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• Beginner’s Guide to Flock, the Social Media Browser

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you wanting a browser that can work as a social hub from the first moment that you start it up? If you love the idea of a browser that is ready to go out of the box then join us as we look at Flock. During the Install Process When you are installing Flock there are two install windows that you should watch for. The first one lets you choose between the “Express Setup & Custom Setup”. We recommend the “Custom Setup”. Once you have selected the “Custom Setup” you can choose which of the following options will enabled. Notice the “anonymous usage statistics” option at the bottom…you can choose to leave this enabled or disable it based on your comfort level. The First Look When you start Flock up for the first time it will open with three tabs. All three are of interest…especially if this is your first time using Flock. With the first tab you can jump right into “logging in/activating” favorite social services within Flock. This page is set to display each time that you open Flock unless you deselect the option in the lower left corner. The second tab provides a very nice overview of Flock and its’ built-in social management power. The third and final page can be considered a “Personal Page”. You can make some changes to the content displayed for quick and easy access and/or monitoring “Twitter Search, Favorite Feeds, Favorite Media, Friend Activity, & Favorite Sites”. Use the “Widget Menu” in the upper left corner to select the “Personal Page Components” that you would like to use. In the upper right corner there is a built-in “Search Bar” and buttons for “Posting to Your Blog & Uploading Media”. To help personalize the “My World Page” just a bit more you can even change the text to your name or whatever best suits your needs. The Flock Toolbar The “Flock Toolbar” is full of social account management goodness. In order from left to right the buttons are: My World (Homepage), Open People Sidebar, Open Media Bar, Open Feeds Sidebar, Webmail, Open Favorites Sidebar, Open Accounts and Services Sidebar, Open Web Clipboard Sidebar, Open Blog Editor, & Open Photo Uploader. The buttons will be “highlighted” with a blue background to help indicate which area you are in. The first area will display a listing of people that you are watching/following at the services shown here. Clicking on the “Media Bar Button” will display the following “Media Slider Bar” above your “Tab Bar”. Notice that there is a built-in “Search Bar” on the right side. Any photos, etc. clicked on will be opened in the currently focused tab below the “Media Bar”. Here is a listing of the “Media Streams” available for viewing. By default Flock will come with a small selection of pre-subscribed RSS Feeds. You can easily unsubscribe, rearrange, add custom folders, or non-categorized feeds as desired. RSS Feeds subscribed to here can be viewed combined together as a single feed (clickable links) in the “My World Page”. or can be viewed individually in a new tab. Very nice! Next on the “Flock Toolbar is the “Webmail Button”. You can set up access to your favorite “Yahoo!, Gmail, & AOL Mail” accounts from here. The “Favorites Sidebar” combines your “Browser History & Bookmarks” into one convenient location. The “Accounts and Services Sidebar” gives you quick and easy access to get logged into your favorite social accounts. Clicking on any of the links will open that particular service’s login page in a new tab. Want to store items such as photos, links, and text to add into a blog post or tweet later on? Just drag and drop them into the “Web Clipboard Sidebar” for later access. Clicking on the “Blog Editor Button” will open up a separate blogging window to compose your posts in. If you have not logged into or set up an account yet in Flock you will see the following message window. The “Blogging Window”…nice, simple, and straightforward. If you are not already logged into your photo account(s) then you will see the following message window when you click on the “Photo Uploader Button”. Clicking “OK” will open the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” with compatible photo services highlighted in a light yellow color. Log in to your favorite service to start uploading all those great images. After Setting Up Here is what our browser looked like after setting up some of our favorite services. The Twitter feed is certainly looking nice and easy to read through… Some tweaking in the “RSS Feeds Sidebar” makes for a perfect reading experience. Keeping up with our e-mail is certainly easy to do too. A look back at the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” shows that all of our accounts are actively logged in (green dot on the right side). Going back to our “My World Page” you can see how nice everything looks for monitoring our “Friend Activity & Favorite Feeds”. Moving on to regular browsing everything is looking very good… Flock is a perfect choice for anyone wanting a browser and social hub all built into a single app. Conclusion Anyone who loves keeping up with their favorite social services while browsing will find using Flock to be a wonderful experience. You literally get the best of both worlds with this browser. Links Download Flock The Official Flock Extensions Homepage The Official Flock Toolbar Homepage Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow to use an ISO image on Ubuntu LinuxAdvertise on How-To GeekFixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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• Silverlight for Everyone!!

  - by subodhnpushpak

  Someone asked me to compare Silverlight / HTML development. I realized that the question can be answered in many ways: Below is the high level comparison between a HTML /JavaScript client and Silverlight client and why silverlight was chosen over HTML / JavaScript client (based on type of users and major functionalities provided): 1. For end users Browser compatibility Silverlight is a plug-in and requires installation first. However, it does provides consistent look and feel across all browsers. For HTML / DHTML, there is a need to tweak JavaScript for each of the browser supported. In fact, tags like <span> and <div> works differently on different browser / version. So, HTML works on most of the systems but also requires lot of efforts coding-wise to adhere to all standards/ browsers / versions. Out of browser support No support in HTML. Third party tools like  Google gears offers some functionalities but there are lots of issues around platform and accessibility. Out of box support for out-of-browser support. provides features like drag and drop onto application surface. Cut and copy paste in HTML HTML is displayed in browser; which, in turn provides facilities for cut copy and paste. Silverlight (specially 4) provides rich features for cut-copy-paste along with full control over what can be cut copy pasted by end users and .advanced features like visual tree printing. Rich user experience HTML can provide some rich experience by use of some JavaScript libraries like JQuery. However, extensive use of JavaScript combined with various versions of browsers and the supported JavaScript makes the solution cumbersome. Silverlight is meant for RIA experience. User data storage on client end In HTML only small amount of data can be stored that too in cookies. In Silverlight large data may be stored, that too in secure way. This increases the response time. Post back In HTML / JavaScript the post back can be stopped by use of AJAX. Extensive use of AJAX can be a bottleneck as browser stack is used for the calls. Both look and feel and data travel over network.                           In Silverlight everything run the client side. Calls are made to server ONLY for data; which also reduces network traffic in long run. 2. For Developers Coding effort HTML / JavaScript can take considerable amount to code if features (requirements) are rich. For AJAX like interfaces; knowledge of third party kits like DOJO / Yahoo UI / JQuery is required which has steep learning curve. ASP .Net coding world revolves mostly along <table> tags for alignments whereas most popular tools provide <div> tags; which requires lots of tweaking. AJAX calls can be a bottlenecks for performance, if the calls are many. In Silverlight; coding is in C#, which is managed code. XAML is also very intuitive and Blend can be used to provide look and feel. Event handling is much clean than in JavaScript. Provides for many clean patterns like MVVM and composable application. Each call to server is asynchronous in silverlight. AJAX is in built into silverlight. Threading can be done at the client side itself to provide for better responsiveness; etc. Debugging Debugging in HTML / JavaScript is difficult. As JavaScript is interpreted; there is NO compile time error handling. Debugging in Silverlight is very helpful. As it is compiled; it provides rich features for both compile time and run time error handling. Multi -targeting browsers HTML / JavaScript have different rendering behaviours in different browsers / and their versions. JavaScript have to be written to sublime the differences in browser behaviours. Silverlight works exactly the same in all browsers and works on almost all popular browser. Multi-targeting desktop No support in HTML / JavaScript Silverlight is very close to WPF. Bot the platform may be easily targeted while maintaining the same source code. Rich toolkit HTML /JavaScript have limited toolkit as controls Silverlight provides a rich set of controls including graphs, audio, video, layout, etc. 3. For Architects Design Patterns Silverlight provides for patterns like MVVM (MVC) and rich (fat)  client architecture. This segregates the "separation of concern" very clearly. Client (silverlight) does what it is expected to do and server does what it is expected of. In HTML / JavaScript world most of the processing is done on the server side. Extensibility Silverlight provides great deal of extensibility as custom controls may be made. Extensibility is NOT restricted by browser but by the plug-in silverlight runs in. HTML / JavaScript works in a certain way and extensibility is generally done on the server side rather than client end. Client side is restricted by the limitations of the browser. Performance Silverlight provides localized storage which may be used for cached data storage. this reduces the response time. As processing can be done on client side itself; there is no need for server round trips. this decreases the round about time. Look and feel of the application is downloaded ONLY initially, afterwards ONLY data is fetched form the server. Security Silverlight is compiled code downloaded as .XAP; As compared to HTML / JavaScript, it provides more secure sandboxed approach. Cross - scripting is inherently prohibited in silverlight by default. If proper guidelines are followed silverlight provides much robust security mechanism as against HTML / JavaScript world. For example; knowing server Address in obfuscated JavaScript is easier than a compressed compiled obfuscated silverlight .XAP file. Some of these like (offline and Canvas support) will be available in HTML5. However, the timelines are not encouraging at all. According to Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5 for details. The above is MY opinion. I will love to hear yours; do let me know via comments. Technorati Tags: Silverlight

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• SQL SERVER – Thinking about Deprecated, Discontinued Features and Breaking Changes while Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 – Guest Post by Nakul Vachhrajani

  - by pinaldave

  Nakul Vachhrajani is a Technical Specialist and systems development professional with iGATE having a total IT experience of more than 7 years. Nakul is an active blogger with BeyondRelational.com (150+ blogs), and can also be found on forums at SQLServerCentral and BeyondRelational.com. Nakul has also been a guest columnist for SQLAuthority.com and SQLServerCentral.com. Nakul presented a webcast on the “Underappreciated Features of Microsoft SQL Server” at the Microsoft Virtual Tech Days Exclusive Webcast series (May 02-06, 2011) on May 06, 2011. He is also the author of a research paper on Database upgrade methodologies, which was published in a CSI journal, published nationwide. In addition to his passion about SQL Server, Nakul also contributes to the academia out of personal interest. He visits various colleges and universities as an external faculty to judge project activities being carried out by the students. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are his own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter | Google+ Let us hear the thoughts of Nakul in first person - Those who have been following my blogs would be aware that I am recently running a series on the database engine features that have been deprecated in Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Based on the response that I have received, I was quite surprised to know that most of the audience found these to be breaking changes, when in fact, they were not! It was then that I decided to write a little piece on how to plan your database upgrade such that it works with the next version of Microsoft SQL Server. Please note that the recommendations made in this article are high-level markers and are intended to help you think over the specific steps that you would need to take to upgrade your database. Refer the documentation – Understand the terms Change is the only constant in this world. Therefore, whenever customer requirements, newer architectures and designs require software vendors to make a change to the keywords, functions, etc; they ensure that they provide their end users sufficient time to migrate over to the new standards before dropping off the old ones. Microsoft does that too with it’s Microsoft SQL Server product. Whenever a new SQL Server release is announced, it comes with a list of the following features: Breaking changes These are changes that would break your currently running applications, scripts or functionalities that are based on earlier version of Microsoft SQL Server These are mostly features whose behavior has been changed keeping in mind the newer architectures and designs Lesson: These are the changes that you need to be most worried about! Discontinued features These features are no longer available in the associated version of Microsoft SQL Server These features used to be “deprecated” in the prior release Lesson: Without these changes, your database would not be compliant/may not work with the version of Microsoft SQL Server under consideration Deprecated features These features are those that are still available in the current version of Microsoft SQL Server, but are scheduled for removal in a future version. These may be removed in either the next version or any other future version of Microsoft SQL Server The features listed for deprecation will compose the list of discontinued features in the next version of SQL Server Lesson: Plan to make necessary changes required to remove/replace usage of the deprecated features with the latest recommended replacements Once a feature appears on the list, it moves from bottom to the top, i.e. it is first marked as “Deprecated” and then “Discontinued”. We know of “Breaking change” comes later on in the product life cycle. What this means is that if you want to know what features would not work with SQL Server 2012 (and you are currently using SQL Server 2008 R2), you need to refer the list of breaking changes and discontinued features in SQL Server 2012. Use the tools! There are a lot of tools and technologies around us, but it is rarely that I find teams using these tools religiously and to the best of their potential. Below are the top two tools, from Microsoft, that I use every time I plan a database upgrade. The SQL Server Upgrade Advisor Ever since SQL Server 2005 was announced, Microsoft provides a small, very light-weight tool called the “SQL Server upgrade advisor”. The upgrade advisor analyzes installed components from earlier versions of SQL Server, and then generates a report that identifies issues to fix either before or after you upgrade. The analysis examines objects that can be accessed, such as scripts, stored procedures, triggers, and trace files. Upgrade Advisor cannot analyze desktop applications or encrypted stored procedures. Refer the links towards the end of the post to know how to get the Upgrade Advisor. The SQL Server Profiler Another great tool that you can use is the one most SQL Server developers & administrators use often – the SQL Server profiler. SQL Server Profiler provides functionality to monitor the “Deprecation” event, which contains: Deprecation announcement – equivalent to features to be deprecated in a future release of SQL Server Deprecation final support – equivalent to features to be deprecated in the next release of SQL Server You can learn more using the links towards the end of the post. A basic checklist There are a lot of finer points that need to be taken care of when upgrading your database. But, it would be worth-while to identify a few basic steps in order to make your database compliant with the next version of SQL Server: Monitor the current application workload (on a test bed) via the Profiler in order to identify usage of features marked as Deprecated If none appear, you are all set! (This almost never happens) Note down all the offending queries and feature usages Run analysis sessions using the SQL Server upgrade advisor on your database Based on the inputs from the analysis report and Profiler trace sessions, Incorporate solutions for the breaking changes first Next, incorporate solutions for the discontinued features Revisit and document the upgrade strategy for your deployment scenarios Revisit the fall-back, i.e. rollback strategies in case the upgrades fail Because some programming changes are dependent upon the SQL server version, this may need to be done in consultation with the development teams Before any other enhancements are incorporated by the development team, send out the database changes into QA QA strategy should involve a comparison between an environment running the old version of SQL Server against the new one Because minimal application changes have gone in (essential changes for SQL Server version compliance only), this would be possible As an ongoing activity, keep incorporating changes recommended as per the deprecated features list As a DBA, update your coding standards to ensure that the developers are using ANSI compliant code – this code will require a change only if the ANSI standard changes Remember this: Change management is a continuous process. Keep revisiting the product release notes and incorporate recommended changes to stay prepared for the next release of SQL Server. May the power of SQL Server be with you! Links Referenced in this post Breaking changes in SQL Server 2012: Link Discontinued features in SQL Server 2012: Link Get the upgrade advisor from the Microsoft Download Center at: Link Upgrade Advisor page on MSDN: Link Profiler: Review T-SQL code to identify objects no longer supported by Microsoft: Link Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 by Vinod Kumar: Link Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Upgrade

