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• Developing Mobile Applications: Web, Native, or Hybrid?

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Authors: Joe Huang, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Mobile Application Development Framework  and Carlos Chang, Senior Principal Product Director The proliferation of mobile devices and platforms represents a game-changing technology shift on a number of levels. Companies must decide not only the best strategic use of mobile platforms, but also how to most efficiently implement them. Inevitably, this conversation devolves to the developers, who face the task of developing and supporting mobile applications—not a simple task in light of the number of devices and platforms. Essentially, developers can choose from the following three different application approaches, each with its own set of pros and cons. Native Applications: This refers to apps built for and installed on a specific platform, such as iOS or Android, using a platform-specific software development kit (SDK).  For example, apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad are designed to run specifically on iOS and are written in Xcode/Objective-C. Android has its own variation of Java, Windows uses C#, and so on.  Native apps written for one platform cannot be deployed on another. Native apps offer fast performance and access to native-device services but require additional resources to develop and maintain each platform, which can be expensive and time consuming. Mobile Web Applications: Unlike native apps, mobile web apps are not installed on the device; rather, they are accessed via a Web browser.  These are server-side applications that render HTML, typically adjusting the design depending on the type of device making the request.  There are no program coding constraints for writing server-side apps—they can be written in Java, C, PHP, etc., it doesn’t matter.  Instead, the server detects what type of mobile browser is pinging the server and adjusts accordingly. For example, it can deliver fully JavaScript and CSS-enabled content to smartphone browsers, while downgrading gracefully to basic HTML for feature phone browsers. Mobile apps work across platforms, but are limited to what you can do through a browser and require Internet connectivity. For certain types of applications, these constraints may not be an issue. Oracle supports mobile web applications via ADF Faces (for tablets) and ADF Mobile browser (Trinidad) for smartphone and feature phones. Hybrid Applications: As the name implies, hybrid apps combine technologies from native and mobile Web apps to gain the benefits each. For example, these apps are installed on a device, like their pure native app counterparts, while the user interface (UI) is based on HTML5.  This UI runs locally within the native container, which usually leverages the device’s browser engine.  The advantage of using HTML5 is a consistent, cross-platform UI that works well on most devices.  Combining this with the native container, which is installed on-device, provides mobile users with access to local device services, such as camera, GPS, and local device storage.  Native apps may offer greater flexibility in integrating with device native services.  However, since hybrid applications already provide device integrations that typical enterprise applications need, this is typically less of an issue.  The new Oracle ADF Mobile release is an HTML5 and Java hybrid framework that targets mobile app development to iOS and Android from one code base. So, Which is the Best Approach? The short answer is – the best choice depends on the type of application you are developing.  For instance, animation-intensive apps such as games would favor native apps, while hybrid applications may be better suited for enterprise mobile apps because they provide multi-platform support. Just for starters, the following issues must be considered when choosing a development path. Application Complexity: How complex is the application? A quick app that accesses a database or Web service for some data to display?  You can keep it simple, and a mobile Web app may suffice. However, for a mobile/field worker type of applications that supports mission critical functionality, hybrid or native applications are typically needed. Richness of User Interactivity: What type of user experience is required for the application?  Mobile browser-based app that’s optimized for mobile UI may suffice for quick lookup or productivity type of applications.  However, hybrid/native application would typically be required to deliver highly interactive user experiences needed for field-worker type of applications.  For example, interactive BI charts/graphs, maps, voice/email integration, etc.  In the most extreme case like gaming applications, native applications may be necessary to deliver the highly animated and graphically intensive user experience. Performance: What type of performance is required by the application functionality?  For instance, for real-time look up of data over the network, mobile app performance depends on network latency and server infrastructure capabilities.  If consistent performance is required, data would typically need to be cached, which is supported on hybrid or native applications only. Connectivity and Availability: What sort of connectivity will your application require? Does the app require Web access all the time in order to always retrieve the latest data from the server? Or do the requirements dictate offline support? While native and hybrid apps can be built to operate offline, Web mobile apps require Web connectivity. Multi-platform Requirements: The terms “consumerization of IT” and BYOD (bring your own device) effectively mean that the line between the consumer and the enterprise devices have become blurred. Employees are bringing their personal mobile devices to work and are often expecting that they work in the corporate network and access back-office applications.  Even if companies restrict access to the big dogs: (iPad, iPhone, Android phones and tablets, possibly Windows Phone and tablets), trying to support each platform natively will require increasing resources and domain expertise with each new language/platform. And let’s not forget the maintenance costs, involved in upgrading new versions of each platform.   Where multi-platform support is needed, Web mobile or hybrid apps probably have the advantage. Going native, and trying to support multiple operating systems may be cost prohibitive with existing resources and developer skills. Device-Services Access:  If your app needs to access local device services, such as the camera, contacts app, accelerometer, etc., then your choices are limited to native or hybrid applications.   Fragmentation: Apple controls Apple iOS and the only concern is what version iOS is running on any given device.   Not so Android, which is open source. There are many, many versions and variants of Android running on different devices, which can be a nightmare for app developers trying to support different devices running different flavors of Android.  (Is it an Amazon Kindle Fire? a Samsung Galaxy?  A Barnes & Noble Nook?) This is a nightmare scenario for native apps—on the other hand, a mobile Web or hybrid app, when properly designed, can shield you from these complexities because they are based on common frameworks.  Resources: How many developers can you dedicate to building and supporting mobile application development?  What are their existing skills sets?  If you’re considering native application development due to the complexity of the application under development, factor the costs of becoming proficient on a each platform’s OS and programming language. Add another platform, and that’s another language, another SDK. On the other side of the equation, Web mobile or hybrid applications are simpler to make, and readily support more platforms, but there may be performance trade-offs. Conclusion This only scratches the surface. However, I hope to have suggested some food for thought in choosing your mobile development strategy.  Do your due diligence, search the Web, read up on mobile, talk to peers, attend events. The development team at Oracle is working hard on mobile technologies to help customers extend enterprise applications to mobile faster and effectively.  To learn more on what Oracle has to offer, check out the Oracle ADF Mobile (hybrid) and ADF Faces/ADF Mobile browser (Web Mobile) solutions from Oracle.   Additional Information Blog: ADF Blog Product Information on OTN: ADF Mobile 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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• SQL SERVER – Windows File/Folder and Share Permissions – Notes from the Field #029

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a 29th episode of Notes from the Field series. Security is the task which we should give it to the experts. If there is a small overlook or misstep, there are good chances that security of the organization is compromised. This is very true, but there are always devils’s advocates who believe everyone should know the security. As a DBA and Administrator, I often see people not taking interest in the Windows Security hiding behind the reason of not expert of Windows Server. We all often miss the important mission statement for the success of any organization – Teamwork. In this blog post Brian tells the story in very interesting lucid language. Read On! In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Brian Kelley explains a very crucial issue DBAs and Developer faces on their production server. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. Read the experience of Brian in his own words. When I talk security among database professionals, I find that most have at least a working knowledge of how to apply security within a database. When I talk with DBAs in particular, I find that most have at least a working knowledge of security at the server level if we’re speaking of SQL Server. One area I see continually that is weak is in the area of Windows file/folder (NTFS) and share permissions. The typical response is, “I’m a database developer and the Windows system administrator is responsible for that.” That may very well be true – the system administrator may have the primary responsibility and accountability for file/folder and share security for the server. However, if you’re involved in the typical activities surrounding databases and moving data around, you should know these permissions, too. Otherwise, you could be setting yourself up where someone is able to get to data he or she shouldn’t, or you could be opening the door where human error puts bad data in your production system. File/Folder Permission Basics: I wrote about file/folder permissions a few years ago to give the basic permissions that are most often seen. Here’s what you must know as a minimum at the file/folder level: Read - Allows you to read the contents of the file or folder. Having read permissions allows you to copy the file or folder. Write  – Again, as the name implies, it allows you to write to the file or folder. This doesn’t include the ability to delete, however, nothing stops a person with this access from writing an empty file. Delete - Allows the file/folder to be deleted. If you overwrite files, you may need this permission. Modify - Allows read, write, and delete. Full Control - Same as modify + the ability to assign permissions. File/Folder permissions aggregate, unless there is a DENY (where it trumps, just like within SQL Server), meaning if a person is in one group that gives Read and antoher group that gives Write, that person has both Read and Write permissions. As you might expect me to say, always apply the Principle of Least Privilege. This likely means that any additional permission you might add does not need Full Control. Share Permission Basics: At the share level, here are the permissions. Read - Allows you to read the contents on the share. Change - Allows you to read, write, and delete contents on the share. Full control - Change + the ability to modify permissions. Like with file/folder permissions, these permissions aggregate, and DENY trumps. So What Access Does a Person / Process Have? Figuring out what someone or some process has depends on how the location is being accessed: Access comes through the share (\\ServerName\Share) – a combination of permissions is considered. Access is through a drive letter (C:\, E:\, S:\, etc.) – only the file/folder permissions are considered. The only complicated one here is access through the share. Here’s what Windows does: Figures out what the aggregated permissions are at the file/folder level. Figures out what the aggregated permissions are at the share level. Takes the most restrictive of the two sets of permissions. You can test this by granting Full Control over a folder (this is likely already in place for the Users local group) and then setting up a share. Give only Read access through the share, and that includes to Administrators (if you’re creating a share, likely you have membership in the Administrators group). Try to read a file through the share. Now try to modify it. The most restrictive permission is the Share level permissions. It’s set to only allow Read. Therefore, if you come through the share, it’s the most restrictive. Does This Knowledge Really Help Me? In my experience, it does. I’ve seen cases where sensitive files were accessible by every authenticated user through a share. Auditors, as you might expect, have a real problem with that. I’ve also seen cases where files to be imported as part of the nightly processing were overwritten by files intended from development. And I’ve seen cases where a process can’t get to the files it needs for a process because someone changed the permissions. If you know file/folder and share permissions, you can spot and correct these types of security flaws. Given that there are a lot of database professionals that don’t understand these permissions, if you know it, you set yourself apart. And if you’re able to help on critical processes, you begin to set yourself up as a linchpin (link to .pdf) for your organization. If you want to get started with performance tuning and database security with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Elegance, thy Name is jQuery

  - by SGWellens

  So, I'm browsing though some questions over on the Stack Overflow website and I found a good jQuery question just a few minutes old. Here is a link to it. It was a tough question; I knew that by answering it, I could learn new stuff and reinforce what I already knew: Reading is good, doing is better. Maybe I could help someone in the process too. I cut and pasted the HTML from the question into my Visual Studio IDE and went back to Stack Overflow to reread the question. Dang, someone had already answered it! And it was a great answer. I never even had a chance to start analyzing the issue. Now I know what a one-legged man feels like in an ass-kicking contest. Nevertheless, since the question and answer were so interesting, I decided to dissect them and learn as much as possible. The HTML consisted of some divs separated by h3 headings.  Note the elements are laid out sequentially with no programmatic grouping: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div></form></body>  The requirement was to wrap a div around each h3 heading and the subsequent divs grouping them into sections. Why? I don't know, I suppose if you screen-scrapped some HTML from another site, you might want to reformat it before displaying it on your own. Anyways… Here is the marvelously, succinct posted answer: $('.heading').each(function(){ $(this).nextUntil('.heading').andSelf().wrapAll('<div class="section">');}); I was familiar with all the parts except for nextUntil and andSelf. But, I'll analyze the whole answer for completeness. I'll do this by rewriting the posted answer in a different style and adding a boat-load of comments: function Test(){ // $Sections is a jQuery object and it will contain three elements var $Sections = $('.heading'); // use each to iterate over each of the three elements $Sections.each(function () { // $this is a jquery object containing the current element // being iterated var $this = $(this); // nextUntil gets the following sibling elements until it reaches // an element with the CSS class 'heading' // andSelf adds in the source element (this) to the collection $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading').andSelf(); // wrap the elements with a div $this.wrapAll('<div class="section" >'); });}  The code here doesn't look nearly as concise and elegant as the original answer. However, unless you and your staff are jQuery masters, during development it really helps to work through algorithms step by step. You can step through this code in the debugger and examine the jQuery objects to make sure one step is working before proceeding on to the next. It's much easier to debug and troubleshoot when each logical coding step is a separate line. Note: You may think the original code runs much faster than this version. However, the time difference is trivial: Not enough to worry about: Less than 1 millisecond (tested in IE and FF). Note: You may want to jam everything into one line because it results in less traffic being sent to the client. That is true. However, most Internet servers now compress HTML and JavaScript by stripping out comments and white space (go to Bing or Google and view the source). This feature should be enabled on your server: Let the server compress your code, you don't need to do it. Free Career Advice: Creating maintainable code is Job One—Maximum Priority—The Prime Directive. If you find yourself suddenly transferred to customer support, it may be that the code you are writing is not as readable as it could be and not as readable as it should be. Moving on… I created a CSS class to see the results: .section{ background-color: yellow; border: 2px solid black; margin: 5px;} Here is the rendered output before:   …and after the jQuery code runs.   Pretty Cool! But, while playing with this code, the logic of nextUntil began to bother me: What happens in the last section? What stops elements from being collected since there are no more elements with the .heading class? The answer is nothing.  In this case it stopped because it was at the end of the page.  But what if there were additional HTML elements? I added an anchor tag and another div to the HTML: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div><a>this is a link</a><div>unrelated div</div> </form></body> The code as-is will include both the anchor and the unrelated div. This isn't what we want.   My first attempt to correct this used the filter parameter of the nextUntil function: nextUntil('.heading', 'div')  This will only collect div elements. But it merely skipped the anchor tag and it still collected the unrelated div:   The problem is we need a way to tell the nextUntil function when to stop. CSS selectors to the rescue: nextUntil('.heading, a')  This tells nextUntil to stop collecting sibling elements when it gets to an element with a .heading class OR when it gets to an anchor tag. In this case it solved the problem. FYI: The comma operator in a CSS selector allows multiple criteria.   Bingo! One final note, we could have broken the code down even more: We could have replaced the andSelf function here: $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a').andSelf(); With this: // get all the following siblings and then add the current item$this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a');$this.add(this);  But in this case, the andSelf function reads real nice. In my opinion. Here's a link to a jsFiddle if you want to play with it. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens CodeProject

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• Inventory Management concepts in XNA game

