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• Lubuntu upgrade to 13.04 killed sound with ALSA. How to troubleshoot?

  - by Sven

  After upgrading to 13.04 from 12.10 Lubuntu lost audio playback after unplugging usb soundcard (Polycom) and plugging it back in. Volume control was gray and leading to pulseaudio mixer (not installed) so I uninstalled the pulseaudio package. I also removed and reinstalled the alsa-base package. After restart I have the alsamixer back everything seemingly as usual(volume 100%, unmute) but every sound program gets me errors no matter what device I select. aplay -L: null Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture) pulse PulseAudio Sound Server default:CARD=NVidia HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Default Audio Device sysdefault:CARD=NVidia HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Default Audio Device front:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Front speakers surround40:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog 4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers surround41:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog 4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers surround50:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog 5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers surround51:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog 5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers surround71:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog 7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers iec958:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Digital IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, HDMI 0 HDMI Audio Output dmix:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Direct sample mixing device dmix:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Digital Direct sample mixing device dmix:CARD=NVidia,DEV=3 HDA NVidia, HDMI 0 Direct sample mixing device dsnoop:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Direct sample snooping device dsnoop:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Digital Direct sample snooping device dsnoop:CARD=NVidia,DEV=3 HDA NVidia, HDMI 0 Direct sample snooping device hw:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Direct hardware device without any conversions hw:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Digital Direct hardware device without any conversions hw:CARD=NVidia,DEV=3 HDA NVidia, HDMI 0 Direct hardware device without any conversions plughw:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Hardware device with all software conversions plughw:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Digital Hardware device with all software conversions plughw:CARD=NVidia,DEV=3 HDA NVidia, HDMI 0 Hardware device with all software conversions default:CARD=Communicator Default Audio Device sysdefault:CARD=Communicator Default Audio Device front:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio Front speakers surround40:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio 4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers surround41:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio 4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers surround50:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio 5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers surround51:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio 5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers surround71:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio 7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers iec958:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output dmix:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio Direct sample mixing device dsnoop:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio Direct sample snooping device hw:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio Direct hardware device without any conversions plughw:CARD=Communicator,DEV=0 Polycom Communicator, USB Audio Hardware device with all software conversions etc/asound.conf: defaults.ctl.card 1 defaults.pcm.card 1 defaults.pcm.device 1 Following gets same result with both devices. aplay -vv -D front:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 "Release the Pressure.wav": Playing WAVE 'Release the Pressure.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz, Mono aplay: set_params:1087: Channels count non available Guayadeque mp3 playback: AL lib: alsa_open_playback: Could not open playback device 'default': No such file or directory 21:32:14: Error: Gstreamer error 'Configured audiosink playbackbin is not working.' Audacious: ALSA error: snd_mixer_attach failed: No such file or directory. ALSA error: snd_pcm_open failed: No such device. So How do I fix my audio? UPDATE: I removed the usb soundcard and got rid of all alsa config. Everything is working as before the install but it sure feels fragile.

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• Project Euler 17: (Iron)Python

  - by Ben Griswold

  In my attempt to learn (Iron)Python out in the open, here’s my solution for Project Euler Problem 17.  As always, any feedback is welcome. # Euler 17 # http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=17 # If the numbers 1 to 5 are written out in words: # one, two, three, four, five, then there are # 3 + 3 + 5 + 4 + 4 = 19 letters used in total. # If all the numbers from 1 to 1000 (one thousand) # inclusive were written out in words, how many letters # would be used? # # NOTE: Do not count spaces or hyphens. For example, 342 # (three hundred and forty-two) contains 23 letters and # 115 (one hundred and fifteen) contains 20 letters. The # use of "and" when writing out numbers is in compliance # with British usage. import time start = time.time() def to_word(n): h = { 1 : "one", 2 : "two", 3 : "three", 4 : "four", 5 : "five", 6 : "six", 7 : "seven", 8 : "eight", 9 : "nine", 10 : "ten", 11 : "eleven", 12 : "twelve", 13 : "thirteen", 14 : "fourteen", 15 : "fifteen", 16 : "sixteen", 17 : "seventeen", 18 : "eighteen", 19 : "nineteen", 20 : "twenty", 30 : "thirty", 40 : "forty", 50 : "fifty", 60 : "sixty", 70 : "seventy", 80 : "eighty", 90 : "ninety", 100 : "hundred", 1000 : "thousand" } word = "" # Reverse the numbers so position (ones, tens, # hundreds,...) can be easily determined a = [int(x) for x in str(n)[::-1]] # Thousands position if (len(a) == 4 and a[3] != 0): # This can only be one thousand based # on the problem/method constraints word = h[a[3]] + " thousand " # Hundreds position if (len(a) >= 3 and a[2] != 0): word += h[a[2]] + " hundred" # Add "and" string if the tens or ones # position is occupied with a non-zero value. # Note: routine is broken up this way for [my] clarity. if (len(a) >= 2 and a[1] != 0): # catch 10 - 99 word += " and" elif len(a) >= 1 and a[0] != 0: # catch 1 - 9 word += " and" # Tens and ones position tens_position_value = 99 if (len(a) >= 2 and a[1] != 0): # Calculate the tens position value per the # first and second element in array # e.g. (8 * 10) + 1 = 81 tens_position_value = int(a[1]) * 10 + a[0] if tens_position_value <= 20: # If the tens position value is 20 or less # there's an entry in the hash. Use it and there's # no need to consider the ones position word += " " + h[tens_position_value] else: # Determine the tens position word by # dividing by 10 first. E.g. 8 * 10 = h[80] # We will pick up the ones position word later in # the next part of the routine word += " " + h[(a[1] * 10)] if (len(a) >= 1 and a[0] != 0 and tens_position_value > 20): # Deal with ones position where tens position is # greater than 20 or we have a single digit number word += " " + h[a[0]] # Trim the empty spaces off both ends of the string return word.replace(" ","") def to_word_length(n): return len(to_word(n)) print sum([to_word_length(i) for i in xrange(1,1001)]) print "Elapsed Time:", (time.time() - start) * 1000, "millisecs" a=raw_input('Press return to continue')

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• Is inconsistent formatting a sign of a sloppy programmer?

  - by dreza

  I understand that everyone has their own style of programming and that you should be able to read other people's styles and accept it for what it is. However, would one be considered a sloppy programmer if one's style of coding was inconsistent across whatever standard they were working against? Some example of inconsistencies might be: Sometimes naming private variables with _ and sometimes not Sometimes having varying indentations within code blocks Not aligning braces up i.e. same column if using start using new line style Spacing not always consistent around operators i.e. p=p+1, p+=1 vs other times p =p+1 or p = p + 1 etc Is this even something that as a programmer I should be concerned with addressing? Or is it such a minor nit picking thing that at the end of the day I should just not worry about it and worry about what the end user sees and whether the code works rather than how it looks while working? Is it sloppy programming or just over obsessive nit picking? EDIT: After some excellent comments I realized I may have left out some information in my question. This question came about after reviewing another colleagues code check-in and noticing some of these things and then realizing that I've seen these kind of in-consistencies in previous check-ins. It then got me thinking about my code and whether I do the same things and noticed that I typically don't etc I'm not suggesting his technique is either bad or good in this question or whether his way of doing things is right or wrong. EDIT: To answer some queries to some more good feed back. The specific instance this review occurred in was using Visual Studio 2010 and programming in c# so I don't think the editor would cause any issues. In fact it should only help I would hope. Sorry if I left that piece of info out and it effects any current answers. I was trying to be a bit more generic in understanding if this would be considered sloppy etc. And to add an even more specific example of a code piece I saw during reading of the check-in: foreach(var block in Blocks) { // .. some other code in here foreach(var movement in movements) { movement.Moved.Zero(); } // the un-formatted brace } Such a minor thing I know, but many small things add up(???), and I did have to double glance at the code at the time to see where everything lined up I guess. Please note this code was formatted appropriately before this check-in. EDIT: After reading some great answers and varying thoughts, the summary I've taken from this was. It's not necessarily a sign of a sloppy programmer however as programmers we have a duty (to ourselves and other programmers) to make the code as readable as possible to assist in further ongoing development. However it can hint at inadequacies which is something that is only possible to review on a case by case (person by person) basis. There are many reasons why this might occur. They should be taken in context and worked through with the person/people involved if reasonable. We have a duty to try and help all programmers become better programmers! In the good old days when development was done using good old notepad (or other simple text editing tool) this occurred much more frequently. However we have the assistance of modern IDE's now so although we shouldn't necessarily become OTT about this, it should still probably be addressed to some degree. We as programmers vary in our standards, styles and approaches to solutions. However it seems that in general we all take PRIDE in our work and as a trait it is something that can stand programmers apart. Making something to the best of our abilities both internal (code) and external (end user result) goes along way to giving us that big fat pat on the back that we may not go looking for but swells our heart with pride. And finally to quote CrazyEddie from his post below. Don't sweat the small stuff

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• Is Java viable for serious game development?

