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• How do I get the Apple Wireless Keyboard Working in 10.10?

  - by Jamie

  So I've gone and bought a Magic Mouse and Apple Wireless Non-Numeric Keyboard. The magic mouse worked out-of-the-box almost perfectly, except for the forward/back gesture which still isn't functioning, whereas the keyboard didn't. It has constant trouble with the bluetooth connection. Only the 7, 8 and 9 buttons and volume media keys correspond correctly with the output. Pressing every single key on keyboard has this output: 789/=456*123-0.+ When I use Blueman the keyboard can be setup and shows up in "Devices" but I get a warning when I click "Setup"; "Device added successfully, but failed to connect" (although removing the keyboard and setting it up as a new device doesn't incur this error). Using gnome-bluetooth I have encountered no error messages but it connects properly less often than Blueman and I can still only type the aforementioned output. What am I not doing? Where is this going wrong? EDIT: I have read this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224673 inside out several times to no avail. It seems these commands don't work for me with the apple peripherals sudo hidd --search hcitool scan Fortunately I have the luxury of a 1TB hard drive, near limitless patience and no job. I have installed a fresh Ubuntu 10.10 64bit (albeit smaller than mine) and after updating and restarting for the first time, I set up my devices in exactly the same way as I have learnt on my original install I succeeded once again with the mouse and, to my joy, with the keyboard also. Though I could not seem to find Alt+F2 and had to reconfigure that and several other keyboard shortcuts, the keyboard is working and in a spectacular fashion. Still, this leaves me with the issue of my original install. I returned to it with some new found knowledge but failed again. Perhaps I have a missing dependancy? I did uninstall bluetooth after the initial set up and reinstalled it recently for the pupose of these peripherals. Maybe it's because I'm running 64bit? This is still not solved, but easily avoided by not changing too much from the original install. Just hide stuff or turn it off, don't uninstall too much.

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• Finalists for the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure

  - by ScottGu

  Today, I am pleased to announce the ten finalists for the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure powered by TechStars. These startups are about to launch into a three-month program where they will develop new products and businesses using Windows Azure. The response to the program has been fantastic - we received nearly 600 applications from entrepreneurs in 69 countries around the world, spanning a host of industries including retail, travel, entertainment, banking, real estate and more.  There were so many innovative ideas and amazing teams that it really made the selection process hard.  We finally landed on 10 finalists, based on their experience, qualifications, and innovative business ideas built on the cloud. This fall’s Windows Azure class includes: Advertory – Berlin, Germany. Advertory helps local businesses increase revenue and build customer loyalty. Appetas – Seattle, WA. Appetas' mission is to make restaurants look as beautiful online as they do on the plate! BagsUp – Sydney, Australia. Find great places from people you trust. Embarke – San Diego, CA. Embarke allows developers and companies the ability to integrate with any human communication channel (Facebook, Email, Text Message, Twitter) without having to learn the specifics, write code, or spend time on any of them. Fanzo – Seattle, WA. Fanzo puts sports fans in the spotlight. Find other fans, show off your fanswagger and get rewarded for your passion. MetricsHub – Bellevue, WA. A service providing cloud monitoring with incident detection and prebuilt workflows for remedying common problems. Mobilligy – Bellevue, WA. Mobilligy revolutionizes how people pay their bills by bringing convenient, secure, and instant bill payment support to mobile devices. Realty Mogul – Los Angeles, CA. Realty Mogul is a crowdfunding platform for real estate where accredited investors pool capital and invest in properties that are acquired, managed and eventually resold by professional private real estate companies and their management teams. Staq – San Francisco, CA. Back-end as a service for APIs. Socedo – Bellevue, WA. A simple and effective web application for lead generation and relationship management on Twitter. Each startup will be hosted in Seattle and mentored by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists as well as leaders from Windows Azure and other Microsoft organizations. The teams will spend the first month ideating and refining their business concepts with input and advice from their mentors as well as Microsoft customers, followed by two months of design and development. They will present their results to investors and Microsoft partners at an event in mid-January. We are really looking forward to seeing how their businesses evolve.  These teams have demonstrated incredible energy, passion, and innovative capabilities – and they are ready to show the world what’s possible with Windows Azure. Thanks, Scott P.S. And if you are new to Twitter you can also optionally follow me: @scottgu

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• Oracle WebCenter: The Best of the Best

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  You may remember that the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  Last week, we provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter, and this week, we'll focus on Convergence and how the new release of Oracle WebCenter is the Best of the Best..Our development team has been working very hard to bring all the best capabilities from each of the existing portal products into one modern user experience platform that provides a robust foundation for moving customers into the future.  Each of the development teams still maintain their existing products to support the current customers,  but they've been tasked with converging their unique best of breed features into the new WebCenter release so that it will meet the broadest set of use cases possible. For example, we've taken the fastest and most scalable portlet engine in the industry with Oracle WebLogic Portal, integrated it within WebCenter, and improved performance further, to deliver even more performance for our customers.  In addition, we've focused on extending the reach of all the different user experience resources so that customers can deliver robust capabilities into their existing portals, applications, composite applications, dashboards, mobile applications, really any channel that requires information.  And finally, we've combined a whole set of community and multi-site capabilities leveraging the pioneering capabilities of Plumtree portal directly into the new WebCenter release.  While at the same time we've built and delivered the new WebCenter release, we've also provided new feature releases of all the existing products.  In this way, customers can continue to gain value out of their existing investments while at the same time have the smoothest path to upgrading to the new WebCenter release. With the new WebCenter release, we are delivering a converged platform to address all portal requirements that have been delivered by different point products in our portal portfolio in the past. Additionally, this release delivers the most modern user experience that goes well beyond the experience the other portal products provided. This is because the new WebCenter release has been built from the ground up with modern technologies around rich clients, SOA, and customizations compared with other portal products whose architecture has been adapted to add capabilities like AJAX, personalization, and social computing.The new WebCenter release addresses the broadest set of use cases using single product set and single architecture spanning extranet sites to social communities. It helps customers manage, maintain and develop one technology set, but leverage it throughout their organization whether it's embedded in an application or a new destination for improved customer and employee productivity. Additionally, the new release of WebCenter leverages the best and most performant features of all the existing portfolio products to deliver the fastest and most scalable portal platform.  Most importantly, it supports the broadest development models spanning from J2EE/Java to HTML/REST to .NET.Keep checking back this week as we provide additional resources and information on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter is the Best of the Best - converging all the best capabilities from each of the existing portal products into one modern user experience platform.