  - by user1332755

  I am trying to code the inventory system in my first real game so I have very little experience in both c# and game engine development. Basically, I need some general guidance and tips with how to structure and organize these sorts of systems. Please tell me if I am on the right track or not before I get too deep into making some badly structured system. It's fine if you don't feel like looking through my code, suggestions about general structure would also be appreciated. What I am aiming to end up with is some sort of system like Minecraft or Terraria. It must include: main inventory GUI (items can be dragged and placed in whatever slot desired Itembar outside of the main inventory which can be assigned to certain items the ability to use items from either location So far, I have 4 main classes: Inventory holds the general info and methods, inventoryslot holds info for individual slots, Itembar holds all info and methods for itself, and finally, ItemManager to manage interactions between the two and hold a master list of items. So far, my itembar works perfectly and interacts well with mousedragging items into and out of it as well as activating the item effect. Here is the code I have so far: (there is a lot but I will try to keep it relevant) This is the code for the itembar on the main screen: class Itembar { public Texture2D itembarfull, iSelected; public static Rectangle itembar = new Rectangle(5, 218, 40, 391); public Rectangle box1 = new Rectangle(itembar.X, 218, 40, 40); //up to 10 Rectangles for each slot public int Selected = 0; private ItemManager manager; public Itembar(Texture2D texture, Texture2D texture3, ItemManager mann) { itembarfull = texture; iSelected = texture3; manager = mann; } public void Update(GameTime gametime) { } public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { spriteBatch.Draw( itembarfull, new Vector2 (itembar.X, itembar.Y), null, Color.White, 0.0f, Vector2.Zero, 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 1.0f); if (Selected == 1) spriteBatch.Draw(iSelected, new Rectangle(box1.X-3, box1.Y-3, box1.Width+6, box1.Height+6), Color.White); //goes up to 10 slots } public int Box1Query() { foreach (Item item in manager.items) { if(box1.Contains(item.BoundingBox)) return manager.items.IndexOf(item); } return 999; } //10 different box queries It is working fine right now. I just put an Item in there and the box will query things like the item's effects, stack number, consumable or not etc...This one is basically almost complete. Here is the main inventory class: class Inventory { public bool isActive; public List<Rectangle> mainSlots = new List<Rectangle>(24); public List<InventorySlot> mainSlotscheck = new List<InventorySlot>(24); public static Rectangle inv = new Rectangle(841, 469, 156, 231); public Rectangle invfull = new Rectangle(inv.X, inv.Y, inv.Width, inv.Height); public Rectangle inv1 = new Rectangle(inv.X + 4, inv.Y +3, 32, 32); //goes up to inv24 resulting in a 6x4 grid of Rectangles public Inventory() { mainSlots.Add(inv1); mainSlots.Add(inv2); mainSlots.Add(inv3); mainSlots.Add(inv4); //goes up to 24 foreach (Rectangle slot in mainSlots) mainSlotscheck.Add(new InventorySlot(slot)); } //update and draw methods are empty because im not too sure what to put there public int LookforfreeSlot() { int slotnumber = 999; for (int x = 0; x < mainSlots.Count; x++) { if (mainSlotscheck[x].isFree) { slotnumber = x; break; } } return slotnumber; } } } LookforFreeSlot() method is meant to be called when I do AddtoInventory(). I'm kinda stumped about what other things I need to put in this class. Here is the inventorySlot class: (its main purpose is to check the bool "isFree" to see whether or not something already occupies the slot. But i guess it can also do other stuff like get item info.) class InventorySlot { public int X, Y; public int Width = 32, Height = 32; public Vector2 Position; public int slotnumber; public bool free = true; public int? content = null; public bool isFree { get { return free; } set { free = value; } } public InventorySlot(Rectangle slot) { slot = new Rectangle(X, Y, Width, Height); } } } Finally, here is the ItemManager (I am omitting the master list because it is too long) class ItemManager { public List<Item> items = new List<Item>(20); public List<Item> inventory1 = new List<Item>(24); public List<Item> inventory2 = new List<Item>(24); public List<Item> inventory3 = new List<Item>(24); public List<Item> inventory4 = new List<Item>(24); public Texture2D icon, filta; private Rectangle msRect; MouseState mouseState; public int ISelectedIndex; Inventory inventory; SpriteFont font; public void GenerateItems() { items.Add(new Item(new Rectangle(0, 0, 32, 32), icon, font)); items[0].name = "Grass Chip"; items[0].itemID = 0; items[0].consumable = true; items[0].stackable = true; items[0].maxStack = 99; items.Add(new Item(new Rectangle(32, 0, 32, 32), icon, font)); //master list continues. it will generate all items in the game; } public ItemManager(Inventory inv, Texture2D itemsheet, Rectangle mouseRectt, MouseState ms, Texture2D fil, SpriteFont f) { icon = itemsheet; msRect = mouseRectt; filta = fil; mouseState = ms; inventory = inv; font = f; } //once again, no update or draw public void mousedrag() { items[0].DestinationRect = new Rectangle (msRect.X, msRect.Y, 32, 32); items[0].dragging = true; } public void AddtoInventory(Item item) { int index = inventory.LookforfreeSlot(); if (index == 999) return; item.DestinationRect = inventory.mainSlots[index]; inventory.mainSlotscheck[index].content = item.itemID; inventory.mainSlotscheck[index].isFree = false; item.IsActive = true; } } } The mousedrag works pretty well. AddtoInventory doesn't work because LookforfreeSlot doesn't work. Relevant code from the main program: When I want to add something to the main inventory, I do something like this: foreach (Particle ether in ether1.ethers) { if (ether.isCollected) itemmanager.AddtoInventory(itemmanager.items[14]); } This turned out to be much longer than I had expected :( But I hope someone is interested enough to comment.

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 3 – Agile or agile?

  - by Chris George

  Another early start for my last Lean Coffee of the conference, and again it was not wasted. We had some really interesting discussions around how to determine what test automation is useful, if agile is not faster, why do it? and a rather existential discussion on whether unicorns exist! First keynote of the day was entitled “Fast Feedback Teams” by Ola Ellnestam. Again this relates nicely to the releasing faster talk on day 2, and something that we are looking at and some teams are actively trying. Introducing the notion of feedback, Ola describes a game he wrote for his eldest child. It was a simple game where every time he clicked a button, it displayed “You’ve Won!”. He then changed it to be a Win-Lose-Win-Lose pattern and watched the feedback from his son who then twigged the pattern and got his younger brother to play, alternating turns… genius! (must do that with my children). The idea behind this was that you need that feedback loop to learn and progress. If you are not getting the feedback you need to close that loop. An interesting point Ola made was to solve problems BEFORE writing software. It may be that you don’t have to write anything at all, perhaps it’s a communication/training issue? Perhaps the problem can be solved another way. Writing software, although it’s the business we are in, is expensive, and this should be taken into account. He again mentions frequent releases, and how they should be made as soon as stuff is ready to be released, don’t leave stuff on the shelf cause it’s not earning you anything, money or data. I totally agree with this and it’s something that we will be aiming for moving forwards. “Exceptions, Assumptions and Ambiguity: Finding the truth behind the story” by David Evans started off very promising by making references to ‘Grim up North’ referring to the north of England. Not sure it was appreciated by most of the audience, but it made me laugh! David explained how there are always risks associated with exceptions, giving the example of a one-way road near where he lives, with an exception sign giving rights to coaches to go the wrong way. Therefore you could merrily swing around the corner of the one way road straight into a coach! David showed the danger in making assumptions with lyrical quotes from Lola by The Kinks “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola” and with a picture of a toilet flush that needed instructions to operate the full and half flush. With this particular flush, you pulled the handle all the way down to half flush, and half way down to full flush! hmmm, a bit of a crappy user experience methinks! Then through a clever use of a passage from the Jabberwocky, David then went onto show how mis-translation/ambiguity is the can completely distort the original meaning of something, and this is a real enemy of software development. This was all helping to demonstrate that the term Story is often heavily overloaded in the Agile world, and should really be stripped back to what it is really for, stating a business problem, and offering a technical solution. Therefore a story could be worded as “In order to {make some improvement}, we will { do something}”. The first ‘in order to’ statement is stakeholder neutral, and states the problem through requesting an improvement to the software/process etc. The second part of the story is the verb, the doing bit. So to achieve the ‘improvement’ which is not currently true, we will do something to make this true in the future. My PM is very interested in this, and he’s observed some of the problems of overloading stories so I’m hoping between us we can use some of David’s suggestions to help clarify our stories better. The second keynote of the day (and our last) proved to be the most entertaining and exhausting of the conference for me. “The ongoing evolution of testing in agile development” by Scott Barber. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Scott before… OMG I would love to have even half of the energy he has! What struck me during this presentation was Scott’s explanation of how testing has become the role/job that it is (largely) today, and how this has led to the need for ‘methodologies’ to make dev and test work! The argument that we should be trying to converge the roles again is a very valid one, and one that a couple of the teams at work are actively doing with great results. Making developers as responsible for quality as testers is something that has been lost over the years, but something that we are now striving to achieve. The idea that we (testers) should be testing experts/specialists, not testing ‘union members’, supports this idea so the entire team works on all aspects of a feature/product, with the ‘specialists’ taking the lead and advising/coaching the others. This leads to better propagation of information around the team, a greater holistic understanding of the project and it allows the team to continue functioning if some of it’s members are off sick, for example. Feeling somewhat drained from Scott’s keynote (but at the same time excited that alot of the points he raised supported actions we are taking at work), I headed into my last presentation for Agile Testing Days 2012 before having to make my way to Tegel to catch the flight home. “Thinking and working agile in an unbending world” with Pete Walen was a talk I was not going to miss! Having spoken to Pete several times during the past few days, I was looking forward to hearing what he was going to say, and I was not disappointed. Pete started off by trying to separate the definitions of ‘Agile’ as in the methodology, and ‘agile’ as in the adjective by pronouncing them the ‘english’ and ‘american’ ways. So Agile pronounced (Ajyle) and agile pronounced (ajul). There was much confusion around what the hell he was talking about, although I thought it was quite clear. Agile – Software development methodology agile – Marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace; Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character. Anyway, that aside (although it provided a few laughs during the presentation), the point was that many teams that claim to be ‘Agile’ but are not, in fact, ‘agile’ by nature. Implementing ‘Agile’ methodologies that are so prescriptive actually goes against the very nature of Agile development where a team should anticipate, adapt and explore. Pete made a valid point that very few companies intentionally put up roadblocks to impede work, so if work is being blocked/delayed, why? This is where being agile as a team pays off because the team can inspect what’s going on, explore options and adapt their processes. It is through experimentation (and that means trying and failing as well as trying and succeeding) that a team will improve and grow leading to focussing on what really needs to be done to achieve X. So, that was it, the last talk of our conference. I was gutted that we had to miss the closing keynote from Matt Heusser, as Matt was another person I had spoken too a few times during the conference, but the flight would not wait, and just as well we left when we did because the traffic was a nightmare! My Takeaway Triple from Day 3: Release often and release small – don’t leave stuff on the shelf Keep the meaning of the word ‘agile’ in mind when working in ‘Agile Look at testing as more of a skill than a role  

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• Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Millennials

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Christine Mellon Much is said and written about the new generations of employees entering our workforce, as though they are a strange specimen, a mysterious life form to be “figured out,” accommodated and engaged – at a safe distance, of course.  At its worst, this talk takes a critical and disapproving tone, with baby boomer employees adamantly refusing to validate this new breed of worker, let alone determine how to help them succeed and achieve their potential.   The irony of our baby-boomer resentments and suspicions is that they belie the fact that we created the very vision that younger employees are striving to achieve.  From our frustrations with empty careers that did not fulfill us, from our opposition to “the man,” from our sharp memories of our parents’ toiling for 30 years just for the right to retire, from the simple desire not to live our lives in a state of invisibility, came the seeds of hope for something better. One characteristic of Millennial workers that grew from these seeds is the desire to experience as much as possible.  They are the “Experiential Employee”, with a passion for growing in diverse ways and expanding personal and professional horizons.  Rather than rooting themselves in a single company for a career, or even in a single career path, these employees are committed to building a broad portfolio of experiences and capabilities that will enable them to make a difference and to leave a mark of significance in the world.  How much richer is the organization that nurtures and leverages this inclination?  Our curmudgeonly ways must be surrendered and our focus redirected toward building the next generation of talent ecosystems, if we are to optimize what future generations have to offer.   Accelerating Professional Development In spite of our Boomer grumblings about Millennials’ “unrealistic” expectations, the truth is that we have a well-matched set of circumstances.  We have executives-in-waiting who want to learn quickly and a concurrent, urgent need to ramp up their development time, based on anticipated high levels of retirement in the next 10+ years.  Since we need to rapidly skill up these heirs to the corporate kingdom, isn’t it a fortunate coincidence that they are hungry to learn, develop and move fluidly throughout our organizations??  So our challenge now is to efficiently operationalize the wisdom we have acquired about effective learning and development.   We have already evolved from classroom-based models to diverse instructional methods.  The next step is to find the best approaches to help younger employees learn quickly and apply new learnings in an impactful way.   Creating temporary or even permanent functional partnerships among Millennial employees is one way to maximize outcomes.  This might take the form of 2 or more employees owning aspects of what once fell under a single role.  While one might argue this would mean duplication of resources, it could be a short term cost while employees come up to speed.  And the potential benefits would be numerous:  leveraging and validating the inherent sense of community of new generations, creating cross-functional skills with broad applicability, yielding additional perspectives and approaches to traditional work outcomes, and accelerating the performance curve for incumbents through Cooperative Learning (Johnson, D. and Johnson R., 1989, 1999).  This well-researched teaching strategy, where students support each other in the absorption and application of new information, has been shown to deliver faster, more efficient learning, and greater retention. Alternately, perhaps short term contracts with exiting retirees, or former retirees, to help facilitate the development of following generations may have merit.  Again, a short term cost, certainly.  However, the gains realized in shortening the learning curve, and strengthening engagement are substantial and lasting. Ultimately, there needs to be creative thinking applied for each organization on how to accelerate the capabilities of our future leaders in unique ways that mesh with current culture. The manner in which performance is evaluated must finally shift as well.  Employees will need to be assessed on how well they have developed key skills and capabilities vs. end-to-end mastery of functional positions they have no interest in keeping for an entire career. As we become more comfortable in placing greater and greater weight on competencies vs. tasks, we will realize increased organizational agility via this new generation of workers, which will be further enhanced by their natural flexibility and appetite for change. Revisiting Succession  For many years, organizations have failed to deliver desired succession planning outcomes.  According to CEB’s 2013 research, only 28% of current leaders were pre-identified in a succession plan. These disappointing results, along with the entrance of the experiential, Millennial employee into the workforce, may just provide the needed impetus for HR to reinvent succession processes.   We have recognized that the best professional development efforts are not always linear, and the time has come to fully adopt this philosophy in regard to succession as well.  Paths to specific organizational roles will not look the same for newer generations who seek out unique learning opportunities, without consideration of a singular career destination.  Rather than charting particular jobs as precursors for key positions, the experiences and skills behind what makes an incumbent successful must become essential in succession mapping.  And the multitude of ways in which those experiences and skills may be acquired must be factored into the process, along with the individual employee’s level of learning agility. While this may seem daunting, it is necessary and long overdue.  We have talked about the criticality of competency-based succession, however, we have not lived up to our own rhetoric.  Many Boomers have experienced the same frustration in our careers; knowing we are capable of shining in a particular role, but being denied the opportunity due to how our career history lined up, on paper, with documented job requirements.  These requirements usually emphasized past jobs/titles and specific tasks, versus capabilities, drive and willingness (let alone determination) to learn new things.  How satisfying would it be for us to leave a legacy where such narrow thinking no longer applies and potential is amplified? Realizing Diversity Another bloom from the seeds we Boomers have tried to plant over the past decades is a completely evolved view of diversity.  Millennial employees assume a diverse workforce, and are startled by anything less.  Their social tolerance, nurtured by wide and diverse networks, is unprecedented.  College graduates expect a similar landscape in the “real world” to what they experienced throughout their lives.  They appreciate and seek out divergent points of view and experiences without needing any persuasion.  The face of our U.S. workforce will likely see dramatic change as Millennials apply their fresh take on hiring and building strong teams, with an inherent sense of inclusion.  This wonderful aspect of the Millennial wave should be celebrated and strongly encouraged, as it is the fulfillment of our own aspirations. Future Perfect The Experiential Employee is operating more as a free agent than a long term player, and their commitment will essentially last as long as meaningful organizational culture and personal/professional opportunities keep their interest.  As Boomers, we have laid the foundation for this new, spirited employment attitude, and we should take pride in knowing that.  Generations to come will challenge organizations to excel in how they identify, manage and nurture talent. Let’s support and revel in the future that we’ve helped invent, rather than lament what we think has been lost.  After all, the future is always connected to the past.  And as so eloquently phrased by Antoine Lavoisier, French nobleman, chemist and politico:  “Nothing is Lost, Nothing is Created, and Everything is Transformed.” Christine has over 25 years of diverse HR experience.  She has held HR consulting and corporate roles, including CHRO positions for Echostar in Denver, a 6,000+ employee global engineering firm, and Aepona, a startup software firm, successfully acquired by Intel. Christine is a resource to Oracle clients, to assist in Human Capital Management strategy development and implementation, compensation practices, talent development initiatives, employee engagement, global HR management, and integrated HR systems and processes that support the full employee lifecycle. 