  - by tehtros

  Ever since I was a little kid, my dream has been to develop games. Well, now that I am older, more mature, and have some programming experience, I would like to start. However, I would like to turn this into a career. The problem, is that my language of choice is Java. Now, I am not intending this to be a Java vs. C++ question, but rather, is Java an acceptable language for serious game development, instead of lower level languages like C++. By serious, I mean high quality graphics, and being able to play a game with said high quality graphics, without much lag on decent computers. Also, eventually, possible making it to consoles. I have scoured the internet, but there are not very many resources for Java game development, not nearly as many as C++. In fact, most engines are written in C++. Once, I tried to play a made with jMonkeyEngine. The game was terribly slow, to the point where my computer froze. I had no other Java applications running and nothing too resource intensive. Keep in mind, that my computer can play most modern 3D games with ease. So, I am really serious about game development, is Java still a viable choice? I have tried multiple times to learn C++, but I don't really like the language. I don't really know why, but usually, whenever I try to learn, I can never grasp the topics. Also, my most of my friends know Java, and one is even anti-C++, saying that no one knows how to use it right. Then, he goes to say that "there is no right way to use C++, that it can not be used correctly. The nature of the language prevents good code." Also, if I continue to learn and improve Java now, and it turns out that later I am required to learn C++, will making the switch be difficult? So, in short, can Java be taken serious, for serious game development. This includes heavy graphics, fast game play without lag, and possibly, and easy switch to consoles?

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• MS Tech Ed 2011 Coming Soon

  - by sonam

  Microsoft Tech ed 2010 was a great success. Infact  Most of such conferences always provide a great place to meet other  technology enthusiasts and ofcourse,whats in the pipeline for future products of a company or field.. And yet again,MS Tech ed India is coming on 23-25 march  in Banglore,India.Well,the place is  ofcourse right suited for any IT/Computing conference.After all,Its Silicon Valley of India.. From Last year.I remember  a session by Harish about  “Building pure client side apps with  Jquery and Microsoft Ajax .” Here’s the video: http://live.viasilverlight.com/TechEdOnDemand/Breakouts/TheWebSimplified1/Session4/AjaxClientSideApps.wmv At that time only,I got to know that jquery is so easy to use for  ajax or client side templating.Though I prefer jquery over  Microsoft Ajax many folds.UpdatePanel  is Dead for sure in my view. I believe,Web forms will be dead sooner or later with ASP.Net  MVC  gaining share many folds.(TODO:Learn MVC). The new standard is surely:JQUERY . Between,Last years videos and ppt’s  are available to browse and download: http://microsoftteched.in/2010/downloads.aspx After going through Tech Ad 2011 session agendas : http://www.microsoft.com/india/teched2011/agenda.aspx Few of my personal choices to watch would be: Day 1: a) Identity And Access Control in the Cloud        b)Windows 7 at  Home:Digitizing your Home.(Sounds cool.)        c) And ofcourse,Jquery and MS ajax(Lets see if MS can do something that’s not already happening with their version Of Ajax).. Day 2:  a) Lap Around Silverlight 5 and Html 5 as I have heard some hot talks that html5 will kill Silverlight,(I don’t see it in near future though).        b) Html 5 more than “Html 5”…Google will be seeing this one. Day3: a) Cross Browser applications in Azure       b)VS 2010 sessions of automated testing azure apps etc. Windows Phone 7 sessions will surely be of more interest now after MS-Nokia Deal. Though,Personally,I would want atleast some worth of  sessions on MS  future in Robotics,AI.Perhaps  I am looking at wrong place..(When is PDC?) And Since,Bill Gates  consider Robotics as the next big thing, Refer  this one : http://www.cs.virginia.edu/robins/A_Robot_in_Every_Home.pdf  I am sure,they wont loose this new hot spot to competitors,  like how google rules in Online  Search now.Robotics and AI will surely provide a big battlefield  for future.See,What IBM is doing with IBM Watson. OR see this, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218083711.htm this is cool only if you can control your mind.Atleast,I’ll prefer regular driving (I would devote my mind seeing  people,places which we see on road).thats what jouney makes “cool”.:P.

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• Using Oracle BPM to Extend Oracle Applications

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Srikant Subramaniam, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Fusion Middleware Customers often modify applications to meet their specific business needs - varying regulatory requirements, unique business processes, product mix transition, etc. Traditional implementation practices for such modifications are typically invasive in nature and introduce risk into projects, affect time-to-market and ease of use, and ultimately increase the costs of running and maintaining the applications. Another downside of these traditional implementation practices is that they literally cast the application in stone, making it difficult for end-users to tailor their individual work environments to meet specific needs, without getting IT involved. For many businesses, however, IT lacks the capacity to support such rapid business changes. As a result, adopting innovative solutions to change the economics of customization becomes an imperative rather than a choice. Let's look at a banking process in Siebel Financial Services and Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) using Oracle Business Process Management. This approach makes modifications simple, quick to implement and easy to maintain/upgrade. The process model is based on the Loan Origination Process Accelerator, i.e., a set of ready to deploy business solutions developed by Oracle using Business Process Management (BPM) 11g, containing customizable and extensible pre-built processes to fit specific customer requirements. This use case is a branch-based loan origination process. Origination includes a number of steps ranging from accepting a loan application, applicant identity and background verification (Know Your Customer), credit assessment, risk evaluation and the eventual disbursal of funds (or rejection of the application). We use BPM to model all of these individual tasks and integrate (via web services) with: Siebel Financial Services and (simulated) backend applications: FLEXCUBE for loan management, Background Verification and Credit Rating. The process flow starts in Siebel when a customer applies for loan, switches to OPA for eligibility verification and product recommendations, before handing it off to BPM for approvals. OPA Connector for Siebel simplifies integration with Siebel’s web services framework by saving directly into Siebel the results from the self-service interview. This combination of user input and product recommendation invokes the BPM process for loan origination. At the end of the approval process, we update Siebel and the financial app to complete the loop. We use BPM Process Spaces to display role-specific data via dashboards, including the ability to track the status of a given process (flow trace). Loan Underwriters have visibility into the product mix (loan categories), status of loan applications (count of approved/rejected/pending), volume and values of loans approved per processing center, processing times, requested vs. approved amount and other relevant business metrics. Summary Oracle recommends the use of Fusion Middleware as an extensions platform for applications. This approach makes modifications simple, quick to implement and easy to maintain/upgrade applications (by moving customizations away from applications to the process layer). It is also easier to manage processes that span multiple applications by using Oracle BPM. Additional Information Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• How can story and gameplay be artfully merged?