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• A Plea for Plain English

  - by Tony Davis

  The English language has, within a lifetime, emerged as the ubiquitous 'international language' of scientific, political and technical communication. On the one hand, learning a single, common language, International English, has made it much easier to participate in and adopt new technologies; on the other hand it must be exasperating to have to use English at international conferences, or on community sites, when your own language has a long tradition of scientific and technical usage. It is also hard to master the subtleties of using a foreign language to explain advanced ideas. This requires English speakers to be more considerate in their writing. Even if you’re used to speaking English, you may be brought up short by this sort of verbiage… "Business Intelligence delivering actionable insights is becoming more critical in the enterprise, and these insights require large data volumes for trending and forecasting" It takes some imagination to appreciate the added hassle in working out what it means, when English is a language you only use at work. Try, just to get a vague feel for it, using Google Translate to translate it from English to Chinese and back again. "Providing actionable business intelligence point of view is becoming more and more and more business critical, and requires that these insights and projected trends in large amounts of data" Not easy eh? If you normally use a different language, you will need to pause for thought before finally working out that it really means … "Every Business Intelligence solution must be able to help companies to make decisions. In order to detect current trends, and accurately predict future ones, we need to analyze large volumes of data" Surely, it is simple politeness for English speakers to stop peppering their writing with a twisted vocabulary that renders it inaccessible to everyone else. It isn’t just the problem of writers who use long words to give added dignity to their prose. It is the use of Colloquial English. This changes and evolves at a dizzying rate, adding new terms and idioms almost daily; it is almost a new and separate language. By contrast, ‘International English', is gradually evolving separately, at its own, more sedate, pace. As such, all native English speakers need to make an effort to learn, and use it, switching from casual colloquial patter into a simpler form of communication that can be widely understood by different cultures, even if it gives you less credibility on the street. Simple-Talk is based, at least in part, on the idea that technical articles can be written simply and clearly in a form of English that can be easily understood internationally, and that they can be written, with a little editorial help, by anyone, and read by anyone, regardless of their native language. Cheers, Tony.

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• New Themes New Benefits (WinForms)

  We believe that working hard on something can be great fun at the end when everything is done and the seeds have resulted in the sweetest fruits. This is the case with the new Theming Mechanism and the new Visual Style Builder which we introduced as of Q1 2010.   I am not going to dive into any details on the new concepts behind all this stuff, but will simply focus on the numbers: both in terms of loading speed and memory usage. As you may already know, the new approach we use to style our controls uses the so called Style Repository which stores style settings that can be reused throughout the whole theme. As a result, we have estimated that the size of our themes has been significantly reduced. For instance, the size of all XML files of the Desert theme sums up to 1.83 MB. The case with the new version of the Desert theme is drastically different. Despite the fact that the new theme consists of more XML files compared to the old, its size is only 707 KB!   Furthermore, we have performed a simple performance test since the common sense tells us that such a great improvement in terms of memory footprint should be followed by a great improvement in terms of speed. We have estimated that loading and applying the new Desert theme to a form containing all RadControls for WinForms takes roughly 30% less time compared to the same operation with the old version of the Desert theme. The following screenshots briefly demonstrate the scenario which we used to estimate the loading time difference between the old and the new Desert theme:     Here, the old Desert theme is applied to all controls on the Form which takes almost 1,3 seconds.     Applying the new Desert theme (based on the new Theming Mechanism) takes about 0,78 seconds.   On top of all these great improvements, we can add the fact that the new Visual Style Builder significantly reduces the time needed to style a control by entirely changing the approach compared to the old version of this tool. You can be sure that we have already prepared some great new stuff for Q1 2010 SP1 that will simplify things further so that designing themes with the new VSB will become more fun than ever!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• New Themes New Benefits (WinForms)

  We believe that working hard on something can be great fun at the end when everything is done and the seeds have resulted in the sweetest fruits. This is the case with the new Theming Mechanism and the new Visual Style Builder which we introduced as of Q1 2010.   I am not going to dive into any details on the new concepts behind all this stuff, but will simply focus on the numbers: both in terms of loading speed and memory usage. As you may already know, the new approach we use to style our controls uses the so called Style Repository which stores style settings that can be reused throughout the whole theme. As a result, we have estimated that the size of our themes has been significantly reduced. For instance, the size of all XML files of the Desert theme sums up to 1.83 MB. The case with the new version of the Desert theme is drastically different. Despite the fact that the new theme consists of more XML files compared to the old, its size is only 707 KB!   Furthermore, we have performed a simple performance test since the common sense tells us that such a great improvement in terms of memory footprint should be followed by a great improvement in terms of speed. We have estimated that loading and applying the new Desert theme to a form containing all RadControls for WinForms takes roughly 30% less time compared to the same operation with the old version of the Desert theme. The following screenshots briefly demonstrate the scenario which we used to estimate the loading time difference between the old and the new Desert theme:     Here, the old Desert theme is applied to all controls on the Form which takes almost 1,3 seconds.     Applying the new Desert theme (based on the new Theming Mechanism) takes about 0,78 seconds.   On top of all these great improvements, we can add the fact that the new Visual Style Builder significantly reduces the time needed to style a control by entirely changing the approach compared to the old version of this tool. You can be sure that we have already prepared some great new stuff for Q1 2010 SP1 that will simplify things further so that designing themes with the new VSB will become more fun than ever!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• .NET development on a “Retina” MacBook Pro

