row); for(int layer = 0; layer < tiles.length; layer++){ Tile currentTile = tiles[layer]; boolean shouldDraw = true; //I only draw the tile if it exists and is not empty (id=-1) if(currentTile != null && currentTile.getId() >= 0){ //The layers above 1 can be draw behing or infront of the player according to where it's standing if(layer > 1 && currentTile.getId() >= 0){ if(playerBehind(col, row, layer, listOfCharacters.get(0))){ behinds.get(0).add(new int[]{col, row}); //the tiles that are infront of the player wont be draw right now shouldDraw = false; } } if(shouldDraw){ g2d.drawImage( tiles[layer].getImage(), (col-map_draw_col)*TILE_SIZE - deducedX + xAdjust, (row-map_draw_row)*TILE_SIZE - deducedY + yAdjust, null); } } } } } } There's some more code in this method but nothing relevant to this question. Basically, the biggest problem is that I iterate over around 5000 tiles (in this specific resolution) 60 times each second. I thought about rendering the visible portion of the map once and storing it into a BufferedImage and when the player moved move the whole image the same amount but to the opposite side and then drawn the tiles that appeared on the screen, but if I do it like that, I wont be able to have animated tiles (at least I think). That being said, any suggestions?

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Clouds, Clouds, Clouds Everywhere, Not a Drop of Rain!

- by sxkumar

At the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld 2012, the center of discussion was clearly Cloud. Over the five action packed days, I got to meet a large number of customers and most of them had serious interest in all things cloud. Public Cloud - particularly the Oracle Cloud - clearly got a lot of attention and interest. I think the use cases and the value proposition for public cloud is pretty straight forward. However, when it comes to private cloud, there were some interesting revelations. Well, I shouldn’t really call them revelations since they are pretty consistent with what I have heard from customers at other conferences as well as during 1:1 interactions. While the interest in enterprise private cloud remains to be very high, only a handful of enterprises have truly embarked on a journey to create what the purists would call true private cloud - with capabilities such as self-service and chargeback/show back. For a large majority, today's reality is simply consolidation and virtualization - and they are quite far off from creating an agile, self-service and transparent IT infrastructure which is what the enterprise cloud is all about. Even a handful of those who have actually implemented a close-to-real enterprise private cloud have taken an infrastructure centric approach and are seeing only limited business upside. Quite a few were frank enough to admit that chargeback and self-service isn’t something that they see an immediate need for. This is in quite contrast to the picture being painted by all those surveys out there that show a large number of enterprises having already implemented an enterprise private cloud. On the face of it, this seems quite contrary to the observations outlined above. So what exactly is the reality? Well, the reality is that there is undoubtedly a huge amount of interest among enterprises about transforming their legacy IT environment - which is often seen as too rigid, too fragmented, and ultimately too expensive - to something more agile, transparent and business-focused. At the same time however, there is a great deal of confusion among CIOs and architects about how to get there. This isn't very surprising given all the buzz and hype surrounding cloud computing. Every IT vendor claims to have the most unique solution and there isn't a single IT product out there that does not have a cloud angle to it. Add to this the chatter on the blogosphere, it will get even a sane mind spinning. Consequently, most enterprises are still struggling to fully understand the concept and value of enterprise private cloud. Even among those who have chosen to move forward relatively early, quite a few have made their decisions more based on vendor influence/preferences rather than what their businesses actually need. Clearly, there is a disconnect between the promise of the enterprise private cloud and the current adoption trends. So what is the way forward? I certainly do not claim to have all the answers. But here is a perspective that many cloud practitioners have found useful and thus worth sharing. To take a step back, the fundamental premise of the enterprise private cloud is IT transformation. It is the quest to create a more agile, transparent and efficient IT infrastructure that is driven more by business needs rather than constrained by operational and procedural inefficiencies. It is the new way of delivering and consuming IT services - where the IT organizations operate more like enablers of strategic services rather than just being the gatekeepers of IT resources. In an enterprise private cloud environment, IT organizations are expected to empower the end users via self-service access/control and provide the business stakeholders a transparent view of how the resources are being used, what’s the cost of delivering a given service, how well are the customers being served, etc. But the most important thing to note here is the enterprise private cloud is not just an IT project, rather it is a business initiative to create an IT setup that is more aligned with the needs of today's dynamic and highly competitive business environment. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Just remember how the business users have been at the forefront of public cloud adoption within enterprises and private cloud is no exception. Such a broad-based transformation makes cloud more than a technology initiative. It requires people (organizational) and process changes as well, and these changes are as critical as is the choice of right tools and technology. In my next blog, I will share how essential it is for enterprise cloud technology to go hand-in hand with process re-engineering and organization changes to unlock true value of enterprise cloud. I am sharing a short video from my session "Managing your private Cloud" at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. More videos from this session will be posted at the recently introduced Zero to Cloud resource page. Many other experts of Oracle enterprise private cloud solution will join me on this blog "Zero to Cloud" and share best practices , deployment tips and information on how to plan, build, deploy, monitor, manage , meter and optimize the enterprise private cloud. We look forward to your feedback, suggestions and having an engaging conversion with you on this blog.