  - by NauticalMile

  Let me give some context. Three of my friends and I have a pretty good game idea cooking. It's based off of a prototype I made that's evolving into a cool game mechanic. The mechanic itself is a toy that's fun on its own, but we haven't designed any puzzles around it yet. We have a design document going, and we are answering a lot of questions about what's in the game. It's become clear early on that everyone (including myself) likes the characters and the story a lot. Considering what our favorite games are, this is unsurprising. A story driven game makes sense to me. I like the emphasis that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year-Door, Portal 2, and Tomb Raider place on story, and I imagine our game will have a similar feel (lots of dialogue, plot twists, lovable characters). However, one team member raised this point in the design doc: I am feeling like [fleshing out the story] is our biggest hurdle right now for making more design decisions - like more specific decisions about levels etc. Is this true? I am uncertain about working on the story extensively before gameplay, and my uneasiness was reinforced when I read this question about story vs. gameplay. What I want to say is: "Let's continue to work on the story, but also start brainstorming and prototyping abstract puzzles and combat sequences, and we'll creatively match them together later." Is this a reasonable approach? If so, how much of the development of these elements should be done independently? Should I try and create a whole bunch of puzzles while my other teammates focus on story and aesthetics? Then when we have a lot of story and game 'chunks' we can match them with eachother to build something meaningful. Or should we focus on iterating individual levels as distinct units where puzzles, story, etc... are designed together? Or maybe we need to put our excitement about the story on hold and just focus on gameplay. Is there another approach to design that we can take? Am I missing something crucial? I have discussed story and gameplay because they seem the most likely to be at odds with each other, but we also have to consider user interface, music, art direction, etc... Can we design these independently as well?

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 11/17/2011

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Building an Infrastructure Cloud with Oracle VM for x86 + Enterprise Manager 12c | Richard Rotter Richard Rotter demonstrates "how easy it could be to build a cloud infrastructure with Oracle's solution for cloud computing." Article: Social + Lean = Agile | Dave Duggal In today’s increasingly dynamic business environment, organizations must continuously adapt to survive. Change management has become a major bottleneck. Organizations’ need a practical mechanism for managing controlled variance and change in-flight to break the logjam. This paper provides a foundation for applying lean and agile principles to achieve Enterprise Agility through social collaboration. Stress Testing Java EE 6 Applications - Free Article In Free Java Magazine : Adam Bien "It is strange," says Adam Bien, "everyone is obsessed about green bars and code coverage, but testing of multi threaded behavior is widely ignored - until the applications run into massive problems." Using Access Manager to Secure Applications Deployed on WebLogic | Rene van Wijk Another great how-to post from Oracle ACE Rene van Wijk, this time involving JBoss RichFaces, Facelets, Oracle Coherence, and Oracle WebLogic Server. DOAG 2011 vs. Devoxx - Value and Attraction | Markus Eisele Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele compares and contrasts these popular conferences with the aim of helping others decide which to attend. SOA All the Time; Architects in AZ; Clearing Info Integration hurdles SOA all the Time; Architects in AZ; Clearing Info Integration Hurdles This week on the Architect Home Page on OTN. Webcast: Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile Event Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2011 Time: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET Featuring Manan Goel (Director BI Product Marketing, Oracle) and Shailesh Shedge (Director BI and Analytics Practice, Ascentt). Webcast: Maximum Availability on Private Clouds A discussion of Oracle’s Maximum Availability Architecture, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and Oracle Database appliance, featuring Margaret Hamburger (Director, Product Marketing, Oracle) and Joe Meeks (Director, Product Management, Oracle). November 30, 2011 at 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET. Oracle Technology Network Architect Day - Phoenix, AZ Wednesday December 14, 2011, 8:30am - 5:00pm. The Ritz-Carlton, Phoenix, 2401 East Camelback Road, Phoenix, AZ 85016. Registration is free, but seating is limited.

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• What's Old is New Again

  - by David Dorf

  Last night I told my son he could stream music to his tablet "from the cloud" (in this case, the Amazon Cloud).  He paused, then said, "what is the cloud?"  I replied, "a bunch of servers connected to the internet."  Apparently he had visions of something much more magnificent.  Another similar term is "big data."  These marketing terms help to quickly convey topics but are oversimplifications that are open to many interpretations.  At their core, those terms a shiny packages holding recycled ideas. I see many headlines declaring big data changes everything, but it doesn't.  Savvy retailers have been dealing with large volumes of data since the electronic cash register was invented.  But the there have a been a few changes to the landscape that make big data a topic of conversation: 1. Computing power has caught up to storage volumes. Its now possible to more thoroughly analyze the copious volumes of data retailers have been squirreling away.  CPUs are faster, sold state drives more plentiful, and new ways to store and search data are available.  My iPhone is more power than the computer used in the Apollo mission to the moon. 2. Unstructured data is everywhere.  The Web used to be where retailers published product information, but now users are generating the bulk of the content in the form of comments, videos, and "likes."  The variety of information available to retailers is huge, and it meaning difficult to discern. 3. Everything is connected.  Looking at a report from my router, there are no less than 20 active devices on my home network.  We can track the location of mobile phones, tag products with RFID, and set our thermostats (I love my Nest) from a thousand miles away.  Not only is there more data, but its arriving at higher velocity. Careful readers will note the three Vs that help define so-called big data: volume, variety, and velocity. We now have more volume, more variety, and more velocity and different technologies to deal with them.  But at the heart, the objectives are still the same: Informed decisions Accurate forecasts Improved optimizations So don't let the term "big data" throw you off the scent.  Retailers still need to execute on the basics.  But do take a fresh look at the data that's available and the new technologies to process it.  The landscape will continue to change and agile organizations will always be reevaluating their approaches.  You can just add some more weapons to the arsenal.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for September 9-15, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most-viewed items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the week of September 9-15, 2017. 15 Lessons from 15 Years as a Software Architect | Ingo Rammer In this presentation from the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen, Ingo Rammer shares 15 tips regarding people, complexity and technology that he learned doing software architecture for 15 years. Attend OTN Architect Day – by Architects, for Architects – October 25 You won't need 3D glasses to take in these live presentations (8 sessions, two tracks) on Cloud computing, SOA, and engineered systems. And the ticket price is: Zero. Nothing. Absolutely free. Register now for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles. Thursday October 25, 2012, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles , 8555 Beverly Boulevard , Los Angeles, CA 90048. Cloud API and service designers, stop thinking small | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld "The focus must shift away from fine-grained APIs that provide some type of primitive service, such as pushing data to a block of storage or perhaps making a request to a cloud-rooted database," says InfoWorld's David Linthicum. "To go beyond primitives, you must understand how these services should be used in a much larger architectural context. In other words, you need to understand how businesses will employ these services to form real workplace solutions—inside and outside the enterprise." Adding a runtime picker to a taskflow parameter in WebCenter | Yannick Ongena Oracle ACE Yannick Ongena shows how to create an Oracle WebCenter popup to allow users to "select items or do more complex things." Oracle IAM 11g R2 docs are now available "One of the great things about the new doc set is the inclusion of ePub files," says Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Chris Johnson. "This means that if you have an iPad you can load up the doc library onto that and read the docs on the couch." Setting up a local Yum Server using the Exalogic ZFS Storage Appliance | Donald A concise technical post from the man named Donald. What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2? | The Fat Bloke Sings "One of the trends we've seen is that as the average host platform becomes more powerful, our users are consistently running more and more vm's," says The Fat Bloke. "Some of our users have large libraries of vm's of various vintages, whilst others have groups of vm's that are run together as an assembly of the various tiers in a multi-tiered software solution, for example, a database tier, middleware tier, and front-ends." The new VirtualBox release, a year in the making, addresses the needs of these users, he explains. Configuring Oracle Business Intelligence 11g MDS XML Source Control Management with Git Version Control | Christian Screen Oracle ACE Christian Screen developed this tutorial for those interested in learning how to configure the Oracle Business Intelligence 11g (11.1.1.6) metadata repository for development using the new MDS XML source control management functionality. Identity and Access Management at Oracle Open World 2012 | Brian Eidelman Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Brian Eideleman highlights three Oracle Openworld sessions that will put Identity and Access Management in the spotlight, and shares a link to the "Focus On: Identity Management" document, a comprehensive listing of Openworld activities also dealing with IM. Starting and stopping WebLogic automatically using Upstart | Chris Johnson "In Ubuntu, RedHat and Oracle Linux there's a new flavor of init called Upstart that all the kids are using," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Chris Johnson. "It's the new hotness when it comes to making programs into daemons and wiring them to start and stop at appropriate times." Thought for the Day "The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it." — Pamela Zave Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Making the most of next weeks SharePoint 2010 developer training

