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• Calling home, receiving calls and smartphone data from the US

  - by Rob Farley

  I got asked about calling home from the US, by someone going to the PASS Summit. I found myself thinking “there should be a blog post about this”... The easiest way to phone home is Skype - no question. Use WiFi, and if you’re calling someone who has Skype on their phone at the other end, it’s free. Even if they don’t, it’s still pretty good price-wise. The PASS Summit conference centre has good WiFI, as do the hotels, and plenty of other places (like Starbucks). But if you’re used to having data all the time, particularly when you’re walking from one place to another, then you’ll want a sim card. This also lets you receive calls more easily, not just solving your data problem. You’ll need to make sure your phone isn’t locked to your local network – get that sorted before you leave. It’s no trouble to drop by a T-mobile or AT&T store and getting a prepaid sim. You can’t get one from the airport, but if the PASS Summit is your first stop, there’s a T-mobile store on 6th in Seattle between Pine & Pike, so you can see it from the Sheraton hotel if that’s where you’re staying. AT&T isn’t far away either. But – there’s an extra step that you should be aware of. If you talk to one of these US telcos, you’ll probably (hopefully I’m wrong, but this is how it was for me recently) be told that their prepaid sims don’t work in smartphones. And they’re right – the APN gets detected and stops the data from working. But luckily, Apple (and others) have provided information about how to change the APN, which has been used by a company based in New Zealand to let you get your phone working. Basically, you send your phone browser to http://unlockit.co.nz and follow the prompts. But do this from a WiFi place somewhere, because you won’t have data access until after you’ve sorted this out... Oh, and if you get a prepaid sim with “unlimited data”, you will still need to get a Data Feature for it. And just for the record – this is WAY easier if you’re going to the UK. I dropped into a T-mobile shop there, and bought a prepaid sim card for five quid, which gave me 250MB data and some (but not much) call credit. In Australia it’s even easier, because you can buy data-enabled sim cards that work in smartphones from the airport when you arrive. I think having access to data really helps you feel at home in a different place. It means you can pull up maps, see what your friends are doing, and more. Hopefully this post helps, but feel free to post comments with extra information if you have it. @rob_farley

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• Games at Work Part 1: Introduction to Gamification and Applications

  - by ultan o'broin

  Games Are Everywhere How many of you (will admit to) remember playing Pong? OK then, do you play Angry Birds on your phone during work hours? Thought about why we keep playing online, video, and mobile games and what this "gamification" business we're hearing about means for the enterprise applications user experience? In Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal says that playing computer and online games now provides more rewards for people than their real lives do. Games offer intrinsic rewards and happiness to the players as they pursue more satisfying work and the success, social connection, and meaning that goes with it. Yep, Gran Turismo, Dungeons & Dragons, Guitar Hero, Mario Kart, Wii Boxing, and the rest are all forms of work it seems. Games are, in fact, work taken so seriously that governments now move to limit the impact of virtual gaming currencies on the real financial system. Anyone who spends hours harvesting crops on FarmVille realizes it’s hard work too. Yet games evoke a positive emotion in players who voluntarily stay engaged with games for hours, day after day. Some 183 million active gamers in the United States play on average 13 hours per week. Weekly, 5 million of those gamers play for longer than a working week (45 hours). So why not harness the work put into games to solve real-world problems? Or, in the case of our applications users, real-world work problems? What’s a Game? Jane explains that all games have four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. We need to look at what motivational ideas behind the dynamics of the game—what we call gamification—are appropriate for our users. Typically, these motivators are achievement, altruism, competition, reward, self-expression, and status). Common game techniques for leveraging these motivations include: Badging and avatars Points and awards Leader boards Progress charts Virtual currencies or goods Gifting and giving Challenges and quests Some technology commentators argue for a game layer on top of everything, but this layer is already part of our daily lives in many instances. We see gamification working around us already: the badging and kudos offered on My Oracle Support or other Oracle community forums, becoming a Dragon Slayer implementor of Atlassian applications, being made duke of your favorite coffee shop on Yelp, sharing your workout details with Nike+, or donating to Japanese earthquake relief through FarmVille, for example. And what does all this mean for the applications that you use in your work? Read on in part two...

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• OpenGLES GLSL Shader attributes always bound to 0

  - by codemonkey

  So I have a very simple vertex shader as follows #version 120 attribute vec3 position; attribute vec3 inColor; uniform mat4 mvp; varying vec3 fragColor; void main(void){ fragColor = inColor; gl_Position = mvp * vec4(position, 1.0); } Which I load, as well as the fragment shader: #version 120 varying vec3 fragColor; void main(void) { gl_FragColor = vec4(fragColor,1.0); } Which I then load, compile, and link to my shader program. I check for link status using glGetProgramiv(shaderProgram, GL_LINK_STATUS, &shaderSuccess); which returns GL_TRUE so I think its ok. However, when I query the active attributes and uniforms using #ifdef DEBUG int totalAttributes = -1; glGetProgramiv(shaderProgram, GL_ACTIVE_ATTRIBUTES, &totalAttributes); for(int i=0; i<totalAttributes; ++i) { int name_len=-1, num=-1; GLenum type = GL_ZERO; char name[100]; glGetActiveAttrib(shaderProgram, GLuint(i), sizeof(name)-1, &name_len, &num, &type, name ); name[name_len] = 0; GLuint location = glGetAttribLocation(shaderProgram, name); fprintf(stderr, "Attribute %s is bound at %d\n", name, location); } int totalUniforms = -1; glGetProgramiv(shaderProgram, GL_ACTIVE_UNIFORMS, &totalUniforms); for(int i=0; i<totalUniforms; ++i) { int name_len=-1, num=-1; GLenum type = GL_ZERO; char name[100]; glGetActiveUniform(shaderProgram, GLuint(i), sizeof(name)-1, &name_len, &num, &type, name ); name[name_len] = 0; GLuint location = glGetUniformLocation(shaderProgram, name); fprintf(stderr, "Uniform %s is bound at %d\n", name, location); } #endif I get: Attribute inColor is bound at 0 Attribute position is bound at 1 Uniform mvp is bound at 0 Which leads to failure when trying to use the shader to render the objects. I have tried switching the order of declaration of position & inColor, but still, only position is bound with the other two giving 0 Can someone please explain why this is happening? Thanks

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• What to do when opensource project starts to tear apart? (or a manager tries to write code and than shouts at the team)