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 17, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 17, 2010New ProjectsAstalanumerator: A JavaScript based recursive DOM/JS object inspector. Uses a simple tree menu to enumerate all properties of a object.BDD Log Converter: A simple .NET class and console application that will convert BDD logs (MDT) into XML format.CastleInvestProj: Castle Investigating project Easy Callback: This library facilitates the use of multiple asynchronous calls on the same page, and asynchronous calls from a user control also have a clean cod...Easy Wings: Small webApp to manage aircraft booking in flying club. French only for the moment.EPiServer Template Foundation: EPiServer Template Foundation builds on top of Page Type Builder to provide a framework for common site features such as basic page type properties...guidebook: a project to plan your road trip.Look into documents for e-discovery: Search, browse, tag, annotate documents such as MS Word, PDF, e-mail, etc. Good for legal professionals do e-discovery. One Bus Away for Windows Phone: A Windows Phone 7 application written in Silverlight for the OneBusAway (www.onebusaway.org) website. Allows mobile users to search for public tra...OneBusAway for Windows Phone 7: OneBusAway is a service with transit information for the Seattle, WA region. We are creating a mobile application for Windows Phone 7 utilizing th...PoFabLab - Poetry Generation Library and Editor in .NET: PoFabLab is an open source library and word processor designed for digital poets. The library can scan lines, perform Markov analysis, filter text...Project Axure: More details coming soon.Чат кутежа 2.0: ИРЦ чат специально для форума ЕНЕ简易代码生成器: 初次使用CodePlex，这只是一个测试项目。打算用WPF做一个简单的代码生成器，兼具SQL Server Client功能。使用.Net 4.0, C#开发。运营工作系统: TRAS(Team resource assist system) is a toolkit that help the studio to manage and distribute the daily work, like publish the news, GM broadcast a...New ReleasesAmuse - A New MU* Client For Windows: 2010 June: Important Notice to TestersPlease uninstall any previous versions of Amuse prior to this one before installing. Changes and InformationFirst relea...ASP.NET Generic Data Source Control: V1.0: GenericDataSource - Version 1.0Binary This is the first official binary release of the GenericDataSource for ASP.NET - stable and ready for product...Astalanumerator: Astalanumerator 0.7: I wanted to map all properties in javascript and inspect them regardless if they were objects or not. IE doesn’t support for(i in..) for native pro...BDD Log Converter: BDD Log Converter 0.1.0: First release (0.1.0).DVD Swarm: 0.8.10.616: Major update with improvements to encoding speed.Easy Callback: Easy Callback 1.0.0.0: Easy Callback library 1.0.0.0Facebook Connect Authentication for ASP.NET: Facebook Connect Authentication for ASP.NET - v1.0: Now supporting Facebook's new Open Graph API JavaScript SDK, this release of FBConnectAuth also adds support for running in partially trusted envir...FlickrNet API Library: 3.0 Beta 3: Another small Beta. Changed parsing code so exceptions aren't raised when new attributes are added by Flickr. This affects searches where you are ...Infragistics Analytics Framework: Infragistics Analytics Framework 10.2: An updated version of Infragistics Analytics Framework, which utilizes the newest version (v.1.4.4) of MSAF as well as the newest release (v.10.2) ...NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications: NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications 1.0 build 1: Version 1.0 build 1:[change] Test run failure notification now disappears automaticallyOpen Source PLM Activities: 3dxml player integration for Aras Innovator: This is just a simple html file you need to add to your Aras Innovator install directory. It loads the 3Dxml player for your 3dxml files. Tested o...patterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: WAAG - Part 2 - Drop 1: First code and docs drop for Part 2 of the Windows Azure Architecture Guide Part 1 of the Guide is released here. Highlights of this release are:...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (June 2010): Installer of the latest binaries of Phalanger 2.0 (June 2010) and its integration into Visual Studio 2008 SP1. * Improved compatibility with P...RIA Services Essentials: Book Club Application (June 16, 2010): Added some XAML to hide/show link to BookShelf page based on whether the user is logged in or not. Updated IsBookOwner authorization rule implement...secs4net: Relase 1.01: version 1.01 releasesELedit: sELedit v1.1c: Added: Tool for exporting NPC/Mob database file that is used by sNPCeditSharePoint Ad Rotator: SPAdRotator 2.0 Beta 2: Added: Open tool pane link to default Web Part text Made all images except the first hidden by default, so the Web Part will degrade gracefully w...sMAPtool: sMAPtool v0.7f (without Maps): Added: 3rd party magnifier softwaresNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9c: Added: npc/mob names and corresponding datbaseSolidWorks Addin Development: GenericAddinFrameworkR1-06.17.2010: .sTASKedit: sTASKedit v0.8: Important BugFix: there was an mistake in the structure, team-member block and get-items block was swapped internally. Tasks that contains both blo...stefvanhooijdonk.com: UnitTesting-SP2010-TFS2010: Files for my post on TFS2010 and NUnit testing with SP2010 projects. see the post here: http://wp.me/pMnlQ-88 The XSLT here is from http://nunit4t...Telerik CAB Enabling Kit for RadControls for WinForms: TCEK 2010.1.10.504: What's new in v2010.1.0610 (Beta): RadDocking component has been replaced with the latest RadDock control Requirements: Visual Studio 2005+ Tele...TFS Buddy: TFS Buddy 1.2: Fixes a problem with notificationsThales Simulator Library: Version 0.9: The Thales Simulator Library is an implementation of a software emulation of the Thales (formerly Zaxus & Racal) Hardware Security Module cryptogra...Triton Application Framework: Tools - Code Generator - Build 1.0: This is the first release of the Generator. This is buggy but works.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30616.0: Automatic drop of latest buildXsltDb - DotNetNuke Module Builder: 01.01.27: Code completion for XsltDb, HTML and XSL stuff!! Full screen editing Some bugs are still in EditArea component and object lists in code completi...Чат кутежа 2.0: 0.9a build 2 версия: вторая сборка первой альфа-версии ирц-клиента.Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsdotSpatialpatterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contribpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETLightweight Fluent WorkflowRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodeSunlit World SchemeNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleSolidWorks Addin DevelopmentN2 CMS

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• MySQL Cluster 7.3 Labs Release – Foreign Keys Are In!

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 1097 6254 Homework 52 14 7337 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;} Summary (aka TL/DR): Support for Foreign Key constraints has been one of the most requested feature enhancements for MySQL Cluster. We are therefore extremely excited to announce that Foreign Keys are part of the first Labs Release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 – available for download, evaluation and feedback now! (Select the mysql-cluster-7.3-labs-June-2012 build) In this blog, I will attempt to discuss the design rationale, implementation, configuration and steps to get started in evaluating the first MySQL Cluster 7.3 Labs Release. Pace of Innovation It was only a couple of months ago that we announced the General Availability (GA) of MySQL Cluster 7.2, delivering 1 billion Queries per Minute, with 70x higher cross-shard JOIN performance, Memcached NoSQL key-value API and cross-data center replication.  This release has been a huge hit, with downloads and deployments quickly reaching record levels. The announcement of the first MySQL Cluster 7.3 Early Access lab release at today's MySQL Innovation Day event demonstrates the continued pace in Cluster development, and provides an opportunity for the community to evaluate and feedback on new features they want to see. What’s the Plan for MySQL Cluster 7.3? Well, Foreign Keys, as you may have gathered by now (!), and this is the focus of this first Labs Release. As with MySQL Cluster 7.2, we plan to publish a series of preview releases for 7.3 that will incrementally add new candidate features for a final GA release (subject to usual safe harbor statement below*), including: - New NoSQL APIs; - Features to automate the configuration and provisioning of multi-node clusters, on premise or in the cloud; - Performance and scalability enhancements; - Taking advantage of features in the latest MySQL 5.x Server GA. Design Rationale MySQL Cluster is designed as a “Not-Only-SQL” database. It combines attributes that enable users to blend the best of both relational and NoSQL technologies into solutions that deliver web scalability with 99.999% availability and real-time performance, including: Concurrent NoSQL and SQL access to the database; Auto-sharding with simple scale-out across commodity hardware; Multi-master replication with failover and recovery both within and across data centers; Shared-nothing architecture with no single point of failure; Online scaling and schema changes; ACID compliance and support for complex queries, across shards. Native support for Foreign Key constraints enables users to extend the benefits of MySQL Cluster into a broader range of use-cases, including: - Packaged applications in areas such as eCommerce and Web Content Management that prescribe databases with Foreign Key support. - In-house developments benefiting from Foreign Key constraints to simplify data models and eliminate the additional application logic needed to maintain data consistency and integrity between tables. Implementation The Foreign Key functionality is implemented directly within MySQL Cluster’s data nodes, allowing any client API accessing the cluster to benefit from them – whether using SQL or one of the NoSQL interfaces (Memcached, C++, Java, JPA or HTTP/REST.) The core referential actions defined in the SQL:2003 standard are implemented: CASCADE RESTRICT NO ACTION SET NULL In addition, the MySQL Cluster implementation supports the online adding and dropping of Foreign Keys, ensuring the Cluster continues to serve both read and write requests during the operation. An important difference to note with the Foreign Key implementation in InnoDB is that MySQL Cluster does not support the updating of Primary Keys from within the Data Nodes themselves - instead the UPDATE is emulated with a DELETE followed by an INSERT operation. Therefore an UPDATE operation will return an error if the parent reference is using a Primary Key, unless using CASCADE action, in which case the delete operation will result in the corresponding rows in the child table being deleted. The Engineering team plans to change this behavior in a subsequent preview release. Also note that when using InnoDB "NO ACTION" is identical to "RESTRICT". In the case of MySQL Cluster “NO ACTION” means “deferred check”, i.e. the constraint is checked before commit, allowing user-defined triggers to automatically make changes in order to satisfy the Foreign Key constraints. Configuration There is nothing special you have to do here – Foreign Key constraint checking is enabled by default. If you intend to migrate existing tables from another database or storage engine, for example from InnoDB, there are a couple of best practices to observe: 1. Analyze the structure of the Foreign Key graph and run the ALTER TABLE ENGINE=NDB in the correct sequence to ensure constraints are enforced 2. Alternatively drop the Foreign Key constraints prior to the import process and then recreate when complete. Getting Started Read this blog for a demonstration of using Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster.  You can download MySQL Cluster 7.3 Labs Release with Foreign Keys today - (select the mysql-cluster-7.3-labs-June-2012 build) If you are new to MySQL Cluster, the Getting Started guide will walk you through installing an evaluation cluster on a singe host (these guides reflect MySQL Cluster 7.2, but apply equally well to 7.3) Post any questions to the MySQL Cluster forum where our Engineering team will attempt to assist you. Post any bugs you find to the MySQL bug tracking system (select MySQL Cluster from the Category drop-down menu) And if you have any feedback, please post them to the Comments section of this blog. Summary MySQL Cluster 7.2 is the GA, production-ready release of MySQL Cluster. This first Labs Release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 gives you the opportunity to preview and evaluate future developments in the MySQL Cluster database, and we are very excited to be able to share that with you. Let us know how you get along with MySQL Cluster 7.3, and other features that you want to see in future releases. * Safe Harbor Statement This information is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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• Using Node.js as an accelerator for WCF REST services

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform "for easily building fast, scalable network applications". It's built on Google's V8 JavaScript engine and uses an (almost) entirely async event-driven processing model, running in a single thread. If you're new to Node and your reaction is "why would I want to run JavaScript on the server side?", this is the headline answer: in 150 lines of JavaScript you can build a Node.js app which works as an accelerator for WCF REST services*. It can double your messages-per-second throughput, halve your CPU workload and use one-fifth of the memory footprint, compared to the WCF services direct.   Well, it can if: 1) your WCF services are first-class HTTP citizens, honouring client cache ETag headers in request and response; 2) your services do a reasonable amount of work to build a response; 3) your data is read more often than it's written. In one of my projects I have a set of REST services in WCF which deal with data that only gets updated weekly, but which can be read hundreds of times an hour. The services issue ETags and will return a 304 if the client sends a request with the current ETag, which means in the most common scenario the client uses its local cached copy. But when the weekly update happens, then all the client caches are invalidated and they all need the same new data. Then the service will get hundreds of requests with old ETags, and they go through the full service stack to build the same response for each, taking up threads and processing time. Part of that processing means going off to a database on a separate cloud, which introduces more latency and downtime potential.   We can use ASP.NET output caching with WCF to solve the repeated processing problem, but the server will still be thread-bound on incoming requests, and to get the current ETags reliably needs a database call per request. The accelerator solves that by running as a proxy - all client calls come into the proxy, and the proxy routes calls to the underlying REST service. We could use Node as a straight passthrough proxy and expect some benefit, as the server would be less thread-bound, but we would still have one WCF and one database call per proxy call. But add some smart caching logic to the proxy, and share ETags between Node and WCF (so the proxy doesn't even need to call the servcie to get the current ETag), and the underlying service will only be invoked when data has changed, and then only once - all subsequent client requests will be served from the proxy cache.   I've built this as a sample up on GitHub: NodeWcfAccelerator on sixeyed.codegallery. Here's how the architecture looks:     The code is very simple. The Node proxy runs on port 8010 and all client requests target the proxy. If the client request has an ETag header then the proxy looks up the ETag in the tag cache to see if it is current - the sample uses memcached to share ETags between .NET and Node. If the ETag from the client matches the current server tag, the proxy sends a 304 response with an empty body to the client, telling it to use its own cached version of the data. If the ETag from the client is stale, the proxy looks for a local cached version of the response, checking for a file named after the current ETag. If that file exists, its contents are returned to the client as the body in a 200 response, which includes the current ETag in the header. If the proxy does not have a local cached file for the service response, it calls the service, and writes the WCF response to the local cache file, and to the body of a 200 response for the client. So the WCF service is only troubled if both client and proxy have stale (or no) caches.   The only (vaguely) clever bit in the sample is using the ETag cache, so the proxy can serve cached requests without any communication with the underlying service, which it does completely generically, so the proxy has no notion of what it is serving or what the services it proxies are doing. The relative path from the URL is used as the lookup key, so there's no shared key-generation logic between .NET and Node, and when WCF stores a tag it also stores the "read" URL against the ETag so it can be used for a reverse lookup, e.g:   Key Value /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3 "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3    In Node we read the cache using the incoming URL path as the key and we know that "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" is the current ETag; we look for a local cached response in /caches/28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6.body (and the corresponding .header file which contains the original service response headers, so the proxy response is exactly the same as the underlying service). When the data is updated, we need to invalidate the ETag cache – which is why we need the reverse lookup in the cache. In the WCF update service, we don't need to know the URL of the related read service - we fetch the entity from the database, do a reverse lookup on the tag cache using the old ETag to get the read URL, update the new ETag against the URL, store the new reverse lookup and delete the old one.   Running Apache Bench against the two endpoints gives the headline performance comparison. Making 1000 requests with concurrency of 100, and not sending any ETag headers in the requests, with the Node proxy I get 102 requests handled per second, average response time of 975 milliseconds with 90% of responses served within 850 milliseconds; going direct to WCF with the same parameters, I get 53 requests handled per second, mean response time of 1853 milliseconds, with 90% of response served within 3260 milliseconds. Informally monitoring server usage during the tests, Node maxed at 20% CPU and 20Mb memory; IIS maxed at 60% CPU and 100Mb memory.   Note that the sample WCF service does a database read and sleeps for 250 milliseconds to simulate a moderate processing load, so this is *not* a baseline Node-vs-WCF comparison, but for similar scenarios where the  service call is expensive but applicable to numerous clients for a long timespan, the performance boost from the accelerator is considerable.     * - actually, the accelerator will work nicely for any HTTP request, where the URL (path + querystring) uniquely identifies a resource. In the sample, there is an assumption that the ETag is a GUID wrapped in double-quotes (e.g. "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6") – which is the default for WCF services. I use that assumption to name the cache files uniquely, but it is a trivial change to adapt to other ETag formats.

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• CEN/CENELEC Lacks Perspective