  - by Jeff

  The rumor that Apple would release a super high resolution version of its 15” laptop has been around for quite awhile, and one I watched closely. After more than three years with a 17” MacBook Pro, and all of the screen real estate it offered, I was ready to replace it with something much lighter. It was a fantastic machine, still doing 6 or 7 hours after 460 charge cycles, but I wanted lighter and faster. With the SSD I put in it, I was able to sell it for $750. The appeal of higher resolution goes way back, when I would plug into a projector and scale up. Consolas, as it turns out, is a nice looking font for code when it’s bigger. While I have mostly indifference for iOS, I have to admit that a higher dot pitch on the iPhone and iPad is pretty to look at. So I ordered the new 15” “Retina” model as soon as the Apple Store went live with it, and got it seven days later. I’ve been primarily using Parallels as my VM of choice from OS X for about five years. They recently put out an update for compatibility with the display, though I’m not entirely sure what that means. I figured there would have to be some messing around to get the VM to look right. The combination that seems to work best is this: Set the display in OS X to “more room,” which is roughly the equivalent of the 1920x1200 that my 17” did. It’s not as stunning as the text at the default 1440x900 equivalent (in OS X), but it’s still quite readable. Parallels still doesn’t entirely know what to do with the high resolution, though what it should do is somehow treat it as native. That flaw aside, I set the Windows 7 scaling to 125%, and it generally looks pretty good. It’s not really taking advantage of the display for sharpness, but hopefully that’s something that Parallels will figure out. Screen tweaking aside, I got the base model with 16 gigs of RAM, so I give the VM 8. I can boot a Windows 7 VM in 9 seconds. Nine seconds! The Windows Experience Index scores are all 7 and above, except for graphics, which are both at 6. Again, that’s in a VM. It’s hard to believe there’s something so fast in a little slim package like that. Hopefully this one gets me at least three years, like the last one.

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• Gain Quick Access to the Cache in Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you looking for a quick and simple way to view the contents of the cache in Firefox? Then you will definitely want to see how easy it can be using the CacheViewer extension. Note: CacheViewer is a front-end app for easily accessing and searching the memory cache. Before Viewing the cache in Firefox using “about:cache” provides some information about the contents but may not be the most efficient method available for some people. CacheViewer in Action Once you have installed the extension there are three easy ways to access your new cache viewer. The first is using the “CacheViewer Command” available in the “Tools Menu” and the second is using the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl + Shift + C”. The third way is by adding a “Toolbar Button” to your browser’s UI. All three work equally well…choose the method that best suits your personal needs. When you access the “CacheViewer Window” this is what it will look like. You may decide to resize it and move (or hide) some of the columns for the best viewing. You can easily scroll through the cache contents and preview images if desired as shown here. If you keep the “CacheViewer Window” open you can refresh it as you browse using the “Refresh Button” in the lower right corner. This is a nice, quick, and very simple way to access the cache on demand and save items to your hard-drive if desired. Note: The “CacheViewer” can also be set to open in a new tab instead (see “Options”). Options Choose whether “CacheViewer” opens in a separate window (default) or in a new tab. Conclusion If you want a quick and simple way to view the cache in Firefox then the CacheViewer extension is just what you have been looking for. Link Download the CacheViewer extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add a Cache Clearing Button to FirefoxSearch for Install Packages from the Ubuntu Command LineQuick Tip: Empty Internet Explorer 7 Cache when Browser is ClosedView Internet Explorer Cache Files the Easy WayQuick Hits: 11 Firefox Tab How-Tos TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Out of band Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 Cool Looking Screensavers for Windows SyncToy syncs Files and Folders across Computers on a Network (or partitions on the same drive) If it were only this easy Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook

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• SQLAuthority News – First SQL Bangalore Event Report – Nov 24, 2012 – SQL Server User Group Bangalore

  - by pinaldave

  A very common question I often receive - Do we have SQL Server User Group in Bangalore? Yes! SQL Bangalore – we had very first meeting on Nov 24, 2012 and very soon we are going to have another User Group meeting. The goal is to keep up a monthly rhythm of User Group meeting. If you are in Bangalore area please join the Facebook page and you will keep on getting regular update about SQL Server. In the very first meeting we have five 30 minute session and had a fantastic time. We had the best of the best speakers presenting all the five sessions. The event was inaugurated by Vinod Kumar M by presenting on T-SQL Pitfalls. His excellent and eye-opening session was followed by Manas Dash. He enlightened everybody with functions introduced in SQL Server 2012. We had a surprise guest from Mumbai – Raj Chaodhary. If you know him he has a very interesting way to present sessions and he presented on SQL Joins. His hard to follow act was followed by Sudeepta who presented on Contained Database. This subject is quite entertaining and interesting. My session was last in order and I was eagerly waiting to present. I had decided to do something new this time so I had created around 52 slides and two demos. I was committed to go over all the 52 slides and both of the demos in 25 minutes of the time. I had interesting story as well. Though, I was a bit nervous I was able to go over a complete slide deck and demo in 25 minutes of the time I had. We also were very fortunate to have international guest Lynn Langit from USA present at the event as well. She presented an overview of the Big Data in very little time – something not everyone can do it efficiently. We are very thankful to our sponsor Pluralsight for awarding USD 300 worth Annual Subscription. It was the most awaited moment of the day. Well, overall we had a great fun with 100+ attendees learning SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• 2D Barcode Addendum

  - by Tim Dexter

  Having finally got my external drive back(long story) today from Oklahoma (thank you so much Sammy) Im back with a full compliment of Oracle and blogging tools at my disposal. I have missed JDeveloper this past week, which I have found, I immensely prefer over Eclipse (let the flaming commence :0) I use Zoundry Raven for writing articles and its not installed locally but on my external drove, so I have been soldiering on with the blog server's pain in the backside UI for writing. Now I have my favority editor back and things are calming down workwise, I will start to get the Excel template posts out. Today thou, a note about 2D barcode support or more specifically any barcode that needs some data manipulation before the barcode font is applied. I wrote about these fonts a long time back and laid out the java class you would need to write if you had an algorithm from the font manufacturer to use. I missed out a valuable point and James at Luminex fell into the trap. He was wanting to use the datamatrix font from IDAutomation but and had built the java class to be called from the RTF template but it was not encoding or at least did not appear to be. New debugging feature to the rescue. Kan over at the bipconsultng blog documented the feature a while back. Just adding <?xdo-debug-level:'STATEMENT'?> to my test template generated all the debug files in my c:\temp directory. No messing with files, just a simple command ... at last! Kan has documented the feature here. With the log in hand I spotted a java error stack referencing a missing code128a method, huh? Looking at James' class he had the following snippet: ENCODERS.put("code128a",mUtility.getClass().getMethod("code128a",clazz)); ENCODERS.put("code128b",mUtility.getClass().getMethod("code128b", clazz)); ENCODERS.put("code128c",mUtility.getClass().getMethod("code128c", clazz)); ENCODERS.put("pdf417",mUtility.getClass().getMethod("pdf417", clazz)); ENCODERS.put("datamatrix",mUtility.getClass().getMethod("datamatrix", clazz)); His class did not include the other code128 and pdf147 methods and BIP was expecting them. An easy fix, just comment them out, rebuild and deploy and the encoding started working. If you are hitting similar problems, check that class and ensure all of the referenced methods are available, if not, delete or get commenting. James now has purdy labels popping out that his hard ware can read, sweet!