  - by Kabumbus

  Imagine there is an open source cross-platform project on Google code. It has lots of revisions (1000). It concentrates in itself lots technological stuff - rare stuff - it mixes top tech. It contains server, and more than one client. The project was created by a well-connected team of developers (friends) and a manager that was sponsoring project at its start up during its first few months (project now is more than a year old-sponsoring oss project is a big good deal- also gave the idea of project to developers). The project was growing in complexity and effort reqiered to continue development. Once upon a time a manager - team leader started trying to write code (he was a programmer in some other projects - not the best, but he felt like he was one). He started because one of the developers suggested an idea at the team meeting and he felt he just needed to do it on his own. He failed, and he told the dev team about it. The dev team did what he failed to do in a few days. After that, the manager feels that team codes with out him perfectly and gets the job done in short time. He felt sorry and lost and he started to crash like an old bad PC. Firstly, he started to scream (in forms of messages not in voice) he tried to tell developers that what they were doing was a bad, not-needed thing - developers kindly told him that his "beginnings" were not compilable while dev team product worked as needed. He told the developers that all work they do should be firstly discussed with him. Here is the part where we need to mention that all team members are "project owners" and logically have equal rights. The team leader suggested to the developers these options: change their dev process to go through him, or be moved from project owners to contributers. So what are our options as developers? What arguments we can provide to the team leader/manager for him to calm down? Is it possible to save the project or is it better to fork out now? An important issue is that lately we had no active ticket system, and I personally think that this was the reason the mess appeared. So... any ideas?

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• Function Folding in #PowerQuery

  - by Darren Gosbell

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/darrengosbell/archive/2014/05/16/function-folding-in-powerquery.aspxLooking at a typical Power Query query you will noticed that it's made up of a number of small steps. As an example take a look at the query I did in my previous post about joining a fact table to a slowly changing dimension. It was roughly built up of the following steps: Get all records from the fact table Get all records from the dimension table do an outer join between these two tables on the business key (resulting in an increase in the row count as there are multiple records in the dimension table for each business key) Filter out the excess rows introduced in step 3 remove extra columns that are not required in the final result set. If Power Query was to execute a query like this literally, following the same steps in the same order it would not be overly efficient. Particularly if your two source tables were quite large. However Power Query has a feature called function folding where it can take a number of these small steps and push them down to the data source. The degree of function folding that can be performed depends on the data source, As you might expect, relational data sources like SQL Server, Oracle and Teradata support folding, but so do some of the other sources like OData, Exchange and Active Directory. To explore how this works I took the data from my previous post and loaded it into a SQL database. Then I converted my Power Query expression to source it's data from that database. Below is the resulting Power Query which I edited by hand so that the whole thing can be shown in a single expression: let     SqlSource = Sql.Database("localhost", "PowerQueryTest"),     BU = SqlSource{[Schema="dbo",Item="BU"]}[Data],     Fact = SqlSource{[Schema="dbo",Item="fact"]}[Data],     Source = Table.NestedJoin(Fact,{"BU_Code"},BU,{"BU_Code"},"NewColumn"),     LeftJoin = Table.ExpandTableColumn(Source, "NewColumn"                                   , {"BU_Key", "StartDate", "EndDate"}                                   , {"BU_Key", "StartDate", "EndDate"}),     BetweenFilter = Table.SelectRows(LeftJoin, each (([Date] >= [StartDate]) and ([Date] <= [EndDate])) ),     RemovedColumns = Table.RemoveColumns(BetweenFilter,{"StartDate", "EndDate"}) in     RemovedColumns If the above query was run step by step in a literal fashion you would expect it to run two queries against the SQL database doing "SELECT * …" from both tables. However a profiler trace shows just the following single SQL query: select [_].[BU_Code],     [_].[Date],     [_].[Amount],     [_].[BU_Key] from (     select [$Outer].[BU_Code],         [$Outer].[Date],         [$Outer].[Amount],         [$Inner].[BU_Key],         [$Inner].[StartDate],         [$Inner].[EndDate]     from [dbo].[fact] as [$Outer]     left outer join     (         select [_].[BU_Key] as [BU_Key],             [_].[BU_Code] as [BU_Code2],             [_].[BU_Name] as [BU_Name],             [_].[StartDate] as [StartDate],             [_].[EndDate] as [EndDate]         from [dbo].[BU] as [_]     ) as [$Inner] on ([$Outer].[BU_Code] = [$Inner].[BU_Code2] or [$Outer].[BU_Code] is null and [$Inner].[BU_Code2] is null) ) as [_] where [_].[Date] >= [_].[StartDate] and [_].[Date] <= [_].[EndDate] The resulting query is a little strange, you can probably tell that it was generated programmatically. But if you look closely you'll notice that every single part of the Power Query formula has been pushed down to SQL Server. Power Query itself ends up just constructing the query and passing the results back to Excel, it does not do any of the data transformation steps itself. So now you can feel a bit more comfortable showing Power Query to your less technical Colleagues knowing that the tool will do it's best fold all the  small steps in Power Query down the most efficient query that it can against the source systems.

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• Is MongoDB a good choice or not for my application?

  - by shubham

  I have a Reporting application which stores the reports in xml format as recieved from source (XML schema is not defined, it can be any format) and those reports contain some keys and values. Like jobid, setid be keys for 1 type of report and userid, groupId for another type of report etc. The type of keys that can be referred from the document is determined by the namespaces used in the xml doc. These keys are stored on the basis of namespace used in the xml document. For e.g. If a tag in xml fragment uses namespace= "myspace1", then I have keys A and B for myspace1 stored in another table. It will fetch those keys from that table for this namespace, look for their values in xml doc and store it in another table along with the pointer to this xml document (Id of a record storing complete xml document in a cell). Use cases: When the user comes and queries for that key and value, I return the document or a set of documents that are having those key/value pairs. When the user comes and queries for a certain key and provide a name for xslt (pre stored), I fetch the set of documents fulfilling that criteria and convert that xml to html with the specified xslt. When the user comes and asks for a particular fragment of a doc then it can fetch a subset from a particular document also. When the user comes and queries for top x values of a certain key, I return the set of documents that are having top 10 values of that key. I am using DB2 database for its support of xml along with relational capabilities. That makes easier for me to run xpath expressions and fetch values of keys and also aggregate a set of documents fullfilling a criteria, all on the database side. Problems: DB2 stores XML doc of upto 2GB in size. Retrieval is very slow. If some thing involves many documents, then it takes significant time for things to show up in browser, and the user has to wait. Can MongoDb help in this case, as it is document oriented? can I do xml related xpath queries and document transformations on db side? Or is it ok to use both in such a case?