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  Over the last few months, two of the European Standardization Organizations (ESOs), CEN and CENELEC have circulated an unfortunate position statement distorting the facts around fora and consortia. For the benefit of outsiders to this debate, let's just say that this debate regards whether and how the EU should recognize standards and specifications from certain fora and consortia based on a process evaluating the openness and transparency of such deliverables. The topic is complex, and somewhat confusing even to insiders, but nevertheless crucial to the European economy. As far as I can judge, their positions are not based on facts. This is unfortunate. For the benefit of clarity, here are some of the observations they make: a)"Most consortia are in essence driven by technology companies making hardware and software solutions, by definition very few of the largest ones are European-based". b) "Most consortia lack a European presence, relevant Committees, even those that are often cited as having stronger links with Europe, seem to lack an overall, inclusive set of participants". c) "Recognising specific consortia specifications will not resolve any concrete problems of interoperability for public authorities; interoperability depends on stringing together a range of specifications (from formal global bodies or consortia alike)". d) "Consortia already have the option to have their specifications adopted by the international formal standards bodies and many more exercise this than the two that seem to be campaigning for European recognition. Such specifications can then also be adopted as European standards." e) "Consortium specifications completely lack any process to take due and balanced account of requirements at national level - this is not important for technologies but can be a critical issue when discussing cross-border issues within the EU such as eGovernment, eHealth and so on". f) "The proposed recognition will not lead to standstill on national or European activities, nor to the adoption of the specifications as national standards in the CEN and CENELEC members (usually in their official national languages), nor to withdrawal of conflicting national standards. A big asset of the European standardization system is its coherence and lack of fragmentation." g) "We always miss concrete and specific examples of where consortia referencing are supposed to be helpful." First of all, note that ETSI, the third ESO, did not join the position. The reason is, of course, that ETSI beyond being an ESO, also has a global perspective and, moreover, does consider reality. Secondly, having produced arguments a) to g), CEN/CENELEC has the audacity to call a meeting on Friday 25 February entitled "ICT standardization - improving collaboration in Europe". This sounds very nice, but they have not set the stage for constructive debate. Rather, they demonstrate a striking lack of vision and lack of perspective. I will back this up by three facts, and leave it there. 1. Since the 1980s, global industry fora and consortia, such as IETF, W3C and OASIS have emerged as world-leading ICT standards development organizations with excellent procedures for openness and transparency in all phases of standards development, ex post and ex ante. - Practically no ICT system can be built without using fora and consortia standards (FCS). - Without using FCS, neither the Internet, upon which the EU economy depends, nor EU institutions would operate. - FCS are of high relevance for achieving and promoting interoperability and driving innovation. 2. FCS are complementary to the formally recognized standards organizations including the ESOs. - No work will be taken away from the ESOs should the EU recognize certain FCS. - Each FCS would be evaluated on its merit and on the openness of the process that produced it. ESOs would, with other stakeholders, have a say. - ESOs could potentially educate and assist European stakeholders to engage more actively and constructively with FCS. - ETSI, also an ESO, seems to clearly recognize these facts. 3. Europe and its Member States have a strong voice in several of the most relevant global industry fora and consortia. - W3C: W3C was founded in 1994 by an Englishman, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in collaboration with CERN, the European research lab. In April 1995, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) in France became the first European W3C host and in 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics), also based in France, took over the role of European W3C host from INRIA. Today, W3C has 326 Members, 40% of which are European. Government participation is also strong, and it could be increased - a development that is very much desired by W3C. Current members of the W3C Advisory Board includes Ora Lassila (Nokia) and Charles McCathie Nevile (Opera). Nokia is Finnish company, Opera is a Norwegian company. SAP's Claus von Riegen is an alumni of the same Advisory Board. - OASIS: its membership - 30% of which is European - represents the marketplace, reflecting a balance of providers, user companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. In particular, about 15% of OASIS members are governments or universities. Frederick Hirsch from Nokia, Claus von Riegen from SAP AG and Charles-H. Schulz from Ars Aperta are on the Board of Directors. Nokia is a Finnish company, SAP is a German company and Ars Aperta is a French company. The Chairman of the Board is Peter Brown, who is an Independent Consultant, an Austrian citizen AND an official of the European Parliament currently on long-term leave. - IETF: The oversight of its activities is by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), since 2007 chaired by Olaf Kolkman, a Dutch national who lives in Uithoorn, NL. Kolkman is director of NLnet Labs, a foundation chartered to develop open source software and open source standards for the Internet. Other IAB members include Marcelo Bagnulo whose affiliation is the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain as well as Hannes Tschofenig from Nokia Siemens Networks. Nokia is a Finnish company. Siemens is a German company. Nokia Siemens is a European joint venture. - Member States: At least 17 European Member States have developed Interoperability Frameworks that include FCS, according to the EU-funded National Interoperability Framework Observatory (see list and NIFO web site on IDABC). This also means they actively procure solutions using FCS, reference FCS in their policies and even in laws. Member State reps are free to engage in FCS, and many do. It would be nice if the EU adjusted to this reality. - A huge number of European nationals work in the global IT industry, on European soil or elsewhere, whether in EU registered companies or not. CEN/CENELEC lacks perspective and has engaged in an effort to twist facts that is quite striking from a publicly funded organization. I wish them all possible success with Friday's meeting but I fear all of the most important stakeholders will not be at the table. Not because they do not wish to collaborate, but because they just have been insulted. If they do show up, it would be a gracious move, almost beyond comprehension. While I do not expect CEN/CENELEC to line up perfectly in favor of fora and consortia, I think it would be to their benefit to stick to more palatable observations. Actually, I would suggest an apology, straightening out the facts. This works among friends and it works in an organizational context. Then, we can all move on. Standardization is important. Too important to ignore. Too important to distort. The European economy depends on it. We need CEN/CENELEC. It is an important organization. But CEN/CENELEC needs fora and consortia, too.

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• What Makes a Good Design Critic? CHI 2010 Panel Review

  - by jatin.thaker

  Author: Daniel Schwartz, Senior Interaction Designer, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle Applications UX Chief Evangelist Patanjali Venkatacharya organized and moderated an innovative and stimulating panel discussion titled "What Makes a Good Design Critic? Food Design vs. Product Design Criticism" at CHI 2010, the annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The panelists included Janice Rohn, VP of User Experience at Experian; Tami Hardeman, a food stylist; Ed Seiber, a restaurant architect and designer; John Kessler, a food critic and writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; and Larry Powers, Chef de Cuisine at Shaun's restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia. Building off the momentum of his highly acclaimed panel at CHI 2009 on what interaction design can learn from food design (for which I was on the other side as a panelist), Venkatacharya brought together new people with different roles in the restaurant and software interaction design fields. The session was also quite delicious -- but more on that later. Criticism, as it applies to food and product or interaction design, was the tasty topic for this forum and showed that strong parallels exist between food and interaction design criticism. Figure 1. The panelists in discussion: (left to right) Janice Rohn, Ed Seiber, Tami Hardeman, and John Kessler. The panelists had great insights to share from their respective fields, and they enthusiastically discussed as if they were at a casual collegial dinner. John Kessler stated that he prefers to have one professional critic's opinion in general than a large sampling of customers, however, "Web sites like Yelp get users excited by the collective approach. People are attracted to things desired by so many." Janice Rohn added that this collective desire was especially true for users of consumer products. Ed Seiber remarked that while people looked to the popular view for their target tastes and product choices, "professional critics like John [Kessler] still hold a big weight on public opinion." Chef Powers indicated that chefs take in feedback from all sources, adding, "word of mouth is very powerful. We also look heavily at the sales of the dishes to see what's moving; what's selling and thus successful." Hearing this discussion validates our design work at Oracle in that we listen to our users (our diners) and industry feedback (our critics) to ensure an optimal user experience of our products. Rohn considers that restaurateur Danny Meyer's book, Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, which is about creating successful restaurant experiences, has many applicable parallels to user experience design. Meyer actually argues that the customer is not always right, but that "they must always feel heard." Seiber agreed, but noted "customers are not designers," and while designers need to listen to customer feedback, it is the designer's job to synthesize it. Seiber feels it's the critic's job to point out when something is missing or not well-prioritized. In interaction design, our challenges are quite similar, if not parallel. Software tasks are like puzzles that are in search of a solution on how to be best completed. As a food stylist, Tami Hardeman has the demanding and challenging task of presenting food to be as delectable as can be. To present food in its best light requires a lot of creativity and insight into consumer tastes. It's no doubt then that this former fashion stylist came up with the ultimate catch phrase to capture the emotion that clients want to draw from their users: "craveability." The phrase was a hit with the audience and panelists alike. Sometime later in the discussion, Seiber remarked, "designers strive to apply craveability to products, and I do so for restaurants in my case." Craveabilty is also very applicable to interaction design. Creating straightforward and smooth workflows for users of Oracle Applications is a primary goal for my colleagues. We want our users to really enjoy working with our products where it makes them more efficient and better at their jobs. That's our "craveability." Patanjali Venkatacharya asked the panel, "if a design's "craveability" appeals to some cultures but not to others, then what is the impact to the food or product design process?" Rohn stated that "taste is part nature and part nurture" and that the design must take the full context of a product's usage into consideration. Kessler added, "good design is about understanding the context" that the experience necessitates. Seiber remarked how important seat comfort is for diners and how the quality of seating will add so much to the complete dining experience. Sometimes if these non-food factors are not well executed, they can also take away from an otherwise pleasant dining experience. Kessler recounted a time when he was dining at a restaurant that actually had very good food, but the photographs hanging on all the walls did not fit in with the overall décor and created a negative overall dining experience. While the tastiness of the food is critical to a restaurant's success, it is a captivating complete user experience, as in interaction design, which will keep customers coming back and ultimately making the restaurant a hit. Figure 2. Patanjali Venkatacharya enjoyed the Sardinian flatbread salad. As a surprise Chef Powers brought out a signature dish from Shaun's restaurant for all the panelists to sample and critique. The Sardinian flatbread dish showcased Atlanta's taste for fresh and local produce and cheese at its finest as a salad served on a crispy flavorful flat bread. Hardeman said it could be photographed from any angle, a high compliment coming from a food stylist. Seiber really enjoyed the colors that the dish brought together and thought it would be served very well in a casual restaurant on a summer's day. The panel really appreciated the taste and quality of the different components and how the rosemary brought all the flavors together. Seiber remarked that "a lot of effort goes into the appearance of simplicity." Rohn indicated that the same notion holds true with software user interface design. A tremendous amount of work goes into crafting straightforward interfaces, including user research, prototyping, design iterations, and usability studies. Design criticism for food and software interfaces clearly share many similarities. Both areas value expert opinions and user feedback. Both areas understand the importance of great design needing to work well in its context. Last but not least, both food and interaction design criticism value "craveability" and how having users excited about experiencing and enjoying the designs is an important goal. Now if we can just improve the taste of software user interfaces, people may choose to dine on their enterprise applications over a fresh organic salad.

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• A Good Developer is So Hard to Find

  - by James Michael Hare

  Let me start out by saying I want to damn the writers of the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever – 2. It is eating every last shred of my free time! But as I've been churning through each puzzle and marvelling at the brain teasers and trivia within, I began to think about interviewing developers and why it seems to be so hard to find good ones.  The problem is, it seems like no matter how hard we try to find the perfect way to separate the chaff from the wheat, inevitably someone will get hired who falls far short of expectations or someone will get passed over for missing a piece of trivia or a tricky brain teaser that could have been an excellent team member.   In shops that are primarily software-producing businesses or other heavily IT-oriented businesses (Microsoft, Amazon, etc) there often exists a much tighter bond between HR and the hiring development staff because development is their life-blood. Unfortunately, many of us work in places where IT is viewed as a cost or just a means to an end. In these shops, too often, HR and development staff may work against each other due to differences in opinion as to what a good developer is or what one is worth.  It seems that if you ask two different people what makes a good developer, often you will get three different opinions.   With the exception of those shops that are purely development-centric (you guys have it much easier!), most other shops have management who have very little knowledge about the development process.  Their view can often be that development is simply a skill that one learns and then once aquired, that developer can produce widgets as good as the next like workers on an assembly-line floor.  On the other side, you have many developers that feel that software development is an art unto itself and that the ability to create the most pure design or know the most obscure of keywords or write the shortest-possible obfuscated piece of code is a good coder.  So is it a skill?  An Art?  Or something entirely in between?   Saying that software is merely a skill and one just needs to learn the syntax and tools would be akin to saying anyone who knows English and can use Word can write a 300 page book that is accurate, meaningful, and stays true to the point.  This just isn't so.  It takes more than mere skill to take words and form a sentence, join those sentences into paragraphs, and those paragraphs into a document.  I've interviewed candidates who could answer obscure syntax and keyword questions and once they were hired could not code effectively at all.  So development must be more than a skill.   But on the other end, we have art.  Is development an art?  Is our end result to produce art?  I can marvel at a piece of code -- see it as concise and beautiful -- and yet that code most perform some stated function with accuracy and efficiency and maintainability.  None of these three things have anything to do with art, per se.  Art is beauty for its own sake and is a wonderful thing.  But if you apply that same though to development it just doesn't hold.  I've had developers tell me that all that matters is the end result and how you code it is entirely part of the art and I couldn't disagree more.  Yes, the end result, the accuracy, is the prime criteria to be met.  But if code is not maintainable and efficient, it would be just as useless as a beautiful car that breaks down once a week or that gets 2 miles to the gallon.  Yes, it may work in that it moves you from point A to point B and is pretty as hell, but if it can't be maintained or is not efficient, it's not a good solution.  So development must be something less than art.   In the end, I think I feel like development is a matter of craftsmanship.  We use our tools and we use our skills and set about to construct something that satisfies a purpose and yet is also elegant and efficient.  There is skill involved, and there is an art, but really it boils down to being able to craft code.  Crafting code is far more than writing code.  Anyone can write code if they know the syntax, but so few people can actually craft code that solves a purpose and craft it well.  So this is what I want to find, I want to find code craftsman!  But how?   I used to ask coding-trivia questions a long time ago and many people still fall back on this.  The thought is that if you ask the candidate some piece of coding trivia and they know the answer it must follow that they can craft good code.  For example:   What C++ keyword can be applied to a class/struct field to allow it to be changed even from a const-instance of that class/struct?  (answer: mutable)   So what do we prove if a candidate can answer this?  Only that they know what mutable means.  One would hope that this would infer that they'd know how to use it, and more importantly when and if it should ever be used!  But it rarely does!  The problem with triva questions is that you will either: Approve a really good developer who knows what some obscure keyword is (good) Reject a really good developer who never needed to use that keyword or is too inexperienced to know how to use it (bad) Approve a really bad developer who googled "C++ Interview Questions" and studied like hell but can't craft (very bad) Many HR departments love these kind of tests because they are short and easy to defend if a legal issue arrises on hiring decisions.  After all it's easy to say a person wasn't hired because they scored 30 out of 100 on some trivia test.  But unfortunately, you've eliminated a large part of your potential developer pool and possibly hired a few duds.  There are times I've hired candidates who knew every trivia question I could throw out them and couldn't craft.  And then there are times I've interviewed candidates who failed all my trivia but who I took a chance on who were my best finds ever.    So if not trivia, then what?  Brain teasers?  The thought is, these type of questions measure the thinking power of a candidate.  The problem is, once again, you will either: Approve a good candidate who has never heard the problem and can solve it (good) Reject a good candidate who just happens not to see the "catch" because they're nervous or it may be really obscure (bad) Approve a candidate who has studied enough interview brain teasers (once again, you can google em) to recognize the "catch" or knows the answer already (bad). Once again, you're eliminating good candidates and possibly accepting bad candidates.  In these cases, I think testing someone with brain teasers only tests their ability to answer brain teasers, not the ability to craft code. So how do we measure someone's ability to craft code?  Here's a novel idea: have them code!  Give them a computer and a compiler, or a whiteboard and a pen, or paper and pencil and have them construct a piece of code.  It just makes sense that if we're going to hire someone to code we should actually watch them code.  When they're done, we can judge them on several criteria: Correctness - does the candidate's solution accurately solve the problem proposed? Accuracy - is the candidate's solution reasonably syntactically correct? Efficiency - did the candidate write or use the more efficient data structures or algorithms for the job? Maintainability - was the candidate's code free of obfuscation and clever tricks that diminish readability? Persona - are they eager and willing or aloof and egotistical?  Will they work well within your team? It may sound simple, or it may sound crazy, but when I'm looking to hire a developer, I want to see them actually develop well-crafted code.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 15, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 15, 2011Popular ReleasesTerraria World Viewer: Version 1.2: Update June 15thNew User Interface Map drawing will not cause the program to freeze anymore Fixed the "Draw Symbols" (now called "Markers") checkbox not having any effectMVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.1.5 RC: Added Extended Dropdown allows a prompt item to be inserted as first element. RequiredAttribute, if present, trggers if no element is chosen Client side javascript function to set/get the values of DateTimeInput, TypedTextBox, TypedEditDisplay, and to bind/unbind a "change" handler The selected page in the pager is applied the attribute selected-page="selected" that can be used in the definition of CSS rules to style the selected page items controls now interpret a null value as an empr...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco CMS 5.0 CTP 1: Umbraco 5 Community Technology Preview Umbraco 5 will be the next version of everyone's favourite, friendly ASP.NET CMS that already powers over 100,000 websites worldwide. Try out our first CTP of version 5 today! If you're new to Umbraco and would like to get a quick low-down on our popular and easy-to-learn approach to content management, check out our intro video here. What's in the v5 CTP box? This is a preview version of version 5 and includes support for the following familiar Umbr...Ribbon Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Browser (1.0.514.30): Initial releaseTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v3.0 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: In this version, I did an overhaul of the GUI of the program. The only pop-up window you will receive now is a warning box for for when you click on the "Delete" button. Everything has been integrated into the tabs on the form. I added every item included with v1.0.4 of Terraria and added the option to set inventory/bank slots to "No Item". This WILL work with characters that have not been opened in v1.0.4patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 11 - June 14, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Many code changes: please see the readme.mht for details. New "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Updated "Application Notifications" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "jQuery UI Widget" chapter. Updated "Widget QuickStart" appendix and code. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separat...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.2: Build: 1.2.41 Published: 6/14/2010 How to Install Orchard To install Orchard using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard.ashx. Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.1.2.41.zip file. http://orchardproject.net/docs/Manually-installing-Orchard-zip-file.ashx The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents o...PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: PowerGUI VSX 1.3.4: Changes - Got rid of suppressed exceptions on assemblies loading at project startup - Fixed Issue #28535 "No Print Support" - Enabled IntelliSence commands wich are supported by ActiPro Syntax Editor control: ToggleBookmark, NextBookmark, PreviousBookmark, ShowMemberList - Added missing Import directives in PS Script project template - Fixed exception occurring on debug start - Fixed an issue: after creating a new PS project, a debugging session hung being run for the second timeSnippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.4.0: Snippet Designer 1.4.0 for Visual Studio 2010 Change logSnippet Explorer ChangesReworked language filter UI to work better in the side bar. Added result count drop down which lets you choose how many results to see. Language filter and result count choices are persisted after Visual Studio is closed. Added file name to search criteria. Search is now case insensitive. Snippet Editor Changes Snippet Editor ChangesAdded menu option for the $end$ symbol which indicates where the c...SizeOnDisk: 1.0.9.0: Can handle Right-To-Left languages (issue 316) About box (issue 310) New language: Deutsch (thanks to kyoka) Fix: file and folder context menuDropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.1: Added different popup descriptions for actions (copy/append/update/remove) Added popup timeout control (with live preview) Added option to overwrite clipboard with the last link only Notification popup closes on user click Notification popup default timeout increased to 3 sec. Added codeplex link to about .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile requiredWCF Community Site: WCF Express Interop Bindings 1.0: Welcome to the first release of the WCF Express Interop BindingsThis project provides a starter kit for WCF service developers wishing to connect with Java clients in WebSphere, WebLogic, Metro and Apache. It supports security, MTOM and RM features. For more information see the Landing page We welcome your feedback (Topic: Interop Bindings). Please submit any feature requests / bug fixes via the issue tracker. FeaturesVSIX Installer WCF Bindings for Oracle WebLogic, Oracle Metro, IBM WebS...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 1.0.4.1: Stable Release 51 Degrees.mobi Foundation is the best way to detect and redirect mobile devices and their capabilities on ASP.NET and is being used on thousands of websites worldwide. We’re highly confident in our software and we recommend all users update to this version. Changes to Version 1.0.4.1Changed the BlackberryHandler and BlackberryVersion6Handler to have equal CONFIDENCE values to ensure they both get a chance at detecting BlackBerry version 4&5 and version 6 devices. Prior to thi...Kouak - HTTP File Share Server: Kouak Beta 3 - Clean: Some critical bug solved and dependecy problems There's 3 package : - The first, contains the cli server and the graphical server. - The second, only the cli server - The third, only the graphical client. It's a beta release, so don't hesitate to emmit issue ;pRawr: Rawr 4.1.06: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta6: ??AcDown?????????????，?????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta6 ?????(imanhua.com)????? ???? ?? ??"????","?????","?????","????"?????? "????"?????"????????"?? ??????????? ?????????????? ?????????????/???? ?? ????Windows 7???????????? ????????? ?? ????????????? ???????/??????????? ???????????? ?? ?? ?????(imanh...Pulse: Pulse Beta 2: - Added new wallpapers provider http://wallbase.cc. Supports english search, multiple keywords* - Improved font rendering in Options window - Added "Set wallpaper as logon background" option* - Fixed crashes if there is no internet connection - Fixed: Rewalls downloads empty images sometimes - Added filters* Note 1: wallbase provider supports only english search. Rewalls provider supports only russian search but Pulse automatically translates your english keyword into russian using Google Tr...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.7: Version: 2.0.0.7 (Milestone 7): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...SimplePlanner: v2.0b: For 2011-2012 Sem 1 ???2011-2012 ????Visual Studio 2010 Help Downloader: 1.0.0.3: Domain name support for proxy Cleanup old packages bug Writing to EventLog with UAC enabled bug Small fixes & RefactoringNew Projects360U: 360UAd Configuration + Rotator for Windows Phone: Ad Configuration and Rotator for Windows Phone is a set of classes and controls which allow you to remotely manage advertising providers used inside your Windows Phone application. Advertising providers can be plugged in on an 'as needed' so application only ship with the providers being used.CommerceShopSystem: CommerceShopSystemContour strikes again: Collection of extensions for the Umbraco Contour form builderFarseer Physics & GLEED2D Link: This project includes c# files usable to implement the Farseer Physics engine in a level created using GLEED2D.FolderComparer: This DLL holds an extension of the DirectoryInfo class. It contains a logic that helps compare the contents of two folders. HierList Hierarchial Outline ASP.NET Server Control ( using UL or OL and LI ): The HierList ASP WebControl generates a hierarchial list using the UL, OL, and LI html tags. Images Organizator: A C# .Net program that organizes all pictures in a folder by date.KiggDemo: i study kiggLavieOrnamentos: LavieOrnamentos is a MVC project written in C# for a standard business website. I plan to use it as a base for a bigger project, a standard business site framework targeting small companies that just want to display their products and latest news.Multiple Choice Training Application: This is an ASP.Net (VB.Net) Web based training application. This application can be configured to ask multiple choice questions for multiple groups, score based on percentage, create completion certificates and be completely managed via a web interface,Orchard Windows Authentication: This module allows Windows domain users to be authenticated in Orchard.Party Estimator: Party Estimator is a training project based on requirements from O'Reilly's _Head First C#_, and is not intended for widespread use. SharePoint Enforcer - Ensuring large sites comply with standards: SharePoint Enforcer is a utility that aids in governance of large SharePoint sites to ensure that the sites comply with various business rules that have been created to keep the site from growing out of control.SharePoint WarmUp Tool (Claims+FBA): This tools is for warming up (waking) SharPoint sites. It addresses the issue of a 403 forbidden error when the SharePoint web app is in claims mode and FBA. It uses Windows authentication to warm up the sites and bypasses the FBA login redirection causing the 403 forbidden error.Super Mario Limitless: Super Mario Limitless is an in-production Super Mario level engine. It allows you to play your own levels and worlds, play others' levels and worlds, and even play online. With limitless features, you'll spend hours playing and creating.VB.NET ASP.NET MVC 2 - Music Store: This project is a port using the VB language with ASP.NET MVC 2 of the MusicStore application that can be found at : http://mvcmusicstore.codeplex.com/ Veni, Vedi, Velcro...: A personal phone 7 social media app that shows basic elements of design, ad model, panorama etc.XMLServiceMonitor: A Windows service (VB.Net) that allows the monitoring of failure of Servers, Services, Applications, Scheduled Tasks and SQL Jobs. The service is configurable with simple XML files and sends out email notifications of failures.