  - by Eric Nelson

  [you can still register if you are free on the afternoons of 9th to 11th – UK time] We have 50+ registrations with more coming in – which is fantastic. Please read on to make the most of the training. Background We have structured the training to make sure that you can still learn lots during the three days even if you do not have SharePoint 2010 installed. Additionally the course is based around a subset of the channel 9 training to allow you to easily dig deeper or look again at specific areas. Which means if you have zero time between now and next Wednesday then you are still good to go. But if you can do some pre-work you will likely get even more out of the three days. Step 1: Check out the topics and resources available on-demand The course is based around a subset of the channel 9 training to allow you to easily dig deeper or look again at specific areas. Take a lap around the SharePoint 2010 Training Course on Channel 9 Download the SharePoint Developer Training Kit Step 2: Use a pre-configured Virtual Machine which you can download (best start today – it is large!) Consider using the VM we created If you don't have access to SharePoint 2010. You will need a 64bit host OS and bare minimum of 4GB of RAM. 8GB recommended. Virtual PC can not be used with this VM – Virtual PC only supports 32bit guests. The 2010-7a Information Worker VM gives you everything you need to develop for SharePoint 2010. Watch the Video on how to use this VM Download the VM Remember you only need to download the “parts” for the 2010-7a VM. There are 3 subtly different ways of using this VM: Easiest is to follow the advice of the video and get yourself a host OS of Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and simply use the VM Alternatively you can take the VHD and create a “Boot to VHD” if you have Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise Edition. This works really well – especially if you are already familiar with “Boot to VHD” (This post I did will help you get started) Or you can take the VHD and use an alternative VM tool such as VirtualBox if you have a different host OS. NB: This tends to involve some work to get everything running fine. Check out parts 1 to 3 from Rolly and if you go with Virtual Box use an IDE controller not SATA. SATA will blue screen. Note in the screenshot below I also converted the vhd to a vmdk. I used the FREE Starwind Converter to do this whilst I was fighting blue screens – not sure its necessary as VirtualBox does now work with VHDs. or Step 3 – Install SharePoint 2010 on a 64bit Windows 7 or Vista Host I haven’t tried this but it is now supported. Check out MSDN. Final notes: I am in the process of securing a number of hosted VMs for ISVs directly managed by my team. Your Architect Evangelist will have details once I have them! Else we can sort out on the Wed. Regrettably I am unable to give folks 1:1 support on any issues around Boot to VHD, 3rd party VM products etc. Related Links: Check you are fully plugged into the work of my team – have you done these simple steps including joining our new LinkedIn group?

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• Standards Corner: Preventing Pervasive Monitoring

  - by independentid

   Phil Hunt is an active member of multiple industry standards groups and committees and has spearheaded discussions, creation and ratifications of industry standards including the Kantara Identity Governance Framework, among others. Being an active voice in the industry standards development world, we have invited him to share his discussions, thoughts, news & updates, and discuss use cases, implementation success stories (and even failures) around industry standards on this monthly column. Author: Phil Hunt On Wednesday night, I watched NBC’s interview of Edward Snowden. The past year has been tumultuous one in the IT security industry. There has been some amazing revelations about the activities of governments around the world; and, we have had several instances of major security bugs in key security libraries: Apple's ‘gotofail’ bug  the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug, not to mention Java’s zero day bug, and others. Snowden’s information showed the IT industry has been underestimating the need for security, and highlighted a general trend of lax use of TLS and poorly implemented security on the Internet. This did not go unnoticed in the standards community and in particular the IETF. Last November, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) met in Vancouver Canada, where the issue of “Internet Hardening” was discussed in a plenary session. Presentations were given by Bruce Schneier, Brian Carpenter,  and Stephen Farrell describing the problem, the work done so far, and potential IETF activities to address the problem pervasive monitoring. At the end of the presentation, the IETF called for consensus on the issue. If you know engineers, you know that it takes a while for a large group to arrive at a consensus and this group numbered approximately 3000. When asked if the IETF should respond to pervasive surveillance attacks? There was an overwhelming response for ‘Yes'. When it came to 'No', the room echoed in silence. This was just the first of several consensus questions that were each overwhelmingly in favour of response. This is the equivalent of a unanimous opinion for the IETF. Since the meeting, the IETF has followed through with the recent publication of a new “best practices” document on Pervasive Monitoring (RFC 7258). This document is extremely sensitive in its approach and separates the politics of monitoring from the technical ones. Pervasive Monitoring (PM) is widespread (and often covert) surveillance through intrusive gathering of protocol artefacts, including application content, or protocol metadata such as headers. Active or passive wiretaps and traffic analysis, (e.g., correlation, timing or measuring packet sizes), or subverting the cryptographic keys used to secure protocols can also be used as part of pervasive monitoring. PM is distinguished by being indiscriminate and very large scale, rather than by introducing new types of technical compromise. The IETF community's technical assessment is that PM is an attack on the privacy of Internet users and organisations. The IETF community has expressed strong agreement that PM is an attack that needs to be mitigated where possible, via the design of protocols that make PM significantly more expensive or infeasible. Pervasive monitoring was discussed at the technical plenary of the November 2013 IETF meeting [IETF88Plenary] and then through extensive exchanges on IETF mailing lists. This document records the IETF community's consensus and establishes the technical nature of PM. The draft goes on to further qualify what it means by “attack”, clarifying that  The term is used here to refer to behavior that subverts the intent of communicating parties without the agreement of those parties. An attack may change the content of the communication, record the content or external characteristics of the communication, or through correlation with other communication events, reveal information the parties did not intend to be revealed. It may also have other effects that similarly subvert the intent of a communicator.  The past year has shown that Internet specification authors need to put more emphasis into information security and integrity. The year also showed that specifications are not good enough. The implementations of security and protocol specifications have to be of high quality and superior testing. I’m proud to say Oracle has been a strong proponent of this, having already established its own secure coding practices. 

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• Stir Trek 2: Iron Man Edition

  Next month (7 May 2010) Ill be presenting at the second annual Stir Trek event in Columbus, Ohio. Stir Trek (so named because last year its themes mixed MIX and the opening of the Star Trek movie) is a very cool local event.  Its a lot of fun to present at and to attend, because of its unique venue: a movie theater.  And whats more, the cost of admission includes a private showing of a new movie (this year: Iron Man 2).  The sessions cover a variety of topics (not just Microsoft), similar to CodeMash.  The event recently sold out, so Im not telling you all of this so that you can go and sign up (though I believe you can get on the waitlist still).  Rather, this is pretty much just an excuse for me to talk about my session as a way to organize my thoughts. Im actually speaking on the same topic as I did last year, but the key difference is that last year the subject of my session was nowhere close to being released, and this year, its RTM (as of last week).  Thats right, the topic is Whats New in ASP.NET 4 how did you guess? Whats New in ASP.NET 4 So, just what *is* new in ASP.NET 4?  Hasnt Microsoft been spending all of their time on Silverlight and MVC the last few years?  Well, actually, no.  There are some pretty cool things that are now available out of the box in ASP.NET 4.  Theres a nice summary of the new features on MSDN.  Here is my super-brief summary: Extensible Output Caching use providers like distributed cache or file system cache Preload Web Applications IIS 7.5 only; avoid the startup tax for your site by preloading it. Permanent (301) Redirects are finally supported by the framework in one line of code, not two. Session State Compression Can speed up session access in a web farm environment.  Test it to see. Web Forms Features several of which mirror ASP.NET MVC advantages (viewstate, control ids) Set Meta Keywords and Description easily Granular and inheritable control over ViewState Support for more recent browsers and devices Routing (introduced in 3.5 SP1) some new features and zero web.config changes required Client ID control makes client manipulation of DOM elements much simpler. Row Selection in Data Controls fixed (id based, not row index based) FormView and ListView enhancements (less markup, more CSS compliant) New QueryExtender control makes filtering data from other Data Source Controls easy More CSS and Accessibility support Reduction of Tables and more control over output for other template controls Dynamic Data enhancements More control templates Support for inheritance in the Data Model New Attributes ASP.NET Chart Control (learn more) Lots of IDE enhancements Web Deploy tool My session will cover many but not all of these features.  Theres only an hour (3pm-4pm), and its right before the prize giveaway and movie showing, so Ill be moving quickly and most likely answering questions off-line via email after the talk. Hope to see you there! 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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• Guest blog: A Closer Look at Oracle Price Analytics by Will Hutchinson