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• Exchange 2010, Exchange 2003 Mail Flow issue

  - by Ryan Roussel

  While performing the initial Exchange 2010 deployment for a customer migrating from Exchange 2003, I ran into an issue with mail flow between the two environments.  The Exchange 2003 mailboxes could send to Exchange 2010, as well as to and from the internet.  Exchange 2010 mailboxes could send and receive to the internet, however they could not send to Exchange 2003 mailboxes.   After scouring the internet for a solution, it seemed quite a few people were experiencing this issue with no resolution to be found, or at least not easily.  After many attempts of manually deleting and recreating the routing group connectors,  I finally lucked onto the answer in an obscure comment left to another blogger.   If inheritable permissions are not allowed on the Exchange 2003 object in the Active Directory schema, exchange server authentication cannot be achieved between the servers.   It seems when Blackberry Enterprise Server gets added to 2003 environments, a lot of Admins get tricky and add the BES Admin user explicitly to the server object  to allow  inheritance down from there to all mailboxes.  The problem is they also coincidently turn off inheritance to the server object itself from its parent containers.  You can re-establish inheritance without overwriting the existing ACL however so that the BES Admin can remain in the server object ACL.   By re-establishing inheritance to the 2003 server object, mail flow was instantly restored between the servers.    To re-establish inheritance: 1. Open ASDIedit by adding the snap-in to a MMC (should be included on your 2008 server where Exchange 2010 is installed) 2. Navigate to Configuration > Services > Microsoft Exchange > Exchange Organization > Administrative Groups > First Administrative Group > Servers 3. In the right pane, right click on the CN=Server Name of your Exchange 2003 Server, select properties 4. Navigate to the Security tab, hit advanced toward the bottom. 5. Check the checkbox that reads “include inheritable permissions” toward the bottom of the dialogue box.

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• WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF&ndash;Part 1: Overview

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  A lot has been written already about passive federation and integration of WIF and ADFS 2 into web apps. The whole active/WS-Trust feature area is much less documented or covered in articles and blogs. Over the next few posts I will try to compile all relevant information about the above topics – but let’s start with an overview. ADFS 2 has a number of endpoints under the /services/trust base address that implement the WS-Trust protocol. They are grouped by the WS-Trust version they support (/13 and /2005), the client credential type (/windows*, /username*, /certificate*) and the security mode (*transport, *mixed and message). You can see the endpoints in the MMC console under the Service/Endpoints page. So in other words, you use one of these endpoints (which exactly depends on your configuration / system setup) to request tokens from ADFS 2. The bindings behind the endpoints are more or less standard WCF bindings, but with SecureConversation (establishSecurityContext) disabled. That means that whenever you need to programmatically talk to these endpoints – you can (easily) create client bindings that are compatible. Another option is to use the special bindings that come with WIF (in the Microsoft.IdentityModel.Protocols.WSTrust.Bindings namespace). They are already pre-configured to be compatible with the ADFS endpoints. The downside of these bindings is, that you can’t use them in configuration. That’s definitely a feature request of mine for the next version of WIF. The next important piece of information is the so called Federation Service Identifier. This is the value that you (at least by default) have to use as a realm/appliesTo whenever you are requesting a token for ADFS (e.g. in  IdP –> RSTS scenario). Or (even more) technically speaking, ADFS 2 checks for this value in the audience URI restriction in SAML tokens. You can get to this value by clicking the “Edit Federation Service Properties” in the MMC when the Service tree-node is selected. OK – I will come back to this basic information in the following posts. Basically I want to go through the following scenarios: ADFS in the IdP role ADFS in the R-STS role (with a chained claims provider) Using the WCF bindings for automatic token issuance Using WSTrustChannelFactory for manual token handling Stay tuned…

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• Writing or extending existing emacs packages: is it worth or should I move to Netbeans/Eclipse?

  - by Andrea

  I'm finishing my master degree course in CS and I've almost become addicted to Emacs. I've used it to write in C, Latex, Java, JSP,XML, CommonLisp, Ada and other languages no other editor supported, like AMPL. I'd like to improve the packages I've been using the most or create new ones, but, in practice, I find that the implementation of Emacs leaves a lot to be desired. There are a lot of poorly-featured/poorly-maintained packages with either overlapping functionalities or obscure incompatibilities, and Elisp just seems to foster the situation by lacking the common features modern lisps have. In contrast Eclipse and Netbeans are actively improved and it does seem they can be effective for non-mainstream languages. I tried Hibachi for Ada in Eclipse and it worked well, there's CUPS for Lisp in Eclipse and LambdaBeans built using NetBeans components. On the other hand those plugins seem to be less active than their Emacs' counterparts, for example Hibachi was archived last year. What's your opinion on this? Which editor should I write extension for? EDIT: To answer Larry Coleman (see comment below): I like Emacs as a user because it is efficient both for me and the computer I'm using. It's fast and the textual interface (i.e. minibuffer) allows for quick interaction. It's solid and packages are usually small and easy to manage. If I need to correct or remove something I usually just have to change a row in my .emacs or an elisp file, or delete a directory. Eclipse plugins rely on a more complicated process that screwed my Eclipse configuration a couple of times, forcing me to do a clean reinstall. Emacs works as long as I use the basic packages. If I need something more complicated the situation gets pretty hairy. As a "power user" I think that the best I can hope for is to write a severely crippled version of the extensions I'd actually like to have; in other words, that it's not worth the trouble. I'd like to write extensions for the things I'd like to have automated in Emacs, for example project support with automated tag-table update on file writing. There are a few projects on this that lack integration, documentation, extensibility and so forth. The best one is probably CEDET, for which I believe the Greenspun's 10th rule can be applied. EDIT: To comment Larry Coleman's answer I'm pretty sure I can pick elisp programming but the extensions I have in mind don't exist yet despite their relative simplicity and the effort more knowledgeable people poured into related projects.This makes me wonder whether it is so because of the way emacs is developed, i.e. people tend to write their own little extensions without coordination, or its implementation, its extension language not being able to keep up with the growing complexity.

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• A sample Memento pattern: Is it correct?

  - by TheSilverBullet

  Following this query on memento pattern, I have tried to put my understanding to test. Memento pattern stands for three things: Saving state of the "memento" object for its successful retrieval Saving carefully each valid "state" of the memento Encapsulating the saved states from the change inducer so that each state remains unaltered Have I achieved these three with my design? Problem This is a zero player game where the program is initialized with a particular set up of chess pawns - the knight and queen. Then program then needs to keep adding set of pawns or knights and queens so that each pawn is "safe" for the next one move of every other pawn. The condition is that either both pawns should be placed, or none of them should be placed. The chessboard with the most number of non conflicting knights and queens should be returned. Implementation I have 4 classes for this: protected ChessBoard (the Memento) private int [][] ChessBoard; public void ChessBoard(); protected void SetChessBoard(); protected void GetChessBoard(int); public Pawn This is not related to memento. It holds info about the pawns public enum PawnType: int { Empty = 0, Queen = 1, Knight = 2, } //This returns a value that shown if the pawn can be placed safely public bool IsSafeToAddPawn(PawnType); public CareTaker This corresponds to caretaker of memento This is a double dimentional integer array that keeps a track of all states. The reason for having 2D array is to keep track of how many states are stored and which state is currently active. An example: 0 -2 1 -1 2 0 - This is current state. With second index 0/ 3 1 - This state has been saved, but has been undone private int [][]State; private ChessBoard [] MChessBoard; //This gets the chessboard at the position requested and assigns it to originator public ChessBoard GetChessBoard(int); //This overwrites the chessboard at given position public void SetChessBoard(ChessBoard, int); private int [][]State; public PlayGame (This is the originator) private bool status; private ChessBoard oChessBoard; //This sets the state of chessboard at position specified public SetChessBoard(ChessBoard, int); //This gets the state of chessboard at position specified public ChessBoard GetChessBoard(int); //This function tries to place both the pawns and returns the status of this attempt public bool PlacePawns(Pawn);

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• With AMD style modules in JavaScript is there any benefit to namespaces?