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• How can I keep the cpu temp low?

  - by Newton

  I have an HP pavilion dv7, I'm using ubuntu 12.04 so the overheating problem with sandybridge cpu is a lot better. However my laptop is still becoming too hot to keep on my legs. The problem is that the fan wait too much before starting, so the medium temp is too hight. When I'm using windows 7 the laptop is room-temperature cold, I've absolutely no problem. On windows the fan is always spinning very low & very silently so the heat is continuously removed, without reaching an unconfortable temp. How can I force the computer to act like that also on ubuntu? PS The bios can't let me control this kind of thing, and this is my experience with lm-sensors and fancontrol al@notebook:~$ sudo sensors-detect [sudo] password for al: # sensors-detect revision 5984 (2011-07-10 21:22:53 +0200) # System: Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion dv7 Notebook PC (laptop) # Board: Hewlett-Packard 1800 This program will help you determine which kernel modules you need to load to use lm_sensors most effectively. It is generally safe and recommended to accept the default answers to all questions, unless you know what you're doing. Some south bridges, CPUs or memory controllers contain embedded sensors. Do you want to scan for them? This is totally safe. (YES/no): y Module cpuid loaded successfully. Silicon Integrated Systems SIS5595... No VIA VT82C686 Integrated Sensors... No VIA VT8231 Integrated Sensors... No AMD K8 thermal sensors... No AMD Family 10h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 11h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 12h and 14h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 15h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 15h power sensors... No Intel digital thermal sensor... Success! (driver `coretemp') Intel AMB FB-DIMM thermal sensor... No VIA C7 thermal sensor... No VIA Nano thermal sensor... No Some Super I/O chips contain embedded sensors. We have to write to standard I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe. Do you want to scan for Super I/O sensors? (YES/no): y Probing for Super-I/O at 0x2e/0x2f Trying family `National Semiconductor/ITE'... No Trying family `SMSC'... No Trying family `VIA/Winbond/Nuvoton/Fintek'... No Trying family `ITE'... No Probing for Super-I/O at 0x4e/0x4f Trying family `National Semiconductor/ITE'... Yes Found unknown chip with ID 0x8518 Some hardware monitoring chips are accessible through the ISA I/O ports. We have to write to arbitrary I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe though. Yes, you do have ISA I/O ports even if you do not have any ISA slots! Do you want to scan the ISA I/O ports? (YES/no): y Probing for `National Semiconductor LM78' at 0x290... No Probing for `National Semiconductor LM79' at 0x290... No Probing for `Winbond W83781D' at 0x290... No Probing for `Winbond W83782D' at 0x290... No Lastly, we can probe the I2C/SMBus adapters for connected hardware monitoring devices. This is the most risky part, and while it works reasonably well on most systems, it has been reported to cause trouble on some systems. Do you want to probe the I2C/SMBus adapters now? (YES/no): y Using driver `i2c-i801' for device 0000:00:1f.3: Intel Cougar Point (PCH) Module i2c-i801 loaded successfully. Module i2c-dev loaded successfully. Next adapter: i915 gmbus disabled (i2c-0) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus ssc (i2c-1) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOB (i2c-2) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus vga (i2c-3) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOA (i2c-4) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus panel (i2c-5) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Client found at address 0x50 Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1033'... No Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1034'... No Probing for `SPD EEPROM'... No Probing for `EDID EEPROM'... Yes (confidence 8, not a hardware monitoring chip) Next adapter: i915 GPIOC (i2c-6) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Client found at address 0x50 Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1033'... No Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1034'... No Probing for `SPD EEPROM'... No Probing for `EDID EEPROM'... Yes (confidence 8, not a hardware monitoring chip) Next adapter: i915 gmbus dpc (i2c-7) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOD (i2c-8) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus dpb (i2c-9) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOE (i2c-10) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus reserved (i2c-11) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus dpd (i2c-12) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOF (i2c-13) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: DPDDC-B (i2c-14) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Now follows a summary of the probes I have just done. Just press ENTER to continue: Driver `coretemp': * Chip `Intel digital thermal sensor' (confidence: 9) To load everything that is needed, add this to /etc/modules: #----cut here---- # Chip drivers coretemp #----cut here---- If you have some drivers built into your kernel, the list above will contain too many modules. Skip the appropriate ones! Do you want to add these lines automatically to /etc/modules? (yes/NO)y Successful! Monitoring programs won't work until the needed modules are loaded. You may want to run 'service module-init-tools start' to load them. Unloading i2c-dev... OK Unloading i2c-i801... OK Unloading cpuid... OK al@notebook:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/module-init-tools restart Rather than invoking init scripts through /etc/init.d, use the service(8) utility, e.g. service module-init-tools restart Since the script you are attempting to invoke has been converted to an Upstart job, you may also use the stop(8) and then start(8) utilities, e.g. stop module-init-tools ; start module-init-tools. The restart(8) utility is also available. module-init-tools stop/waiting al@notebook:~$ sudo service module-init-tools restart stop: Unknown instance: module-init-tools stop/waiting al@notebook:~$ sudo service module-init-tools start module-init-tools stop/waiting al@notebook:~$ sudo pwmconfig # pwmconfig revision 5857 (2010-08-22) This program will search your sensors for pulse width modulation (pwm) controls, and test each one to see if it controls a fan on your motherboard. Note that many motherboards do not have pwm circuitry installed, even if your sensor chip supports pwm. We will attempt to briefly stop each fan using the pwm controls. The program will attempt to restore each fan to full speed after testing. However, it is ** very important ** that you physically verify that the fans have been to full speed after the program has completed. /usr/sbin/pwmconfig: There are no pwm-capable sensor modules installed Is my case too desperate?

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• Oracle's Global Single Schema

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Maximizing business process efficiencies in a heterogeneous environment is very difficult. The difficulty stems from the fact that the various applications across the Information Technology (IT) landscape employ different integration standards, different message passing strategies, and different workflow engines. Vendors such as Oracle and others are delivering tools to help IT organizations manage the complexities introduced by these differences. But the one remaining intractable problem impacting efficient operations is the fact that these applications have different definitions for the same business data. Business data is your business information codified for computer programs to use. A good data model will represent the way your organization does business. The computer applications your organization deploys to improve operational efficiency are built to operate on the business data organized into this schema.  If the schema does not represent how you do business, the applications on that schema cannot provide the features you need to achieve the desired efficiencies. Business processes span these applications. Data problems break these processes rendering them far less efficient than they need to be to achieve organization goals. Thus, the expected return on the investment in these applications is never realized. The success of all business processes depends on the availability of accurate master data.  Clearly, the solution to this problem is to consolidate all the master data an organization uses to run its business. Then clean it up, augment it, govern it, and connect it back to the applications that need it. Until now, this obvious solution has been difficult to achieve because no one had defined a data model sufficiently broad, deep and flexible enough to support transaction processing on all key business entities and serve as a master superset to all other operational data models deployed in heterogeneous IT environments. Today, the situation has changed. Oracle has created an operational data model (aka schema) that can support accurate and consistent master data across heterogeneous IT systems. This is foundational for providing a way to consolidate and integrate master data without having to replace investments in existing applications. This Global Single Schema (GSS) represents a revolutionary breakthrough that allows for true master data consolidation. Oracle has deep knowledge of applications dating back to the early 1990s.  It developed applications in the areas of Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Financials and Manufacturing. In addition, Oracle applications were delivered for key industries such as Communications, Financial Services, Retail, Public Sector, High Tech Manufacturing (HTM) and more. Expertise in all these areas drove requirements for GSS. The following figure illustrates Oracle's unique position that enabled the creation of the Global Single Schema. GSS Requirements Gathering GSS defines all the key business entities and attributes including Customers, Contacts, Suppliers, Accounts, Products, Services, Materials, Employees, Installed Base, Sites, Assets, and Inventory to name just a few. In addition, Oracle delivers GSS pre-integrated with a wide variety of operational applications.  Business Process Automation EBusiness is about maximizing operational efficiency. At the highest level, these 'operations' span all that you do as an organization.  The following figure illustrates some of these high-level business processes. Enterprise Business Processes Supplies are procured. Assets are maintained. Materials are stored. Inventory is accumulated. Products and Services are engineered, produced and sold. Customers are serviced. And across this entire spectrum, Employees do the procuring, supporting, engineering, producing, selling and servicing. Not shown, but not to be overlooked, are the accounting and the financial processes associated with all this procuring, manufacturing, and selling activity. Supporting all these applications is the master data. When this data is fragmented and inconsistent, the business processes fail and inefficiencies multiply. But imagine having all the data under these operational business processes in one place. ·            The same accurate and timely customer data will be provided to all your operational applications from the call center to the point of sale. ·            The same accurate and timely supplier data will be provided to all your operational applications from supply chain planning to procurement. ·            The same accurate and timely product information will be available to all your operational applications from demand chain planning to marketing. You would have a single version of the truth about your assets, financial information, customers, suppliers, employees, products and services to support your business automation processes as they flow across your business applications. All company and partner personnel will access the same exact data entity across all your channels and across all your lines of business. Oracle's Global Single Schema enables this vision of a single version of the truth across the heterogeneous operational applications supporting the entire enterprise. Global Single Schema Oracle's Global Single Schema organizes hundreds of thousands of attributes into 165 major schema objects supporting over 180 business application modules. It is designed for international operations, and extensibility.  The schema is delivered with a full set of public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and an Integration Repository with modern Service Oriented Architecture interfaces to make data available as a services (DaaS) to business processes and enable operations in heterogeneous IT environments. ·         Key tables can be extended with unlimited numbers of additional attributes and attribute groups for maximum flexibility.  o    This enables model extensions that reflect business entities unique to your organization's operations. ·         The schema is multi-organization enabled so data manipulation can be controlled along organizational boundaries. ·         It uses variable byte Unicode to support over 31 languages. ·         The schema encodes flexible date and flexible address formats for easy localizations. No matter how complex your business is, Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold your business objects and support your global operations. Oracle's Global Single Schema identifies and defines the business objects an enterprise needs within the context of its business operations. The interrelationships between the business objects are also contained within the GSS data model. Their presence expresses fundamental business rules for the interaction between business entities. The following figure illustrates some of these connections.   Interconnected Business Entities Interconnecte business processes require interconnected business data. No other MDM vendor has this capability. Everyone else has either one entity they can master or separate disconnected models for various business entities. Higher level integrations are made available, but that is a weak architectural alternative to data level integration in this critically important aspect of Master Data Management.    