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• Anticipating JavaOne 2012 – Number 17!

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  As I write this, JavaOne 2012 (September 30-October 4 in San Francisco, CA) is just over a week away -- the seventeenth JavaOne! I’ll resist the impulse to travel in memory back to the early days of JavaOne. But I will say that JavaOne is a little like your birthday or New Year’s in that it invites reflection, evaluation, and comparison. It’s a time when we take the temperature of Java and assess the world of information technology generally. At JavaOne, insight and information flow amongst Java developers like no other time of the year.This year, the status of Java seems more secure in the eyes of most Java developers who agree that Oracle is doing an acceptable job of stewarding the platform, and while the story is still in progress, few doubt that Oracle is engaging strongly with the Java community and wants to see Java thrive. From my perspective, the biggest news about Java is the growth of some 250 alternative languages for the JVM – from Groovy to Jython to JRuby to Scala to Clojure and on and on – offering both new opportunities and challenges. The JVM has proven itself to be unusually flexible, resulting in an embarrassment of riches in which, more and more, developers are challenged to find ways to optimally mix together several different languages on projects.    To the matter at hand -- I can say with confidence that Oracle is working hard to make each JavaOne better than the last – more interesting, more stimulating, more networking, and more fun! A great deal of thought and attention is being devoted to the task. To free up time for the 475 technical sessions/Birds of feather/Hands-on-Labs slots, the Java Strategy, Partner, and Technical keynotes will be held on Sunday September 30, beginning at 4:00 p.m.   Let’s not forget Java Embedded@JavaOne which is being held Wednesday, Oct. 3rd and Thursday, Oct. 4th at the Hotel Nikko. It will provide business decision makers, technical leaders, and ecosystem partners important information about Java Embedded technologies and new business opportunities.   This year's JavaOne theme is “Make the Future Java”. So come to JavaOne and make your future better by:--Choosing from 475 sessions given by the experts to improve your working knowledge and coding expertise --Networking with fellow developers in both casual and formal settings--Enjoying world-class entertainment--Delighting in one of the world’s great cities (my home town) Hope to see you there!

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• Calling a REST Based JSON Endpoint with HTTP POST and WCF

  - by Wallym

  Note: I always forget this stuff, so I'm putting it my blog to help me remember it.Calling a JSON REST based service with some params isn't that hard.  I have an endpoint that has this interface:        [WebInvoke(UriTemplate = "/Login",             Method="POST",             BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Wrapped,            RequestFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json,            ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json )]        [OperationContract]        bool Login(LoginData ld); The LoginData class is defined like this:    [DataContract]    public class LoginData    {        [DataMember]        public string UserName { get; set; }        [DataMember]        public string PassWord { get; set; }        [DataMember]        public string AppKey { get; set; }    } Now that you see my method to call to login as well as the class that is passed for the login, the body of the login request looks like this:{ "ld" : {  "UserName":"testuser", "PassWord":"ackkkk", "AppKey":"blah" } } The header (in Fiddler), looks like this:User-Agent: FiddlerHost: hostnameContent-Length: 76Content-Type: application/json And finally, my url to POST against is:http://www.something.com/...../someservice.svc/LoginAnd there you have it, calling a WCF JSON Endpoint thru REST (and HTTP POST)

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• The Whole Enchilada — Fusion Supply Chain in the Cloud

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Tyra Crockett, Senior Manager at Oracle No other vendor can offer everything in the cloud the way Oracle can. You can get HR from Workday and CRM from Salesforce, but you can get the whole enchilada—HCM, CRM and ERP—all from Oracle on one platform. If you’re thinking about using Oracle's Cloud Services to implement the newest Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications, this post is for you. Point #1: The Oracle Cloud Applications Services portfolio includes ERP cloud services which are flexible and can adapt to fill your supply chain needs. For example, you might be opening a small distribution facility in California, but don’t have the time or IT resources to warrant a full scale supply chain implementation. You can use Oracle’s Cloud to implement the Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications you need without an increase in IT staff or hardware. Then as your business grows, you can add more features and applications to your cloud.   Point #2: Whether you’re implementing a slice of the Fusion Procurement pie, or the entire ERP portfolio, you want to be up and running fast with low upfront costs and investment risks. That’s where you can trust a world-class technology organization like Oracle. Your SaaS subscription-based deployment model will take away the headaches associated with determining your software costs. You also will be able to eliminate expensive customizations and configure your deployment as you like, saving you time and money during the initial stages and upon upgrade. Point #3: Another great benefit of operating your Oracle Fusion Supply Chain in the cloud is the opportunity to standardize your processes across your entire supply chain. You can institute processes in San Francisco and be confident they will be followed in Mexico City and Hong Kong. Point #4: If data security is a concern – and it is for most of us – Oracle-managed cloud services give you the comfort of knowing that your data will always be there when you need it. You will not have to manage the IT services associated with patching and upgrade. They will be taken care of automatically. This enables you to focus on what you do best: managing your business. Point #5: Cloud services aren’t an either/or proposition. You might have very good business reasons for choosing a hybrid model -- running some applications in the cloud and others on premise. That allows you to leverage your own IT department, when and where you need to, and shift focus when necessary. I urge you to take a hard look at the Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications running in the cloud. These solutions running alongside your existing legacy systems can solve your toughest business challenges as you move forward in the 21st century.