  - by gman

  Coming from C++ originally and seeing lots of Java programmers doing the same we brought namespaces to JavaScript. See Google's closure library as an example where they have a main namespace, goog and under that many more namespaces like goog.async, goog.graphics But now, having learned the AMD style of requiring modules it seems like namespaces are kind of pointless in JavaScript. Not only pointless but even arguably an anti-pattern. What is AMD? It's a way of defining and including modules that removes all direct dependencies. Effectively you do this // some/module.js define([ 'name/of/needed/module', 'name/of/someother/needed/module', ], function( RefToNeededModule, RefToSomeOtherNeededModule) { ...code... return object or function }); This format lets the AMD support code know that this module needs name/of/needed/module.js and name/of/someother/needed/module.js loaded. The AMD code can load all the modules and then, assuming no circular dependencies, call the define function on each module in the correct order, record the object/function returned by the module as it calls them, and then call any other modules' define function with references to those modules. This seems to remove any need for namespaces. In your own code you can call the reference to any other module anything you want. For example if you had 2 string libraries, even if they define similar functions, as long as they follow the AMD pattern you can easily use both in the same module. No need for namespaces to solve that. It also means there's no hard coded dependencies. For example in Google's closure any module could directly reference another module with something like var value = goog.math.someMathFunc(otherValue) and if you're unlucky it will magically work where as with AMD style you'd have to explicitly include the math library otherwise the module wouldn't have a reference to it since there are no globals with AMD. On top of that dependency injection for testing becomes easy. None of the code in the AMD module references things by namespace so there is no hardcoded namespace paths, you can easily mock classes at testing time. Is there any other point to namespaces or is that something that C++ / Java programmers are bringing to JavaScript that arguably doesn't really belong?

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• How to move a website and domain name without experiencing downtime for emails or site?

  - by user4842

  Okay, I have a pretty complex problem, so I'll get right to it. I'm a designer who built a new website for my client. Their old site is hosted at GoDaddy, as well as their email. Problem is, the guy who built the original site decided to put the original domain name and hosting under HIS personal GoDaddy account. Well, that turned out to be a bad move for several reasons. Here's how it's all tied together. The original domain name, www.domainoriginal.com, was actually purchased at Network Solutions. The original web designer pointed the nameservers from Network Solutions to his GoDaddy account, where the email and hosting is setup. The new domain name, www.domainnew.com, was purchased under a new and separate GoDaddy account belonging to the company, and the new website was built under a 3rd party platform (Big Commerce). So, the www.domainnew.com is already pointed to the new website using A records at new GoDaddy account. All is fine there. However, they still need www.domainoriginal.com to point to the NEW website as well. (The old one can simply be deleted, it is NOT important). AND, they want to keep their old email addresses intact and working as well, but under the NEW GoDaddy account. Obviously, I have no DNS control at Network Solutions, and I have no idea what kind of control I have at GoDaddy under the old account because the web designer will not let me see inside his account. But, he and GoDaddy both tell me nothing can be done other than to repoint the nameservers to Network Solutions, and then repoint the A record to my new website, www.domainnew.com, and point the MX Records to GoDaddy. I'm told the downtime would be 24-48 hours if I do this. Ideally, we'd like to do a domain name transfer and get www.domainoriginal.com in the new GoDaddy account created by the company. But, I'm told this could take up to 7 days. Does this mean the site and email will be down for 7 days? And any emails sent during this time, would they be lost forever? If I do this, how long could I expect the site and email to go down? And, will the emails be permanently lost? I've gotten different answers from everybody at GoDaddy so I kind of don't trust them anymore... Any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks, Tyson

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• Java: How to manage UDP client-server state

  - by user92947

  I am trying to write a Java application that works similar to MapReduce. There is a server and several workers. Workers may come and go as they please and the membership to the group has a soft-state. To become a part of the group, the worker must send a UDP datagram to the server, but to continue to be part of the group, the worker must send the UDP datagram to the server every 5 minutes. In order to accommodate temporary errors, a worker is allowed to miss as many as two consecutive periodic UDP datagrams. So, the server must keep track of the current set of workers as well as the last time each worker had sent a UDP datagram. I've implemented a class called WorkerListener that implements Runnable and listens to UDP datagrams on a particular UDP port. Now, to keep track of active workers, this class may maintain a HashSet (or HashMap). When a datagram is received, the server may query the HashSet to check if it is a new member. If so, it can add the new worker to the group by adding an entry into the HashSet. If not, it must reset a "timer" for the worker, noting that it has just heard from the corresponding worker. I'm using the word timer in a generic sense. It doesn't have to be a clock of sorts. Perhaps this could also be implemented using int or long variables. Also, the server must run a thread that continuously monitors the timers for the workers to see that a client that times out on two consecutive datagram intervals, it is removed from the HashSet. I don't want to do this in the WorkerListener thread because it would be blocking on the UDP datagram receive() function. If I create a separate thread to monitor the worker HashSet, it would need to be a different class, perhaps WorkerRegistrar. I must share the HashSet with that thread. Mutual exclusion must also be implemented, then. My question is, what is the best way to do this? Pointers to some sample implementation would be great. I want to use the barebones JDK implementation, and not some fancy state maintenance API that takes care of everything, because I want this to be a useful demonstration for a class that I am teaching. Thanks

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• eSTEP Newsletter December 2012