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• Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business - Q&A from the Webcast

  - by [email protected]

  A few weeks ago, Vince Casarez and I presented with KMWorld on the Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business. It was an enjoyable, interactive webcast in which Vince and I discussed the ways Enterprise 2.0 can transform your business and more importantly, highlighted key customer examples of how to do so. If you missed the webcast, you can catch a replay here. We had a lot of audience participation in some of the polls we conducted and in the Q&A session. We weren't able to address all of the questions during the broadcast, so we attempted to answer them here: Q: Which area within your firm focuses on Web 2.0? Meaning, do you find new departments developing just to manage the web 2.0 (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) user experience or are you structuring current departments? A: There are three distinct efforts within Oracle. The first is around delivery of these Web 2.0 services for enterprise deployments. This is the focus of the WebCenter team. The second effort is injecting these Web 2.0 services into use cases that drive the different enterprise applications. This effort is focused on how to manage these external services and bring them into a cohesive flow for marketing programs, customer care, and purchasing. The third effort is how we consume these services internally to enhance Oracle's business delivery. It leverages the technologies and use cases of the first two but also pushes the envelope with regards to future directions of these other two areas. Q: In a business, Web 2.0 is mostly like action logs. How can we leverage the official process practice versus the logs of a recent action? Example: a system configuration modified last night on a call out versus the official practice that everybody would use in the morning.A: The key thing to remember is that most Web 2.0 actions / activity streams today are based on collaboration and communication type actions. At least with public social sites like Facebook and Twitter. What we're delivering as part of the WebCenter Suite are not just these types of activities but also enterprise application activities. These enterprise application activities come from different application modules: purchasing, HR, order entry, sales opportunity, etc. The actions within these systems are normally tied to a business object or process: purchase order/customer, employee or department, customer and supplier, customer and product, respectively. Therefore, the activities or "logs" as you name them are able to be "typed" so that as a viewer, you can filter or decide to see only certain types of information. In your example, you could have a view that only showed you recent "configuration" changes and this could be right next to a view that showed off the items to be watched every morning. Q: It's great to hear about customers using the software but is there any plan for future webinars to show what the products/installs look like? That would be very helpful.A: We don't have a webinar planned to show off the install process. However, we have a viewlet that's posted on Oracle Technology Network. You can see it here:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/testcontent/wcs-install-098014.htmlAnd we've got excellent documentation that walks you through the steps here:http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/install.1111/e12001/install.htmAnd there's a whole set of demos and examples of what WebCenter can do at this URL:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/webcenter/release11-demos-097468.html Q: How do you anticipate managing metadata across the enterprise to make content findable?A: We need to first make sure we are all talking about the same thing when we use a word like "metadata". Here's why...  For a developer, metadata means information that describes key elements of the portal or application and what the portal or application can do. For content systems, metadata means key terms that provide a taxonomy or folksonomy about the information that is being indexed, ordered, and managed. For business intelligence systems, metadata means key terms that provide labels to groups of data that most non-mathematicians need to understand. And for SOA, metadata means labels for parts of the processes that business owners should understand that connect development terminology. There are also additional requirements for metadata to be available to the team building these new solutions as well as requirements to make this metadata available to the running system. These requirements are often separated by "design time" and "run time" respectively. So clearly, a general goal of managing metadata across the enterprise is very challenging. We've invested a huge amount of resources around Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) to be able to provide a more generic system for all of these elements. No other vendor has anything like this technology foundation in their products. This provides a huge benefit to our customers as they will now be able to find content, processes, people, and information from a common set of search interfaces with consistent enterprise wide results. Q: Can you give your definition of terms as to document and content, please?A: Content applies to a broad category of information from Word documents, presentations and reports through attachments to invoices and/or purchase orders. Content is essentially any type of digital asset including images, video, and voice. A document is just one type of content. Q: Do you have special integration tools to realize an interaction between UCM and WebCenter Spaces/Services?A: Yes, we've dedicated a whole team of engineers to exploit the key features of Oracle UCM within WebCenter.  While ensuring that WebCenter can connect to other non-Oracle systems, we've made sure that with the combined set of Oracle technology, no other solution can match the combined power and integration.  This is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy which is to provide best in class capabilities for Content and Portals.  When combined together, the synergy between the two products enables users to quickly add capabilities when they are needed.  For example, simple document sharing is part of the combined product offering, but if legal discovery or archiving is required, Oracle UCM product includes these capabilities that can be quickly added.  There's no need to move content around or add another system to support this, it's just a feature that gets turned on within Oracle UCM. Q: All customers have some interaction with their applications and have many older versions, how do you see some of these new Enterprise 2.0 capabilities adding value to existing enterprise application deployments?A: Just as Service Oriented Architectures allowed for connecting the processes of different applications systems to work together, there's a need for a similar approach with regards to these enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Oracle WebCenter is built on a core architecture that allows for SOA of these Enterprise 2.0 services so that one set of scalable services can be used and integrated directly into any type of application. In this way, users can get immediate value out of the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities without having to wait for the next major release or upgrade. These centrally managed WebCenter services expose a set of standard interfaces that make it extremely easy to add them into existing applications no matter what technology the application has been implemented. Q: We've heard about Oracle Next Generation applications called "Fusion Applications", can you tell me how all this works together?A: Oracle WebCenter powers the core collaboration and social computing services found within Fusion Applications. It is the core user experience technology for how all the application screens have been implemented. And the core concept of task flows allows for all the Fusion Applications modules to be adaptable and composable by business users and IT without needing to be a professional developer. Oracle WebCenter is at the heart of the new Fusion Applications. In addition, the same patterns and technologies are now being added to the existing applications including JD Edwards, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and eBusiness Suite. The core technology enables all these customers to have a much smoother upgrade path to Fusion Applications. They get immediate benefits of injecting new user interactions into their existing applications without having to completely move to Fusion Applications. And then when the time comes, their users will already be well versed in how the new capabilities work. Q: Does any of this work with non Oracle software? Other databases? Other application servers? etc.A: We have made sure that Oracle WebCenter delivers the broadest set of development choices so that no matter what technology you developers are using, WebCenter capabilities can be quickly and easily added to the site or application. In addition, we have certified Oracle WebCenter to run against non-Oracle databases like DB2 and SQLServer. We have stated plans for certification against MySQL as well. Later in CY 2011, Oracle will provide certification on non-Oracle application servers such as WebSphere and JBoss. Q: How do we balance User and IT requirements in regards to Enterprise 2.0 technologies?A: Wrong decisions are often made because employee knowledge is not tapped efficiently and opportunities to innovate are often missed because the right people do not work together. Collaboration amongst workers in the right business context is critical for success. While standalone Enterprise 2.0 technologies can improve collaboration for collaboration's sake, using social collaboration tools in the context of business applications and processes will improve business responsiveness and lead companies to a more competitive position. As these systems become more mission critical it is essential that they maintain the highest level of performance and availability while scaling to support larger communities. Q: What are the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 can improve business responsiveness?A: With a wide range of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the marketplace, CIOs need to deploy solutions that will meet the requirements from users as well as address the requirements from IT. Workers want a next-generation user experience that is personalized and aggregates their daily tools and tasks, while IT needs to ensure the solution is secure, scalable, flexible, reliable and easily integrated with existing systems. An open and integrated approach to deploying portals, content management, and collaboration can enhance your business by addressing both the needs of knowledge workers for better information and the IT mandate to conserve resources by simplifying, consolidating and centralizing infrastructure and administration.  

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• You Say You Want a (Customer Experience) Revolution

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} rev-o-lu-tion [rev-uh-loo-shuhn] noun 1. a sudden, radical or complete change 2. fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something; a change of paradigm 3. a changeover in use or preference especially in technology <the computer revolution> Lately, I've been hearing an awful lot about the customer experience revolution.  Tonight Oracle will be hosting The Experience Revolution, an evening of exploration and networking with customer experience executives in New York City where Oracle President Mark Hurd will introduce Oracle Customer Experience, a cross-stack suite of customer experience products that includes Oracle WebCenter and a number of other Oracle technologies. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Forrester Customer Experience Forum East also kicks off in New York City where they'll examine how businesses can "reap the full business benefits of the customer experience revolution." So, are we in the midst of a customer experience revolution? As a consumer, I can answer that question with a definitive “yes.” When I bought my very first car, I had a lot of questions. How do I know if I’m paying a fair price? How do I know if this dealer is honest? Why do I have to sit through these good cop, bad cop shenanigans between sales and sales management at the dealership? Why do I feel like I’m doing these people a favor by giving them my business? In the end the whole experience left me feeling deeply unsatisfied. I didn’t feel that I held all that much power over the experience and the only real negotiating trick I had was to walk out, which I did, many times before actually making a purchase. Fast forward to a year ago and I found myself back in the market for a new car. The very first car that I bought had finally kicked the bucket after many years, many repair bills, and much wear and tear. Man, I had loved that car. It was time to move on, but I had a knot in my stomach when I reflected back on my last car purchase experience and dreaded the thought of going through that again. Could that have been the reason why I drove my old car for so long? But as I started the process of researching new cars, I started to feel really confident. I had a wealth of online information that helped me in my search. I went to Edmunds and plugged in some information on my preferences and left with a short list of vehicles. After an afternoon spent test driving the cars my short list, I had determined my favorite – it was a model I didn’t even know about until my research on Edmunds! But I didn’t want to go back to the dealership where I test drove it. They were clearly old school and wanted me to buy the way that they wanted to sell. No thanks! After that I went back online. I figured out exactly what people had paid for this car in my area. I found out what kind of discount others were able to negotiate from an online community forum dedicated to the make and model. I found out how the sales people were being incentivized by the manufacturer that month. I learned which dealers had the best ratings and reviews. This was actually getting exciting. I was feeling really empowered. My next step was to request online quotes from the some of the highest rated dealers but I already knew exactly how much I was going to pay. This was really a test for the dealers. My new mantra was “let he who delivers the best customer experience win.” An inside sales rep from one dealer responded to my quote request within a couple of hours. I told him I had already decided on the make and model and it was just a matter of figuring out who I would buy it from. I also told them that I was really busy and wouldn’t set foot in the dealership unless we had come to terms beforehand. Lastly, I let him know that I’d prefer to work out the details via email. He promised to get back to me shortly with a detailed quote. Over the next few days I received calls from other dealers. One asked me a host of questions that I had already answered in their lengthy online form. Another blamed their website performance issues for their delay in responding to my request. But by then it didn’t really matter because I’d already bought the car days before from the dealer who responded to me first and who was willing to adjust their sales process to accommodate my buying one. So, yes, I really do believe we are in the midst of a customer experience revolution. And every revolution leaves some victorious and other vanquished. Which side do you want to be on when it comes to the customer experience revolution?

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• Cloud Computing = Elasticity * Availability

  - by Herve Roggero

  What is cloud computing? Is hosting the same thing as cloud computing? Are you running a cloud if you already use virtual machines? What is the difference between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and a cloud provider? And the list goes on… these questions keep coming up and all try to fundamentally explain what “cloud” means relative to other concepts. At the risk of over simplification, answering these questions becomes simpler once you understand the primary foundations of cloud computing: Elasticity and Availability.   Elasticity The basic value proposition of cloud computing is to pay as you go, and to pay for what you use. This implies that an application can expand and contract on demand, across all its tiers (presentation layer, services, database, security…).  This also implies that application components can grow independently from each other. So if you need more storage for your database, you should be able to grow that tier without affecting, reconfiguring or changing the other tiers. Basically, cloud applications behave like a sponge; when you add water to a sponge, it grows in size; in the application world, the more customers you add, the more it grows. Pure IaaS providers will provide certain benefits, specifically in terms of operating costs, but an IaaS provider will not help you in making your applications elastic; neither will Virtual Machines. The smallest elasticity unit of an IaaS provider and a Virtual Machine environment is a server (physical or virtual). While adding servers in a datacenter helps in achieving scale, it is hardly enough. The application has yet to use this hardware.  If the process of adding computing resources is not transparent to the application, the application is not elastic.   As you can see from the above description, designing for the cloud is not about more servers; it is about designing an application for elasticity regardless of the underlying server farm.   Availability The fact of the matter is that making applications highly available is hard. It requires highly specialized tools and trained staff. On top of it, it's expensive. Many companies are required to run multiple data centers due to high availability requirements. In some organizations, some data centers are simply on standby, waiting to be used in a case of a failover. Other organizations are able to achieve a certain level of success with active/active data centers, in which all available data centers serve incoming user requests. While achieving high availability for services is relatively simple, establishing a highly available database farm is far more complex. In fact it is so complex that many companies establish yearly tests to validate failover procedures.   To a certain degree certain IaaS provides can assist with complex disaster recovery planning and setting up data centers that can achieve successful failover. However the burden is still on the corporation to manage and maintain such an environment, including regular hardware and software upgrades. Cloud computing on the other hand removes most of the disaster recovery requirements by hiding many of the underlying complexities.   Cloud Providers A cloud provider is an infrastructure provider offering additional tools to achieve application elasticity and availability that are not usually available on-premise. For example Microsoft Azure provides a simple configuration screen that makes it possible to run 1 or 100 web sites by clicking a button or two on a screen (simplifying provisioning), and soon SQL Azure will offer Data Federation to allow database sharding (which allows you to scale the database tier seamlessly and automatically). Other cloud providers offer certain features that are not available on-premise as well, such as the Amazon SC3 (Simple Storage Service) which gives you virtually unlimited storage capabilities for simple data stores, which is somewhat equivalent to the Microsoft Azure Table offering (offering a server-independent data storage model). Unlike IaaS providers, cloud providers give you the necessary tools to adopt elasticity as part of your application architecture.    Some cloud providers offer built-in high availability that get you out of the business of configuring clustered solutions, or running multiple data centers. Some cloud providers will give you more control (which puts some of that burden back on the customers' shoulder) and others will tend to make high availability totally transparent. For example, SQL Azure provides high availability automatically which would be very difficult to achieve (and very costly) on premise.   Keep in mind that each cloud provider has its strengths and weaknesses; some are better at achieving transparent scalability and server independence than others.    Not for Everyone Note however that it is up to you to leverage the elasticity capabilities of a cloud provider, as discussed previously; if you build a website that does not need to scale, for which elasticity is not important, then you can use a traditional host provider unless you also need high availability. Leveraging the technologies of cloud providers can be difficult and can become a journey for companies that build their solutions in a scale up fashion. Cloud computing promises to address cost containment and scalability of applications with built-in high availability. If your application does not need to scale or you do not need high availability, then cloud computing may not be for you. In fact, you may pay a premium to run your applications with cloud providers due to the underlying technologies built specifically for scalability and availability requirements. And as such, the cloud is not for everyone.   Consistent Customer Experience, Predictable Cost With all its complexities, buzz and foggy definition, cloud computing boils down to a simple objective: consistent customer experience at a predictable cost.  The objective of a cloud solution is to provide the same user experience to your last customer than the first, while keeping your operating costs directly proportional to the number of customers you have. Making your applications elastic and highly available across all its tiers, with as much automation as possible, achieves the first objective of a consistent customer experience. And the ability to expand and contract the infrastructure footprint of your application dynamically achieves the cost containment objectives.     Herve Roggero is a SQL Azure MVP and co-author of Pro SQL Azure (APress).  He is the co-founder of Blue Syntax Consulting (www.bluesyntax.net), a company focusing on cloud computing technologies helping customers understand and adopt cloud computing technologies. For more information contact herve at hroggero @ bluesyntax.net .