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• 3D Ball Physics Theory: collision response on ground and against walls?

  - by David

  I'm really struggling to get a strong grasp on how I should be handling collision response in a game engine I'm building around a 3D ball physics concept. Think Monkey Ball as an example of the type of gameplay. I am currently using sphere-to-sphere broad phase, then AABB to OBB testing (the final test I am using right now is one that checks if one of the 8 OBB points crosses the planes of the object it is testing against). This seems to work pretty well, and I am getting back: Plane that object is colliding against (with a point on the plane, the plane's normal, and the exact point of intersection. I've tried what feels like dozens of different high-level strategies for handling these collisions, without any real success. I think my biggest problem is understanding how to handle collisions against walls in the x-y axes (left/right, front/back), which I want to have elasticity, and the ground (z-axis) where I want an elastic reaction if the ball drops down, but then for it to eventually normalize and be kept "on the ground" (not go into the ground, but also not continue bouncing). Without kluging something together, I'm positive there is a good way to handle this, my theories just aren't getting me all the way there. For physics modeling and movement, I am trying to use a Euler based setup with each object maintaining a position (and destination position prior to collision detection), a velocity (which is added onto the position to determine the destination position), and an acceleration (which I use to store any player input being put on the ball, as well as gravity in the z coord). Starting from when I detect a collision, what is a good way to approach the response to get the expected behavior in all cases? Thanks in advance to anyone taking the time to assist... I am grateful for any pointers, and happy to post any additional info or code if it is useful. UPDATE Based on Steve H's and eBusiness' responses below, I have adapted my collision response to what makes a lot more sense now. It was close to right before, but I didn't have all the right pieces together at the right time! I have one problem left to solve, and that is what is causing the floor collision to hit every frame. Here's the collision response code I have now for the ball, then I'll describe the last bit I'm still struggling to understand. // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... if (m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal) <= 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold // -- NOTE: this was an experimental idea I had to solve the "jitter" bug I'll describe below float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position + intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); The above snippet is run after a collision is detected on the ball (collider) with a collidee (floor in this case). With a dampening force of 1.8f, the ball's reflected "upward" velocity will eventually be overcome by gravity, so the ball will essentially be stuck on the floor. THIS is the problem I have now... the collision code is running every frame (since the ball's z-velocity is constantly pushing it a collision with the floor below it). The ball is not technically stuck, I can move it around still, but the movement is really goofy because the velocity and position keep getting affected adversely by the above snippet. I was experimenting with an idea to clamp the z-velocity to zero if it was "close to zero", but this didn't do what I think... probably because the very next frame the ball gets a new gravity acceleration applied to its velocity regardless (which I think is good, right?). Collisions with walls are as they used to be and work very well. It's just this last bit of "stickiness" to deal with. The camera is constantly jittering up and down by extremely small fractions too when the ball is "at rest". I'll keep playing with it... I like puzzles like this, especially when I think I'm close. Any final ideas on what I could be doing wrong here? UPDATE 2 Good news - I discovered I should be subtracting the intersection.diff from the m_position (position prior to collision). The intersection.diff is my calculation of the difference in the vector of position to destPosition from the intersection point to the position. In this case, adding it was causing my ball to always go "up" just a little bit, causing the jitter. By subtracting it, and moving that clamper for the velocity.z when close to zero to being above the dot product (and changing the test from <= 0 to < 0), I now have the following: // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... float dotprod = m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal); if (dotprod < 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration? // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position - intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); UpdateWorldMatrix(m_destWorldMatrix, m_destOBB, m_destPosition, false); This is MUCH better. No jitter, and the ball now "rests" at the floor, while still bouncing off the floor and walls. The ONLY thing left is that the ball is now virtually "stuck". He can move but at a much slower rate, likely because the else of my dot product test is only letting the ball move at a rate multiplied against the tRemaining... I think this is a better solution than I had previously, but still somehow not the right idea. BTW, I'm trying to journal my progress through this problem for anyone else with a similar situation - hopefully it will serve as some help, as many similar posts have for me over the years.

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• Learnings from trying to write better software: Loud errors from the very start

  - by theo.spears

  Microsoft made a very small number of backwards incompatible changes between .NET 1.1 and 2.0, because they wanted to make it as easy and safe as possible to port applications to the new runtime. (Here’s a list.) However, one thing they did change was what happens when a background thread fails with an unhanded exception - in .NET 1.1 nothing happened, the thread terminated, and the application continued oblivious. Try the same trick in .NET 2.0 and the entire application, including all threads, will rudely terminate. There are three reasons for this. Firstly if a background thread has crashed, it may have left the entire application in an inconsistent state, in a way that will affect other threads. It’s better to terminate the entire application than continue and have the application perform actions based on a broken state, for example take customer orders, or write corrupt files to disk.  Secondly, during software development, it is far better for errors to be loud and obtrusive. Even if you have unit tests and integration tests (and you should), a key part of ensuring software works properly is to actually try using it, both through systematic testing and through the casual use all software gets by its developers during use. Subtle errors are easy to miss if you are not actually doing real work using the application, loud errors are obvious. Thirdly, and most importantly, even if catching and swallowing exceptions indiscriminately doesn't cause any problems in your application, the presence of unexpected exceptions shows you do not fully understand the behavior of your code. The currently released version of your application may be absolutely correct. However, because your mental model of the behavior is wrong, any future change you make to the program could and probably will introduce critical errors.  This applies to more than just exceptions causing threads to exit, any unexpected state should make the application blow up in an un-ignorable way. The worst thing you can do is silently swallow errors and continue. And let's be clear, writing to a log file does not count as blowing up in an un-ignorable way.  This is all simple as long as the call stack only contains your code, but when your functions start to be called by third party or .NET framework code, it's surprisingly easy for exceptions to start vanishing. Let's look at two examples.   1. Windows forms drag drop events  Usually if you throw an exception from a winforms event handler it will bring up the "application has crashed" dialog with abort and continue options. This is a good default behavior - the error is big and loud, but it is possible for the user to ignore the error and hopefully save their data, if somehow this bug makes it past testing. However drag and drop are different - throw an exception from one of these and it will just be silently swallowed with no explanation.  By the way, it's not just drag and drop events. Timer events do it too.  You can research how exceptions are treated in different handlers and code appropriately, but the safest and most user friendly approach is to always catch exceptions in your event handlers and show your own error message. I'll talk about one good approach to handling these exceptions at the end of this post.   2. SSMS integration for SQL Tab Magic  A while back wrote an SSMS add-in called SQL Tab Magic (learn more about the process here). It works by listening to certain SSMS events and remembering what documents are opened and closed. I deployed it internally and it was used for a few months by a number of people without problems, so I was reasonably confident in its quality. Before releasing I made a few cleanups, including introducing error reporting. Bam. A few days later I was looking at over 1,000 error reports in my inbox. In turns out I wasn't handling table designers properly. The exceptions were there, but again SSMS was helpfully swallowing them all for me, so I was blissfully unaware. Had I made my errors loud from the start, I would have noticed these issues long before and fixed them.   Handling exceptions  Now you are systematically catching exceptions throughout your application, you need to do something with them. I've tried 3 options: log them, alert the user, and automatically send them home.  There are a few good options for logging in .NET. The most widespread is Apache log4net, which provides a very capable and configurable logging framework. There is also NLog which has a compatible interface, with a greater emphasis on fluent rather than XML configuration.  Alerting the user serves two purposes. Firstly it means they understand their action has failed to they don't just assume it worked (Silent file copy failure is a problem if you then delete the originals) or that they should keep waiting for a background task to complete. Secondly, it means the users can report the bug to your support team, and then you can fix it. This means the message you show the user should contain the information you need as a developer to identify and fix it. And the user will probably just send you a screenshot of the dialog, so it shouldn't be hidden by scroll bars.  This leads us to the third option, automatically sending error reports home. By automatic I mean with minimal effort on the part of the user, rather than doing it silently behind their backs. The advantage of this is you can send back far more detailed and precise information than you can expect a user to include in an email, and by making it easier to report errors, you make it more likely users will do so.  We do this using a great tool called SmartAssembly (full disclosure: this is a product made by Red Gate). It captures complete stack traces including the values of all local variables and then allows the user to send all this information back with a single click. We also capture log files to help understand what lead up to the error. We then use the free SmartAssembly Sync for Jira to dedupe these reports and raise them as bugs in our bug tracking system.  The combined effect of loud errors during development and then automatic error reporting once software is deployed allows us to find and fix more bugs, correct misunderstandings on how our software works, and overall is a key piece in delivering higher quality software. However it is no substitute for having motivated cunning testers in the building - and we're looking to hire more of those too.   If you found this post interesting you should follow me on twitter.  

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• Expectations + Rewards = Innovation

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  “Innovation” is a heavy word. We regard those that embrace it as “Innovators”. We describe organizations as being “Innovative”. We hold those associated with the word in high regard, even though its dictionary definition is very simple: Introducing something new. What our culture has done is wrapped Innovation in white robes and a gold crown. Innovation is rarely just introducing something new. Innovations and innovators are typically associated with other terms: groundbreaking, genius, industry-changing, creative, leading. Being a true innovator and creating innovations are a big deal, and something companies try to strive for…or at least say they strive for. There’s huge value in being recognized as an innovator in an industry, since the idea is that innovation equates to increased profitability. IBM ran an ad a few years back that showed what their view of innovation is: “The point of innovation is to make actual money.” If the money aspect makes you feel uneasy, consider it another way: the point of innovation is to <insert payoff here>. Companies that innovate will be more successful. Non-profits that innovate can better serve their target clients. Governments that innovate can better provide services to their citizens. True innovation is not easy to come by though. As with anything in business, how well an organization will innovate is reliant on the employees it retains, the expectations placed on those employees, and the rewards available to them. In a previous blog post I talked about one formula: Right Employees + Happy Employees = Productive Employees I want to introduce a new one, that builds upon the previous one: Expectations + Rewards = Innovation  The level of innovation your organization will realize is directly associated with the expectations you place on your staff and the rewards you make available to them. Expectations We may feel uncomfortable with the idea of placing expectations on our staff, mainly because expectation has somewhat of a negative or cold connotation to it: “I expect you to act this way or else!” The problem is in the or-else part…we focus on the negative aspects of failing to meet expectations instead of looking at the positive side. “I expect you to act this way because it will produce <insert benefit here>”. Expectations should not be set to punish but instead be set to ensure quality. At a recent conference I spoke with some Microsoft employees who told me that you have five years from starting with the company to reach a “Senior” level. If you don’t, then you’re let go. The expectation Microsoft placed on their staff is that they should be working towards improving themselves, taking more responsibility, and thus ensure that there is a constant level of quality in the workforce. Rewards Let me be clear: a paycheck is not a reward. A paycheck is simply the employer’s responsibility in the employee/employer relationship. A paycheck will never be the key motivator to drive innovation. Offering employees something over and above their required compensation can spur them to greater performance and achievement. Working in the food service industry, this tactic was used again and again: whoever has the highest sales over lunch will receive a free lunch/gift certificate/entry into a draw/etc. There was something to strive for, to try beyond the baseline of what our serving jobs were. It was through this that innovative sales techniques would be tried and honed, with key servers being top sellers time and time again. At a code camp I spoke at, I was amazed to see that all the employees from one company receive $100 Visa gift cards as a thank you for taking time to speak. Again, offering something over and above that can give that extra push for employees. Rewards work. But what about the fairness angle? In the restaurant example I gave, there were servers that would never win the competition. They just weren’t good enough at selling and never seemed to get better. So should those that did work at performing better and produce more sales for the restaurant not get rewarded because those who weren’t working at performing better might get upset? Of course not! Organizations succeed because of their top performers and those that strive to join their ranks. The Expectation/Reward Graph While the Expectations + Rewards = Innovation formula may seem like a simple mathematics formula, there’s much more going under the hood. In fact there are three different outcomes that could occur based on what you put in as values for Expectations and Rewards. Consider the graph below and the descriptions that follow: Disgruntled – High Expectation, Low Reward I worked at a company where the mantra was “Company First, Because We Pay You”. Even today I still hear stories of how this sentiment continues to be perpetuated: They provide you a paycheck and a means to live, therefore you should always put them as your top priority. Of course, this is a huge imbalance in the expectation/reward equation. Why would anyone willingly meet high expectations of availability, workload, deadlines, etc. when there is no reward other than a paycheck to show for it? Remember: paychecks are not rewards! Instead, you see employees be disgruntled which not only affects the level of production but also the level of quality within an organization. It also means that you see higher turnover. Complacent – Low Expectation, Low Reward Complacency is a systemic problem that typically exists throughout all levels of an organization. With no real expectations or rewards, nobody needs to excel. In fact, those that do try to innovate, improve, or introduce new things into the organization might be shunned or pushed out by the rest of the staff who are just doing things the same way they’ve always done it. The bigger issue for the organization with low/low values is that at best they’ll never grow beyond their current size (and may shrink actually), and at worst will cease to exist. Entitled – Low Expectation, High Reward It’s one thing to say you have the best people and reward them as such, but its another thing to actually have the best people and reward them as such. Organizations with Entitled employees are the former: their organization provides them with all types of comforts, benefits, and perks. But there’s no requirement before the rewards are dolled out, and there’s no short-list of who receives the rewards. Everyone in the company is treated the same and is given equal share of the spoils. Entitlement is actually almost identical with Complacency with one notable difference: just try to introduce higher expectations into an entitled organization! Entitled employees have been spoiled for so long that they can’t fathom having rewards taken from them, or having to achieve specific levels of performance before attaining them. Those running the organization also buy in to the Entitled sentiment, feeling that they must persist the same level of comforts to appease their staff…even though the quality of the employee pool may be suspect. Innovative – High Expectation, High Reward Finally we have the Innovative organization which places high expectations but also provides high rewards. This organization gets it: if you truly want the best employees you need to apply equal doses of pressure and praise. Realize that I’m not suggesting crazy overtime or un-realistic working conditions. I do not agree with the “Glengary-Glenross” method of encouragement. But as anyone who follows sports can tell you, the teams that win are the ones where the coaches push their players to be their best; to achieve new levels of performance that they didn’t know they could receive. And the result for the players is more money, fame, and opportunity. It’s in this environment that organizations can focus on innovation – true innovation that builds the business and allows everyone involved to truly benefit. In Closing Organizations love to use the word “Innovation” and its derivatives, but very few actually do innovate. For many, the term has just become another marketing buzzword to lump in with all the other business terms that get overused. But for those organizations that truly get the value of innovation, they will be the ones surging forward while other companies simply fade into the background. And they will be the organizations that expect more from their employees, and give them their just rewards.