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I'm a contract developer and I think I'm about to get screwed [closed]

- by kagaku

I do contract development on the side. You could say that I'm a contract developer? Considering I've only ever had one client I'd say that's not exactly the truth - more like I took a side job and needed some extra cash. It started out as a "rebuild our website and we'll pay you $10k" type project. Once that was complete (a bit over schedule, but certainly not over budget), the company hired me on as a "long term support" contractor. The contract is to go from March of this year, expiring on December 31st of this year - 10 months. Over which a payment is to be paid on the 30th of each month for a set amount. I've been fulfilling my end of the contract on all points - doing server maintenence, application and database changes, doing huge rush changes and pretty much just going above and beyond. Currently I'm in the middle of development of an iPhone mobile application (PhoneGap based) which is nearing completion (probably 3-4 weeks from submission). It has not been all peaches and flowers though. Each and every month when my paycheck comes due, there always seems to be an issue of sorts. These issues did not occur during the initial project, only during the support contract. The actual contract states that my check should be mailed out on the 30th of the month. I have received my check on time approximately once (on time being about 2-3 days within the 30th). I've received my paycheck as late as the 15th of the next month - over two weeks late. I've put up with it because I need the paycheck. There have been promises and promises of "we'll send it out on time next time! I promise" - only to receive it just as late the next month. When I ask about payment they give me a vibe like "why are you only worried about money?" - unfortunately I don't have the luxury of not worrying about money. The last straw was with my August payment, which should have been mailed on August 30th. I received it on September 12th. The reason for the delay? "USPS is delaying it man! we sent it out on the 1st!" is the reason I got. When I finally got the check in the mail, the postage on the envelope was marked September 10th - the date it was run through the postage machine. I've been outright lied to, at this point. I carry on working, because again - I need a paycheck. I orchestrated the move of our application to a new server, developed a bunch of new changes and continued work on the iPhone app. All told I probably went over my hourly allotment (I'm paid for 40 hours a month, I probably put in at least 50). On Saturday, the 1st, I gave the main contact at the company (a company of 3, by the way - this is not some big corporation) a ring and filled him in on the status of my work for the past two weeks. Unusually I hadn't heard from him since the middle of September. His response was "oh... well, that is nice and uh.. good job. well, we've been talking within the company about things and we've certainly got some decisions ahead of us..." - not verbatim but you get the idea (I hope?). I got out of this conversation that the site is not doing very well (which it's not) and they're considering pulling the plug. Crap, this contract is going to end early - there goes Christmas! Fine, that's alright, no problem. I'll get paid for the last months work and call it a day. Unfortunately I still haven't gotten last months check, and I'm getting dicked around now. "Oh.. we had problems transferring funds, we'll try and mail it out tomorrow" and "I left a VM with the finance guy, but I can't get ahold of him". So I'm getting the feeling I'm not getting paid for all the work I put in for September. This is obviously breach of contract, and I am pissed. Thinking irrationally, I considered changing all their passwords and holding their stuff hostage. Before I think it through (by the way, I am NOT going to do this, realized it would probably get me in trouble), I go and try some passwords for our various accounts. Google Apps? Oh, I'm no longer administrator here. Godaddy? Whoops, invalid password. Disqus? Nope, invalid password here too. Google Adsense / Analytics? Invalid password. Dedicated server account manager? Invalid password. Now, I have the servers root password - I just built the box last week and haven't had a chance to send the guy the root password. Wasn't in a rush, I manage the server and they never touch it. Now all of a sudden all the passwords except this one are changed; the writing is on the wall - I am out. Here's the conundrum. I have the root password, they do not. If I give them this password all the leverage I have is gone, out the door and out of my hands. During this argument of why am I not getting paid the guy sends me an email saying "oh by the way, what's the root username and password to the server?". Considering he knows absolutely nothing, I gave him an "admin" account which really has almost no rights. I still have exclusive access to the server, I just don't know where to go. I can hold their data hostage, but I'm almost positive this is the wrong thing to do. I'd consider it blackmail, regardless of whether or not I have gotten paid yet. I can "break" something on the server and give them the whole "well, if you were paying me I could fix it!" spiel. This works from a "well he's not holding their stuff hostage" point of view, but what stops them from hiring some one else to just fix the issue at hand? For all I know the guys nephew is a "l33t hax0r" and can figure it out for free. I can give in, document as much as I can and take him to small claims court. This is breach of contract, I'm not getting paid. I have a case, right? ???? Does anyone have any experience in this? What can I do? What are my options? I'm broke, I can't afford a lawyer and I can barely afford not getting this paycheck. My wife doesn't work (I work two jobs so she doesn't have to work - we have a 1 year old) and is already looking at getting a part time job to cover the bills. Long term we'll be fine, but this has pissed me off beyond belief! Help me out, I'm about to get screwed.

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