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• Service Broker, not ETL

  - by jamiet

  I have been very quiet on this blog of late and one reason for that is I have been very busy on a client project that I would like to talk about a little here. The client that I have been working for has a website that runs on a distributed architecture utilising a messaging infrastructure for communication between different endpoints. My brief was to build a system that could consume these messages and produce analytical information in near-real-time. More specifically I basically had to deliver a data warehouse however it was the real-time aspect of the project that really intrigued me. This real-time requirement meant that using an Extract transformation, Load (ETL) tool was out of the question and so I had no choice but to write T-SQL code (i.e. stored-procedures) to process the incoming messages and load the data into the data warehouse. This concerned me though – I had no way to control the rate at which data would arrive into the system yet we were going to have end-users querying the system at the same time that those messages were arriving; the potential for contention in such a scenario was pretty high and and was something I wanted to minimise as much as possible. Moreover I did not want the processing of data inside the data warehouse to have any impact on the customer-facing website. As you have probably guessed from the title of this blog post this is where Service Broker stepped in! For those that have not heard of it Service Broker is a queuing technology that has been built into SQL Server since SQL Server 2005. It provides a number of features however the one that was of interest to me was the fact that it facilitates asynchronous data processing which, in layman’s terms, means the ability to process some data without requiring the system that supplied the data having to wait for the response. That was a crucial feature because on this project the customer-facing website (in effect an OLTP system) would be calling one of our stored procedures with each message – we did not want to cause the OLTP system to wait on us every time we processed one of those messages. This asynchronous nature also helps to alleviate the contention problem because the asynchronous processing activity is handled just like any other task in the database engine and hence can wait on another task (such as an end-user query). Service Broker it was then! The stored procedure called by the OLTP system would simply put the message onto a queue and we would use a feature called activation to pick each message off the queue in turn and process it into the warehouse. At the time of writing the system is not yet up to full capacity but so far everything seems to be working OK (touch wood) and crucially our users are seeing data in near-real-time. By near-real-time I am talking about latencies of a few minutes at most and to someone like me who is used to building systems that have overnight latencies that is a huge step forward! So then, am I advocating that you all go out and dump your ETL tools? Of course not, no! What this project has taught me though is that in certain scenarios there may be better ways to implement a data warehouse system then the traditional “load data in overnight” approach that we are all used to. Moreover I have really enjoyed getting to grips with a new technology and even if you don’t want to use Service Broker you might want to consider asynchronous messaging architectures for your BI/data warehousing solutions in the future. This has been a very high level overview of my use of Service Broker and I have deliberately left out much of the minutiae of what has been a very challenging implementation. Nonetheless I hope I have caused you to reflect upon your own approaches to BI and question whether other approaches may be more tenable. All comments and questions gratefully received! Lastly, if you have never used Service Broker before and want to kick the tyres I have provided below a very simple “Service Broker Hello World” script that will create all of the objects required to facilitate Service Broker communications and then send the message “Hello World” from one place to anther! This doesn’t represent a “proper” implementation per se because it doesn’t close down down conversation objects (which you should always do in a real-world scenario) but its enough to demonstrate the capabilities! @Jamiet ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /*This is a basic Service Broker Hello World app. Have fun! -Jamie */ USE MASTER GO CREATE DATABASE SBTest GO --Turn Service Broker on! ALTER DATABASE SBTest SET ENABLE_BROKER GO USE SBTest GO -- 1) we need to create a message type. Note that our message type is -- very simple and allowed any type of content CREATE MESSAGE TYPE HelloMessage VALIDATION = NONE GO -- 2) Once the message type has been created, we need to create a contract -- that specifies who can send what types of messages CREATE CONTRACT HelloContract (HelloMessage SENT BY INITIATOR) GO --We can query the metadata of the objects we just created SELECT * FROM   sys.service_message_types WHERE name = 'HelloMessage'; SELECT * FROM   sys.service_contracts WHERE name = 'HelloContract'; SELECT * FROM   sys.service_contract_message_usages WHERE  service_contract_id IN (SELECT service_contract_id FROM sys.service_contracts WHERE name = 'HelloContract') AND        message_type_id IN (SELECT message_type_id FROM sys.service_message_types WHERE name = 'HelloMessage'); -- 3) The communication is between two endpoints. Thus, we need two queues to -- hold messages CREATE QUEUE SenderQueue CREATE QUEUE ReceiverQueue GO --more querying metatda SELECT * FROM sys.service_queues WHERE name IN ('SenderQueue','ReceiverQueue'); --we can also select from the queues as if they were tables SELECT * FROM SenderQueue   SELECT * FROM ReceiverQueue   -- 4) Create the required services and bind them to be above created queues CREATE SERVICE Sender   ON QUEUE SenderQueue CREATE SERVICE Receiver   ON QUEUE ReceiverQueue (HelloContract) GO --more querying metadata SELECT * FROM sys.services WHERE name IN ('Receiver','Sender'); -- 5) At this point, we can begin the conversation between the two services by -- sending messages DECLARE @conversationHandle UNIQUEIDENTIFIER DECLARE @message NVARCHAR(100) BEGIN   BEGIN TRANSACTION;   BEGIN DIALOG @conversationHandle         FROM SERVICE Sender         TO SERVICE 'Receiver'         ON CONTRACT HelloContract WITH ENCRYPTION=OFF   -- Send a message on the conversation   SET @message = N'Hello, World';   SEND  ON CONVERSATION @conversationHandle         MESSAGE TYPE HelloMessage (@message)   COMMIT TRANSACTION END GO --check contents of queues SELECT * FROM SenderQueue   SELECT * FROM ReceiverQueue   GO -- Receive a message from the queue RECEIVE CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX), message_body) AS MESSAGE FROM ReceiverQueue GO --If no messages were received and/or you can't see anything on the queues you may wish to check the following for clues: SELECT * FROM sys.transmission_queue -- Cleanup DROP SERVICE Sender DROP SERVICE Receiver DROP QUEUE SenderQueue DROP QUEUE ReceiverQueue DROP CONTRACT HelloContract DROP MESSAGE TYPE HelloMessage GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE SBTest GO

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• Resizing text in an HTML 5 page using JQuery

  - by nikolaosk

  This is going to be the ninth post in a series of posts regarding HTML 5. You can find the other posts here, here , here , here, here , here , here and here.In this post I will demonstrate how to implement a very common feature found in websites today, enabling the visitor to increase or decrease the font size of a page. You can use the JQuery code I will write in this post for HTML pages which do not follow the HTML 5 standard. As I said earlier we need to write JavaScript to implement this functionality.I will use the very popular JQuery Library. Please download the library (minified version) from http://jquery.com/downloadIn this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like.You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here. The HTML markup for the page follows. <!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en">  <head>    <title>HTML 5, CSS3 and JQuery</title>        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">     <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.8.2.min.js">        </script><script type="text/javascript">$(function() {    $('a').click(function() {        var getfont = $('p').css('font-size');        var mynum = parseFloat(getfont, 10);        var newmwasure = getfont.slice(-2);                $('p').css('font-size', mynum / 1.2 + newmwasure);                if(this.id == 'increase') {            $('p').css('font-size', mynum * 1.4 + newmwasure);        }     })    })</script>       </head>  <body>      <div id="header">      <h1>Learn cutting edge technologies</h1>      <h2>HTML 5, JQuery, CSS3</h2>    </div>    <div id="resize">    <a href="" id="increase">Increase Font</a>       |        <a href="" id="decrease">Decrease Font</a>        </div>        <div id="main">          <h2>HTML 5</h2>                        <article>          <p>            HTML5 is the latest version of HTML and XHTML. The HTML standard defines a single language that can be written in HTML and XML. It attempts to solve issues found in previous iterations of HTML and addresses the needs of Web Applications, an area previously not adequately covered by HTML.          </p>          </article>      </div>             </body>  </html>  There is nothing difficult or fancy in the HTML markup above. I have a link to the external JQuery library and the JQuery code is included inside the .html page.I have two links on this page that will increase/decrease the font size of the contents enclosed inside the <p></p> tags.Let me explain what the JQuery code does.When the user clicks on the link, I store in a variable the current font size of the <p> element that I get back from the CSS function. var getfont = $('p').css('font-size'); So now we have the original value. That will return a value like "16px" "1.2em".Then I need to get the unit of measurement (px,em).I use the slice() function. var newmwasure = getfont.slice(-2); Then I want to get only the numeric part of the returning value.I do that using the parseFloat() function.Have a look at the parseFloat() function.Finally with this bit of code I choose a ratio (I am devising a very simple algorithm for increasing and decreasing) and apply it to the <p> element. I still use the CSS function. You can get but also set the font size for a particular element with the CSS function.So I check for the id=increase and if this matches I will increase the font size of the <p> element.If it does not match we will decrease the font size.   $('p').css('font-size', mynum / 1.2 + newmwasure);                if(this.id == 'increase') {            $('p').css('font-size', mynum * 1.4 + newmwasure);  The code for the css file (style.css) followsbody{background-color:#eaeaea;}p{font-size:0.8em;font-family:Tahoma;}#resize{width:200px;background-color:#dadada;}#resize a {text-decoration:none;}The above CSS rules are very easy to understand. Now I save all my work.I view my page on the browser for the first time.Have a look at the picture below Now I increase the font size by clicking the respective linkHave a look at the picture below  Finally I decrease the font size by clicking on the respective linkHave a look at the picture below   Once more we see that the power and simplicity of JQuery library enables us to write less code but accomplish a lot at the same time. Hope it helps!!  

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• 14+ WordPress Portfolio Themes

  - by Edward

  There are various portfolio themes for WordPress out there, with this collection we are trying to help you choose the best one. These themes can be used to create any type of personal, photography, art or corporate portfolio. Display 3 in 1 Display 3 in 1 – Business & Portfolio WordPress Theme. Features a fantastic 3D Image slideshow that can be controlled from your backend with a custom tool. The Theme has a huge wordpress custom backend (8 additional Admin Pages) that make customization of the Theme easy for those who dont know much about coding or wordpress. Price: $40 View Demo Download DeepFocus Tempting features such as automatic separation of blog and portfolio content by template, publishing of most important information on homepage, styles to choose from and many more such features. It also provides for page templates for blog, portfolio, blog archive, tags etc. It has the best feature that helps you to manage everything from one place. Price: $39 (Package includes more than 55 themes) View Demo Download SimplePress Simple, yet awesome. One of the best portfolio theme. Price: $39 (Package includes more than 55 themes) View Demo Download Graphix Graphix is one of best word press portfolio themes. It is most suited to aspiring designers, developers, artists and photographers who’d like a framework theme, which has a great-looking portfolio with a feature-rich blog. It has theme option page, 5-color style, SEO option, featured content blocks, drop down multi-level menu, social profile link custom widgets, custom post, custom page template etc. Price: $69 Single & $149 Developer Package View Demo Download Bizznizz It boasts of many features such as custom homepage, custom post types, custom widgets, portfolio templates, alternative styles and many more. View Demo Download Showtime Ultimate WordPress Theme for you to create your web portfolio, It has 3 different styles for you to choose from. Price: $40 View Demo Download Montana WP Horizontal Portfolio Theme Montana Theme – WP Horizontal Portfolio Theme, best suited for creative studios to showcase design, photography, illustration, paintings and art. Price: $30 View Demo Download OverALL OverALL Premium WordPress Blog & Portfolio Theme, is low priced & has amazing tons of features. Price: $17 View Demo Download Habitat Habitat – Blog and Portfolio Theme. Unique Portfolio Sorting/Filtering with a custom jQuery script (each entry supports multiple images or a video) Multiple Featured Images for each post to generate individual Slideshows per Post, or the option to directly embed video content from youtube, vimeo, hulu etc. Price: $35 View Demo Download Fresh Folio Fresh Folio from WooThemes, can be used as both portfolio and a premium WordPress theme. The theme is a remix of the Fresh News Theme and Proud Folio Theme which combines all the best elements of the respective blog and portfolio style themes. View Demo Download Fresh Folio Features: Can be used to create an impressive portfolio. 7 diverse theme styles to choose from (default, blue, red, grunge light, grunge floral, antique, blue creamer, nightlife) The template will automatically (visually) separate your blog & portfolio content, making this an amazing theme for aspiring designers, developers, artists, photographers etc. Unique page templates types for the portfolio, blog, blog archives, tags & search results. Integrated Theme Options (for WordPress) to tweak the layout, colour scheme etc. for the theme Optional Automatic Image Resize, which is used to dynamically create the thumbnails and featured images Includes Widget enabled Sidebars. eGallery eGallery is a theme made to transform your wordpress blog into a fully functional online portfolio. Theme is perfectly designed to emphasize the artwork you choose to showcase. The design has been greatly enhanced using javascript, and is easy to implement. Price: $39 (Package includes more than 55 themes) View Demo Download ProudFolio ProudFolio is a portfolio premium WordPress theme from Woo Themes. The theme is for designers, developers, artists and photographers who would like a showcase theme which would depict as a portfolio and also serves a purpose of blog. ProudFolio puts a strong emphasis on the portfolio pieces, allowing for decent-sized thumbnails, huge fullscreen views via Lightbox, and full details on the single page. The theme file also contains a choice of three different background images and color schemes. Price: $70 Single $150 Developer License View Demo Download Features: The template will automatically (visually) separate your blog & portfolio content. An unique homepage layout, which publishes only the most important information; Unique page templates for the portfolio, blog, blog archives, tags & search results. Integrated Theme Options (for WordPress) to tweak the layout, colour scheme etc. for the theme; Built-in video panel, which you can use to publish any web-based Flash videos; Automatic Image Resize, which is used to dynamically create the thumbnails and featured images; Custom Page Templates for Archives, Sitemap & Image Gallery; Built-in Gravatar Support for Authors & Comments; Integrated Banner Management script to display randomized banner ads of your choice site-wide; Pretty drop down navigation everywhere; and Widget Enabled Sidebars. Porftolio WordPress Theme A FREE wordpress theme designed for web portfolios and (for now) just for web portfolios. It is coming with an Administrative Panel from where you can edit the head quote text, you can edit all theme colors, font families, font sizes and you can fill a curriculum vitae and display it into a special page. Theme demo and download can be found here Viz | Biz Viz | Biz is a premium WordPress photo gallery and portfolio theme designed specifically for photographers, graphic designers and web designers who want to display their creative work online, market their services, as well as have a typical text blog, using the power and flexibility of WordPress. It is priced for $79.95. Theme Features: Premium quality portfolio template Custom logo uploader to replace the standard graphic with your own unique look from the WP Dashboard Integrated blog component (front images are custom fields and thumbnails, but you can also have a typical blog) Four tabbed feature areas (About Me, Services, Recent Posts, and Tags) Two home page feature photos (You choose which photos to feature using a WP category) Manage your online portfolio through the WordPress CMS Crop two sizes of your work: One for the front page thumbnails and another full size version and upload to WP Search engine optimized. Related posts:14 WordPress Photo Blog & Portfolio Themes 6 PhotoBlog Portfolio WordPress Themes Professional WordPress Business Themes

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• Cost Comparison Hard Disk Drive to Solid State Drive on Price per Gigabyte - dispelling a myth!