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• External File Upload Optimizations for Windows Azure

  - by rgillen

  [Cross posted from here: http://rob.gillenfamily.net/post/External-File-Upload-Optimizations-for-Windows-Azure.aspx] I’m wrapping up a bit of the work we’ve been doing on data movement optimizations for cloud computing and the latest set of data yielded some interesting points I thought I’d share. The work done here is not really rocket science but may, in some ways, be slightly counter-intuitive and therefore seemed worthy of posting. Summary: for those who don’t like to read detailed posts or don’t have time, the synopsis is that if you are uploading data to Azure, block your data (even down to 1MB) and upload in parallel. Set your block size based on your source file size, but if you must choose a fixed value, use 1MB. Following the above will result in significant performance gains… upwards of 10x-24x and a reduction in overall file transfer time of upwards of 90% (eg, uploading a 1GB file averaged 46.37 minutes prior to optimizations and averaged 1.86 minutes afterwards). Detail: For those of you who want more detail, or think that the claims at the end of the preceding paragraph are over-reaching, what follows is information and code supporting these claims. As the title would indicate, these tests were run from our research facility pointing to the Azure cloud (specifically US North Central as it is physically closest to us) and do not represent intra-cloud results… we have performed intra-cloud tests and the overall results are similar in notion but the data rates are significantly different as well as the tipping points for the various block sizes… this will be detailed separately). We started by building a very simple console application that would loop through a directory and upload each file to Azure storage. This application used the shipping storage client library from the 1.1 version of the azure tools. The only real variation from the client library is that we added code to collect and record the duration (in ms) and size (in bytes) for each file transferred. The code is available here. We then created a directory that had a collection of files for the following sizes: 2KB, 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, 512KB, 1MB, 5MB, 10MB, 25MB, 50MB, 100MB, 250MB, 500MB, 750MB, and 1GB (50 files for each size listed). These files contained randomly-generated binary data and do not benefit from compression (a separate discussion topic). Our file generation tool is available here. The baseline was established by running the application described above against the directory containing all of the data files. This application uploads the files in a random order so as to avoid transferring all of the files of a given size sequentially and thereby spreading the affects of periodic Internet delays across the collection of results.  We then ran some scripts to split the resulting data and generate some reports. The raw data collected for our non-optimized tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. For each file size, we calculated the average upload time (and standard deviation) and the average transfer rate (and standard deviation). As you likely are aware, transferring data across the Internet is susceptible to many transient delays which can cause anomalies in the resulting data. It is for this reason that we randomized the order of source file processing as well as executed the tests 50x for each file size. We expect that these steps will yield a sufficiently balanced set of results. Once the baseline was collected and analyzed, we updated the test harness application with some methods to split the source file into user-defined block sizes and then to upload those blocks in parallel (using the PutBlock() method of Azure storage). The parallelization was handled by simply relying on the Parallel Extensions to .NET to provide a Parallel.For loop (see linked source for specific implementation details in Program.cs, line 173 and following… less than 100 lines total). Once all of the blocks were uploaded, we called PutBlockList() to assemble/commit the file in Azure storage. For each block transferred, the MD5 was calculated and sent ensuring that the bits that arrived matched was was intended. The timer for the blocked/parallelized transfer method wraps the entire process (source file splitting, block transfer, MD5 validation, file committal). A diagram of the process is as follows: We then tested the affects of blocking & parallelizing the transfers by running the updated application against the same source set and did a parameter sweep on the block size including 256KB, 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, and 4MB (our assumption was that anything lower than 256KB wasn’t worth the trouble and 4MB is the maximum size of a block supported by Azure). The raw data for the parallel tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. This data was processed and then compared against the single-threaded / non-optimized transfer numbers and the results were encouraging. The Excel version of the results is available here. Two semi-obvious points need to be made prior to reviewing the data. The first is that if the block size is larger than the source file size you will end up with a “negative optimization” due to the overhead of attempting to block and parallelize. The second is that as the files get smaller, the clock-time cost of blocking and parallelizing (overhead) is more apparent and can tend towards negative optimizations. For this reason (and is supported in the raw data provided in the linked worksheet) the charts and dialog below ignore source file sizes less than 1MB. (click chart for full size image) The chart above illustrates some interesting points about the results: When the block size is smaller than the source file, performance increases but as the block size approaches and then passes the source file size, you see decreasing benefit to the point of negative gains (see the values for the 1MB file size) For some of the moderately-sized source files, small blocks (256KB) are best As the size of the source file gets larger (see values for 50MB and up), the smallest block size is not the most efficient (presumably due, at least in part, to the increased number of blocks, increased number of individual transfer requests, and reassembly/committal costs). Once you pass the 250MB source file size, the difference in rate for 1MB to 4MB blocks is more-or-less constant The 1MB block size gives the best average improvement (~16x) but the optimal approach would be to vary the block size based on the size of the source file.    (click chart for full size image) The above is another view of the same data as the prior chart just with the axis changed (x-axis represents file size and plotted data shows improvement by block size). It again highlights the fact that the 1MB block size is probably the best overall size but highlights the benefits of some of the other block sizes at different source file sizes. This last chart shows the change in total duration of the file uploads based on different block sizes for the source file sizes. Nothing really new here other than this view of the data highlights the negative affects of poorly choosing a block size for smaller files.   Summary What we have found so far is that blocking your file uploads and uploading them in parallel results in significant performance improvements. Further, utilizing extension methods and the Task Parallel Library (.NET 4.0) make short work of altering the shipping client library to provide this functionality while minimizing the amount of change to existing applications that might be using the client library for other interactions.   Related Resources Source code for upload test application Source code for random file generator ODatas feed of raw data from non-optimized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets 2KB Uploads 32KB Uploads 64KB Uploads 128KB Uploads 256KB Uploads 512KB Uploads 1MB Uploads 5MB Uploads 10MB Uploads 25MB Uploads 50MB Uploads 100MB Uploads 250MB Uploads 500MB Uploads 750MB Uploads 1GB Uploads Raw Data OData feeds of raw data from blocked/parallelized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets Raw Data 256KB Blocks 512KB Blocks 1MB Blocks 2MB Blocks 4MB Blocks Excel worksheet showing summarizations and comparisons

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• The Future of Project Management is Social

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Kazim Isfahani, Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Rapid Ascent. Breakneck Speed. Lightning Fast. Perhaps even overwhelming. No matter which set of adjectives we use to describe it, social media’s rise into the enterprise mainstream has been unprecedented. Indeed, the big 4 social media powerhouses (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter), have nearly 2 Billion users between them. You may be asking (as you should really) “That’s all well and good for the consumer, but for me at my company, what’s your point? Beyond the fact that I can check and post updates, that is.” Good question, kind sir. Impact of Social and Collaboration on Project Management I’ll dovetail this discussion to the project management realm, since that’s what I’m writing about. Speed is a big challenge for project-driven organizations. Anything that can help speed up project delivery - be it a new product introduction effort or a geographical expansion project - fast is a good thing. So where does this whole social thing fit particularly since there are already a host of tools to help with traditional project execution? The fact is companies have seen improvements in their productivity by deploying departmental collaboration and other social-oriented solutions. McKinsey’s survey on social tools shows we have reached critical scale: 72% of respondents report that their companies use at least one and over 40% say they are using social networks and blogs. We don’t hear as much about the impact of social media technologies at the project and project manager level, but that does not mean there is none. Consider the new hire. The type of individual entering the workforce and executing on projects is a generation of worker expecting visually appealing, easy to use and easy to understand technology meshing hand-in-hand with business processes. Consider the project manager. The social era has enhanced the role that the project manager must play. Today’s project manager must be a supreme communicator, an influencer, a sympathizer, a negotiator, and still manage to keep all stakeholders in the loop on project progress. Social tools play a significant role in this effort. Now consider the impact to the project team. The way that a project team functions has changed, with newer, social oriented technologies making the process of information dissemination and team communications much more fluid. It’s clear that a shift is occurring where “social” is intersecting with project management. The Rise of Social Project Management We refer to the melding of project management and social networking as Social Project Management. Social Project Management is based upon the philosophy that the project team is one part of an integrated whole, and that valuable and unique abilities exist within the larger organization. For this reason, Social Project Management systems should be integrated into the collaborative platform(s) of an organization, allowing communication to proceed outside the project boundaries. What makes social project management "social" is an implicit awareness where distributed teams build connected links in ways that were previously restricted to teams that were co-located. Just as critical, Social Project Management embraces the vision of seamless online collaboration within a project team, but also provides for, (and enhances) the use of rigorous project management techniques. Social Project Management acknowledges that projects (particularly large projects) are a social activity - people doing work with people, for other people, with commitments to yet other people. The more people (larger projects), the more interpersonal the interactions, and the more social affects the project. The Epitome of Social - Fusion Project Portfolio Management If I take this one level further to discuss Fusion Project Portfolio Management, the notion of Social Project Management is on full display. With Fusion Project Portfolio Management, project team members have a single place for interaction on projects and access to any other resources working within the Fusion ERP applications. This allows team members the opportunity to be informed with greater participation and provide better information. The application’s the visual appeal, and highly graphical nature makes it easy to navigate information. The project activity stream adds to the intuitive user experience. The goal of productivity is pervasive throughout Fusion Project Portfolio Management. Field research conducted with Oracle customers and partners showed that users needed a way to stay in the context of their core transactions and yet easily access social networking tools. This is manifested in the application so when a user executes a business process, they not only have the transactional application at their fingertips, but also have things like e-mail, SMS, text, instant messaging, chat – all providing a number of different ways to interact with people and/or groups of people, both internal and external to the project and enterprise. But in the end, connecting people is relatively easy. The larger issue is finding a way to serve up relevant, system-generated, actionable information, in real time, which will allow for more streamlined execution on key business processes. Fusion Project Portfolio Management’s design concept enables users to create project communities, establish discussion threads, manage event calendars as well as deliver project based work spaces to organize communications within the context of a project – all within a secure business environment. We’d love to hear from you and get your thoughts and ideas about how Social Project Management is impacting your organization. To learn more about Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management, please visit this link

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• Moving from Tortoise to TFS

  - by MarkPearl

  The Past A few years ago my small software company made the jump from storing code on a shared folder to source code control. At the time we had evaluated a few of the options and settled on Tortoise SVN. The main motivation for going the SVN route was that we found a great plugin for Visual Studio that allowed us to avoid the command prompt for uploading changes (like I said we are windows programmers… command prompt bad!! ) and it was free. Up to now we have been pretty happy with SVN as it removed many of the worries that I had about how safe my code was on a shared folder and also gave us the opportunity to safely have several developers work on the same project at the same time. The only times when we have been unhappy has been when we have had SVN hell days – which pretty much occur when you are doing something out of the norm and suddenly SVN just won’t resolve conflicts or something along those lines. This happens once every 4 or 5 months and is not necessarily a problem caused directly by SVN – but a problem augmented by SVN. When you have SVN hell days you want to curse SVN! With that in mind I recently have been relooking at our source code control. I have explored using GIT and was very impressed by it and have also looked at TFS. From a source code control perspective I don’t want to get into a heated discussion on which one is better – but I do want to mention that I wear two hats in my organization – software developer & manager, and with the manager hat on I tend to sway the TFS route. So when I was given a coupon to test DiscountASP.Net Team Foundation Server Service for a year, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try TFS in a distributed environment and also make the first step towards having an integrated development management system. Some of the things that appeal to me about DiscountASP’s offering are the following… Basic management / planning facilities like to do lists inside Visual Studio Daily backup of data on the server – we are developers, not IT managers and so the more of this I could outsource the better Distributed solution – all of us work remotely and so this was a big one as well. Registering and Setting Up with DiscountASP.NET The whole registration process was simple and intuitive. The web interface is not the most visually impressive one, but it is functional and a few seconds after I clicked the last submit button a email was sitting in my inbox giving me my control panel username and suggesting that I read the “Getting Started” article. The getting started article was easy to read and understand so no complaints there either. Next to set my dev environment to work. With a few references to the getting started article I had completed the whole setup process in a matter of minutes. Ten minutes after initiating the whole thing I was logged into VS2010 and creating my first TFS project. With the service that I signed up for, I have access for 5 users – which is sufficient for my internal needs. So from what I can tell, to set the rest of us up on the system I just need to supply them with their user credentials and url. My Concerns Resolved 1) Security So, a few concerns I had about the service. First and foremost – is it secure? I would hate for someone to get access to our code and the whole idea of putting it up on the internet is a concern for me. Turning to the Knowledge Base on the DiscountASP website this is one of the first question I can see answered. According to them it is secure. I have extracted their comment below regarding this. Our TFS hosting service is secure. We only accept HTTPS connections ensuring that any client-server data transmission is encrypted. At the network level, all of our systems are protected by multiple Juniper firewalls, Tipping Point's Intrusion Detection System (see Tipping Point's case study of our use here), and we also employ DDoS mitigation to add extra layers of security. Additionally, physical access to the servers is tightly restricted. Please see the security section of this Knowledge Base article for further details. 2) Web Portal Access The other big concern I have is regarding web portal access. In the ideal world I would like to be able to give my end users access to a web portal for reporting bugs etc. When I initially read through the FAQ of the site it mentioned that there was web portal access – but from what I can see this is just for “users”. Since I am limited to 5 users for the account, it would not be practical to set up external users that we could get feedback from on bugs etc. I would be interested if this is possible – and if so if someone could post it in the comments it would be much appreciated. If this isn’t possible, it is a slight let down as we rely heavily on end user feedback to get feedback and it would have been ideal to have gotten this within the service. Other than those two items, I didn’t have any real concerns that were unresolved. So where do I go from here? So time passed by from the initial writing of this post and as work whirred in and out of my inbox I have still not had a proper opportunity to give the service a test run. Recently though things have began to slow down and then surprise surprise I had another SVN Hell day. With that experience I had a new found resolve to get our team on TFS and so today we are going to start to use the service as a team. I am hoping that I do not have TFS hell days – but if I do, I will be sure to write about them. In short - the verdict is still out on whether this service is going to be invaluable to my business or whether it will create more headaches than it is worth BUT I am hopping it will be an invaluable service. I will only really be able to determine that in a few months… till then!