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• How to Write an E-Book

  A few days ago my attention was drawn to a tweet spat between Karl Seguin and Scott Hanselman around the relaunch of ASP.NET and the title element in HTML. Tempest in a teapot of course, but worthwhile as I did some googling on Karl and found his blog at codebetter.com. From there it was a short jump to his free e-book, The Foundations of Programming. This short book is distinguished by its orientation, opinionated, its tone, mentoring and its honesty, which is refreshing. In Foundations, Karl covers what he considers the basics of programming and good design, including test driven development, dependency injection and domain driven design. Karl is opinionated, as the topics suggest, and doesnt bother to pretend that he doesnt think what hes suggesting is the better way, not just another way. He is aligned with ALT.NET, and gives an excellent overview of what that means; an overview more enlightening than the ALT.NET site. ALT.NET has its critics, but presenting a strong opinion grabbed my attention as a reader. It is a short walk from opinionated to hectoring,  but Karl held my attention without insulting me. He takes the time to explain, with examples, from the ground up, the problems that test driven development and dependency injection solve. So for dependency injection he builds it up from no DI, to a hand crafted approach, to a full fledged DI framework. This approach is more persuasive than just proscriptive and engaged me as the reader to follow along with his train of thought. Foundations is not as pedantic as I am making it sound. The final ingredient in Karls mix is honesty. He acknowledges that sometimes unit testing does cost more up front and take more time. He admits that sometimes he designs something a certain way just to be testable. He also warns that focusing too much on DI and loose coupling can lead to the poor design you are trying to avoid. These points add depth to his argument as I could tell hes speaking from experience, with some hard won lessons. I enjoyed The Foundations of Programming. When I was done with it, I was amazed how much I got a lot out of its 80 some pages. It is a rarity to come across something worthwhile that is longer then a tweet, but shorter than a tome these days. Well done Karl.   -- Relevant Links -- The now titled and newly relaunched page in question: http://www.asp.net/ The pleasantly confusing ALT.NET homepage: http://altdotnet.org/ A longer review, with details, chapter listings and all that important stuff: http://accidentaltechnologist.com/book-reviews/book-review-foundations-of-programming-by-karl-seguin/Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Playing NSF music in FMOD.net

  - by Tesserex

  So, as the title says, I want to be able to play NSF files using FMOD, because my project already uses FMOD and I'd rather not replace it. This will involve figuring out how existing players and emulators work and porting it. I haven't yet found an existing player that uses FMOD. My starting point is the MyNes source from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mynes/. There are two big steps between here and what I'm looking for. MyNes plays from a ROM, not NSF. So, I have to rip out the APU and get it to play NSF files. The MyNes APU uses SlimDX, so I have to convert that to FMOD.NET. I am really stuck about how to go about either of these, because I'm not that familiar with audio formats and it's hard finding resources online. So here are a few questions: From what I can tell from the NSF spec at http://kevtris.org/nes/nsfspec.txt, it's just contains the relevant memory section of the ROM, plus the header. If anyone can verify or correct this that would be great. The emulator APU uses data from the rest of the emulator to play, including things like cycle counts. I'm not sure what replaces this in a standalone player. Can't I just load all the music data at once into a stream and play it? Joining #1 and #2, does the header data from the NSF substitute for some of the ROM data in the emulator code? Using FMOD, will I be following the usercreatedsound example for loading a stream? And does this format count as PCM? Specifically MyNes says PCM8. Any tips on loading / playing the stream in FMOD are appreciated. As an aside, I don't really understand the loading / playing sections of the spec I linked at all. It seems to apply to 6502 systems / emulators only and not to my situation. I know it's a long shot for anyone here to have enough experience in this area to help, but anything you can provide is definitely appreciated. A link to an existing .NET library that does this would be even better, but I don't believe one exists.

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• How to handle "circular dependency" in dependency injection

  - by Roel

  The title says "Circular Dependency", but it is not the correct wording, because to me the design seems solid. However, consider the following scenario, where the blue parts are given from external partner, and orange is my own implementation. Also assume there is more then one ConcreteMain, but I want to use a specific one. (In reality, each class has some more dependencies, but I tried to simplify it here) I would like to instanciate all of this with Depency Injection (Unity), but I obviously get a StackOverflowException on the following code, because Runner tries to instantiate ConcreteMain, and ConcreteMain needs a Runner. IUnityContainer ioc = new UnityContainer(); ioc.RegisterType<IMain, ConcreteMain>() .RegisterType<IMainCallback, Runner>(); var runner = ioc.Resolve<Runner>(); How can I avouid this? Is there any way to structure this so that I can use it with DI? The scenario I'm doing now is setting everything up manually, but that puts a hard dependency on ConcreteMain in the class which instantiates it. This is what i'm trying to avoid (with Unity registrations in configuration). All source code below (very simplified example!); public class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { IUnityContainer ioc = new UnityContainer(); ioc.RegisterType<IMain, ConcreteMain>() .RegisterType<IMainCallback, Runner>(); var runner = ioc.Resolve<Runner>(); Console.WriteLine("invoking runner..."); runner.DoSomethingAwesome(); Console.ReadLine(); } } public class Runner : IMainCallback { private readonly IMain mainServer; public Runner(IMain mainServer) { this.mainServer = mainServer; } public void DoSomethingAwesome() { Console.WriteLine("trying to do something awesome"); mainServer.DoSomething(); } public void SomethingIsDone(object something) { Console.WriteLine("hey look, something is finally done."); } } public interface IMain { void DoSomething(); } public interface IMainCallback { void SomethingIsDone(object something); } public abstract class AbstractMain : IMain { protected readonly IMainCallback callback; protected AbstractMain(IMainCallback callback) { this.callback = callback; } public abstract void DoSomething(); } public class ConcreteMain : AbstractMain { public ConcreteMain(IMainCallback callback) : base(callback){} public override void DoSomething() { Console.WriteLine("starting to do something..."); var task = Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>{ Thread.Sleep(5000);/*very long running task*/ }); task.ContinueWith(t => callback.SomethingIsDone(true)); } }

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• Cutting Paper through Visualization and Collaboration

  - by [email protected]