  - by Takin Babaei

  Overview:  Price Analytics helps companies understand how much of each sale goes into discounts, special terms, and allowances. This visibility lets sales management see the panoply of discounts and start seeing whether each discount drives desired behavior. In Price Analytics monitors parts of the quote-to-order process, tracking quotes, including the whole price waterfall and seeing which result in orders. The “price waterfall” shows all discounts between list price and “pocket price”. Pocket price is the final price the vendor puts in its pocket after all discounts are taken. The value proposition: Based on benchmarks from leading consultancies and companies I have talked to, where they have studied the effects of discounting and started enforcing what many of them call “discount discipline”, they find they can increase the pocket price by 0.8-3%. Yes, in today’s zero or negative inflation environment, one can, through better monitoring of discounts, collect what amounts to a price rise of a few percent. We are not talking about selling more product, merely about collecting a higher pocket price without decreasing quantities sold. Higher prices fall straight to the bottom line. The best reference I have ever found for understanding this phenomenon comes from an article from the September-October 1992 issue of Harvard Business Review called “Managing Price, Gaining Profit” by Michael Marn and Robert Rosiello of McKinsey & Co. They describe the outsized impact price management has on bottom line performance compared to selling more product or cutting variable or fixed costs. Price Analytics manages what Marn and Rosiello call “transaction pricing”, namely the prices of a given transaction, as opposed to what is on the price list or pricing according to the value received. They make the point that if the vendor does not manage the price waterfall, customers will, to the vendor’s detriment. It also discusses its findings that in companies it studied, there was no correlation between discount levels and any indication of customer value. I urge you to read this article. What Price Analytics does: Price analytics looks at quotes the company issues and tracks them until either the quote is accepted or rejected or it expires. There are prebuilt adapters for EBS and Siebel as well as a universal adapter. The target audience includes pricing analysts, product managers, sales managers, and VP’s of sales, marketing, finance, and sales operations. It tracks how effective discounts have been, the win rate on quotes, how well pricing policies have been followed, customer and product profitability, and customer performance against commitments. It has the concept of price waterfall, the deal lifecycle, and price segmentation built into the product. These help product and sales managers understand their pricing and its effectiveness on driving revenue and profit. They also help understand how terms are adhered to during negotiations. They also help people understand what segments exist and how well they are adhered to. To help your company increase its profits and revenues, I urge you to look at this product. If you have questions, please contact me. Will HutchinsonMaster Principal Sales Consultant – Analytics, Oracle Corp. Will Hutchinson has worked in the business intelligence and data warehousing for over 25 years. He started building data warehouses in 1986 at Metaphor, advancing to running Metaphor UK’s sales consulting area. He also worked in A.T. Kearney’s business intelligence practice for over four years, running projects and providing training to new consultants in the IT practice. He also worked at Informatica and then Siebel, before coming to Oracle with the Siebel acquisition. He became Master Principal Sales Consultant in 2009. He has worked on developing ROI and TCO models for business intelligence for over ten years. Mr. Hutchinson has a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University and an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago.

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• Bug in Delphi XE RegularExpressions Unit

  - by Jan Goyvaerts

  Using the new RegularExpressions unit in Delphi XE, you can iterate over all the matches that a regex finds in a string like this: procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); var RegEx: TRegEx; Match: TMatch; begin RegEx := TRegex.Create('\w+'); Match := RegEx.Match('One two three four'); while Match.Success do begin Memo1.Lines.Add(Match.Value); Match := Match.NextMatch; end end; Or you could save yourself two lines of code by using the static TRegEx.Match call: procedure TForm1.Button2Click(Sender: TObject); var Match: TMatch; begin Match := TRegEx.Match('One two three four', '\w+'); while Match.Success do begin Memo1.Lines.Add(Match.Value); Match := Match.NextMatch; end end; Unfortunately, due to a bug in the RegularExpressions unit, the static call doesn’t work. Depending on your exact code, you may get fewer matches or blank matches than you should, or your application may crash with an access violation. The RegularExpressions unit defines TRegEx and TMatch as records. That way you don’t have to explicitly create and destroy them. Internally, TRegEx uses TPerlRegEx to do the heavy lifting. TPerlRegEx is a class that needs to be created and destroyed like any other class. If you look at the TRegEx source code, you’ll notice that it uses an interface to destroy the TPerlRegEx instance when TRegEx goes out of scope. Interfaces are reference counted in Delphi, making them usable for automatic memory management. The bug is that TMatch and TGroupCollection also need the TPerlRegEx instance to do their work. TRegEx passes its TPerlRegEx instance to TMatch and TGroupCollection, but it does not pass the instance of the interface that is responsible for destroying TPerlRegEx. This is not a problem in our first code sample. TRegEx stays in scope until we’re done with TMatch. The interface is destroyed when Button1Click exits. In the second code sample, the static TRegEx.Match call creates a local variable of type TRegEx. This local variable goes out of scope when TRegEx.Match returns. Thus the reference count on the interface reaches zero and TPerlRegEx is destroyed when TRegEx.Match returns. When we call MatchAgain the TMatch record tries to use a TPerlRegEx instance that has already been destroyed. To fix this bug, delete or rename the two RegularExpressions.dcu files and copy RegularExpressions.pas into your source code folder. Make these changes to both the TMatch and TGroupCollection records in this unit: Declare FNotifier: IInterface; in the private section. Add the parameter ANotifier: IInterface; to the Create constructor. Assign FNotifier := ANotifier; in the constructor’s implementation. You also need to add the ANotifier: IInterface; parameter to the TMatchCollection.Create constructor. Now try to compile some code that uses the RegularExpressions unit. The compiler will flag all calls to TMatch.Create, TGroupCollection.Create and TMatchCollection.Create. Fix them by adding the ANotifier or FNotifier parameter, depending on whether ARegEx or FRegEx is being passed. With these fixes, the TPerlRegEx instance won’t be destroyed until the last TRegEx, TMatch, or TGroupCollection that uses it goes out of scope or is used with a different regular expression.

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• Are SQL Injection vulnerabilities in a PHP application acceptable if mod_security is enabled?