  - by tonyrogerson

  It is often said that Hard Disk Drive storage is significantly cheaper per GiByte than Solid State Devices – this is wholly inaccurate within the database space. People need to look at the cost of the complete solution and not just a single component part in isolation to what is really required to meet the business requirement. Buying a single Hitachi Ultrastar 600GB 3.5” SAS 15Krpm hard disk drive will cost approximately £239.60 (http://scan.co.uk, 22nd March 2012) compared to an OCZ 600GB Z-Drive R4 CM84 PCIe costing £2,316.54 (http://scan.co.uk, 22nd March 2012); I’ve not included FusionIO ioDrive because there is no public pricing available for it – something I never understand and personally when companies do this I immediately think what are they hiding, luckily in FusionIO’s case the product is proven though is expensive compared to OCZ enterprise offerings. On the face of it the single 15Krpm hard disk has a price per GB of £0.39, the SSD £3.86; this is what you will see in the press and this is what sales people will use in comparing the two technologies – do not be fooled by this bullshit people! What is the requirement? The requirement is the database will have a static size of 400GB kept static through archiving so growth and trim will balance the database size, the client requires resilience, there will be several hundred call centre staff querying the database where queries will read a small amount of data but there will be no hot spot in the data so the randomness will come across the entire 400GB of the database, estimates predict that the IOps required will be approximately 4,000IOps at peak times, because it’s a call centre system the IO latency is important and must remain below 5ms per IO. The balance between read and write is 70% read, 30% write. The requirement is now defined and we have three of the most important pieces of the puzzle – space required, estimated IOps and maximum latency per IO. Something to consider with regard SQL Server; write activity requires synchronous IO to the storage media specifically the transaction log; that means the write thread will wait until the IO is completed and hardened off until the thread can continue execution, the requirement has stated that 30% of the system activity will be write so we can expect a high amount of synchronous activity. The hardware solution needs to be defined; two possible solutions: hard disk or solid state based; the real question now is how many hard disks are required to achieve the IO throughput, the latency and resilience, ditto for the solid state. Hard Drive solution On a test on an HP DL380, P410i controller using IOMeter against a single 15Krpm 146GB SAS drive, the throughput given on a transfer size of 8KiB against a 40GiB file on a freshly formatted disk where the partition is the only partition on the disk thus the 40GiB file is on the outer edge of the drive so more sectors can be read before head movement is required: For 100% sequential IO at a queue depth of 16 with 8 worker threads 43,537 IOps at an average latency of 2.93ms (340 MiB/s), for 100% random IO at the same queue depth and worker threads 3,733 IOps at an average latency of 34.06ms (34 MiB/s). The same test was done on the same disk but the test file was 130GiB: For 100% sequential IO at a queue depth of 16 with 8 worker threads 43,537 IOps at an average latency of 2.93ms (340 MiB/s), for 100% random IO at the same queue depth and worker threads 528 IOps at an average latency of 217.49ms (4 MiB/s). From the result it is clear random performance gets worse as the disk fills up – I’m currently writing an article on short stroking which will cover this in detail. Given the work load is random in nature looking at the random performance of the single drive when only 40 GiB of the 146 GB is used gives near the IOps required but the latency is way out. Luckily I have tested 6 x 15Krpm 146GB SAS 15Krpm drives in a RAID 0 using the same test methodology, for the same test above on a 130 GiB for each drive added the performance boost is near linear, for each drive added throughput goes up by 5 MiB/sec, IOps by 700 IOps and latency reducing nearly 50% per drive added (172 ms, 94 ms, 65 ms, 47 ms, 37 ms, 30 ms). This is because the same 130GiB is spread out more as you add drives 130 / 1, 130 / 2, 130 / 3 etc. so implicit short stroking is occurring because there is less file on each drive so less head movement required. The best latency is still 30 ms but we have the IOps required now, but that’s on a 130GiB file and not the 400GiB we need. Some reality check here: a) the drive randomness is more likely to be 50/50 and not a full 100% but the above has highlighted the effect randomness has on the drive and the more a drive fills with data the worse the effect. For argument sake let us assume that for the given workload we need 8 disks to do the job, for resilience reasons we will need 16 because we need to RAID 1+0 them in order to get the throughput and the resilience, RAID 5 would degrade performance. Cost for hard drives: 16 x £239.60 = £3,833.60 For the hard drives we will need disk controllers and a separate external disk array because the likelihood is that the server itself won’t take the drives, a quick spec off DELL for a PowerVault MD1220 which gives the dual pathing with 16 disks 146GB 15Krpm 2.5” disks is priced at £7,438.00, note its probably more once we had two controller cards to sit in the server in, racking etc. Minimum cost taking the DELL quote as an example is therefore: {Cost of Hardware} / {Storage Required} £7,438.60 / 400 = £18.595 per GB £18.59 per GiB is a far cry from the £0.39 we had been told by the salesman and the myth. Yes, the storage array is composed of 16 x 146 disks in RAID 10 (therefore 8 usable) giving an effective usable storage availability of 1168GB but the actual storage requirement is only 400 and the extra disks have had to be purchased to get the  IOps up. Solid State Drive solution A single card significantly exceeds the IOps and latency required, for resilience two will be required. ( £2,316.54 * 2 ) / 400 = £11.58 per GB With the SSD solution only two PCIe sockets are required, no external disk units, no additional controllers, no redundant controllers etc. Conclusion I hope by showing you an example that the myth that hard disk drives are cheaper per GiB than Solid State has now been dispelled - £11.58 per GB for SSD compared to £18.59 for Hard Disk. I’ve not even touched on the running costs, compare the costs of running 18 hard disks, that’s a lot of heat and power compared to two PCIe cards!Just a quick note: I've left a fair amount of information out due to this being a blog! If in doubt, email me :)I'll also deal with the myth that SSD's wear out at a later date as well - that's just way over done still, yes, 5 years ago, but now - no.

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• Changing CSS with jQuery syntax in Silverlight using jLight

  - by Timmy Kokke

  Lately I’ve ran into situations where I had to change elements or had to request a value in the DOM from Silverlight. jLight, which was introduced in an earlier article, can help with that. jQuery offers great ways to change CSS during runtime. Silverlight can access the DOM, but it isn’t as easy as jQuery. All examples shown in this article can be looked at in this online demo. The code can be downloaded here.   Part 1: The easy stuff Selecting and changing properties is pretty straight forward. Setting the text color in all <B> </B> elements can be done using the following code:   jQuery.Select("b").Css("color", "red");   The Css() method is an extension method on jQueryObject which is return by the jQuery.Select() method. The Css() method takes to parameters. The first is the Css style property. All properties used in Css can be entered in this string. The second parameter is the value you want to give the property. In this case the property is “color” and it is changed to “red”. To specify which element you want to select you can add a :selector parameter to the Select() method as shown in the next example.   jQuery.Select("b:first").Css("font-family", "sans-serif");   The “:first” pseudo-class selector selects only the first element. This example changes the “font-family” property of the first <B></B> element to “sans-serif”. To make use of intellisense in Visual Studio I’ve added a extension methods to help with the pseudo-classes. In the example below the “font-weight” of every “Even” <LI></LI> is set to “bold”.   jQuery.Select("li".Even()).Css("font-weight", "bold");   Because the Css() extension method returns a jQueryObject it is possible to chain calls to Css(). The following example show setting the “color”, “background-color” and the “font-size” of all headers in one go.   jQuery.Select(":header").Css("color", "#12FF70") .Css("background-color", "yellow") .Css("font-size", "25px");   Part 2: More complex stuff In only a few cases you need to change only one style property. More often you want to change an entire set op style properties all in one go.  You could chain a lot of Css() methods together. A better way is to add a class to a stylesheet and define all properties in there. With the AddClass() method you can set a style class to a set of elements. This example shows how to add the “demostyle” class to all <B></B> in the document.   jQuery.Select("b").AddClass("demostyle");   Removing the class works in the same way:   jQuery.Select("b").RemoveClass("demostyle");   jLight is build for interacting with to the DOM from Silverlight using jQuery. A jQueryObjectCss object can be used to define different sets of style properties in Silverlight. The over 60 most common Css style properties are defined in the jQueryObjectCss class. A string indexer can be used to access all style properties ( CssObject1[“background-color”] equals CssObject1.BackgroundColor). In the code below, two jQueryObjectCss objects are defined and instantiated.   private jQueryObjectCss CssObject1; private jQueryObjectCss CssObject2;   public Demo2() { CssObject1 = new jQueryObjectCss { BackgroundColor = "Lime", Color="Black", FontSize = "12pt", FontFamily = "sans-serif", FontWeight = "bold", MarginLeft = 150, LineHeight = "28px", Border = "Solid 1px #880000" }; CssObject2 = new jQueryObjectCss { FontStyle = "Italic", FontSize = "48", Color = "#225522" }; InitializeComponent(); }   Now instead of chaining to set all different properties you can just pass one of the jQueryObjectCss objects to the Css() method. In this case all <LI></LI> elements are set to match this object.   jQuery.Select("li").Css(CssObject1); When using the jQueryObjectCss objects chaining is still possible. In the following example all headers are given a blue backgroundcolor and the last is set to match CssObject2.   jQuery.Select(":header").Css(new jQueryObjectCss{BackgroundColor = "Blue"}) .Eq(-1).Css(CssObject2);   Part 3: The fun stuff Having Silverlight call JavaScript and than having JavaScript to call Silverlight requires a lot of plumbing code. Everything has to be registered and strings are passed back and forth to execute the JavaScript. jLight makes this kind of stuff so easy, it becomes fun to use. In a lot of situations jQuery can call a function to decide what to do, setting a style class based on complex expressions for example. jLight can do the same, but the callback methods are defined in Silverlight. This example calls the function() method for each <LI></LI> element. The callback method has to take a jQueryObject, an integer and a string as parameters. In this case jLight differs a bit from the actual jQuery implementation. jQuery uses only the index and the className parameters. A jQueryObject is added to make it simpler to access the attributes and properties of the element. If the text of the listitem starts with a ‘D’ or an ‘M’ the class is set. Otherwise null is returned and nothing happens.   private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { jQuery.Select("li").AddClass(function); }   private string function(jQueryObject obj, int index, string className) { if (obj.Text[0] == 'D' || obj.Text[0] == 'M') return "demostyle"; return null; }   The last thing I would like to demonstrate uses even more Silverlight and less jLight, but demonstrates the power of the combination. Animating a style property using a Storyboard with easing functions. First a dependency property is defined. In this case it is a double named Intensity. By handling the changed event the color is set using jQuery.   public double Intensity { get { return (double)GetValue(IntensityProperty); } set { SetValue(IntensityProperty, value); } }   public static readonly DependencyProperty IntensityProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("Intensity", typeof(double), typeof(Demo3), new PropertyMetadata(0.0, IntensityChanged));   private static void IntensityChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) { var i = (byte)(double)e.NewValue; jQuery.Select("span").Css("color", string.Format("#{0:X2}{0:X2}{0:X2}", i)); }   An animation has to be created. This code defines a Storyboard with one keyframe that uses a bounce ease as an easing function. The animation is set to target the Intensity dependency property defined earlier.   private Storyboard CreateAnimation(double value) { Storyboard storyboard = new Storyboard(); var da = new DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames(); var d = new EasingDoubleKeyFrame { EasingFunction = new BounceEase(), KeyTime = KeyTime.FromTimeSpan(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1.0)), Value = value }; da.KeyFrames.Add(d); Storyboard.SetTarget(da, this); Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(da, new PropertyPath(Demo3.IntensityProperty)); storyboard.Children.Add(da); return storyboard; }   Initially the Intensity is set to 128 which results in a gray color. When one of the buttons is pressed, a new animation is created an played. One to animate to black, and one to animate to white.   public Demo3() { InitializeComponent(); Intensity = 128; }   private void button2_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CreateAnimation(255).Begin(); }   private void button3_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CreateAnimation(0).Begin(); }   Conclusion As you can see jLight can make the life of a Silverlight developer a lot easier when accessing the DOM. Almost all jQuery functions that are defined in jLight use the same constructions as described above. I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to the real jQuery. Having JavaScript perform callbacks to Silverlight using jLight will be described in more detail in a future tutorial about AJAX or eventing.

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• Microsoft Business Intelligence Seminar 2011

  - by DavidWimbush

  I was lucky enough to attend the maiden presentation of this at Microsoft Reading yesterday. It was pretty gripping stuff not only because of what was said but also because of what could only be hinted at. Here's what I took away from the day. (Disclaimer: I'm not a BI guru, just a reasonably experienced BI developer, so I may have misunderstood or misinterpreted a few things. Particularly when so much of the talk was about the vision and subtle hints of what is coming. Please comment if you think I've got anything wrong. I'm also not going to even try to cover Master Data Services as I struggled to imagine how you would actually use it.) I was a bit worried when I learned that the whole day was going to be presented by one guy but Rafal Lukawiecki is a very engaging speaker. He's going to be presenting this about 20 times around the world over the coming months. If you get a chance to hear him speak, I say go for it. No doubt some of the hints will become clearer as Denali gets closer to RTM. Firstly, things are definitely happening in the SQL Server Reporting and BI world. Traditionally IT would build a data warehouse, then cubes on top of that, and then publish them in a structured and controlled way. But, just as with many IT projects in general, by the time it's finished the business has moved on and the system no longer meets their requirements. This not sustainable and something more agile is needed but there has to be some control. Apparently we're going to be hearing the catchphrase 'Balancing agility with control' a lot. More users want more access to more data. Can they define what they want? Of course not, but they'll recognise it when they see it. It's estimated that only 28% of potential BI users have meaningful access to the data they need, so there is a real pent-up demand. The answer looks like: give them some self-service tools so they can experiment and see what works, and then IT can help to support the results. It's estimated that 32% of Excel users are comfortable with its analysis tools such as pivot tables. It's the power user's preferred tool. Why fight it? That's why PowerPivot is an Excel add-in and that's why they released a Data Mining add-in for it as well. It does appear that the strategy is going to be to use Reporting Services (in SharePoint mode), PowerPivot, and possibly something new (smiles and hints but no details) to create reports and explore data. Everything will be published and managed in SharePoint which gives users the ability to mash-up, share and socialise what they've found out. SharePoint also gives IT tools to understand what people are looking at and where to concentrate effort. If PowerPivot report X becomes widely used, it's time to check that it shows what they think it does and perhaps get it a bit more under central control. There was more SharePoint detail that went slightly over my head regarding where Excel Services and Excel Web Application fit in, the differences between them, and the suggestion that it is likely they will one day become one (but not in the immediate future). That basic pattern is set to be expanded upon by further exploiting Vertipaq (the columnar indexing engine that enables PowerPivot to store and process a lot of data fast and in a small memory footprint) to provide scalability 'from the desktop to the data centre', and some yet to be detailed advances in 'frictionless deployment' (part of which is about making the difference between local and the cloud pretty much irrelevant). Excel looks like becoming Microsoft's primary BI client. It already has: the ability to consume cubes strong visualisation tools slicers (which are part of Excel not PowerPivot) a data mining add-in PowerPivot A major hurdle for self-service BI is presenting the data in a consumable format. You can't just give users PowerPivot and a server with a copy of the OLTP database(s). Building cubes is labour intensive and doesn't always give the user what they need. This is where the BI Semantic Model (BISM) comes in. I gather it's a layer of metadata you define that can combine multiple data sources (and types of data source) into a clear 'interface' that users can work with. It comes with a new query language called DAX. SSAS cubes are unlikely to go away overnight because, with their pre-calculated results, they are still the most efficient way to work with really big data sets. A few other random titbits that came up: Reporting Services is going to get some good new stuff in Denali. Keep an eye on www.projectbotticelli.com for the slides. You can also view last year's seminar sessions which covered a lot of the same ground as far as the overall strategy is concerned. They plan to add more material as Denali's features are publicly exposed. Check out the PASS keynote address for a showing of Yahoo's SQL BI servers. Apparently they wheeled the rack out on stage still plugged in and running! Check out the Excel 2010 Data Mining Add-Ins. 32 bit only at present but 64 bit is on the way. There are lots of data sets, many of them free, at the Windows Azure Marketplace Data Market (where you can also get ESRI shape files). If you haven't already seen it, have a look at the Silverlight Pivot Viewer (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/29/silverlight-pivotviewer-now-available.aspx). The Bing Maps Data Connector is worth a look if you're into spatial stuff (http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/07/13/data-connector-sql-server-2008-spatial-amp-bing-maps.aspx).  

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• The 20 Most Important Keyboard Shortcuts For Windows PCs

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Keyboard shortcuts are practically essential for using any type of PC. They’ll speed up almost everything you do. But long lists of keyboard shortcuts can quickly become overwhelming if you’re just getting started. This list will cover the most useful keyboard shortcuts that every Windows user should know. If you haven’t used keyboard shortcuts much, these will show you just how useful keyboard shortcuts can be. Windows Key + Search The Windows key is particularly important on Windows 8 — especially before Windows 8.1 — because it allows you to quickly return to the Start screen. On Windows 7, it opens the Start menu. Either way, you can start typing immediately after you press the Windows key to search for programs, settings, and files. For example, if you want to launch Firefox, you can press the Windows key, start typing the word Firefox, and press Enter when the Firefox shortcut appears. It’s a quick way to launch programs, open files, and locate Control Panel options without even touching your mouse and without digging through a cluttered Start menu. You can also use the arrow keys to select the shortcut you want to launch before pressing Enter. Copy, Cut, Paste Copy, Cut, and Paste are extremely important keyboard shortcuts for text-editing. If you do any typing on your computer, you probably use them. These options can be accessed using the mouse, either by right-clicking on selected text or opening the application’s Edit menu, but this is the slowest way to do it. After selecting some text, press Ctrl+C to copy it or Ctrl+X to cut it. Position the cursor where you want the text and use Ctrl+V to paste it. These shortcuts can save you a huge amount of time over using the mouse. Search the Current Page or File To quickly perform a search in the current application — whether you’re in a web browser, PDF viewer, document editor, or almost any other type of application — press Ctrl+F. The application’s search (or “Find”) feature will pop up, and you can instantly start typing a phrase you want to search for. You can generally press Enter to  go to the next appearance of the word or phrase in the document, quickly searching through it for what you’re interested in. Switch Between Applications and Tabs Rather than clicking buttons on your taskbar, Alt+Tab is a very quick way to switch between running applications. Windows orders the list of open windows by the order you accessed them, so if you’re only using two different applications, you can just press Alt+Tab to quickly switch between them. If switching between more than two windows, you’ll have to hold the Alt key and press Tab repeatedly to toggle through the list of open windows. If you miss the window you want, you can always press Alt+Shift+Tab to move through the list in reverse. To move between tabs in an application — such as the browser tabs in your web browser — press Ctrl+Tab. Ctrl+Shift+Tab will move through tabs in reverse. Quickly Print If you’re the kind of person who still prints things, you can quickly open the print window by pressing Ctrl+P. This can be faster than hunting down the Print option in every program you want to print something from. Basic Browser Shortcuts Web browser shortcuts can save you tons of time, too. Ctrl+T is a very useful one, as it will open a new tab with the address bar focused, so you can quickly press Ctrl +T, type a search phrase or web address, and press Enter to go there. To go back or forward while browsing, hold the Ctrl key and press the left or right arrow keys. If you’d just like to focus your web browser’s address bar so you can type a new web address or search without opening a new tab, press Ctrl + L. You can then start typing something and press Enter. Close Tabs and Windows To quickly close the current application, press Alt+F4. This works on the desktop and even in new Windows 8-style applications. To quickly close the current browser tab or document, press Ctrl+W. This will often close the current window if there are no other tabs open. Lock Your Computer When you’re done using your computer and want to step away, you may want to lock it. People won’t be able to log in and access your desktop unless they know your password. You can do this from the Start menu or Start screen, but the fastest way to lock your screen is by quickly pressing Windows Key + L before you get up. Access the Task Manager Ctrl+Alt+Delete will take you to a screen that allows you to quickly launch the Task Manager or perform other operations, such as signing out. This is particularly useful because if can be used to recover from situations where your computer doesn’t appear responsive or isn’t accepting input. For example, if a full-screen game becomes unresponsive, Ctrl+Alt+Delete will often allow you to escape from it and end it via the Task Manager. Windows 8 Shortcuts On Windows 8 PCs, there are other very important keyboard shortcuts. Windows Key + C will open your Charms bar, while Windows Key + Tab will open the new App Switcher. These keyboard shortcuts will allow you to avoid the hot corners, which can be tedious to use with a mouse. On the desktop side, Windows Key + D will take you back to the desktop from anywhere. Windows Key + X will open a special “power user menu” that gives you quick access to options that are hidden in the new Windows 8 interface, including Shut Down, Restart, and Control Panel. If you’re interested in learning more keyboard shortcuts, be sure to check our longer lists of 47 keyboard shortcuts that work in all web browsers and 42+ keyboard shortcuts to speed up text-editing. Image Credit: Jeroen Bennink on Flickr     