  - by uwes

  Dear Partners,We would like to inform you that the December issue of our Newsletter is now available.The issue contains informations to the following topics: Notes from Corporate: It's Earth day - Every Day, Oracle SPARC Newsletter, Pre-Built Developer VMs (for Oracle VM VirtualBox), Oracle Database Appliance Now Certified by SAP, Database High Availability, Cultivating Business-Led Innovation Technical Corner: Geek Fest! Talking About the Design of the T4 and T5 SPARC Chips, Blog: Is This Your Idea of Disaster Recovery?; Oracle® Practitioner Guide - A Pragmatic Approach to Cloud Adoption; Oracle Practitioner Guide: A pragmatic Approach to Cloud Adoption; Darren Moffat Explains the new ZFS Encryption Features in Solaris 11.1; Command Summary: Basic Operations with the Image Packaging System; SPARC T4 Server Delivers Outstanding Performance on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g; SPARC T4-4 Servers Set First World Record on PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Benchmark; Sun ZFS Appliance Monitor Refresh: Core Factor Table; Remanufactured Systems Program for Sun Systems from Oracle; Reminder: Oracle Premier Support for Systems; Reminder: Oracle Platinum Services Learning & Events: eSTEP Events Schedule; Recently Delivered Techcasts; Webinar: Maximum Availibility with Oracle GoldenGate References: LUKOIL Overseas Holding Optimizes Oil Field Development Projects with Integrated Project Management; United Networks Increases Accounting Flexibility and Boosts System Performance with ERP Applications Upgrade; Ziggo Rapidly Creates Applications That Accelerate Communications-Service Orders l How to ...: The Role of Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle Linux Containers in a Virtualization Strategy; How to Update to Oracle Solaris 11.1; Using svcbundle to Create Manifests and Profiles in Oracle Solaris 11.1; How to Migrate Your Data to Oracle Solaris 11 Using Shadow Migration; How to Script Oracle Solaris 11.1 Zones for Easy Cloning; How to Script Oracle Solaris 11 Zones Creation for a Network-in-a-Box Configuration; How to Know Whether T4 Crypto Accelerators Are in Use; Fault Handling and Prevention – Part 1; Transforming and Consolidating Web Data with Oracle Database; Looking Under the Hood at Networking in Oracle VM Server for x86; Best Way to Migrate Data from Legacy File System to ZFS in Oracle Solaris 11; Special Year End Article: The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013 You find the Newsletter on our portal under eSTEP News ---> Latest Newsletter. You will need to provide your email address and the pin below to get access. Link to the portal is shown below.URL: http://launch.oracle.com/PIN: eSTEP_2011Previous published Newsletters can be found under the Archived Newsletters section and more useful information under the Events, Download and Links tab. Feel free to explore and any feedback is appreciated to help us improve the service and information we deliver.Thanks and best regards,Partner HW Enablement EMEA

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• Configurable tables in sql database

  - by dot

  I have the following tables in my database: Config Table: ====================================== Start_Range | End Range | Config_id 10 | 15 | 1 ====================================== Available_UserIDs ========================== ID | UserID | Used_YN | 1 | 10 | t | 1 | 11 | f | 1 | 12 | f | 1 | 13 | f | 1 | 14 | f | 1 | 15 | f | ========================== Users ========================== UserId | FName | LName | 10 |John | Doe | ========================== This is used in a reservation system of sorts... which lets an administrator specify a range of numbers that will be assigned to users in the config table. Once the range has been defined, the system then populates the Available_userIDs table with all the numbers in between the range, and sets the Used_YN flag to false As users sign up, they grab the next user_id number that's not in use... and reserve it. Then the system adds a record to the Users table. Once the admin has specified a range, it is possible that they can change it. For example, they can start with 10-15... and then when the range is used up, they should be able to specify another range like 16 - 99. I've put a unique constraint on the Available_UserIDs table, as well as on the Users table - to ensure that UserIds can't be duplicated. My questions are as follows: What's the best way to prevent the admins from using a range that's already in use? I thought of the following options: -- check either the Users table to see if the start range or ending range numbers are being used. If they are, assume that all the numbers in between are in use too, and reject the range. -- let them specify whatever they want, try to populate the Available_UserIDs table. If there are duplicates, just ignore that specific error message from the database and continue on. How do I find gaps in the number ranges? For example, if they specify 10-15, and then 20-25, it'd be nice to be able to somehow suggest on my web page that 16-19 is currently available. I found this article: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1312101/how-to-find-a-gap-in-running-counter-with-sql But it only seems to return the first available number... so in my example above, it would only return the number 16. I'm sure there's a simpler way to do things that I'm overlooking!

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• Running Built-In Test Simulator with SOA Suite Healthcare 11g in PS4 and PS5

  - by Shub Lahiri, A-Team

  Background SOA Suite for Healthcare Integration pack comes with a pre-installed simulator that can be used as an external endpoint to generate inbound and outbound HL7 traffic on specified MLLP ports. This is a command-line utility that can be very handy when trying to build a complete end-to-end demo within a standalone, closed environment. The ant-based utility accepts the name of a configuration file as the command-line input argument. The format of this configuration file has changed between PS4 and PS5. In PS4, the configuration file was XML based and in PS5, it is name-value property based. The rest of this note highlights these differences and provides samples that can be used to run the first scenario from the product samples set. PS4 - Configuration File The sample configuration file for PS4 is shown below. The configuration file contains information about the following items: Directory for incoming and outgoing files for the host running SOA Suite Healthcare Polling Interval for the directory External Endpoint Logical Names External Endpoint Server Host Name and Ports Message throughput to be simulated for generating outbound messages Documents to be handled by different endpoints A copy of this file can be downloaded from here. PS5 - Configuration File The corresponding sample configuration file for PS5 is shown below. The configuration file contains similar information about the sample scenario but is not in XML format. It has name-value pairs specified in the form of a properties file. This sample file can be downloaded from here. Simulator Configuration Before running the simulator, the environment has to be set by defining the proper ANT_HOME and JAVA_HOME. The following extract is taken from a working sample shell script to set the environment: Also, as a part of setting the environment, template jndi.properties and logging.properties can be generated by using the following ant command: ant -f ant-b2bsimulator-util.xml b2bsimulator-prop Sample jndi.properties and logging.properties are shown below and can be modified, as needed. The jndi.properties contains information about connectivity to the local Weblogic Managed Server instance and the logging.properties file controls the amount of logging that can be generated from the running simulator process. Simulator Usage - Start and Stop The command syntax to launch the simulator via ant is the same in PS4 and PS5. Only the appropriate configuration file has to be supplied as the command-line argument, for example: ant -f ant-b2bsimulator-util.xml b2bsimulatorstart -Dargs="simulator1.hl7-config.xml" This will start the simulator and will keep running to provide an active external endpoint for SOA Healthcare Integration engine. To stop the simulator, a similar ant command can be used, for example: ant -f ant-b2bsimulator-util.xml b2bsimulatorstop

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• Nvidia GT218 repository drivers don't work