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• Refactoring Part 1 : Intuitive Investments

  - by Wes McClure

  Fear, it’s what turns maintaining applications into a nightmare.  Technology moves on, teams move on, someone is left to operate the application, what was green is now perceived brown.  Eventually the business will evolve and changes will need to be made.  The approach to those changes often dictates the long term viability of the application.  Fear of change, lack of passion and a lack of interest in understanding the domain often leads to a paranoia to do anything that doesn’t involve duct tape and bailing twine.  Don’t get me wrong, those have a place in the short term viability of a project but they don’t have a place in the long term.  Add to it “us versus them” in regards to the original team and those that maintain it, internal politics and other factors and you have a recipe for disaster.  This results in code that quickly becomes unmanageable.  Even the most clever of designs will eventually become sub optimal and debt will amount that exponentially makes changes difficult.  This is where refactoring comes in, and it’s something I’m very passionate about.  Refactoring is about improving the process whereby we make change, it’s an exponential investment in the process of change. Without it we will incur exponential complexity that halts productivity. Investments, especially in the long term, require intuition and reflection.  How can we tackle new development effectively via evolving the original design and paying off debt that has been incurred? The longer we wait to ask and answer this question, the more it will cost us.  Small requests don’t warrant big changes, but realizing when changes now will pay off in the long term, and especially in the short term, is valuable. I have done my fair share of maintaining applications and continuously refactoring as needed, but recently I’ve begun work on a project that hasn’t had much debt, if any, paid down in years.  This is the first in a series of blog posts to try to capture the process which is largely driven by intuition of smaller refactorings from other projects. Signs that refactoring could help: Testability How can decreasing test time not pay dividends? One of the first things I found was that a very important piece often takes 30+ minutes to test.  I can only imagine how much time this has cost historically, but more importantly the time it might cost in the coming weeks: I estimate at least 10-20 hours per person!  This is simply unacceptable for almost any situation.  As it turns out, about 6 hours of working with this part of the application and I was able to cut the time down to under 30 seconds!  In less than the lost time of one week, I was able to fix the problem for all future weeks! If we can’t test fast then we can’t change fast, nor with confidence. Code is used by end users and it’s also used by developers, consider your own needs in terms of the code base.  Adding logic to enable/disable features during testing can help decouple parts of an application and lead to massive improvements.  What exactly is so wrong about test code in real code?  Often, these become features for operators and sometimes end users.  If you cannot run an integration test within a test runner in your IDE, it’s time to refactor. Readability Are variables named meaningfully via a ubiquitous language? Is the code segmented functionally or behaviorally so as to minimize the complexity of any one area? Are aspects properly segmented to avoid confusion (security, logging, transactions, translations, dependency management etc) Is the code declarative (what) or imperative (how)?  What matters, not how.  LINQ is a great abstraction of the what, not how, of collection manipulation.  The Reactive framework is a great example of the what, not how, of managing streams of data. Are constants abstracted and named, or are they just inline? Do people constantly bitch about the code/design? If the code is hard to understand, it will be hard to change with confidence.  It’s a large undertaking if the original designers didn’t pay much attention to readability and as such will never be done to “completion.”  Make sure not to go over board, instead use this as you change an application, not in lieu of changes (like with testability). Complexity Simplicity will never be achieved, it’s highly subjective.  That said, a lot of code can be significantly simplified, tidy it up as you go.  Refactoring will often converge upon a simplification step after enough time, keep an eye out for this. Understandability In the process of changing code, one often gains a better understanding of it.  Refactoring code is a good way to learn how it works.  However, it’s usually best in combination with other reasons, in effect killing two birds with one stone.  Often this is done when readability is poor, in which case understandability is usually poor as well.  In the large undertaking we are making with this legacy application, we will be replacing it.  Therefore, understanding all of its features is important and this refactoring technique will come in very handy. Unused code How can deleting things not help? This is a freebie in refactoring, it’s very easy to detect with modern tools, especially in statically typed languages.  We have VCS for a reason, if in doubt, delete it out (ok that was cheesy)! If you don’t know where to start when refactoring, this is an excellent starting point! Duplication Do not pray and sacrifice to the anti-duplication gods, there are excellent examples where consolidated code is a horrible idea, usually with divergent domains.  That said, mediocre developers live by copy/paste.  Other times features converge and aren’t combined.  Tools for finding similar code are great in the example of copy/paste problems.  Knowledge of the domain helps identify convergent concepts that often lead to convergent solutions and will give intuition for where to look for conceptual repetition. 80/20 and the Boy Scouts It’s often said that 80% of the time 20% of the application is used most.  These tend to be the parts that are changed.  There are also parts of the code where 80% of the time is spent changing 20% (probably for all the refactoring smells above).  I focus on these areas any time I make a change and follow the philosophy of the Boy Scout in cleaning up more than I messed up.  If I spend 2 hours changing an application, in the 20%, I’ll always spend at least 15 minutes cleaning it or nearby areas. This gives a huge productivity edge on developers that don’t. Ironically after a short period of time the 20% shrinks enough that we don’t have to spend 80% of our time there and can move on to other areas.   Refactoring is highly subjective, never attempt to refactor to completion!  Learn to be comfortable with leaving one part of the application in a better state than others.  It’s an evolution, not a revolution.  These are some simple areas to look into when making changes and can help get one started in the process.  I’ve often found that refactoring is a convergent process towards simplicity that sometimes spans a few hours but often can lead to massive simplifications over the timespan of weeks and months of regular development.

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• Experiences with learning Chinese

  - by Greg Low

  I've had a few friends asking me about learning Chinese and what I've found works and doesn't work. I was answering a question on a mailing list today and I thought I should post this info where it might be useful to many. The question that was initially asked was whether Rosetta Stone was useful but I've provided much more info on learning the language here. I’ve used Rosetta Stone with Chinese but it’s really hard to know whether to recommend it or not. Rosetta Stone works the same way in all languages. They show you photos and then let you both see and hear the target language and get you to work out what they’re talking about. The thinking is that that’s how children learn. However, at first, I found it very frustrating. I’d be staring at photos trying to work out what they were really trying to get at. Sometimes it’s far from obvious. I could not have survived without Google Translate open at the same time. The other weird thing is that the photos are from a mixture of countries. While that’s good in a way, it also means that they are endlessly showing pictures of something that would never happen in the target language and culture. For any language, constant interaction with a speaker of the target language is needed. Rosetta Stone has a “Studio” option. That’s the best part of the program. In my case, it lets me connect around twice a week to a live online class from Beijing. Classes usually have the teacher plus two to four students. You get some Studio access with the initial packages but need to purchase it for ongoing use. I find it very inexpensive. It seems to work out to about $70 (AUD/USD) for six months. That’s a real bargain. The other downside to Rosetta Stone is that they tend to teach very formal language, but as with other languages, that’s not how the locals speak. It might have been correct at one point but no-one actually says that. As an example, Rosetta Stone teach Gonggòng qìche (pronounced roughly like “gong gong chee chure” for bus. Most of my friends from areas like Taiwan would just say Gongche. Google Translate says Zongxiàn (pronounced somewhat like “dzong sheean”) instead. Mind you, the Rosetta Stone option isn't really as bad as "omnibus"; it's more like saying "public bus". If you say the option they provide, people would understand you. I also listen to ChinesePod in the car. They also have SpanishPod. Each podcast is about five minutes of spoken conversation. It is very good for providing current language. Another resource I use is local Meetup groups. Most cities have these and for a variety of languages. It’s way less structured (just standard conversation) but good for getting interaction. The obvious challenge for Asian languages is reading/writing. The input editors for Chinese that are part of Windows are excellent. Many of my Chinese friends speak fluently but cannot read or write. I was determined to learn to do both. For writing, I’m talking about on a computer, not with a pen. (Mind you, I can barely write English with a pen nowadays). When using Rosetta Stone, you can choose to have the Chinese words displayed in pinyin (Wo xihuan xuéxí zhongguó) or in Chinese characters (???????) or both. This year, I’ve been forcing myself to just use the Chinese characters. I use a pinyin input editor in Windows though, as it’s very fast.  (The character recognition input in the iPad is also amazing). Notice from the example that I provided above that the pronunciation of the pinyin isn’t that obvious to us at first either.  Since changing to only using characters, I find I can now read many more Chinese characters fluently. It’s a major challenge though. I can read about 300 now and yet you need around 2,500 to be able to read a newspaper fairly well. Tones are a major issue for some Asian languages. Mandarin has four tones (plus a neutral tone) and there is a major difference in meaning between two words that are spelled the same in pinyin but with different tones. For example, Ma (3rd tone?) is a horse, Ma (1st tone?) is like “mom”, and ma (neutral tone?) is a question mark and so on. Clearly you don’t want to mix these up. As in English, they also have words that do sound the same but mean different things in different contexts. What’s interesting is that even though we see two words that differ only by tone as very similar, to a native speaker, if you say the right words with the wrong tone, you might as well have said a completely different word. My wife’s dialect of Chinese has eight tones. It’s much worse. The reason I’m so keen to learn to read/write Chinese is that even though the different dialects are pronounced so differently that speakers of one dialect often cannot understand another dialect, the writing is generally the same. The only difference is that many years ago, the Chinese government created a simplified set of characters for some of the most commonly used ones. Older Chinese and most Cantonese speakers often struggle with the simplified characters. This is the simplified form of “three apples”: ????   This is the traditional form of the same words: ????  Note that two of the characters are the same but the middle two are quite different. For most languages, the best thing is to watch current movies in the target language but to watch them with the target language as subtitles, not your native language. You want to know what they actually said, not what it roughly means (which is what the English subtitle would give you). The difficulty with Asian languages like Chinese is that you have the added challenge of understanding the subtitles when they are written in the target language. I wish there were Mandarin Chinese movies with pinyin subtitles. For learning to read characters, I also recommend HanCard on the iPad. It is targeted at the HSK language proficiency levels. (I’m intending to take the first HSK exam as soon as I’m ready). Hope that info helps someone get started.  

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• Benchmarking MySQL Replication with Multi-Threaded Slaves

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 1145 6530 Homework 54 15 7660 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} The objective of this benchmark is to measure the performance improvement achieved when enabling the Multi-Threaded Slave enhancement delivered as a part MySQL 5.6. As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves delivers 5x higher replication performance based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For real-world deployments, higher replication performance directly translates to: · Improved consistency of reads from slaves (i.e. reduced risk of reading "stale" data) · Reduced risk of data loss should the master fail before replicating all events in its binary log (binlog) The multi-threaded slave splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads that isolate application data using databases - e.g. multi-tenant systems deployed in cloud environments. Multi-Threaded Slaves are just one of many enhancements to replication previewed as part of the MySQL 5.6 Development Release, which include: · Global Transaction Identifiers coupled with MySQL utilities for automatic failover / switchover and slave promotion · Crash Safe Slaves and Binlog · Optimized Row Based Replication · Replication Event Checksums · Time Delayed Replication These and many more are discussed in the “MySQL 5.6 Replication: Enabling the Next Generation of Web & Cloud Services” Developer Zone article  Back to the benchmark - details are as follows. Environment The test environment consisted of two Linux servers: · one running the replication master · one running the replication slave. Only the slave was involved in the actual measurements, and was based on the following configuration: - Hardware: Oracle Sun Fire X4170 M2 Server - CPU: 2 sockets, 6 cores with hyper-threading, 2930 MHz. - OS: 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.1 - Memory: 48 GB Test Procedure Initial Setup: Two MySQL servers were started on two different hosts, configured as replication master and slave. 10 sysbench schemas were created, each with a single table: CREATE TABLE `sbtest` (    `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,    `k` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',    `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    PRIMARY KEY (`id`),    KEY `k` (`k`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 10,000 rows were inserted in each of the 10 tables, for a total of 100,000 rows. When the inserts had replicated to the slave, the slave threads were stopped. The slave data directory was copied to a backup location and the slave threads position in the master binlog noted. 10 sysbench clients, each configured with 10 threads, were spawned at the same time to generate a random schema load against each of the 10 schemas on the master. Each sysbench client executed 10,000 "update key" statements: UPDATE sbtest set k=k+1 WHERE id = <random row> In total, this generated 100,000 update statements to later replicate during the test itself. Test Methodology: The number of slave workers to test with was configured using: SET GLOBAL slave_parallel_workers=<workers> Then the slave IO thread was started and the test waited for all the update queries to be copied over to the relay log on the slave. The benchmark clock was started and then the slave SQL thread was started. The test waited for the slave SQL thread to finish executing the 100k update queries, doing "select master_pos_wait()". When master_pos_wait() returned, the benchmark clock was stopped and the duration calculated. The calculated duration from the benchmark clock should be close to the time it took for the SQL thread to execute the 100,000 update queries. The 100k queries divided by this duration gave the benchmark metric, reported as Queries Per Second (QPS). Test Reset: The test-reset cycle was implemented as follows: · the slave was stopped · the slave data directory replaced with the previous backup · the slave restarted with the slave threads replication pointer repositioned to the point before the update queries in the binlog. The test could then be repeated with identical set of queries but a different number of slave worker threads, enabling a fair comparison. The Test-Reset cycle was repeated 3 times for 0-24 number of workers and the QPS metric calculated and averaged for each worker count. MySQL Configuration The relevant configuration settings used for MySQL are as follows: binlog-format=STATEMENT relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE As described in the test procedure, the slave_parallel_workers setting was modified as part of the test logic. The consequence of changing this setting is: 0 worker threads:    - current (i.e. single threaded) sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread and 1 x SQL thread    - SQL thread both reads and executes the events 1 worker thread:    - sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 1 x Worker thread    - coordinator reads the event and hands it to the worker who executes 2+ worker threads:    - parallel execution    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 2+ Worker threads    - coordinator reads events and hands them to the workers who execute them Results Figure 1 below shows that Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver ~5x higher replication performance when configured with 10 worker threads, with the load evenly distributed across our 10 x schemas. This result is compared to the current replication implementation which is based on a single SQL thread only (i.e. zero worker threads). Figure 1: 5x Higher Performance with Multi-Threaded Slaves The following figure shows more detailed results, with QPS sampled and reported as the worker threads are incremented. The raw numbers behind this graph are reported in the Appendix section of this post. Figure 2: Detailed Results As the results above show, the configuration does not scale noticably from 5 to 9 worker threads. When configured with 10 worker threads however, scalability increases significantly. The conclusion therefore is that it is desirable to configure the same number of worker threads as schemas. Other conclusions from the results: · Running with 1 worker compared to zero workers just introduces overhead without the benefit of parallel execution. · As expected, having more workers than schemas adds no visible benefit. Aside from what is shown in the results above, testing also demonstrated that the following settings had a very positive effect on slave performance: relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE For 5+ workers, it was up to 2.3 times as fast to run with TABLE compared to FILE. Conclusion As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver significant performance increases to MySQL replication when handling multiple schemas. This, and the other replication enhancements introduced in MySQL 5.6 are fully available for you to download and evaluate now from the MySQL Developer site (select Development Release tab). You can learn more about MySQL 5.6 from the documentation  Please don’t hesitate to comment on this or other replication blogs with feedback and questions. Appendix – Detailed Results