  - by Austin Smith

  I've been asked to audit a PHP application. No framework, no router, no model. Pure PHP. Few shared functions. HTML, CSS, and JS all mixed together. I've discovered numerous places where SQL injection would be easily possible. There are other problems with the application (XSS vulnerabilities, rampant inline CSS, code copy-pasted everywhere) but this is the biggest. Sometimes they escape inputs, not using a prepared query or even mysql_real_escape_string(), mind you, but using addslashes(). Often, though, their queries look exactly like this (pasted from their code but with columns and variable names changed): $user = mysql_query("select * from profile where profile_id='".$_REQUEST["profile_id"]."'"); The developers in question claimed that they were unable to hack their application. I tried, and found mod_security to be enabled, resulting in HTTP 406 for some obvious SQL injection attacks. I believe there to be sophisticated workarounds for mod_security, but I don't have time to chase them down. They claim that this is a "conceptual" matter and not a "practical" one since the application can't easily be hacked. Their internal auditor agreed that there were problems, but emphasized the conceptual nature of the issues. They also use this conceptual/practical argument to defend against inline CSS and JS, absence of code organization, XSS vulnerabilities, and massive amounts of repetition. My client (rightly so, perhaps) just wants this to go away so they can launch their product. The site works. You can log in, do what you need to do, and things are visibly functional, if slow. SQL Injection would indeed be hard to do, given mod_security. Further, their talk of "conceptual vs. practical" is rhetorically brilliant, considering that my client doesn't understand web application security. I worry that they've succeeded in making me sound like an angry puritan. In many ways, this is a problem of politics, not technology, but I am at a loss. As a developer, I want to tell them to toss the whole project and start over with a new team, but I face a strong defense from the team that built it and a client who really needs to ship their product. Is my position here too harsh? Even if they fix the SQL Injection and XSS problems can I ever endorse the release of an unmaintainable tangle of spaghetti code?

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• Webcast Q&A: Cisco's Platform Approach to Identity Management

  - by Tanu Sood

  Thanks to all who attended the live webcast we hosted on Cisco: Best Practices for a Platform Approach on Wed, March 14th. Those of you who couldn’t join us, the webcast replay is now available. Many thanks to our guest speaker, Ranjan Jain, Security Architect at Cisco for walking us through Cisco’s drivers and rationale for the platform approach, the implementation strategy, results, roadmap and recommendations. We greatly appreciate the insight he shared with us all on the deployment synergies with a platform approach to Identity Management. A forward looking organization, Cisco also has plans for secure cloud and mobile access enablement so it was interesting to learn how the Platform approach to Identity Management today is laying down the foundation for those future initiatives. While we tackled a good few questions during the webcast, we have captured the responses to those that we weren’t able to get to: Q.Can you provide insight into how you approached developing profiles for each user groupA. At Cisco, the user profile was already available to IT before the platform consolidation started. There is a dedicated business team that manages the user profiles. Q. What is the current version of Oracle Identity Manager in the market?A. Oracle Identity Manager 11gR1 is the latest version of our industry leading user provisioning/identity administration solution. Q. Is data resource segmentation part of the overall strategy at Cisco?A. It is but it is managed by the business teams and not at the IT level. Q. Does Cisco also have an Active Directoy LDAP? Do they sync AD from OID or do the provision to AD as another resource?[A. Yes, we do. AD is provisioned using in-house tools and not via Oracle Identity Manager (OIM). Q. If we already have a point IDM solution in place (SSO), can the platform approach still work?A. Yes, the platform approach calls for a seamless, standardized framework for identity management to support the enterprise’s entire infrastructure, both on-premise or in the cloud. Oracle Identity Management solutions are standards based so they can easily integrate and interoperate with existing Oracle or non-Oracle solutions. Hope you enjoyed the webcast and we look forward to having you join us for the next webcast in our Customers Talk: Identity as a Platform webcast series:ING: Scaling Role Management and Access Certification to Thousands of ApplicationsWednesday, April 11th at 10 am PST/ 1 pm ESTRegister Today We are also hosting a live event series in collaboration with the Aberdeen Group. To hear first-hand, the insights from the recently released Aberdeen Report and to discuss the merits of the Platform approach, do join us at this event. You can also connect with Oracle Identity Management SMEs and get your questions answered live. Aberdeen Group Live Event Series: IAM Integrated - Analyzing the "Platform" vs. "Point Solution" ApproachNorth America, April 10 - May 22Register for an event near you And here’s the slide deck from our Cisco webcast:   Oracle_Cisco identity platform approach_webcast View more presentations from OracleIDM

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• Code review recommendations and Code Smells

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  Some time ago Twitter told that I am similar to Boris Lipschitz . Indeed he is also .Net programmer from Russia living in Australia. I‘ve read his list of Code Review points and found them quite comprehensive. A few points  were not clear for me, and it forced me for a further reading.In particular the statement “Exception should not be used to return a status or an error code.” wasn’t fully clear for me, because sometimes we store an exception as an object with all error details and I believe it’s a valid approach. However I agree that throwing exceptions should be avoided, if you expect to return error as a part of a normal flow. Related link: http://codeutopia.net/blog/2010/03/11/should-a-failed-function-return-a-value-or-throw-an-exception/ Another point slightly puzzled me“If Thread.Sleep() is used, can it be replaced with something else, ei Timer, AutoResetEvent, etc” . I believe, that there are very rare cases, when anyone using Thread.Sleep in any production code. Usually it is used in mocks and prototypes.I had to look further to clarify “Dependency injection is used instead of Service Location pattern”.Even most of articles has some preferences to Dependency injection, there are also advantages to use Service Location. E.g see http://geekswithblogs.net/KyleBurns/archive/2012/04/27/dependency-injection-vs.-service-locator.aspx. http://www.cookcomputing.com/blog/archives/000587.html  refers to Concluding Thoughts of Martin Fowler The choice between Service Locator and Dependency Injection is less important than the principle of separating service configuration from the use of services within an applicationThe post had a link to excellent article Code Smells of Jeff Atwood, but the statement, that “code should not pass a review if it violates any of the  code smells” sound too strict for my environment. In particular, I disagree with “Dead Code” recommendation “Ruthlessly delete code that isn't being used. That's why we have source control systems!”. If there is a chance that not used code will be required in a future, it is convenient to keep it as commented or #if/#endif blocks with appropriate explanation, why it could be required in the future. TFS is a good source control system, but context search in source code of current solution is much easier than finding something in the previous versions of the code.I also found a link to a good book “Clean Code.A.Handbook.of.Agile.Software”

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• links for 2011-03-17

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Siba Prasad: Oracle Database on Amazon RDSg Siba Prasad share an analysis of the pros and cons. (tags: oracle database cloud amazon) LIVE WEBCAST March 24 2pm PT- Why Switch from Red Hat and SUSE Linux to Oracle Linux? (Oracle's Linux Blog) Featuring Oracle's Monica Kumar, Sr.Director of Linux, Oracle VM and MySQL and Avi Miller, Principal Sales Consultant, Linux and Virtualization. (tags: oracle linux) Webcast: IBM SOA vs. Oracle SOA, March 24, 1pm ET / 10am PT Maneesh Joshi and Bruce Tierney guide you to a solid understanding of the differences between the Oracle and IBM approach to comprehensive SOA. (tags: oracle soa bpm) Finding the Right Solution to Source and Manage Your Contractors (PeopleSoft Apps Strategy) "Talent has become a primary competitive advantage for most organizations. Contingent labor offers talent on flexible terms; it offers the ability to scale up operations, close skill gaps, and manage risk in the process of delivering services." - Mark Rosenberg (tags: oracle peoplesoft enterprisearchitecture) Oracle Business Intelligence Customers: Have Your Voice Heard in the "2011Wisdom of the Crowds Business Intelligence Market Survey" (BI & Analytics Pulse) "The Wisdom of the Crowds survey combines social media, crowd sourcing, and good old fashioned market research to provide vendors and customers alike an unvarnished and insightful snap shot of what's top of mind with business intelligence professionals." (tags: oracle businessintelligence) Martin Bach: Troubleshooting Grid Infrastructure startup Martin Bach hunts down the problem that caused one of his blades to reboot after an EXT3 journal error. (tags: oracle grid rac) Oracle WebCenter: Social Networking & Collaboration (Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Blog) Kelley Ruppel with information on "how the new release of Oracle WebCenter provides unprecedented Social Networking and Collaboration." (tags: oracle webcenter enterprise2.0 collaboration) VirtaThon: 100% Virtual Java/Oracle/MySQL Conference! | Bex Huff "The goal is simple," says Oracle ACE Director Bex Huff. "Because it's all online, the conference is very cheap. Pricing is not yet announced... but it should be around $300. Also, unlike other conferences, every speaker gets paid a small fee depending on the popularity of his or her session." (tags: oracle oracleace java mysqql) Griffiths Waite Blog: BPM 11g PS3 GW's Ian Heathcock shares a link to "a most interesting article on Oracle's recent release discussing the new features and how PS3 adds value  to the whole SOA message." (tags: oracle soa) The Buttso Blathers: Tutorial: JSF 2.0 and JPA 2.0 with WebLogic Server using NetBeans Should you take application architecture advice from a man named Buttso? In this case, yes. (tags: oracle jsf jpa weblogic) Setting-up a High Available Tuned SOA Environment Middleware Magic (tags: ping.fm) How to Configure Weblogic Messaging Bridge with JBoss Middleware Magic (tags: ping.fm Weblogic JBoss) Richard Veryard on Architecture: Emergent Architecture (tags: ping.fm entarch emergence)