  - by user1042840

  I upgraded all packages with sudo apt-get upgrade command on my Ubuntu 10.04 box and I have Ubuntu 12.04 3.2.0-29-generic-pae now. I have two monitors and the following GPU: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [NVS 300] (rev a2) After upgrading to 12.04, I somehow lost my previous setup with one common workspace stretched across two monitors. When Ubuntu starts only one monitor is on. I can see the message on the active monitor: Not optimum mode. Recommended mode: 1680x1050 60Hz I used Nvidia proprietary drivers on 10.04 but now jockey-text --list shows: xorg:nvidia_current - NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (Proprietary, Disabled, Not in use) xorg:nvidia_current_updates - NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (post-release updates) (Proprietary, Enabled, Not in use) When I run sudo nvidia-settings it says You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver. Please edit your X configuration file (just run `nvidia-xconfig` as root), and restart the X server.' I typed nvidia-xconfig and rebooted, but jockey-text --list says the same after the reboot: Not in use. The same with nvidia-current - Enabled but Not in use. I also tried nvidia-173 but I ended up in tty immediately at startup so I removed it. I used to have some problems with Nvidia proprietary drivers on 10.04, I had to put paths to EDID files in /etc/X11/xorg.conf explicitly, but the resolution was as recommended and both monitors were working. If I understand correctly, nouveau drivers are used now by default because the resolution is still quite high, definitely not 800x600, xrandr showed: xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default Screen 0: minimum 320 x 400, current 1600 x 1200, maximum 1600 x 1200 default connected 1600x1200+0+0 0mm x 0mm 1600x1200 66.0* 1280x1024 76.0 1024x768 76.0 800x600 73.0 640x480 73.0 640x400 0.0 320x400 0.0 1680x1050_60.00 (0x4f) 146.2MHz h: width 1680 start 1784 end 1960 total 2240 skew 0 clock 65.3KHz v: height 1050 start 1053 end 1059 total 1089 clock 60.0Hz However, colors seem a bit faded and blurry with nouveau drivers. Mouse cursor is invisible if it's placed inside Firefox window, and only one monitor is working. I like open source and if it's possible I'd prefer to use nouveau drivers but a few things should be fixed. I'm curious why nvidia-current drivers from the repository don't work now. I read it has something to do with the new X11 server in Ubuntu 12.04, is it true? How can I get it back to work?

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• UK Oracle User Group Event: Trends in Identity Management

  - by B Shashikumar

  As threat levels rise and new technologies such as cloud and mobile computing gain widespread acceptance, security is occupying more and more mindshare among IT executives. To help prepare for the rapidly changing security landscape, the Oracle UK User Group community and our partners at Enline/SENA have put together an User Group event in London on Apr 19 where you can learn more from your industry peers about upcoming trends in identity management. Here are some of the key trends in identity management and security that we predicted at the beginning of last year and look how they have turned out so far. You have to admit that we have a pretty good track record when it comes to forecasting trends in identity management and security. Threat levels will grow—and there will be more serious breaches:   We have since witnessed breaches of high value targets like RSA and Epsilon. Most organizations have not done enough to protect against insider threats. Organizations need to look for security solutions to stop user access to applications based on real-time patterns of fraud and for situations in which employees change roles or employment status within a company. Cloud computing will continue to grow—and require new security solutions: Cloud computing has since exploded into a dominant secular trend in the industry. Cloud computing continues to present many opportunities like low upfront costs, rapid deployment etc. But Cloud computing also increases policy fragmentation and reduces visibility and control. So organizations require solutions that bridge the security gap between the enterprise and cloud applications to reduce fragmentation and increase control. Mobile devices will challenge traditional security solutions: Since that time, we have witnessed proliferation of mobile devices—combined with increasing numbers of employees bringing their own devices to work (BYOD) — these trends continue to dissolve the traditional boundaries of the enterprise. This in turn, requires a holistic approach within an organization that combines strong authentication and fraud protection, externalization of entitlements, and centralized management across multiple applications—and open standards to make all that possible.  Security platforms will continue to converge: As organizations move increasingly toward vendor consolidation, security solutions are also evolving. Next-generation identity management platforms have best-of-breed features, and must also remain open and flexible to remain viable. As a result, developers need products such as the Oracle Access Management Suite in order to efficiently and reliably build identity and access management into applications—without requiring security experts. Organizations will increasingly pursue "business-centric compliance.": Privacy and security regulations have continued to increase. So businesses are increasingly look for solutions that combine strong security and compliance management tools with business ready experience for faster, lower-cost implementations.  If you'd like to hear more about the top trends in identity management and learn how to empower yourself, then join us for the Oracle UK User Group on Thu Apr 19 in London where Oracle and Enline/SENA product experts will come together to share security trends, best practices, and solutions for your business. Register Here.

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• Zenoss Setup for Windows Servers