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 16, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 16, 2012Popular ReleasesCosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System): Release 92560: Prerequisites Visual Studio 2010 - Any version including Express. Express users must also install Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Shell runtime VMWare - Cosmos can run on real hardware as well as other virtualization environments but our default debug setup is configured for VMWare. VMWare Player (Free). or Workstation VMWare VIX API 1.11AutoUpdaterdotNET : Autoupdate for VB.NET and C# Developer: AutoUpdater.NET 1.1: Release Notes *New feature added that allows user to select remind later interval.Sumzlib: API document: API documentMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks 2008 OLTP Script: Install AdventureWorks2008 OLTP database from script The AdventureWorks database can be created by running the instawdb.sql DDL script contained in the AdventureWorks 2008 OLTP Script.zip file. The instawdb.sql script depends on two path environment variables: SqlSamplesDatabasePath and SqlSamplesSourceDataPath. The SqlSamplesDatabasePath environment variable is set to the default Microsoft ® SQL Server 2008 path. You will need to change the SqlSamplesSourceDataPath environment variable to th...HigLabo: HigLabo_20120613: Bug fix HigLabo.Mail Decode header encoded by CP1252Jasc (just another script compressor): 1.3.1: Updated Ajax Minifier to 4.55.WipeTouch, a jQuery touch plugin: 1.2.0: Changes since 1.1.0: New: wipeMove event, triggered while moving the mouse/finger. New: added "source" to the result object. Bug fix: sometimes vertical wipe events would not trigger correctly. Bug fix: improved tapToClick handler. General code refactoring. Windows Phone 7 is not supported, yet! Its behaviour is completely broken and would require some special tricks to make it work. Maybe in the future...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0.0.3026 (June 2012): Fixes: round( 0.0 ) local TimeZone name TimeZone search compiling multi-script-assemblies PhpString serialization DocDocument::loadHTMLFile() token_get_all() parse_url()BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.4: 2012.06.13 Ver5.6.4 　(1) Web???????、???POST??????????????????Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 2.0.0.0 - Ferret: - Merging both 3.5 and 2.0 codebases to a single .NET 2.0 assembly. - MSBuild Task. - NAnt Task.Bumblebee: Version 0.3.1: Changed default config values to decent ones. Restricted visibility of Hive.fs to internal. Added some XML documentation. Added Array.shuffle utility. The dll is also available on NuGet My apologies, the initial source code referenced was missing one file which prevented it from building The source code contains two examples, one in C#, one in F#, illustrating the usage of the framework on the Travelling Salesman Problem: Source CodeSharePoint XSL Templates: SPXSLT 0.0.9: Added new template FixAmpersands. Fixed the contents of the MultiSelectValueCheck.xsl file, which was missing the stylesheet wrapper.ExcelFileEditor: .CS File: nothingBizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter: Release 4.0: Works with BizTalk Server 2010. Compiled in .NET Framework 4.0. In this new version are available small improvements compared to the current version (3.0). We can highlight the following improvements or changes: 24 hours support in “start time” property. Previous versions had an issue with setting the start time, as it shown 12 hours watch but no AM/PM. Daily scheduler review. Solved a small bug on Daily Properties: unable to switch between “Every day” and “on these days” Installation e...Weapsy - ASP.NET MVC CMS: 1.0.0 RC: - Upgrade to Entity Framework 4.3.1 - Added AutoMapper custom version (by nopCommerce Team) - Added missed model properties and localization resources of Plugin Definitions - Minor changes - Fixed some bugsXenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.8.0 Beta: Catalog and Publication reviews and ratings Store language packs in data base Improve reporting system Improve Import/Export system A lot of WebAdmin app UI improvements Initial implementation of the WebForum app DB indexes Improve and simplify architecture Less abstractions Modernize architecture Improve, simplify and unify API Simplify and improve testing A lot of new unit tests Codebase refactoring and ReSharpering Utilize Castle Windsor Utilize NHibernate ORM ...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.55: Properly handle IE extension to CSS3 grammar that allows for multiple parameters to functional pseudo-class selectors. add new switch -braces:(new|same) that affects where opening braces are placed in multi-line output. The default, "new" puts them on their own new line; "same" outputs them at the end of the previous line. add new optional values to the -inline switch: -inline:(force|noforce), which can be combined with the existing boolean value via comma-separators; value "force" (which...Microsoft Media Platform: Player Framework: MMP Player Framework 2.7 (Silverlight and WP7): Additional DownloadsSMFv2.7 Full Installer (MSI) - This will install everything you need in order to develop your own SMF player application, including the IIS Smooth Streaming Client. It only includes the assemblies. If you want the source code please follow the link above. Smooth Streaming Sample Player - This is a pre-built player that includes support for IIS Smooth Streaming. You can configure the player to playback your content by simplying editing a configuration file - no need to co...Liberty: v3.2.1.0 Release 10th June 2012: Change Log -Added -Liberty is now digitally signed! If the certificate on Liberty.exe is missing, invalid, or does not state that it was developed by "Xbox Chaos, Open Source Developer," your copy of Liberty may have been altered in some (possibly malicious) way. -Reach Mass biped max health and shield changer -Fixed -H3/ODST Fixed all of the glitches that users kept reporting (also reverted the changes made in 3.2.0.2) -Reach Made some tag names clearer and more consistent between m...Media Companion: Media Companion 3.503b: It has been a while, so it's about time we release another build! Major effort has been for fixing trailer downloads, plus a little bit of work for episode guide tag in TV show NFOs.New Projects.NinJa (dotNinja): An extensive JavaScript Framework revolving around principles found in .NET and aiming to integrate full Intellisense support. bab-rizg: solve unemployment problemBizTalk Multi-part Message Attachments Zipper Pipeline Component: This pipeline component replaces all attachments of a multi-part message, in a send pipeline, for its zipped equivalent.Boggle.Net: A basic implementation of Boggle for WPF.CFScript: CFScript is an ANT-like scripting system for Compact Framework. Tasks like copying files, setting registry values o install CAB files can be done with CFScript.Diablo3: Diablo3Dygraphs.NET: Dygraphs.NETDynamics CRM plugin for nopCommerce: This plugins is a bridge between nopCommerce and Dynamics CRM. nms.gaming: Place holderProject Bright Star: Project Bright Star. Deal with it.RDFSharp: RDFSharp is a library designed to ease the development of .NET applications based on the RDF and Semantic Web data model.SlamCMS: An application framework that allows you to build content managed sites leveraging SharePoint 2010 for publishing with tools to query and manifest your data.test02: no

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• Community Outreach - Where Should I Go

  - by Roger Brinkley

  A few days ago I was talking to person new to community development and they asked me what guidelines I used to determine the worthiness of a particular event. After our conversation was over I thought about it a little bit more and figured out there are three ways to determine if any event (be it conference, blog, podcast or other social medias) is worth doing: Transferability, Multiplication, and Impact. Transferability - Is what I have to say useful to the people that are going to hear it. For instance, consider a company that has product offering that can connect up using a number of languages like Scala, Grovey or Java. Sending a Scala expert to talk about Scala and the product is not transferable to a Java User Group, but a Java expert doing the same talk with a Java slant is. Similarly, talking about JavaFX to any Java User Group meeting in Brazil was pretty much a wasted effort until it was open sourced. Once it was open sourced it was well received. You can also look at transferability in relation to the subject matter that you're dealing with. How transferable is a presentation that I create. Can I, or a technical writer on the staff, turn it into some technical document. Could it be converted into some type of screen cast. If we have a regular podcast can we make a reference to the document, catch the high points or turn it into a interview. Is there a way of using this in the sales group. In other words is the document purely one dimensional or can it be re-purposed in other forms. Multiplication - On every trip I'm looking for 2 to 5 solid connections that I can make with developers. These are long term connections, because I know that once that relationship is established it will lead to another 2 - 5 from that connection and within a couple of years were talking about some 100 connections from just one developer. For instance, when I was working on JavaHelp in 2000 I hired a science teacher with a programming background. We've developed a very tight relationship over the year though we rarely see each other more than once a year. But at this JavaOne, one of his employees came up to me and said, "Richard (Rick Hard in Czech) told me to tell you that he couldn't make it to JavaOne this year but if I saw you to tell you hi". Another example is from my Mobile & Embedded days in Brasil. On our very first FISL trip about 5 years ago there were two university students that had created a project called "Marge". Marge was a Bluetooth framework that made connecting bluetooth devices easier. I invited them to a "Sun" dinner that evening. Originally they were planning on leaving that afternoon, but they changed their plans recognizing the opportunity. Their eyes were as big a saucers when they realized the level of engineers at the meeting. They went home started a JUG in Florianoplis that we've visited more than a couple of times. One of them went to work for Brazilian government lab like Berkley Labs, MIT Lab, John Hopkins Applied Physicas Labs or Lincoln Labs in the US. That presented us with an opportunity to show Embedded Java as a possibility for some of the work they were doing there. Impact - The final criteria is how life changing is what I'm going to say be to the individuals I'm reaching. A t-shirt is just a token, but when I reach down and tug at their developer hearts then I know I've succeeded. I'll never forget one time we flew all night to reach Joan Pasoa in Northern Brazil. We arrived at 2am went immediately to our hotel only to be woken up at 6 am to travel 2 hours by car to the presentation hall. When we arrived we were totally exhausted. Outside the facility there were 500 people lined up to hear 6 speakers for the day. That itself was uplifting.  I delivered one of my favorite talks on "I have passion". It was a talk on golf and embedded java development, "Find your passion". When we finished a couple of first year students came up to me and said how much my talk had inspired them. FISL is another great example. I had been about 4 years in a row. FISL is a very young group of developers so capturing their attention is important. Several of the students will come back 2 or 3 years later and ask me questions about research or jobs. And then there's Louis. Louis is one my favorite Brazilians. I can only describe him as a big Brazilian teddy bear. I see him every year at FISL. He works primarily in Java EE but he's attended every single one of my talks over the last 4 years. I can't tell you why, but he always greets me and gives me a hug. For some reason I've had a real impact. And of course when it comes to impact you don't just measure a presentation but every single interaction you have at an event. It's the hall way conversations, the booth conversations, but more importantly it's the conversations at dinner tables or in the cars when you're getting transported to an event. There's a good story that illustrates this. Last year in the spring I was traveling to Goiânia in Brazil. I've been there many times and leaders there no me well. One young man has picked me up at the airport on more than one occasion. We were going out to dinner one evening and he brought his girl friend along. One thing let to another and I eventually asked him, in front of her, "Why haven't you asked her to marry you?" There were all kinds of excuses and she just looked at him and smiled. When I came back in December for JavaOne he came and sought me. "I just want to tell you that I thought a lot about what you said, and I asked her to marry me. We're getting married next Spring." Sometimes just one presentation is all it takes to make an impact. Other times it takes years. Some impacts are directly related to the company and some are more personal in nature. It doesn't matter which it is because it's having the impact that matters.

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• Five Key Strategies in Master Data Management

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Here is a very interesting Profit Magazine article on MDM: A recent customer survey reveals the deleterious effects of data fragmentation. by Trevor Naidoo, December 2010   Across industries and geographies, IT organizations have grown in complexity, whether due to mergers and acquisitions, or decentralized systems supporting functional or departmental requirements. With systems architected over time to support unique, one-off process needs, they are becoming costly to maintain, and the Internet has only further added to the complexity. Data fragmentation has become a key inhibitor in delivering flexible, user-friendly systems. The Oracle Insight team conducted a survey assessing customers' master data management (MDM) capabilities over the past two years to get a sense of where they are in terms of their capabilities. The responses, by 27 respondents from six different industries, reveal five key areas in which customers need to improve their data management in order to get better financial results. 1. Less than 15 percent of organizations surveyed understand the sources and quality of their master data, and have a roadmap to address missing data domains. Examples of the types of master data domains referred to are customer, supplier, product, financial and site. Many organizations have multiple sources of master data with varying degrees of data quality in each source -- customer data stored in the customer relationship management system is inconsistent with customer data stored in the order management system. Imagine not knowing how many places you stored your customer information, and whether a customer's address was the most up to date in each source. In fact, more than 55 percent of the respondents in the survey manage their data quality on an ad-hoc basis. It is important for organizations to document their inventory of data sources and then profile these data sources to ensure that there is a consistent definition of key data entities throughout the organization. Some questions to ask are: How do we define a customer? What is a product? How do we define a site? The goal is to strive for one common repository for master data that acts as a cross reference for all other sources and ensures consistent, high-quality master data throughout the organization. 2. Only 18 percent of respondents have an enterprise data management strategy to ensure that data is treated as an asset to the organization. Most respondents handle data at the department or functional level and do not have an enterprise view of their master data. The sales department may track all their interactions with customers as they move through the sales cycle, the service department is tracking their interactions with the same customers independently, and the finance department also has a different perspective on the same customer. The salesperson may not be aware that the customer she is trying to sell to is experiencing issues with existing products purchased, or that the customer is behind on previous invoices. The lack of a data strategy makes it difficult for business users to turn data into information via reports. Without the key building blocks in place, it is difficult to create key linkages between customer, product, site, supplier and financial data. These linkages make it possible to understand patterns. A well-defined data management strategy is aligned to the business strategy and helps create the governance needed to ensure that data stewardship is in place and data integrity is intact. 3. Almost 60 percent of respondents have no strategy to integrate data across operational applications. Many respondents have several disparate sources of data with no strategy to keep them in sync with each other. Even though there is no clear strategy to integrate the data (see #2 above), the data needs to be synced and cross-referenced to keep the business processes running. About 55 percent of respondents said they perform this integration on an ad hoc basis, and in many cases, it is done manually with the help of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. For example, a salesperson needs a report on global sales for a specific product, but the product has different product numbers in different countries. Typically, an analyst will pull all the data into Excel, manually create a cross reference for that product, and then aggregate the sales. The exact same procedure has to be followed if the same report is needed the following month. A well-defined consolidation strategy will ensure that a central cross-reference is maintained with updates in any one application being propagated to all the other systems, so that data is synchronized and up to date. This can be done in real time or in batch mode using integration technology. 4. Approximately 50 percent of respondents spend manual efforts cleansing and normalizing data. Information stored in various systems usually follows different standards and formats, making it difficult to match the data. A customer's address can be stored in different ways using a variety of abbreviations -- for example, "av" or "ave" for avenue. Similarly, a product's attributes can be stored in a number of different ways; for example, a size attribute can be stored in inches and can also be entered as "'' ". These types of variations make it difficult to match up data from different sources. Today, most customers rely on manual, heroic efforts to match, cleanse, and de-duplicate data -- clearly not a scalable, sustainable model. To solve this challenge, organizations need the ability to standardize data for customers, products, sites, suppliers and financial accounts; however, less than 10 percent of respondents have technology in place to automatically resolve duplicates. It is no wonder, therefore, that we get communications about products we don't own, at addresses we don't reside, and using channels (like direct mail) we don't like. An all-too-common example of a potential challenge follows: Customers end up receiving duplicate communications, which not only impacts customer satisfaction, but also incurs additional mailing costs. Cleansing, normalizing, and standardizing data will help address most of these issues. 5. Only 10 percent of respondents have the ability to share data that was mastered in a master data hub. Close to 60 percent of respondents have efforts in place that profile, standardize and cleanse data manually, and the output of these efforts are stored in spreadsheets in various parts of the organization. This valuable information is not easily shared with the rest of the organization and, more importantly, this enriched information cannot be sent back to the source systems so that the data is fixed at the source. A key benefit of a master data management strategy is not only to clean the data, but to also share the data back to the source systems as well as other systems that need the information. Aside from the source systems, another key beneficiary of this data is the business intelligence system. Having clean master data as input to business intelligence systems provides more accurate and enhanced reporting.  Characteristics of Stellar MDM When deciding on the right master data management technology, organizations should look for solutions that have four main characteristics: enterprise-grade MDM performance complete technology that can be rapidly deployed and addresses multiple business issues end-to-end MDM process management with data quality monitoring and assurance pre-built MDM business relevant applications with data stores and workflows These master data management capabilities will aid in moving closer to a best-practice maturity level, delivering tremendous efficiencies and savings as well as revenue growth opportunities as a result of better understanding your customers.  Trevor Naidoo is a senior director in Industry Strategy and Insight at Oracle. 