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• Explanation of the definition of interface inheritance as described in GoF book

  - by Geek

  I am reading the first chapter of the Gof book. Section 1.6 discusses about class vs interface inheritance: Class versus Interface Inheritance It's important to understand the difference between an object's class and its type. An object's class defines how the object is implemented.The class defines the object's internal state and the implementation of its operations.In contrast,an object's type only refers to its interface--the set of requests on which it can respond. An object can have many types, and objects of different classes can have the same type. Of course, there's a close relationship between class and type. Because a class defines the operations an object can perform, it also defines the object's type . When we say that an object is an instance of a class, we imply that the object supports the interface defined by the class. Languages like c++ and Eiffel use classes to specify both an object's type and its implementation. Smalltalk programs do not declare the types of variables; consequently,the compiler does not check that the types of objects assigned to a variable are subtypes of the variable's type. Sending a message requires checking that the class of the receiver implements the message, but it doesn't require checking that the receiver is an instance of a particular class. It's also important to understand the difference between class inheritance and interface inheritance (or subtyping). Class inheritance defines an object's implementation in terms of another object's implementation. In short, it's a mechanism for code and representation sharing. In contrast,interface inheritance(or subtyping) describes when an object can be used in place of another. I am familiar with the Java and JavaScript programming language and not really familiar with either C++ or Smalltalk or Eiffel as mentioned here. So I am trying to map the concepts discussed here to Java's way of doing classes, inheritance and interfaces. This is how I think of of these concepts in Java: In Java a class is always a blueprint for the objects it produces and what interface(as in "set of all possible requests that the object can respond to") an object of that class possess is defined during compilation stage only because the class of the object would have implemented those interfaces. The requests that an object of that class can respond to is the set of all the methods that are in the class(including those implemented for the interfaces that this class implements). My specific questions are: Am I right in saying that Java's way is more similar to C++ as described in the third paragraph. I do not understand what is meant by interface inheritance in the last paragraph. In Java interface inheritance is one interface extending from another interface. But I think the word interface has some other overloaded meaning here. Can some one provide an example in Java of what is meant by interface inheritance here so that I understand it better?

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• VirtualBox 3.2 is released! A Red Letter Day?

  - by Fat Bloke

  Big news today! A new release of VirtualBox packed full of innovation and improvements. Over the next few weeks we'll take a closer look at some of these new features in a lot more depth, but today we'll whet your appetite with the headline descriptions. To start with, we should point out that this is the first Oracle-branded version which makes today a real Red-letter day ;-)  Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2 Version 3.2 moves VirtualBox forward in 3 main areas ( handily, all beginning with "P" ) : performance, power and supported guest operating system platforms.  Let's take a look: Performance New Latest Intel hardware support - Harnessing the latest in chip-level support for virtualization, VirtualBox 3.2 supports new Intel Core i5 and i7 processor and Intel Xeon processor 5600 Series support for Unrestricted Guest Execution bringing faster boot times for everything from Windows to Solaris guests; New Large Page support - Reducing the size and overhead of key system resources, Large Page support delivers increased performance by enabling faster lookups and shorter table creation times. New In-hypervisor Networking - Significant optimization of the networking subsystem has reduced context switching between guests and host, increasing network throughput by up to 25%. New New Storage I/O subsystem - VirtualBox 3.2 offers a completely re-worked virtual disk subsystem which utilizes asynchronous I/O to achieve high-performance whilst maintaining high data integrity; New Remote Video Acceleration - The unique built-in VirtualBox Remote Display Protocol (VRDP), which is primarily used in virtual desktop infrastructure deployments, has been enhanced to deliver video acceleration. This delivers a rich user experience coupled with reduced computational expense, which is vital when servers are running hundreds of virtual machines; Power New Page Fusion - Traditional Page Sharing techniques have suffered from long and expensive cache construction as pages are scrutinized as candidates for de-duplication. Taking a smarter approach, VirtualBox Page Fusion uses intelligence in the guest virtual machine to determine much more rapidly and accurately those pages which can be eliminated thereby increasing the capacity or vm density of the system; New Memory Ballooning- Ballooning provides another method to increase vm density by allowing the memory of one guest to be recouped and made available to others; New Multiple Virtual Monitors - VirtualBox 3.2 now supports multi-headed virtual machines with up to 8 virtual monitors attached to a guest. Each virtual monitor can be a host window, or be mapped to the hosts physical monitors; New Hot-plug CPU's - Modern operating systems such Windows Server 2008 x64 Data Center Edition or the latest Linux server platforms allow CPUs to be dynamically inserted into a system to provide incremental computing power while the system is running. Version 3.2 introduces support for Hot-plug vCPUs, allowing VirtualBox virtual machines to be given more power, with zero-downtime of the guest; New Virtual SAS Controller - VirtualBox 3.2 now offers a virtual SAS controller, enabling it to run the most demanding of high-end guests; New Online Snapshot Merging - Snapshots are powerful but can eat up disk space and need to be pruned from time to time. Historically, machines have needed to be turned off to delete or merge snapshots but with VirtualBox 3.2 this operation can be done whilst the machines are running. This allows sophisticated system management with minimal interruption of operations; New OVF Enhancements - VirtualBox has supported the OVF standard for virtual machine portability for some time. Now with 3.2, VirtualBox specific configuration data is also stored in the standard allowing richer virtual machine definitions without compromising portability; New Guest Automation - The Guest Automation APIs allow host-based logic to drive operations in the guest; Platforms New USB Keyboard and Mouse - Support more guests that require USB input devices; New Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 - Support for the latest version of Oracle's flagship Linux platform; New Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx") - Support for both the desktop and server version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution; And as a man once said, "just one more thing" ... New Mac OS X (experimental) - On Apple hardware only, support for creating virtual machines run Mac OS X. All in all this is a pretty powerful release packed full of innovation and speedups. So what are you waiting for?  -FB 

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• LightSwitch Tutorial - Adding Image to a LightSwitch Screen

  - by ChrisD

  Last week, I have discussed how to control Screen Layouts in LightSwitch. Now, I will talk about how to add an image to the LightSwitch screen. In this demo, I will try to upload the image to the screen and will save the image into the database. The first step we need to do is start the VS 2010, create LightSwitch Desktop application with the name “AddingImageIntoScreenInLSBeta2” as shown in the following figure. The second steps, create a table as shown in the screen by selecting the "create a table" option in the start up screen. Then, we need to add a New Data Screen to our demo application. See the following figure which is the default screen layouts for the screen we have created. So we have to change the layout of this screen so that the uploading and using the image in the screen can be easily explained. Before adding the Model Window we have to prepare the layout. So delete the Highlighted fields as shown in the above figure. After preparing the layout to add the image, just add a new Group to the Person Property Rows Layout. To add a new group, [No: 1] – Select the Rows layout, it will shows you the Add button. [No: 2] – Click the Add button to select the new group. [No: 3] – Select the New Group. After adding the new group change the Layout type to Columns Layout. Here, -          Change the rows layout to columns layouts and give the display name as Uploading Image Example. -          Click on the add button to add the Photo field under the column layout. Add a new group under the Column layout group. Follow the [No: #] to create a new group under the columns layout group. After adding a new group of rows layout add the fields to the newly created group. [No: 1] – Select the Rows Layout group and change the display name as Details. [No: 2] – Click on Add button to select the appropriate fields to add to the group. [No: 3] – Add the fields to the group The above snippet shows the complete layout tree for our screen. Now the screen for uploading the image is ready. Just press the Play button. And see the result.