  It's hard not to hear about "Going Green" these days. Many are working to be more environmentally conscious in their personal lives, and this has extended to the corporate world as well. I know I'm always looking for new ways. Environmental responsibility is important at Oracle too, and we have an entire section of our website dedicated to our solutions around the Eco-Enterprise. You can check it out here: http://www.oracle.com/green/index.html Perhaps the biggest and most obvious challenge in the world of business is the fact that we use so much paper. There are many good reasons why we print today too. For example: Printing off a document, spreadsheet, or CAD design that will be reviewed and marked up while on a plane Having a printout of a facility when a field engineer performs on-site maintenance During a multi-party design review where a number of people will review a drawing in a meeting room, scribbling onto a large scale drawing print to provide their collaborative comments These are just a few potential use cases, and they're valid ones. However, there's a way in which you can turn these paper processes into digital ones. AutoVue allows you to view, mark-up, and collaborate on all the data you would print. Indeed, this is the core of what AutoVue does. So if we take the examples above, we could address each as follows: Allow you to view the document, spreadsheet, or CAD drawing in AutoVue on your laptop. Even if you originally had this data vaulted in some time of system of record (like an ECM solution) and view your data from there, AutoVue allows you to "Work Offline" and take the documents you need to review on your laptop. From there, the many annotation tools in AutoVue will give you what you need to comment upon the documents that you are reviewing. The challenge with the mobile workforce is always access to information. People who perform maintenance and repair operations often are in locations with little to no Internet connectivity. However, technology is coming to these people in the form of laptops, tablet PCs, and other portable devices too. AutoVue can address situations with limited bandwidth through our streaming technology for viewing, meaning that the most up to date information can be pulled up from the central server - without the need for large data transfer. When there is no connectivity at all, the "Work Offline" option will handle this. For a design review session, the Real-Time Collaboration capabilities of AutoVue will let all the participants view the same document in a synchronized view, allowing each person to be able to mark-up the document at the same time. Since this is done in a web-based manner, not only is it not necessary to print the document, but you benefit by reducing the travel needed for these sessions. Not only are trees spared, but jet fuel as well. There are many steps involved with "Going Green", but each step is a necessary one. What we do today will directly influence our future generations, and we're looking to help.

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• Chuck Norris Be Thy Name

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Chuck Norris doesn’t program with a keyboard. He stares the computer down until it does what he wants. All things need a name. We’ve tossed around a bunch of names for the framework of tools we’ve been working on, but one we kept coming back to was Chuck Norris. Why did we choose Chuck Norris? Well Chuck Norris sort of chose us. Everything we talked about, the name kept drawing us closer to it. We couldn’t escape Chuck Norris, no matter how hard we tried. So we gave in. Chuck Norris can divide by zero. What is the Chuck Norris Framework? @drusellers and I have been working on a variety of tools: WarmuP - http://github.com/chucknorris/warmup (Template your entire project/solution and create projects ready to code - From Zero to a Solution with everything in seconds. Your templates, your choices.) UppercuT - http://projectuppercut.org (Build with Conventions - Professional Builds in Moments, Not Days!) | Code also at http://github.com/chucknorris/uppercut DropkicK - http://github.com/chucknorris/dropkick (Deploy Fluently) RoundhousE - http://projectroundhouse.org (Professional Database Management with Versioning) | Code also at http://github.com/chucknorris/roundhouse SidePOP - http://sidepop.googlecode.com (Does your application need to check email?) HeadlocK - http://github.com/chucknorris/headlock (Hash a directory so you can later know if anything has changed) Others – still in concept or vaporware People ask why we choose such violent names for each tool of our framework? At first it was about whipping your code into shape, but after awhile the naming became, “How can we relate this to Chuck Norris?” People also ask why we uppercase the last letter of each name. Well, that’s more about making you ask questions…but there are a few reasons for it. Project managers never ask Chuck Norris for estimations…ever. The class object inherits from Chuck Norris Chuck Norris doesn’t need garbage collection because he doesn’t call .Dispose(), he calls .DropKick() So what are you waiting for? Join the Google group today, download and play with the tools. And lastly, welcome to Chuck Norris. Or should I say Chuck Norris welcomes you…

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• Finally, I have my HP 6910p laptop running with 8Gb RAM

  - by Liam Westley

  Today, I received two Corsair Value Select 4Gb DDR SO-DIMMs (from overclock.co.uk) for my aging HP 6910p to give it the extra lease of life to keep it going until the end of 2010.  And here is the proof that Windows 7 64-bit happily sees all 8Gb, There are no 4Gb modules are officially supported for the HP 6910p (they didn’t exist when it was first build).  I was taking a bit of a gamble, and relying on the UK distance selling regulations which meant that even if they didn’t work I’d be able to send them back, getting a full refund and only paying for the return postage. I’d read Keith Comb’s blog back in 2008, (http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithcombs/archive/2008/07/05/loading-a-hp-6910p-with-8gb-of-ram.aspx) where he mentioned ‘trying’ out 4Gb samples of SO-DIMMs in a HP 6910p laptop, but there still appears to be no mentions of running this configuration in any other blog. Seeing how the 8Gb of memory is used is made easier with the new Resource Monitor available in Windows 7.  With two copies of Visual Studio 2008, Outlook, Firefox (with 30+ tabs), TweetDeck (an infamous memory hog) and VMWare workstation running a virtual machine allocated with 2Gb of memory, you might have no ‘free’ memory remaining, but the standby memory is an awesome 2.4Gb, and once the VM is up and running the Hard Faults/sec hovers around zero,   It’s the page fault figure which really counts, because reducing that value means that you are preventing the Windows 7 system drive from being used for virtual memory paging operations.  Even after only a few hours of use it’s noticeable that disc access has been reduced and applications feel more responsive and ‘snappy’.  I did consider the option of purchasing an SSD to replace the main drive, rather than go for 8Gb of RAM, but I think I’ve probably made the correct decision. Given my hobby topic of virtualisation, I take the view that you can never have too much memory.   It was also a decision made easier by the price differential between 8Gb of RAM compared to a decent size SSD.  In the 18 months since Keith Comb tested the first 4Gb SO-DIMMS they have plummeted in price, at just under £100 per 4Gb, they are around a fifth of the price when launched. So if you ever wondered if a HP 6910p can handle 8Gb, now you know.