  - by Jay Fox

  Recently I was saddled with standing up Zenoss for our enterprise.  We're running about 1200 servers, so manually touching each box was not an option.  We use LANDesk for a lot of automated installs and patching - more about that later.The steps below may not necessarily have to be completed in this order - it's just the way I did it.STEP ONE:Setup a standard AD user.  We want to do this so there's minimal security exposure.  Call the account what ever you want "domain/zenoss" for our examples.***********************************************************STEP TWO:Make the following local groups accessible by your zenoss account.Distributed COM UsersPerformance Monitor UsersEvent Log Readers (which doesn't exist on pre-2008 machines)Here's the Powershell script I used to setup access to these local groups:# Created to add Active Directory account to local groups# Must be run from elevated prompt, with permissions on the remote machine(s).# Create txt file should contain the names of the machines that need the account added, one per line.# Script will process machines line by line.foreach($i in (gc c:\tmp\computers.txt)){# Add the user to the first group$objUser=[ADSI]("WinNT://domain/zenoss")$objGroup=[ADSI]("WinNT://$i/Distributed COM Users")$objGroup.PSBase.Invoke("Add",$objUser.PSBase.Path)# Add the user to the second group$objUser=[ADSI]("WinNT://domain/zenoss")$objGroup=[ADSI]("WinNT://$i/Performance Monitor Users")$objGroup.PSBase.Invoke("Add",$objUser.PSBase.Path)# Add the user to the third group - Group doesn't exist on < Server 2008#$objUser=[ADSI]("WinNT://domain/zenoss")#$objGroup=[ADSI]("WinNT://$i/Event Log Readers")#$objGroup.PSBase.Invoke("Add",$objUser.PSBase.Path)}**********************************************************STEP THREE:Setup security on the machines namespace so our domain/zenoss account can access itThe default namespace for zenoss is:  root/cimv2Here's the Powershell script:#Grant account defined below (line 11) access to WMI Namespace#Has to be run as account with permissions on remote machinefunction get-sid{Param ($DSIdentity)$ID = new-object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount($DSIdentity)return $ID.Translate( [System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier] ).toString()}$sid = get-sid "domain\zenoss"$SDDL = "A;;CCWP;;;$sid" $DCOMSDDL = "A;;CCDCRP;;;$sid"$computers = Get-Content "c:\tmp\computers.txt"foreach ($strcomputer in $computers){    $Reg = [WMIClass]"\\$strcomputer\root\default:StdRegProv"    $DCOM = $Reg.GetBinaryValue(2147483650,"software\microsoft\ole","MachineLaunchRestriction").uValue    $security = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $strcomputer -Namespace root/cimv2 -Class __SystemSecurity    $converter = new-object system.management.ManagementClass Win32_SecurityDescriptorHelper    $binarySD = @($null)    $result = $security.PsBase.InvokeMethod("GetSD",$binarySD)    $outsddl = $converter.BinarySDToSDDL($binarySD[0])    $outDCOMSDDL = $converter.BinarySDToSDDL($DCOM)    $newSDDL = $outsddl.SDDL += "(" + $SDDL + ")"    $newDCOMSDDL = $outDCOMSDDL.SDDL += "(" + $DCOMSDDL + ")"    $WMIbinarySD = $converter.SDDLToBinarySD($newSDDL)    $WMIconvertedPermissions = ,$WMIbinarySD.BinarySD    $DCOMbinarySD = $converter.SDDLToBinarySD($newDCOMSDDL)    $DCOMconvertedPermissions = ,$DCOMbinarySD.BinarySD    $result = $security.PsBase.InvokeMethod("SetSD",$WMIconvertedPermissions)     $result = $Reg.SetBinaryValue(2147483650,"software\microsoft\ole","MachineLaunchRestriction", $DCOMbinarySD.binarySD)}***********************************************************STEP FOUR:Get the SID for our zenoss account.Powershell#Provide AD User get SID$objUser = New-Object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount("domain", "zenoss") $strSID = $objUser.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]) $strSID.Value******************************************************************STEP FIVE:Modify the Service Control Manager to allow access to the zenoss AD account.This command can be run from an elevated command line, or through Powershellsc sdset scmanager "D:(A;;CC;;;AU)(A;;CCLCRPRC;;;IU)(A;;CCLCRPRC;;;SU)(A;;CCLCRPWPRC;;;SY)(A;;KA;;;BA)(A;;CCLCRPRC;;;PUT_YOUR_SID_HERE_FROM STEP_FOUR)S:(AU;FA;KA;;;WD)(AU;OIIOFA;GA;;;WD)"******************************************************************In step two the script plows through a txt file that processes each computer listed on each line.  For the other scripts I ran them on each machine using LANDesk.  You can probably edit those scripts to process a text file as well.That's what got me off the ground monitoring the machines using Zenoss.  Hopefully this is helpful for you.  Watch the line breaks when copy the scripts.

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• My Doors - Why Standards Matter to Business

  - by [email protected]

  By Brian Dayton on April 8, 2010 9:27 PM "Standards save money." "Standards accelerate projects." "Standards make better solutions." What do these statements mean to you? You buy technology solutions like Oracle Applications but you're a business person--trying to close the quarter, get performance reviews processed, negotiate a new sourcing contract, etc. When "standards" come up in presentations and discussions do you: - Nod your head politely - Tune out and check your smart phone - Turn to your IT counterpart and say "Bob's all over this standards thing, right Bob?" Here's why standards matter. My wife wants new external doors downstairs, ones that would get more light into the rooms. Am I OK with that? "Uhh, sure...it's a little dark in the kitchen." - 24 hours ago - wife calls to tell me that she's going to the hardware store and may look at doors - 20 hours ago - wife pulls into driveway, informs me that two doors are in the back of her station wagon, ready for me to carry - 19 hours ago - I re-discovered the fact that it's not fun to carry a solid wood door by myself - 5 hours ago - Local handyman, who was at our house anyway, tells me that the doors we bought will likely cost 2-3x the material cost in installation time and labor...the doors are standard but our doorways aren't We could have done more research. I could be more handy. Sure. But the fact is, my 1951 house wasn't built with me in mind. They built what worked and called it a day. The same holds true with a lot of business applications. They were designed and architected for one-time use with one use-case in mind. Today's business climate is different. If you're going to use your processes and technology to differentiate your business you should have at least a working knowledge of: - How standards can benefit your business - Your IT organization's philosophy around standards - Your vendor's track-record around standards...and watch for those who pay lip-service to standards but don't follow through The rallying cry in most IT organizations today is "learn more about the business, drop the acronyms." I'm not advocating that you go out and learn how to code in Java. But I do believe it will help your business and your decision-making process if you meet IT ½...even ¼ of the way there. Epilogue: The door project has been put on hold and yours truly has to return the doors to the hardware store tomorrow.

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• Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 Event Marker System

  - by Doug Reid

  0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* 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-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:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 includes a number of refinements to the Event Marker system. Using event markers enables GoldenGate processes to take a defined action based on an event in the data stream. This feature within Oracle GoldenGate simplifies methods to embed specific custom processing in the areas of error handling, alerts, and notification. The event marker system effectively allows for DML driven workflows to be created within GoldenGate and enables customers to craft non-standard processing based on special events. There are a number of supported event actions including: trace, log, checkpoint before, suspend, abort, and several others. With 11gR1 events can now be triggered by DDL operations, plus variables can be passed in and out of the system to shell scripts. Some good use cases for this feature are Automatic switchover to the secondary system during planned outages Better monitoring over source systems’ performance and automated switchover to the standby system in case of an outage with the primary system Automatic switchover from initial load to changed data movement Automatic synchronization of any type of batch processing taking place on both the source and target databases for database consistency Automatic stoppage of the Delivery module to allow end-of-day reporting Finding, tracking, and reporting on transactions that are of interest including the ones that do not have primary keys or transaction record numbers If you would like to see a demo, please visit our youtube channel (http://youtube.com/oraclegoldengate)  To learn more about the new features of Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 and to ask questions to the PM team, please join us on September 12th  8am or 10am PST for our live webcast. Click here to register.

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• How to explain bad software to non-technical people?

  - by mtutty

  In discussing software development with non-technical people (customers, business owners, project sponsors, etc.), I often resort to analogies and metaphors. It's relatively easy and effective to use a "house" or other metaphor for describing the size and complexity of new development. However, we often inherit someone else's code or data, and this approach doesn't seem to hold up as well when trying to explain why we're gutting something that already seems to work. Of course we can point to cycle time and cost to be saved in the future but this generally means nothing to business folks. I know doctors can say "just take this pill," but I'm not sure that software devs have the same authority. Ideas? EDIT: Let me add a bit to the discussion. The specific project I'm talking about has customers that don't realize (or care) about specific aspects of the system we're retiring (i.e., they think it was just fine): The system would save a NEW RECORD every time someone updated a field The system contained tables for reference data. These tables had new records added every day, even though they were duplicates of previous records. And there was no way to tie the reference data used for a particular case at the time it was closed. This is like 99% of the data in the old system. The field NAMES also have spaces, apostrophes and other inappropriate characters in them, making everything harder to work with. In addition to the incredible amount of duplicate data, they have around 1000 XLS files with data they want added to the system. Previously, they would do a spreadsheet for each case in the database, IN ADDITION TO what they typed into the database. Getting rid of this old, unneeded information and piping in the XLS data comprises about 80% of the total project effort, and was not something we could accurately predict. I'm trying to find a concrete way to describe how bad this thing was, mostly so that the customer will understand why the migration process has been so time-consuming. The actual coding was done pretty quickly and the new system works fine, but without the old data they won't be happy. Sorry to get into the weeds, but most of the answers I've seen so far are pretty basic scope/schedule/cost things. I've been doing this for 15 years, so this really is more of a reflective, philosophical question - but without some of the details it can be difficult to really appreciate the awful beauty of this problem.