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• Oracle SOA Suite - Highlighted Travel and Transportation Customer References

  - by Bruce Tierney

  0 0 1 1137 6483 - 54 15 7605 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Next in this series on industry-specific highlights of Oracle SOA Suite customers is the Travel and Transportation industry.  If you are in the travel or transportation industry, take a look at how these Oracle SOA Suite integration customers have addressed common business requirements to enable better customer service, lower costs, and deliver new business services. For example, All Nippon Airways (ANA) has significantly lowered management costs associated with their hybrid on-premise/cloud ticketing system deployments for domestic and international flights. Their lead-time for changes or new applications has been greatly reduced compared to their old mainframe-based systems, enabling ANA to rapidly develop new services in response to changing market needs. Another example is Schneider National, a leading provider of truckload logistics, and how they have integrated Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management and customers applications using Oracle SOA Suite. Schneider National has 400 BPEL processes that generate over 60 million composite instances over five SOA clusters.  Take a deeper look into any of these case studies, videos, and Oracle Magazine articles that closely align with your industry:  Customers fly and airline succeeds with an IT transformation. Company:  All Nippon Airways  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on January 06, 2014 Any successful business must ensure ongoing customer satisfaction, respond to increased competition, and minimize costs. Running a successful airline in today’s economic climate requires all of those things, as well a... Openmatics Revolutionizes Fleet Management with Standards-Based Vehicle Telematics Platform New Company:  Openmatics s.r.o.  Customer Snapshot   |   Automotive   |   Published on May 20, 2014 Openmatics uses Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle Application Development Framework as a foundation for Openmatics, a vehicle telematics service for next-generation fleet management. It integrated its own app shop wi... Future Proof: To keep pace with mobile, social, and location-based services, smart technologists are using middleware to innovate Company:  SFpark  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Professional Services   |   Published on August 01, 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware is at the heart of a recently completed and very ambitious project to change how people handle the challenge of finding a parking space in San Francisco, California. “Parking is a universal is... Globalia Corporación Empresarial Accelerates Hotel Bookings, Boosts Sales by 40% with In-Memory Data Grid Solution Company:  Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 29, 2013 Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. deployed Oracle Coherence to reengineer the group’s core system for hotel bookings, now serving booking requests involving 80 hotels within an average response time of 100 millise... Choice Hotels Uses Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite to Modernize Global IT Architecture Company:  Choice Hotels  Press Release   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on August 07, 2012 Choice Hotels International, one of the largest and most successful hotel franchises in the world, has implemented Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite. Sascar Consolidates Fleet Management Infrastructure and Accelerates Customers’ Data Access Company:  Sascar  Customer Case Study   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 07, 2014 Description – Sascar used Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g to consolidate fleet management and perform real-time vehicle tracking 4x faster. Directorate General of Civil Aviation Streamlines Key Aviation Applications Access, Improves Productivity and Reduces Maintenance Costs Company:  Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC)  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on May 24, 2013 With Oracle Fusion Middleware, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) provided its 12,500 employees a virtual office environment that integrates team workspaces, business applications, and e-mails within a n... Schneider National Implements Next-Generation IT Infrastructure to Continue Leadership in Transportation and Logistics Industry Company:  Schneider National, Inc.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 26, 2013 Schneider National, Inc. deployed Oracle applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle development tools as the foundation for its next-generation IT environment, which is driving new levels of efficiency, profit... DGAC Cuts Subscription Costs with Oracle Company:  DGAC  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on October 31, 2012 Using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Exalogic, DGAC reduces the cost of subscriptions to newsletters and provide to its 12,500 employees a collaborative workspace portal. Asiana Airlines Builds PIP System with Oracle Solutions Company:  Asiana Airlines  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on July 26, 2012 With Oracle Exalogic and the Oracle SOA Suite, Asiana Airlines builds a passenger service integrated platform providing various services such as integration between its interface and internal systems and a data wareho... Choice Hotels Reduces Time to Market with Oracle WebCenter Company:  Choice Hotels  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 11, 2014 Using Oracle WebCenter and Oracle SOA standardization, Choice Hotels consolidated multiple platforms, reduced IT dependency and realized tremendous benefits in total cost of ownership and faster time to market support... An Interview with Schneider National's Judy Lemke Company:  Schneider National  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on December 17, 2013 Judy Lemke talks with Mark Sunday about the challenges Schneider National faced and how they overcame them through a companywide transformational change. For more details on these case studies, you can use this pre-filtered search on “Travel and Transportation” / “Middleware” / “Service Oriented Architecture” or browse on your own at www.oracle.com/customers

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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 3: Anonymous partial-trust consumer

  - by Elton Stoneman

  This is the third in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer As the patterns get further from the simple .NET full-trust consumer, all that changes is the communication protocol and the authentication mechanism. In Part 3 the scenario is that we still have a secure .NET environment consuming our service, so we can store shared keys securely, but the runtime environment is locked down so we can't use Microsoft.ServiceBus to get the nice WCF relay bindings. To support this we will expose a RESTful endpoint through the Azure Service Bus, and require the consumer to send a security token with each HTTP service request. Pattern applicability This is a good fit for scenarios where: the runtime environment is secure enough to keep shared secrets the consumer can execute custom code, including building HTTP requests with custom headers the consumer cannot use the Azure SDK assemblies the service may need to know who is consuming it the service does not need to know who the end-user is Note there isn't actually a .NET requirement here. By exposing the service in a REST endpoint, anything that can talk HTTP can be a consumer. We'll authenticate through ACS which also gives us REST endpoints, so the service is still accessed securely. Our real-world example would be a hosted cloud app, where we we have enough room in the app's customisation to keep the shared secret somewhere safe and to hook in some HTTP calls. We will be flowing an identity through to the on-premise service now, but it will be the service identity given to the consuming app - the end user's identity isn't flown through yet. In this post, we’ll consume the service from Part 1 in ASP.NET using the WebHttpRelayBinding. The code for Part 3 (+ Part 1) is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 3. Authenticating and authorizing with ACS We'll follow the previous examples and add a new service identity for the namespace in ACS, so we can separate permissions for different consumers (see walkthrough in Part 1). I've named the identity partialTrustConsumer. We’ll be authenticating against ACS with an explicit HTTP call, so we need a password credential rather than a symmetric key – for a nice secure option, generate a symmetric key, copy to the clipboard, then change type to password and paste in the key: We then need to do the same as in Part 2 , add a rule to map the incoming identity claim to an outgoing authorization claim that allows the identity to send messages to Service Bus: Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: partialTrustConsumer Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Send As with Part 2, this sets up a service identity which can send messages into Service Bus, but cannot register itself as a listener, or manage the namespace. RESTfully exposing the on-premise service through Azure Service Bus Relay The part 3 sample code is ready to go, just put your Azure details into Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml and “Run Custom Tool” on the .tt files.  But to do it yourself is very simple. We already have a WebGet attribute in the service for locally making REST calls, so we are just going to add a new endpoint which uses the WebHttpRelayBinding to relay that service through Azure. It's as easy as adding this endpoint to Web.config for the service:         <endpoint address="https://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/rest"                   binding="webHttpRelayBinding"                    contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService"                   behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret">         </endpoint> - and adding the webHttp attribute in your endpoint behavior:           <behavior name="SharedSecret">             <webHttp/>             <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">               <clientCredentials>                 <sharedSecret issuerName="serviceProvider"                               issuerSecret="gl0xaVmlebKKJUAnpripKhr8YnLf9Neaf6LR53N8uGs="/>               </clientCredentials>             </transportClientEndpointBehavior>           </behavior> Where's my WSDL? The metadata story for REST is a bit less automated. In our local webHttp endpoint we've enabled WCF's built-in help, so if you navigate to: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/help - you'll see the uri format for making a GET request to the service. The format is the same over Azure, so this is where you'll be connecting: https://[your-namespace].servicebus.windows.net/rest/reverse?string=abc123 Build the service with the new endpoint, open that in a browser and you'll get an XML version of an HTTP status code - a 401 with an error message stating that you haven’t provided an authorization header: <?xml version="1.0"?><Error><Code>401</Code><Detail>MissingToken: The request contains no authorization header..TrackingId:4cb53408-646b-4163-87b9-bc2b20cdfb75_5,TimeStamp:10/3/2012 8:34:07 PM</Detail></Error> By default, the setup of your Service Bus endpoint as a relying party in ACS expects a Simple Web Token to be presented with each service request, and in the browser we're not passing one, so we can't access the service. Note that this request doesn't get anywhere near your on-premise service, Service Bus only relays requests once they've got the necessary approval from ACS. Why didn't the consumer need to get ACS authorization in Part 2? It did, but it was all done behind the scenes in the NetTcpRelayBinding. By specifying our Shared Secret credentials in the consumer, the service call is preceded by a check on ACS to see that the identity provided is a) valid, and b) allowed access to our Service Bus endpoint. By making manual HTTP requests, we need to take care of that ACS check ourselves now. We do that with a simple WebClient call to the ACS endpoint of our service; passing the shared secret credentials, we will get back an SWT: var values = new System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection(); values.Add("wrap_name", "partialTrustConsumer"); //service identity name values.Add("wrap_password", "suCei7AzdXY9toVH+S47C4TVyXO/UUFzu0zZiSCp64Y="); //service identity password values.Add("wrap_scope", "http://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/"); //this is the realm of the RP in ACS var acsClient = new WebClient(); var responseBytes = acsClient.UploadValues("https://sixeyed-ipasbr-sb.accesscontrol.windows.net/WRAPv0.9/", "POST", values); rawToken = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(responseBytes); With a little manipulation, we then attach the SWT to subsequent REST calls in the authorization header; the token contains the Send claim returned from ACS, so we will be authorized to send messages into Service Bus. Running the sample Navigate to http://localhost:2028/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.WebHttpClient/Default.cshtml, enter a string and hit Go! - your string will be reversed by your on-premise service, routed through Azure: Using shared secret client credentials in this way means ACS is the identity provider for your service, and the claim which allows Send access to Service Bus is consumed by Service Bus. None of the authentication details make it through to your service, so your service is not aware who the consumer is (MSDN calls this "anonymous authentication").

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• Corsair Hackers Reboot

  It wasn't easy for me to attend but it was absolutely worth to go. The Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM) organised another get-together for any open source enthusiast here on the island. Strangely named "Corsair Hackers Reboot" but it stands for a positive cause: "Corsair Hackers Reboot Event A collaborative activity involving LUGM, UoM Computer Club, Fortune Way Shopping Mall and several geeks from around the island, striving to put FOSS into homes & offices. The public is invited to discover and explore Free Software & Open Source." And it was a good opportunity for me and the kids to visit the east coast of Mauritius, too. Perfect timing It couldn't have been better... Why? Well, for two important reasons (in terms of IT): End of support for Microsoft Windows XP - 08.04.2014 Release of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support - 17.04.2014 Quite funnily, those two IT dates weren't the initial reasons and only during the weeks of preparations we put those together. And therefore it was even more positive to promote the use of Linux and open source software in general to a broader audience. Getting there ... Thanks to the new motor way M3 and all the additional road work which has been completed recently it was very simple to get across the island in a very quick and relaxed manner. Compared to my trips in the early days of living in Mauritius (and riding on a scooter) it was very smooth and within less than an hour we hit Centrale de Flacq. Well, being in the city doesn't necessarily mean that one has arrived at the destination. But thanks to modern technology I had a quick look on Google Maps, and we finally managed to get a parking behind the huge bus terminal in Flacq. From there it was just a short walk to Fortune Way. The children were trying to count the number of buses... Well, lots and lots of buses - really impressive actually. What was presented? There were different areas set up. Right at the entrance one's attention was directly drawn towards the elevated hacker's stage. Similar to rock stars performing their gig there was bunch of computers, laptops and networking equipment in order to cater the right working conditions for coding/programming challenge(s) on the one hand and for the pen-testing or system hacking competition on the other hand. Personally, I was very impresses that actually Nitin took care of the pen-testing competition. He hardly started one year back with Linux in general, and Kali Linux specifically. Seeing his personal development from absolute newbie to a decent Linux system administrator within such a short period of time, is really impressive. His passion to open source software made him a living. Next, clock-wise seen, was the Kid's Corner with face-painting as the main attraction. Additionally, there were numerous paper print outs to colour. Plus a decent workstation with the educational suite GCompris. Of course, my little ones were into that. They already know GCompris since a while as they are allowed to use it on an IGEL thin client terminal here at home. To simplify my life, I set up GCompris as full-screen guest session on the server, and they can pass the login screen without any further obstacles. And because it's a thin client hooked up to a XDMCP remote session I don't have to worry about the hardware on their desk, too. The next section was the main attraction of the event: BYOD - Bring Your Own Device Well, compared to the usual context of BYOD the corsairs had a completely different intention. Here, you could bring your own laptop and a team of knowledgeable experts - read: geeks and so on - offered to fully convert your system on any Linux distribution of your choice. And even though I came later, I was told that the USB pen drives had been in permanent use. From being prepared via dd command over launching LiveCD session to finally installing a fresh Linux system on bare metal. Most interestingly, I did a similar job already a couple of months ago, while upgrading an existing Windows XP system to Xubuntu 13.10. So far, the female owner is very happy and enjoys her system almost every evening to go shopping online, checking mails, and reading latest news from the Anime world. Back to the Hackers event, Ish told me that they managed approximately 20 conversion during the day. Furthermore, Ajay and others gladly assisted some visitors with some tricky issues and by the end of the day you can call is a success. While I was around, there was a elderly male visitor that got a full-fledged system conversion to a Linux system running completely in French language. A little bit more to the centre it was Yasir's turn to demonstrate his Arduino hardware that he hooked up with an experimental electrical circuit board connected to an LCD matrix display. That's the real spirit of hacking, and he showed some minor adjustments on the fly while demo'ing the system. Also, very interesting there was a thermal sensor around. Personally, I think that platforms like the Arduino as well as the Raspberry Pi have a great potential at a very affordable price in order to bring a better understanding of electronics as well as computer programming to a broader audience. It would be great to see more of those experiments during future activities. And last but not least there were a small number of vendors. Amongst them was Emtel - once again as sponsor of the general internet connectivity - and another hardware supplier from Riche Terre shopping mall. They had a good collection of Android related gimmicks, like a autonomous web cam that can convert any TV with HDMI connector into an online video chat system given WiFi. It's actually kind of awesome to have a Skype or Google hangout video session on the big screen rather than on the laptop. Some pictures of the event LUGM: Great conversations on Linux, open source and free software during the Corsair Hackers Reboot LUGM: Educational workstation running GCompris suite attracted the youngest attendees of the day. Of course, face painting had to be done prior to hacking... LUGM: Nadim demoing some Linux specifics to interested visitors. Everyone was pretty busy during the whole day LUGM: The hacking competition, here pen-testing a wireless connection and access point between multiple machines LUGM: Well prepared workstations to be able to 'upgrade' visitors' machines to any Linux operating system Final thoughts Gratefully, during the preparations of the event I was invited to leave some comments or suggestions, and the team of the LUGM did a great job. The outdoor banner was a eye-catcher, the various flyers and posters for the event were clearly written and as far as I understood from the quick chats I had with Ish, Nadim, Nitin, Ajay, and of course others all were very happy about the event execution. Great job, LUGM! And I'm already looking forward to the next Corsair Hackers Reboot event ... Crossing fingers: Very soon and hopefully this year again :) Update: In the media The event had been announced in local media, too. L'Express: Salon informatique: Hacking Challenge à Flacq

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• Lenovo V570 CPU fan running constantly, CPU core 1 running over 90%!