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• Finally home - and something fully off topic

  - by Mike Dietrich

  Arrived at Munich Pasing last night at 0:50am ... finally :-) On Sunday I've left the Dylan Hotel in Dublin (thanks to the staff there as well: you were REALLY helpful!!) around 7:30pm to go to the port - and came home on Tuesday morning 1:15am. So all together 29:45hrs door-to-door - not bad for nearly 2000km just relying on public transport. And could have been faster if there were seats in ealier TGV's left. But I don't complain at all ;-) Just checked the website of Dublin Airport - it says currently: 17.00pm: Latest on flight disruptions at Dublin Airport The IAA have advised us that based on the latest Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre London Dublin Airport will remain closed for all inbound and outbound commercial flights until 20.00hours. This effectively means that no flights will land or take off at Dublin Airport until then. A further update will be posted this afternoon. When traveling I have always my iPod with me. It has gotten a bit old now (I think I've bought it 3 years ago in November 2007) but it has a 160GB hard disk in it so it fits most of my music collection (not the entire collection anymore as I'm currently re-riping everything to Apple Lossless because at least for my ears it makes a big difference - but I listen to good ol' vinyl as well ...and I don't download compressed music ;-) ). The battery of my little travel companion is still good for more than 20 hours consistent music playback - and there was a band from Texas being in my ears most of the whole journey called Midlake. I haven't heard of them before until I asked a lady at a Munich store some few weeks ago what she's playing on the speakers in the shop. She was amazed and came back with the CD cover but I hesitated to buy it as I always want to listen the tunes before - and at this day I had no time left to do so. But in Dublin I had a bit of spare time on Saturday and I always enter record stores - and the Tower Records was the sort of store I really enjoy and so I've spent there nearly two hours - leaving with 3 Midlake CDs in my bag. So if you are interested just listen those tunes which may remind some people on Fleetwood Mac: As I said in the title, fully off topic ;-)

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• SQL SERVER – SSMS 2012 Reset Keyboard Shortcuts to Default

  - by pinaldave

  As a technologist, I love my laptop very much and I do not lend it to anyone as I am usually worried that my settings would be messed up when I get it back from its borrower. Honestly, I love how I have set up my laptop and I enjoy the settings and programs I have placed on my computer. If someone changes things there – it will surely be annoying for me. Recently at one of the conferences I was attending in, a small accident happened – one of the speaker’s hard drives failed. The owner immediately panicked due to this and had no clue what to do. I suggested that he may not be able to show the demos but can still show a few things with the product. He accepted my suggestion and finished the presentation. Good thing everybody looked satisfied. Little did I know that a small accident was waiting for me later that day. When I opened my SQL Server Denali, all my shortcuts were totally out of order. When I hit F5, instead of executing query, it was opening up some debugging screen for me. I was very much annoyed so I decided to surf the Internet for me to know how I could reset it to SQL Server 2012 default shortcut. There were so many different advices which further confused me. After reading 4-5 different methods, I used the following method to reset my SQL Server 2012 keyboard shortcuts: Go to SSMS > Tools >> Import and Export Settings… As I wanted to reset all the settings I selected the “Reset all settings” option, but you can select other options as per your need. I suggest you save your current Settings; however, in my case, I did not like the current option so I just decided to overwrite my settings. Here I have two options –  I can either set my shortcut to SQL Server 2012 settings or Visual Studio 2010. I went ahead with the SQL Server 2012 option. Success! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Digital Storage for Airline Entertainment

  - by Bill Evjen

  by Thomas Coughlin Common flash memory cards The most common flash memory products currently in use are SD cards and derivative products (e.g. mini and micro-SD cards) Some compact flash used for professional applications (such as DSLR cameras) Evolution of leading flash formats Standardization –> market expansion Market expansion –> volume iNAND –> focus is on enabling embedded X3 iSSD –> ideal for thin form factor devices Flash memory applications Phones are the #1 user of flash memory Flash memory is used as embedded and removable storage in many mobile applications Flash memory is being used in computers as USB sticks and SSDs Possible use of flash memory in computer combined with HDDs (hybrid HDDs and paired or dual storage computers) It can be a removable card or an embedded card These devices can only handle a specific number of writes Flash memory reads considerably quicker than hard drives Hybrid and dual storage in computers SSDs can provide fast performance but they are expensive HDDs can provide cheap storage but they are relatively slow Combining some flash memory with a HDD can provide costs close to those of HDDs and performance close to flash memory Seagate Momentus XT hybrid HDD Various dual storage offerings putting flash memory with HDDs Other common flash memory devices USB sticks All forms and colors Used for moving files around Some sold with content on them (Sony Movies on USB sticks) Solid State Drives (SSDs) Floating Gate Flash Memory Cell When a bit is programmed, electrons are stored upon the floating gate This has the effect of offsetting the charge on the control gate of the transistor If there is no charge upon the floating gate, then the control gate’s charge determines whether or not a current flows through the channel A strong charge on the control gate assumes that no current flows. A weak charge will allow a strong current to flow through. Similar to HDDs, flash memory must provide: Bit error correction Bad block management NAND and NOR memories are treated differently when it comes to managing wear In many NOR-based systems no management is used at all, since the NOR is simply used to store code, and data is stored in other devices. In this case, it would take a near-infinite amount of time for wear to become an issue since the only time the chip would see an erase/write cycle is when the code in the system is being upgraded, which rarely if ever happens over the life of a typical system. NAND is usually found in very different application than is NOR Flash memory wears out This is expected to get worse over time Retention: Disappearing data Bits fade away Retention decreases with increasing read/writes Bits may change when adjacent bits are read Time and traffic are concerns Controllers typically groom read disturb errors Like DRAM refresh Increases erase/write frequency Application characteristics Music – reads high / writes very low Video – r high / writes very low Internet Cache – r high / writes low On airplanes Many consumers now have their own content viewing devices – do they need the airlines? Is there a way to offer more to consumers, especially with their own viewers Additional special content tie into airplane network access to electrical power, internet Should there be fixed embedded or removable storage for on-board airline entertainment? Is there a way to leverage personal and airline viewers and content in new and entertaining ways?