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• Independent Research on 1500 Companies Reveals Challenges in Performance Visibility – Part 1

  - by ndwyouell

  At the end of May I was joined by Professor Andy Neely of Cambridge University on a webinar, with an audience of over 700, to discuss the results of this extensive study which covered 13 countries and nearly every commercial and industrial sector.  What stunned both of us was not so much the number listening but the 100 questions they asked in just 1 hour.  This certainly represents a record in my experience and for those that organized the webinar. So what was all the fuss about?  Well, to begin with this was a pretty big sample and it represented organizations with over $100m sales across the USA, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. It also delivered some pretty interesting results across a wide range of EPM subjects such as profitability, planning and reporting.  Let’s look at some of those findings. We kicked off with profitability, one of the key factors in driving performance, or that is what you would think, but in fact 82% of our respondents said they did not have complete visibility into the profitability of their organization. 91% of these went further to say that, not surprisingly, this lack of knowledge into the profitability has implications with over half citing 3 or more implications.  Implications cited included misallocated resources, revenue opportunities not maximized, erroneous decisions made and impaired financial performance.  Quite a list of implications, especially given the difficult economic circumstances many organizations are operating in at this time. So why is this?  Well other results in the study point to some of the potential reasons.  Firstly 59% of respondents that use spreadsheets use them for monitoring profitability and 93% of all managers responding to the study use spreadsheets to gather and analyze information.  This is an enormous proportion given the problems with using spreadsheets based performance management systems that have been widely talked about for many years.  For profitability analysis this is particularly important when you consider the typical requirement will be to allocate cost and revenue across 6+ dimensions based on many different allocation methods.  Not something that can be done easily in spreadsheets plus it gets to be a nightmare once you want to change allocations, run different scenarios and then change the basis of your planning and budgeting! It is no wonder so many organizations have challenges in performance visibility. My next blog will look at the fragmented nature of many organizations’ planning.  In the meantime if you want to read the complete report on the research go to: http://www.oracle.com/webapps/dialogue/ns/dlgwelcome.jsp?p_ext=Y&p_dlg_id=10077790&src=7038701&Act=29

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• Speaker Notes...

  - by wulfers

  At a .Net User Group meeting this week, I experienced two poorly prepared speakers floundering through presentations….  As a Lead Technologist at the company I work for, I have experience training technical staff and also giving presentations at code camps.  Here are a few guidelines for aspiring speakers you might find helpful…   1.       Do not stand in front of your audience and read your slides.  This is  offensive to your audience and not what they came for...  Your slides are there to reinforce the information you are presenting and to give the audience a little clarification on some terms you may use and as a visual aid for some complicated issues. 2.       Have someone review your presentation (slides, notes, …) who speaks the language you will be presenting in fluently.  Also record at least ten minutes of your presentation and have that same person review that.  One of the speakers this week used the word “Basically” fifty times in less than thirty minutes…  I started to flinch every time he used the term. 3.       Be Prepared  -  before the presentation begins.  Don’t make any last minute changes to your presentation or demo code the night before.  Don’t patch your laptop or demo servers the night before.  If possible create a virtual image that you only use for presentations and use that (refreshed before every presentation). 4.       Know the level of expertise of your audience.  Speaking above or below their abilities will make or break your presentation. 5.       Deliver what you promise. The presentation this week was supposed to be on BDD (Behavior Driven Develpment).  The presenter completely ran off track and 90% of the discussion was how his team mistakenly used TDD (Test Driven Development), and was unhappy with the results.  Based on his loss of focus we only heard a rushed 10 minute presentation on DBB which was a disservice to the audience. 6.       Practice your presentation with your own small team before you try this on a room full of people you don’t know.  A side benefit of doing this with your own team is that you can get candid feedback from your team and also get kudos for training your own team.  I find I can also turn my presentations into technical white papers and get a third benefit from the work I’ve put into a presentation. 7.       Sharpen your own saw.  Pick a topic that is fairly current.  Something you would like to learn about and would benefit your current career path. 8.       Have fun doing it.

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• Legitimate use of the Windows "Documents" folder in programs.

  - by romkyns

  Anyone who likes their Documents folder to contain only things they place there knows that the standard Documents folder is completely unsuitable for this task. Every program seems to want to put its settings, data, or something equally irrelevant into the Documents folder, despite the fact that there are folders specifically for this job1. So that this doesn't sound empty, take my personal "Documents" folder as an example. I don't ever use it, in that I never, under any circumstances, save anything into this folder myself. And yet, it contains 46 folders and 3 files at the top level, for a total of 800 files in 500 folders. That's 190 MB of "documents" I didn't create. Obviously any actual documents would immediately get lost in this mess. My question is: can anything be done to improve the situation sufficiently to make "Documents" useful again, say over the next 5 years? Can programmers be somehow educated en-masse not to use it as a dumping ground? Could the OS start reporting some "fake" location hidden under AppData through the existing APIs, while only allowing Explorer and the various Open/Save dialogs to know where the "real" Documents folder resides? Or are any attempts completely futile or even unnecessary? 1For the record, here's a quick summary of the various standard directories that should be used instead of "Documents": RoamingAppData for user-specific data and settings. This is the directory to use for user-specific non-temporary data. Anything placed here will be available on any machine that a given user logs on to in networks where this is configured. Do not place large files here though, because they slow down login/logout in such environments. LocalAppData for user-and-machine-specific data and settings. This data differs for every user and every machine. This is also where very large user-specific data should be placed. ProgramData for machine-specific data and settings. These are the same regardless of which user is logged on, and will not roam to other machines in a network. GetTempPath for all files that may be wiped without loss of data when not in use. This is also the place for things like caches, because like temporary data, a cache does not need to be backed up. Place your huge cache here and you'll save your user some backup trouble. "Documents" itself should only ever be used if the user specified it manually by entering a path or selecting it in a Save dialog. That is the only time it is ever appropriate to save stuff in "Documents".

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