  - by Rabbit2190

  I have seen that a lot of people are having this same issue. I am running a Lenovo V570 i5 4 core, 6 gigs of ram, and am running 11.10 Onieric Ocelot. On my system monitor graph it shows CPU at 20%, when I open the monitor it shows core #1 at around 90%, the other cores fluctuate at or below 5-12% if even. Now this seems like a really terrible balance of power between the cores, especially with so much stress on one core only, when these things are designed to work with 4 cores and not at such high temps. My current readings say 64 degrees Celsius, this does not seem normal for any cpu, and I am seriously considering, working on my windows7 partition until I see a real solution to this issue or upgrading to 12.04 right away when it comes out... I have seen countless things saying it has something to do with the Kernel, the kernel on mine is the same as when I upgraded, I really do not like messing with it, as when I had 11.04, I did tinker with it due to the freeze issues I was having, and that just made worse issues. I like this version 11.10 and would like to keep it for a while, but without the fear that my core is going to fry! So any help would be much appreciated! I did try changing a couple things in ACPI, and restarting this did not help, and here I am. I tried one thing prior to that that was listed under a different computer brand, but it would not do a make on the file. I really need help with this, I rely on this computer for a lot of things, and love this OS! Please help so I do not need to resort to my Microsoft partition! PLEASE! Here is the fwts cpufrequ- output: rabbit@rabbit-Lenovo-V570:~$ sudo fwts cpufreq - 00001 fwts Results generated by fwts: Version V0.23.25 (Thu Oct 6 15 00002 fwts :12:31 BST 2011). 00003 fwts 00004 fwts Some of this work - Copyright (c) 1999 - 2010, Intel Corp. 00005 fwts All rights reserved. 00006 fwts Some of this work - Copyright (c) 2010 - 2011, Canonical. 00007 fwts 00008 fwts This test run on 02/04/12 at 17:23:22 on host Linux 00009 fwts rabbit-Lenovo-V570 3.0.0-17-generic-pae #30-Ubuntu SMP Thu 00010 fwts Mar 8 17:53:35 UTC 2012 i686. 00011 fwts 00012 fwts Running tests: cpufreq. 00014 cpufreq CPU frequency scaling tests (takes ~1-2 mins). 00015 cpufreq --------------------------------------------------------- 00016 cpufreq Test 1 of 1: CPU P-State Checks. 00017 cpufreq For each processor in the system, this test steps through 00018 cpufreq the various frequency states (P-states) that the BIOS 00019 cpufreq advertises for the processor. For each processor/frequency 00020 cpufreq combination, a quick performance value is measured. The 00021 cpufreq test then validates that: 00022 cpufreq 1) Each processor has the same number of frequency states 00023 cpufreq 2) Higher advertised frequencies have a higher performance 00024 cpufreq 3) No duplicate frequency values are reported by the BIOS 00025 cpufreq 4) Is BIOS wrongly doing Sw_All P-state coordination across cores 00026 cpufreq 5) Is BIOS wrongly doing Sw_Any P-state coordination across cores 00027 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00028 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00029 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 100.0 % 00030 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.7 % 00031 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.2 % 00032 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.5 % 00033 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.2 % 00034 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.6 % 00035 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.8 % 00036 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.5 % 00037 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.6 % 00038 cpufreq 9 CPU frequency steps supported 00039 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00040 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00041 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 97.7 % 00042 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.7 % 00043 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.6 % 00044 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 63.3 % 00045 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.7 % 00046 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.7 % 00047 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.7 % 00048 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.5 % 00049 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.5 % 00050 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00051 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00052 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 97.7 % 00053 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 84.4 % 00054 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.6 % 00055 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.6 % 00056 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.9 % 00057 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.7 % 00058 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.7 % 00059 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.7 % 00060 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.8 % 00061 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00062 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00063 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 100.0 % 00064 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.6 % 00065 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 67.8 % 00066 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 61.4 % 00067 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.9 % 00068 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.3 % 00069 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00070 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.3 % 00071 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.4 % 00072 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00073 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00074 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.2 % 00075 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.5 % 00076 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.3 % 00077 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.7 % 00078 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.0 % 00079 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 47.4 % 00080 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00081 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.0 % 00082 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.2 % 00083 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00084 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00085 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.5 % 00086 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.6 % 00087 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 68.1 % 00088 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 61.7 % 00089 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.9 % 00090 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.0 % 00091 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00092 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00093 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.8 % 00094 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00095 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00096 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.4 % 00097 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.6 % 00098 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 68.8 % 00099 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 60.5 % 00100 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.4 % 00101 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.8 % 00102 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00103 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00104 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 26.4 % 00105 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00106 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00107 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 95.3 % 00108 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.5 % 00109 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 65.5 % 00110 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.8 % 00111 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.8 % 00112 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.0 % 00113 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.2 % 00114 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00115 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.3 % 00116 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00117 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00118 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.3 % 00119 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.4 % 00120 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 68.3 % 00121 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 61.9 % 00122 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.9 % 00123 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.0 % 00124 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00125 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00126 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.3 % 00127 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00128 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00129 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 100.0 % 00130 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 77.9 % 00131 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 64.6 % 00132 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 54.0 % 00133 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 51.7 % 00134 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 45.2 % 00135 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.0 % 00136 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 33.1 % 00137 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 25.5 % 00138 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00139 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00140 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 93.4 % 00141 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 75.7 % 00142 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 64.5 % 00143 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 59.1 % 00144 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 51.4 % 00145 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 45.9 % 00146 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.3 % 00147 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.7 % 00148 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 25.8 % 00149 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00150 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00151 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 92.1 % 00152 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 78.1 % 00153 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 65.7 % 00154 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 58.6 % 00155 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.5 % 00156 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 45.7 % 00157 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.3 % 00158 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.7 % 00159 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 24.3 % 00160 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00161 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00162 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 88.9 % 00163 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 79.8 % 00164 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 58.4 % 00165 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 52.6 % 00166 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 46.9 % 00167 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 41.0 % 00168 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 35.1 % 00169 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 29.1 % 00170 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 22.9 % 00171 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00172 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00173 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 92.8 % 00174 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 80.1 % 00175 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 66.2 % 00176 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 59.5 % 00177 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.9 % 00178 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 46.2 % 00179 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.5 % 00180 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.9 % 00181 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 26.3 % 00182 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00183 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00184 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 92.9 % 00185 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 79.5 % 00186 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 66.2 % 00187 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 59.6 % 00188 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.9 % 00189 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 46.7 % 00190 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.6 % 00191 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.9 % 00192 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 26.3 % 00193 cpufreq FAILED [MEDIUM] CPUFreqCPUsSetToSW_ANY: Test 1, Processors 00194 cpufreq are set to SW_ANY. 00195 cpufreq FAILED [MEDIUM] CPUFreqSW_ANY: Test 1, Firmware not 00196 cpufreq implementing hardware coordination cleanly. Firmware using 00197 cpufreq SW_ANY instead?. 00198 cpufreq 00199 cpufreq ========================================================= 00200 cpufreq 0 passed, 2 failed, 0 warnings, 0 aborted, 0 skipped, 0 00201 cpufreq info only. 00202 cpufreq ========================================================= 00204 summary 00205 summary 0 passed, 2 failed, 0 warnings, 0 aborted, 0 skipped, 0 00206 summary info only. 00207 summary 00208 summary Test Failure Summary 00209 summary ==================== 00210 summary 00211 summary Critical failures: NONE 00212 summary 00213 summary High failures: NONE 00214 summary 00215 summary Medium failures: 2 00216 summary cpufreq test, at 1 log line: 193 00217 summary "Processors are set to SW_ANY." 00218 summary cpufreq test, at 1 log line: 195 00219 summary "Firmware not implementing hardware coordination cleanly. Firmware using SW_ANY instead?." 00220 summary 00221 summary Low failures: NONE 00222 summary 00223 summary Other failures: NONE 00224 summary 00225 summary Test |Pass |Fail |Abort|Warn |Skip |Info | 00226 summary ---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 00227 summary cpufreq | | 2| | | | | 00228 summary ---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 00229 summary Total: | 0| 2| 0| 0| 0| 0| 00230 summary ---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ rabbit@rabbit-Lenovo-V570:~$

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• Can Google Employees See My Saved Google Chrome Passwords?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Storing your passwords in your web browser seems like a great time saver, but are the passwords secure and inaccessible to others (even employees of the browser company) when squirreled away? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader MMA is curious if Google employees have (or could have) access to the passwords he stores in Google Chrome: I understand that we are really tempted to save our passwords in Google Chrome. The likely benefit is two fold, You don’t need to (memorize and) input those long and cryptic passwords. These are available wherever you are once you log in to your Google account. The last point sparked my doubt. Since the password is available anywhere, the storage must in some central location, and this should be at Google. Now, my simple question is, can a Google employee see my passwords? Searching over the Internet revealed several articles/messages. Do you save passwords in Chrome? Maybe you should reconsider: Talks about your passwords being stolen by someone who has access to your computer account. Nothing mentioned about the central storage security and vulnerability. There is even a response from Chrome browser security tech lead about the first issue. Chrome’s insane password security strategy: Mostly along the same line. You can steal password from somebody if you have access to the computer account. How to Steal Passwords Saved in Google Chrome in 5 Simple Steps: Teaches you how to actually perform the act mentioned in the previous two when you have access to somebody else’s account. There are many more (including this one at this site), mostly along the same line, points, counter-points, huge debates. I refrain from mentioning them here, simply carry a search if you want to find them. Coming back to my original query, can a Google employee see my password? Since I can view the password using a simple button, definitely they can be unhashed (decrypted) even if encrypted. This is very different from the passwords saved in Unix-like OS’s where the saved password can never be seen in plain text. They use a one-way encryption algorithm to encrypt your passwords. This encrypted password is then stored in the passwd or shadow file. When you attempt to login, the password you type in is encrypted again and compared with the entry in the file that stores your passwords. If they match, it must be the same password, and you are allowed access. Thus, a superuser can change my password, can block my account, but he can never see my password. So are his concerns well founded or will a little insight dispel his worry? The Answer SuperUser contributor Zeel helps put his mind at ease: Short answer: No* Passwords stored on your local machine can be decrypted by Chrome, as long as your OS user account is logged in. And then you can view those in plain text. At first this seems horrible, but how did you think auto-fill worked? When that password field gets filled in, Chrome must insert the real password into the HTML form element – or else the page wouldn’t work right, and you could not submit the form. And if the connection to the website is not over HTTPS, the plain text is then sent over the internet. In other words, if chrome can’t get the plain text passwords, then they are totally useless. A one way hash is no good, because we need to use them. Now the passwords are in fact encrypted, the only way to get them back to plain text is to have the decryption key. That key is your Google password, or a secondary key you can set up. When you sign into Chrome and sync the Google servers will transmit the encrypted passwords, settings, bookmarks, auto-fill, etc, to your local machine. Here Chrome will decrypt the information and be able to use it. On Google’s end all that info is stored in its encrpyted state, and they do not have the key to decrypt it. Your account password is checked against a hash to log in to Google, and even if you let chrome remember it, that encrypted version is hidden in the same bundle as the other passwords, impossible to access. So an employee could probably grab a dump of the encrypted data, but it wouldn’t do them any good, since they would have no way to use it.* So no, Google employees can not** access your passwords, since they are encrypted on their servers. * However, do not forget that any system that can be accessed by an authorized user can be accessed by an unauthorized user. Some systems are easier to break than other, but none are fail-proof. . . That being said, I think I will trust Google and the millions they spend on security systems, over any other password storage solution. And heck, I’m a wimpy nerd, it would be easier to beat the passwords out of me than break Google’s encryption. ** I am also assuming that there isn’t a person who just happens to work for Google gaining access to your local machine. In that case you are screwed, but employment at Google isn’t actually a factor any more. Moral: Hit Win + L before leaving machine. While we agree with zeel that it’s a pretty safe bet (as long as your computer is not compromised) that your passwords are in fact safe while stored in Chrome, we prefer to encrypt all our logins and passwords in a LastPass vault. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Possible SWITCH Optimization in DAX – #powerpivot #dax #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  In one of the Advanced DAX Workshop I taught this year, I had an interesting discussion about how to optimize a SWITCH statement (which could be frequently used checking a slicer, like in the Parameter Table pattern). Let’s start with the problem. What happen when you have such a statement? Sales :=     SWITCH (         VALUES ( Period[Period] ),         "Current", [Internet Total Sales],         "MTD", [MTD Sales],         "QTD", [QTD Sales],         "YTD", [YTD Sales],          BLANK ()     ) The SWITCH statement is in reality just syntax sugar for a nested IF statement. When you place such a measure in a pivot table, for every cell of the pivot table the IF options are evaluated. In order to optimize performance, the DAX engine usually does not compute cell-by-cell, but tries to compute the values in bulk-mode. However, if a measure contains an IF statement, every cell might have a different execution path, so the current implementation might evaluate all the possible IF branches in bulk-mode, so that for every cell the result from one of the branches will be already available in a pre-calculated dataset. The price for that could be high. If you consider the previous Sales measure, the YTD Sales measure could be evaluated for all the cells where it’s not required, and also when YTD is not selected at all in a Pivot Table. The actual optimization made by the DAX engine could be different in every build, and I expect newer builds of Tabular and Power Pivot to be better than older ones. However, we still don’t live in an ideal world, so it could be better trying to help the engine finding a better execution plan. One student (Niek de Wit) proposed this approach: Selection := IF (     HASONEVALUE ( Period[Period] ),     VALUES ( Period[Period] ) ) Sales := CALCULATE (     [Internet Total Sales],     FILTER (         VALUES ( 'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity] ),         'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity]             = IF (                 [Selection] = "Current",                 'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity],                 -1             )     ) )     + CALCULATE (         [MTD Sales],         FILTER (             VALUES ( 'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity] ),             'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity]                 = IF (                     [Selection] = "MTD",                     'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity],                     -1                 )         )     )     + CALCULATE (         [QTD Sales],         FILTER (             VALUES ( 'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity] ),             'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity]                 = IF (                     [Selection] = "QTD",                     'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity],                     -1                 )         )     )     + CALCULATE (         [YTD Sales],         FILTER (             VALUES ( 'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity] ),             'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity]                 = IF (                     [Selection] = "YTD",                     'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity],                     -1                 )         )     ) At first sight, you might think it’s impossible that this approach could be faster. However, if you examine with the profiler what happens, there is a different story. Every original IF’s execution branch is now a separate CALCULATE statement, which applies a filter that does not execute the required measure calculation if the result of the FILTER is empty. I used the ‘Internet Sales’[Order Quantity] column in this example just because in Adventure Works it has only one value (every row has 1): in the real world, you should use a column that has a very low number of distinct values, or use a column that has always the same value for every row (so it will be compressed very well!). Because the value –1 is never used in this column, the IF comparison in the filter discharge all the values iterated in the filter if the selection does not match with the desired value. I hope to have time in the future to write a longer article about this optimization technique, but in the meantime I’ve seen this optimization has been useful in many other implementations. Please write your feedback if you find scenarios (in both Power Pivot and Tabular) where you obtain performance improvements using this technique!

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