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• Silverlight Cream for June 16, 2010 -- #884

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Zoltan Arvai, Emiel Jongerius, Charles Petzold, Adam Kinney, Deepesh Mohnani, Timmy Kokke, and Damon Payne. Shoutouts: Andy Beaulieu reported his Coding4Fun: Shuffleboard Game for WP7 has been posted -- Big ol' Tutorial and 6 videos of WP7 goodness Karl Shifflett announced Three New WPF and Silverlight Designer Videos Posted Charles Petzold has a cool Flip-Number Clock in Silverlight posted... cool demo, and the source. From SilverlightCream.com: Data Driven Applications with MVVM Part II: Messaging, Unit Testing, and Live Data Sources Zoltan Arvai has part 2 of his Data-Driven Apps with MVVM up, and this one is also including Messaging, Unit Testing, and Live WCF Data... good tutorial and all the code. Silverlight DataContext Changed Event and Trigger Emiel Jongerius takes a hard swing at the lack of DataContextChanged... his solution involves two attached properties instead of one... check it out and see what you think! Orientation Strategies for Windows Phone 7 Charles Petzold is discussing WP7 Orientation... showing the problems you can get involved in, and how to work through them... and you might be surprised at how he does it :) ... pretty cool as usual, Charles! Debugging the TranslateZoomRotate WPF Behavior in Blend Adam Kinney talks through a bug reported about the WPF TranslateZoomRotate Behavior. Again, it's WPF, but it's in Blend, and ya never know when the solution might apply. I want my app to look like the Zune client Deepesh Mohnani demonstrates using the Cosmopolitan theme to get his app to have the same look as the Zune client. MVVM Project and Item Templates Timmy Kokke is continuing with his cool SilverAmp media player, using it to expand upon the new Blend and Silverlight 4 features. This episode touches very lightly on cranking up a new MVVM project in Blend. Great Features for MVVM Friendly Objects Part 0: Favor Composition Over Inheritance Damon Payne has the first part up of a series he's working on with 'MVVM Friendly' features... he's building out a lot of the infrastructure in this post for the ones that follow... all good stuff. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• BAM design pointers

  - by Kavitha Srinivasan

  In working recently with a large Oracle customer on SOA and BAM, I discovered that some BAM best practices are not quite well known as I had always assumed ! There is a doc bug out to formally incorporate those learnings but here are a few notes..  EMS-DO parity When using EMS (Enterprise Message Source) as a BAM feed, the best practice is to use one EMS to write to one Data Object. There is a possibility of collisions and duplicates when multiple EMS write to the same row of a DO at the same time. This customer had 17 EMS writing to one DO at the same time. Every sensor in their BPEL process writes to one topic but the Topic was read by 1 EMS corresponding to one sensor. They then used XSL within BAM to transform the payload into the BAM DO format. And hence for a given BPEL instance, 17 sensors fired, populated 1 JMS topic, was consumed by 17 EMS which in turn wrote to 1 DataObject.(You can image what would happen for later versions of the application that needs to send more information to BAM !).  We modified their design to use one Master XSL based on sensorname for all sensors relating to a DO- say Data Object 'Orders' and were able to thus reduce the 17 EMS to 1 with a master XSL. For those of you wondering about how squeaky clean this design is, you are right ! This is indeed not squeaky clean and that brings us to yet another 'inferred' best practice. (I try very hard not to state the obvious in my blogs with the hope that everytime I blog, it is very useful but this one is an exception.) Transformations and Calculations It is optimal to do transformations within an engine like BPEL. Not only does this provide modelling ease with a nice GUI XSL mapper in JDeveloper, the XSL engine in BPEL is quite efficient at runtime as well. And so, doing XSL transformations in BAM is not quite prudent.  The same is true for any non-trivial calculations as well. It is best to do all transformations,calcuations and sanitize the data in a BPEL or like layer and then send this to BAM (via JMS, WS etc.) This then delegates simply the function of report rendering and mechanics of real-time reporting to the Oracle BAM reporting tool which it is most suited to do. All nulls are not created equal Here is yet another possibly known fact but reiterated here. For an EMS with an Upsert operation: a) If Empty tags or tags with no value are sent like <Tag1/> or <Tag1></Tag1>, the DO will be overwritten with --null-- b) If Empty tags are suppressed ie not generated at all, the corresponding DO field will NOT be overwritten. The field will have whatever value existed previously.  For an EMS with an Insert operation, both tags with an empty value and no tags result in –null-- being written to the DO. Hope this helps .. Happy 4th!

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• The Niantic Project: Ingress by Felicia Hajra-Lee

  Despite the current fact that the augmented reality game for Android is still in beta phase, it is amazing to see that the world of literature is already taking momentum on this 'real-life' universe. After reading 'The Alignment: Ingress' by Thomas Greanias it took only a blink of the eye to go for 'The Niantic Project: Ingress' by Felicia Hajra-Lee, too. Here is the review I posted on Amazon.com: Ingress, a parallel universe to our reality, is here. There is no doubt about this anymore... The Niantic Project, originated at the CERN collider in Geneva, Switzerland, got into focus of global players. And the game is hard; fair-play is only for the fainted ones. Felicia understands to drag the audience directly into the action of the Niantic Project and its protagonists. The novella is heavily based on the investigations posted daily on the website of Ingress. She really understands how to interweave the various clues and creates an atmosphere where it sometimes feels challenging to differentiate between fiction and reality. It all starts with 'Epiphany Night' at the Niantic Labs, the high exposure of Exotic Matter (XM) and the escape of scientist Dr. Devra Bogdanovich and 'sentinel' Roland Jarvis. Of course, a new research, or should we name it technology, like the Niantic Project has to be protected and there are multiple parties on the hunt. Throughout the various chapters Felicia introduces new potential buyers from all over the globe, gives us detailed insights on the hunters and their brutal effectiveness to finish an assignment, and manages to keep the reader in high-pitched mode thanks to a couple of turn-arounds in the overall story. Personally, I have to say that I really enjoyed reading this title. Felicia's love to details is absolutely amazing, and sometimes I was really wondering whether she would be one of the assassins. But unfortunately I also have to say that I'm not a great fan of the structural organization of the (title-less) chapters. It is fascinating to follow the ventures of Devra, Farlowe and 855 but occasionally I had to go back to previous paragraphs in order to keep track of the individual plots. Overall a great title, captivating and rich in details but simply too short. Please Fecilia, gives us more to read. As an owner of an Android smartphone or tablet, you should get yourself into the world of Ingress. Check out the Play Store to install the app. Now. ;-)

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