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• CIO's Corner: Achieving a Balance

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Rick Beers Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware All too often, a CIO is unfairly characterized as either technology-focused or business-focused; as more concerned with either infrastructure performance or business excellence. It seems to me that this completely misses the point. I have long thought that a CIO has probably the most complex C-level position in an enterprise, one that requires an artful balance among four entirely different constituencies, often with competing values and needs. How a CIO balances these is the single largest determinant of success. I was reminded of this while reading the excellent interview of Mark Hurd by CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo in a recent issue of USATODAY (Bartiromo: Oracle's Hurd is in tech sweet spot). The interview covers topics such as Big Data, Leadership and Oracle’s growth strategy. But the topic that really got my interest, and reminded me of the need for balance, was on IT spending trends, in which Mark Hurd observed, “…budgets are tight. What most of our customers have today is both an austerity plan to save money and at the same time a plan to reapply that money to innovation. There isn't a customer we have that doesn't have an austerity plan and an innovation plan.” In an era of economic uncertainty, and an accelerating pace of business change, this is probably the toughest balance a CIO must achieve. Yet for far too many IT organizations, operating costs consume over 75% of their budgets, leaving precious little for innovation and investment in business-critical technology programs. I have found that many CIO’s are trapped by their enterprise systems platforms, which were originally architected for Standardization, Compliance and tightly integrated linear Workflows. Yes, these traits are still required for specific reasons and cannot be compromised. But they are no longer enough. New demands are emerging: the explosion in the volume and diversity of Data, the Consumerization of IT, the rise of Social Media, and the need for continual Business Process Reengineering. These were simply not the design criteria for Enterprise 1.0 and attempting to leverage them with current systems platforms results in an escalation in complexity and a resulting increase in operating costs for many IT organizations. This is the cost vs investment trap and what most constrains CIO’s from achieving the balance they need. But there is a way out of this trap. Enterprise 2.0 represents an entirely new enterprise systems architecture, one that is ‘Business-Centric’ rather than ‘ERP Centric’, which defined the architecture of Enterprise 1.0. Oracle’s best in class suite of Fusion Middleware Products enables a layered approach to enterprise systems architectures that provides the balance that an enterprise needs. The most exciting part of all this? The bottom two layers are focused upon reducing costs and the upper two layers provide business value and innovation. Finally, the Balance a CIO needs.  Additional Information Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• database design help for game / user levels / progress

  - by sprugman

  Sorry this got long and all prose-y. I'm creating my first truly gamified web app and could use some help thinking about how to structure the data. The Set-up Users need to accomplish tasks in each of several categories before they can move up a level. I've got my Users, Tasks, and Categories tables, and a UserTasks table which joins the three. ("User 3 has added Task 42 in Category 8. Now they've completed it.") That's all fine and working wonderfully. The Challenge I'm not sure of the best way to track the progress in the individual categories toward each level. The "business" rules are: You have to achieve a certain number of points in each category to move up. If you get the number of points needed in Cat 8, but still have other work to do to complete the level, any new Cat 8 points count toward your overall score, but don't "roll over" into the next level. The number of Categories is small (five currently) and unlikely to change often, but by no means absolutely fixed. The number of points needed to level-up will vary per level, probably by a formula, or perhaps a lookup table. So the challenge is to track each user's progress toward the next level in each category. I've thought of a few potential approaches: Possible Solutions Add a column to the users table for each category and reset them all to zero each time a user levels-up. Have a separate UserProgress table with a row for each category for each user and the number of points they have. (Basically a Many-to-Many version of #1.) Add a userLevel column to the UserTasks table and use that to derive their progress with some kind of SUM statement. Their current level will be a simple int in the User table. Pros & Cons (1) seems like by far the most straightforward, but it's also the least flexible. Perhaps I could use a naming convention based on the category ids to help overcome some of that. (With code like "select cats; for each cat, get the value from Users.progress_{cat.id}.") It's also the one where I lose the most data -- I won't know which points counted toward leveling up. I don't have a need in mind for that, so maybe I don't care about that. (2) seems complicated: every time I add or subtract a user or a category, I have to maintain the other table. I foresee synchronization challenges. (3) Is somewhere in between -- cleaner than #2, but less intuitive than #1. In order to find out where a user is, I'd have mildly complex SQL like: SELECT categoryId, SUM(points) from UserTasks WHERE userId={user.id} & countsTowardLevel={user.level} groupBy categoryId Hmm... that doesn't seem so bad. I think I'm talking myself into #3 here, but would love any input, advice or other ideas. P.S. Sorry for the cross-post. I wrote this up on SO and then remembered that there was a game dev-focused one. Curious to see if I get different answers one place than the other....

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• Sparse virtual machine disk image resizing weirdness?

  - by Matt H

  I have a partitioned virtual machine disk image created by vmware. What I want to do is resize that by 10GB. The file size is showing as 64424509440. Or 60GB. So I ran this: dd if=/dev/zero of=./win7.img seek=146800640 count=0 It ran without errors and I can verify the new size is in fact 75161927680 bytes or 70GB. This is where it gets a little odd. I started the guest domain in xen which is a Windows 7 enterprise machine. What I was expecting to see in diskmgmt.msc is 2 partitions. 1 system partition at the start of around 100MB and near 60GB partition (which is C drive) followed by around 10GB of free space. Actually what I saw was a 70GB partition!?! That confused me... so I decided to run the Check Disk which when you set it on the C drive it asks you to reboot so it'll run on boot. So I did that and during the boot it ran the checks. It got all the way through stage 3 and didn't show any errors at all. Looked at the partitions in disk manager and now C drive has shrunk back to 60GB and there is no free space. What gives? Ok, I thought I'd try mounting it under Dom0 and examining it with fdisk. This is what I get when mounted sudo xl block-attach 0 tap:aio:/home/xen/vms/otoy_v1202-xen.img xvda w sudo fdisk -l /dev/xvda Disk /dev/xvda: 64.4 GB, 64424509440 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7832 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x582dfc96 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/xvda1 * 1 13 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/xvda2 13 7833 62810112 7 HPFS/NTFS Note the cylinder boundary comment. When I run sudo cfdisk /dev/xvda I get: FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends in the final partial cylinder Press any key to exit cfdisk So I guess this is a bigger problem than first thought. How can I fix this? EDIT: Oops, the cylinder boundary thing is not a problem at all since disks have used LBA etc. So that threw me for a moment... still the problem exists... Now this output looks a little different. sudo sfdisk -uS -l /dev/xvda Disk /dev/xvda: 7832 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System /dev/xvda1 * 2048 206847 204800 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/xvda2 206848 125827071 125620224 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/xvda3 0 - 0 0 Empty /dev/xvda4 0 - 0 0 Empty BTW: I do have a backup of the image so if you help me mess it up that's ok. EDIT: sudo parted /dev/xvda print free Model: Xen Virtual Block Device (xvd) Disk /dev/xvda: 64.4GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 32.3kB 1049kB 1016kB Free Space 1 1049kB 106MB 105MB primary ntfs boot 2 106MB 64.4GB 64.3GB primary ntfs 64.4GB 64.4GB 1049kB Free Space Cool. Linux is showing free space is 10GB which is what I expect. The problem is windows isn't seeing this?

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