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• What Makes a Good Design Critic? CHI 2010 Panel Review

  - by Applications User Experience

  Author: Daniel Schwartz, Senior Interaction Designer, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle Applications UX Chief Evangelist Patanjali Venkatacharya organized and moderated an innovative and stimulating panel discussion titled "What Makes a Good Design Critic? Food Design vs. Product Design Criticism" at CHI 2010, the annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The panelists included Janice Rohn, VP of User Experience at Experian; Tami Hardeman, a food stylist; Ed Seiber, a restaurant architect and designer; Jonathan Kessler, a food critic and writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; and Larry Powers, Chef de Cuisine at Shaun's restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia. Building off the momentum of his highly acclaimed panel at CHI 2009 on what interaction design can learn from food design (for which I was on the other side as a panelist), Venkatacharya brought together new people with different roles in the restaurant and software interaction design fields. The session was also quite delicious -- but more on that later. Criticism, as it applies to food and product or interaction design, was the tasty topic for this forum and showed that strong parallels exist between food and interaction design criticism. Figure 1. The panelists in discussion: (left to right) Janice Rohn, Ed Seiber, Tami Hardeman, and Jonathan Kessler. The panelists had great insights to share from their respective fields, and they enthusiastically discussed as if they were at a casual collegial dinner. Jonathan Kessler stated that he prefers to have one professional critic's opinion in general than a large sampling of customers, however, "Web sites like Yelp get users excited by the collective approach. People are attracted to things desired by so many." Janice Rohn added that this collective desire was especially true for users of consumer products. Ed Seiber remarked that while people looked to the popular view for their target tastes and product choices, "professional critics like John [Kessler] still hold a big weight on public opinion." Chef Powers indicated that chefs take in feedback from all sources, adding, "word of mouth is very powerful. We also look heavily at the sales of the dishes to see what's moving; what's selling and thus successful." Hearing this discussion validates our design work at Oracle in that we listen to our users (our diners) and industry feedback (our critics) to ensure an optimal user experience of our products. Rohn considers that restaurateur Danny Meyer's book, Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, which is about creating successful restaurant experiences, has many applicable parallels to user experience design. Meyer actually argues that the customer is not always right, but that "they must always feel heard." Seiber agreed, but noted "customers are not designers," and while designers need to listen to customer feedback, it is the designer's job to synthesize it. Seiber feels it's the critic's job to point out when something is missing or not well-prioritized. In interaction design, our challenges are quite similar, if not parallel. Software tasks are like puzzles that are in search of a solution on how to be best completed. As a food stylist, Tami Hardeman has the demanding and challenging task of presenting food to be as delectable as can be. To present food in its best light requires a lot of creativity and insight into consumer tastes. It's no doubt then that this former fashion stylist came up with the ultimate catch phrase to capture the emotion that clients want to draw from their users: "craveability." The phrase was a hit with the audience and panelists alike. Sometime later in the discussion, Seiber remarked, "designers strive to apply craveability to products, and I do so for restaurants in my case." Craveabilty is also very applicable to interaction design. Creating straightforward and smooth workflows for users of Oracle Applications is a primary goal for my colleagues. We want our users to really enjoy working with our products where it makes them more efficient and better at their jobs. That's our "craveability." Patanjali Venkatacharya asked the panel, "if a design's "craveability" appeals to some cultures but not to others, then what is the impact to the food or product design process?" Rohn stated that "taste is part nature and part nurture" and that the design must take the full context of a product's usage into consideration. Kessler added, "good design is about understanding the context" that the experience necessitates. Seiber remarked how important seat comfort is for diners and how the quality of seating will add so much to the complete dining experience. Sometimes if these non-food factors are not well executed, they can also take away from an otherwise pleasant dining experience. Kessler recounted a time when he was dining at a restaurant that actually had very good food, but the photographs hanging on all the walls did not fit in with the overall décor and created a negative overall dining experience. While the tastiness of the food is critical to a restaurant's success, it is a captivating complete user experience, as in interaction design, which will keep customers coming back and ultimately making the restaurant a hit. Figure 2. Patnajali Venkatacharya enjoyed the Sardian flatbread salad. As a surprise Chef Powers brought out a signature dish from Shaun's restaurant for all the panelists to sample and critique. The Sardinian flatbread dish showcased Atlanta's taste for fresh and local produce and cheese at its finest as a salad served on a crispy flavorful flat bread. Hardeman said it could be photographed from any angle, a high compliment coming from a food stylist. Seiber really enjoyed the colors that the dish brought together and thought it would be served very well in a casual restaurant on a summer's day. The panel really appreciated the taste and quality of the different components and how the rosemary brought all the flavors together. Seiber remarked that "a lot of effort goes into the appearance of simplicity." Rohn indicated that the same notion holds true with software user interface design. A tremendous amount of work goes into crafting straightforward interfaces, including user research, prototyping, design iterations, and usability studies. Design criticism for food and software interfaces clearly share many similarities. Both areas value expert opinions and user feedback. Both areas understand the importance of great design needing to work well in its context. Last but not least, both food and interaction design criticism value "craveability" and how having users excited about experiencing and enjoying the designs is an important goal. Now if we can just improve the taste of software user interfaces, people may choose to dine on their enterprise applications over a fresh organic salad.

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• Contracting as a Software Developer in the UK

  - by Frez

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE 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-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} Having had some 15 years’ experience of working as a software contractor, I am often asked by developers who work as permanent employees (permies) about the pros and cons of working as a software consultant through my own limited company and whether the move would be a good one for them. Whilst it is possible to contract using other financial vehicles such as umbrella companies, this article will only consider limited companies as that is what I have experience of using. Contracting or consultancy requires a different mind-set from being a permanent member of staff, and not all developers are capable of this shift in attitude. Whilst you can look forward to an increase in the money you take home, there are real risks and expenses you would not normally be exposed to as a permie. So let us have a look at the pros and cons: Pros: More money There is no doubt that whilst you are working on contracts you will earn significantly more than you would as a permanent employee. Furthermore, working through a limited company is more tax efficient. Less politics You really have no need to involve yourself in office politics. When the end of the day comes you can go home and not think or worry about the power struggles within the company you are contracted to. Your career progression is not tied to the company. Expenses from gross income All your expenses of trading as a business will come out of your company’s gross income, i.e. before tax. This covers travelling expenses provided you have not been at the same client/location for more than two years, internet subscriptions, professional subscriptions, software, hardware, accountancy services and so on. Cons: Work is more transient Contracts typically range from a couple of weeks to a year, although will most likely start at 3 months. However, most contracts are extended either because the project you have been brought in to help with takes longer to deliver than expected, the client decides they can use you on other aspects of the project, or the client decides they would like to use you on other projects. The temporary nature of the work means that you will have down-time between contracts while you secure new opportunities during which time your company will have no income. You may need to attend several interviews before securing a new contract. Accountancy expenses Your company is a separate entity and there are accountancy requirements which, unless you like paperwork, means your company will need to appoint an accountant to prepare your company’s accounts. It may also be worth purchasing some accountancy software, so talk to your accountant about this as they may prefer you to use a particular software package so they can integrate it with their systems. VAT You will need to register your company for VAT. This is tax neutral for you as the VAT you charge your clients you will pass onto the government less any VAT you are reclaiming from expenses, but it is additional paperwork to undertake each quarter. It is worth checking out the Fixed Rate VAT Scheme that is available, particularly after the initial expenses of setting up your company are over. No training Clients take you on based on your skills, not to train you when they will lose that investment at the end of the contract, so understand that it is unlikely you will receive any training funded by a client. However, learning new skills during a contract is possible and you may choose to accept a contract on a lower rate if this is guaranteed as it will help secure future contracts. No financial extras You will have no free pension, life, accident, sickness or medical insurance unless you choose to purchase them yourself. A financial advisor can give you all the necessary advice in this area, and it is worth taking seriously. A year after I started as a consultant I contracted a serious illness, this kept me off work for over two months, my client was very understanding and it could have been much worse, so it is worth considering what your options might be in the case of illness, death and retirement. Agencies Whilst it is possible to work directly for end clients there are pros and cons of working through an agency.  The main advantage is cash flow, you invoice the agency and they typically pay you within a week, whereas working directly for a client could have you waiting up to three months to be paid. The downside of working for agencies, especially in the current difficult times, is that they may go out of business and you then have difficulty getting the money you are owed. Tax investigation It is possible that the Inland Revenue may decide to investigate your company for compliance with tax law. Insurance is available to cover you for this. My personal recommendation would be to join the PCG as this insurance is included as a benefit of membership, Professional Indemnity Some agencies require that you are covered by professional indemnity insurance; this is a cost you would not incur as a permie. Travel Unless you live in an area that has an abundance of opportunities, such as central London, it is likely that you will be travelling further, longer and with more expense than if you were permanently employed at a local company. This not only affects you monetarily, but also your quality of life and the ability to keep fit and healthy. Obtaining finance If you want to secure a mortgage on a property it can be more difficult or expensive, especially if you do not have three years of audited accounts to show a mortgage lender.   Caveat This post is my personal opinion and should not be used as a definitive guide or recommendation to contracting and whether it is suitable for you as an individual, i.e. I accept no responsibility if you decide to take up contracting based on this post and you fare badly for whatever reason.

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• Oracle Flashback Technologies - Overview

  - by Sridhar_R-Oracle

  Oracle Flashback Technologies - IntroductionIn his May 29th 2014 blog, my colleague Joe Meeks introduced Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) and discussed both planned and unplanned outages. Let’s take a closer look at unplanned outages. These can be caused by physical failures (e.g., server, storage, network, file deletion, physical corruption, site failures) or by logical failures – cases where all components and files are physically available, but data is incorrect or corrupt. These logical failures are usually caused by human errors or application logic errors. This blog series focuses on these logical errors – what causes them and how to address and recover from them using Oracle Database Flashback. In this introductory blog post, I’ll provide an overview of the Oracle Database Flashback technologies and will discuss the features in detail in future blog posts. Let’s get started. We are all human beings (unless a machine is reading this), and making mistakes is a part of what we do…often what we do best!  We “fat finger”, we spill drinks on keyboards, unplug the wrong cables, etc.  In addition, many of us, in our lives as DBAs or developers, must have observed, caused, or corrected one or more of the following unpleasant events: Accidentally updated a table with wrong values !! Performed a batch update that went wrong - due to logical errors in the code !! Dropped a table !! How do DBAs typically recover from these types of errors? First, data needs to be restored and recovered to the point-in-time when the error occurred (incomplete or point-in-time recovery).  Moreover, depending on the type of fault, it’s possible that some services – or even the entire database – would have to be taken down during the recovery process.Apart from error conditions, there are other questions that need to be addressed as part of the investigation. For example, what did the data look like in the morning, prior to the error? What were the various changes to the row(s) between two timestamps? Who performed the transaction and how can it be reversed?  Oracle Database includes built-in Flashback technologies, with features that address these challenges and questions, and enable you to perform faster, easier, and convenient recovery from logical corruptions. HistoryFlashback Query, the first Flashback Technology, was introduced in Oracle 9i. It provides a simple, powerful and completely non-disruptive mechanism for data verification and recovery from logical errors, and enables users to view the state of data at a previous point in time.Flashback Technologies were further enhanced in Oracle 10g, to provide fast, easy recovery at the database, table, row, and even at a transaction level.Oracle Database 11g introduced an innovative method to manage and query long-term historical data with Flashback Data Archive. The 11g release also introduced Flashback Transaction, which provides an easy, one-step operation to back out a transaction. Oracle Database versions 11.2.0.2 and beyond further enhanced the performance of these features. Note that all the features listed here work without requiring any kind of restore operation.In addition, Flashback features are fully supported with the new multi-tenant capabilities introduced with Oracle Database 12c, Flashback Features Oracle Flashback Database enables point-in-time-recovery of the entire database without requiring a traditional restore and recovery operation. It rewinds the entire database to a specified point in time in the past by undoing all the changes that were made since that time.Oracle Flashback Table enables an entire table or a set of tables to be recovered to a point in time in the past.Oracle Flashback Drop enables accidentally dropped tables and all dependent objects to be restored.Oracle Flashback Query enables data to be viewed at a point-in-time in the past. This feature can be used to view and reconstruct data that was lost due to unintentional change(s) or deletion(s). This feature can also be used to build self-service error correction into applications, empowering end-users to undo and correct their errors.Oracle Flashback Version Query offers the ability to query the historical changes to data between two points in time or system change numbers (SCN) Oracle Flashback Transaction Query enables changes to be examined at the transaction level. This capability can be used to diagnose problems, perform analysis, audit transactions, and even revert the transaction by undoing SQLOracle Flashback Transaction is a procedure used to back-out a transaction and its dependent transactions.Flashback technologies eliminate the need for a traditional restore and recovery process to fix logical corruptions or make enquiries. Using these technologies, you can recover from the error in the same amount of time it took to generate the error. All the Flashback features can be accessed either via SQL command line (or) via Enterprise Manager.  Most of the Flashback technologies depend on the available UNDO to retrieve older data. The following table describes the various Flashback technologies: their purpose, dependencies and situations where each individual technology can be used.   Example Syntax Error investigation related:The purpose is to investigate what went wrong and what the values were at certain points in timeFlashback Queries  ( select .. as of SCN | Timestamp )   - Helps to see the value of a row/set of rows at a point in timeFlashback Version Queries  ( select .. versions between SCN | Timestamp and SCN | Timestamp)  - Helps determine how the value evolved between certain SCNs or between timestamps Flashback Transaction Queries (select .. XID=)   - Helps to understand how the transaction caused the changes.Error correction related:The purpose is to fix the error and correct the problems,Flashback Table  (flashback table .. to SCN | Timestamp)  - To rewind the table to a particular timestamp or SCN to reverse unwanted updates Flashback Drop (flashback table ..  to before drop )  - To undrop or undelete a table Flashback Database (flashback database to SCN  | Restore Point )  - This is the rewind button for Oracle databases. You can revert the entire database to a particular point in time. It is a fast way to perform a PITR (point-in-time recovery). Flashback Transaction (DBMS_FLASHBACK.TRANSACTION_BACKOUT(XID..))  - To reverse a transaction and its related transactions Advanced use cases Flashback technology is integrated into Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Oracle Data Guard. So, apart from the basic use cases mentioned above, the following use cases are addressed using Oracle Flashback. Block Media recovery by RMAN - to perform block level recovery Snapshot Standby - where the standby is temporarily converted to a read/write environment for testing, backup, or migration purposes Re-instate old primary in a Data Guard environment – this avoids the need to restore an old backup and perform a recovery to make it a new standby. Guaranteed Restore Points - to bring back the entire database to an older point-in-time in a guaranteed way. and so on..I hope this introductory overview helps you understand how Flashback features can be used to investigate and recover from logical errors.  As mentioned earlier, I will take a deeper-dive into to some of the critical Flashback features in my upcoming blogs and address common use cases.

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