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  • It’s time that you ought to know what you don’t know

    - by fatherjack
    There is a famous quote about unknown unknowns and known knowns and so on but I’ll let you review that if you are interested. What I am worried about is that there are things going on in your environment that you ought to know about, indeed you have asked to be told about but you are not getting the information. When you schedule a SQL Agent job you can set it to send an email to an inbox monitored by someone who needs to know and indeed can do something about it. However, what happens if the email process isnt successful? Check your servers with this: USE [msdb] GO /* This code selects the top 10 most recent SQLAgent jobs that failed to complete successfully and where the email notification failed too. Jonathan Allen Jul 2012 */ DECLARE @Date DATETIME SELECT @Date = DATEADD(d, DATEDIFF(d, '19000101', GETDATE()) - 1, '19000101') SELECT TOP 10 [s].[name] , [sjh].[step_name] , [sjh].[sql_message_id] , [sjh].[sql_severity] , [sjh].[message] , [sjh].[run_date] , [sjh].[run_time] , [sjh].[run_duration] , [sjh].[operator_id_emailed] , [sjh].[operator_id_netsent] , [sjh].[operator_id_paged] , [sjh].[retries_attempted] FROM [dbo].[sysjobhistory] AS sjh INNER JOIN [dbo].[sysjobs] AS s ON [sjh].[job_id] = [s].[job_id] WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM [dbo].[sysjobs] AS s INNER JOIN [dbo].[sysjobhistory] AS s2 ON [s].[job_id] = [s2].[job_id] WHERE [sjh].[job_id] = [s2].[job_id] AND [s2].[message] LIKE '%failed to notify%' AND CONVERT(DATETIME, CONVERT(VARCHAR(15), [s2].[run_date])) >= @date AND [s2].[run_status] = 0 ) AND sjh.[run_status] = 0 AND sjh.[step_id] != 0 AND CONVERT(DATETIME, CONVERT(VARCHAR(15), [run_date])) >= @date ORDER BY [sjh].[run_date] DESC , [sjh].[run_time] DESC go USE [msdb] go /* This code summarises details of SQLAgent jobs that failed to complete successfully and where the email notification failed too. Jonathan Allen Jul 2012 */ DECLARE @Date DATETIME SELECT @Date = DATEADD(d, DATEDIFF(d, '19000101', GETDATE()) - 1, '19000101') SELECT [s].name , [s2].[step_id] , CONVERT(DATETIME, CONVERT(VARCHAR(15), [s2].[run_date])) AS [rundate] , COUNT(*) AS [execution count] FROM [dbo].[sysjobs] AS s INNER JOIN [dbo].[sysjobhistory] AS s2 ON [s].[job_id] = [s2].[job_id] WHERE [s2].[message] LIKE '%failed to notify%' AND CONVERT(DATETIME, CONVERT(VARCHAR(15), [s2].[run_date])) >= @date AND [s2].[run_status] = 0 GROUP BY name , [s2].[step_id] , [s2].[run_date] ORDER BY [s2].[run_dateDESC] These two result sets will show if there are any SQL Agent jobs that have run on your servers that failed and failed to successfully email about the failure. I hope it’s of use to you. Disclaimer – Jonathan is a Friend of Red Gate and as such, whenever they are discussed, will have a generally positive disposition towards Red Gate tools. Other tools are often available and you should always try others before you come back and buy the Red Gate ones. All code in this blog is provided “as is” and no guarantee, warranty or accuracy is applicable or inferred, run the code on a test server and be sure to understand it before you run it on a server that means a lot to you or your manager.

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  • .NET Reflector Pro Coming…

    The very best software is almost always originally the creation of a single person. Readers of our 'Geek of the Week' will know of a few of them.  Even behemoths such as MS Word or Excel started out with one programmer.  There comes a time with any software that it starts to grow up, and has to move from this form of close parenting to being developed by a team.  This has happened several times within Red-Gate: SQL Refactor, SQL Compare, and SQL Dependency Tracker, not to mention SQL Backup, were all originally the work of a lone coder, who subsequently handed over the development to a structured team of programmers, test engineers and usability designers. Because we loved .NET Reflector when Lutz Roeder wrote and nurtured it, and, like many other .NET developers, used it as a development tool ourselves, .NET Reflector's progress from being the apple of Lutz's eye to being a Red-Gate team-based development  seemed natural.  Lutz, after all, eventually felt he couldn't afford the time to develop it to the extent it deserved. Why, then, did we want to take on .NET Reflector?  Different people may give you different answers, but for us in the .NET team, it just seemed a natural progression. We're always very surprised when anyone suggests that we want to change the nature of the tool since it seems right just as it is. .NET Reflector will stay very much the tool we all use and appreciate, although the new version will support .NET 4, and will have many improvements in the accuracy of its decompiling. Whilst we've made a lot of improvements to Reflector, the radical addition, which we hope you'll want to try out as well, is '.NET Reflector Pro'. This is an extension to .NET Reflector that allows the debugging of decompiled code using the Visual Studio debugger. It is an add-in, but we'll be charging for it, mainly because we prefer to live indoors with a warm meal, rather than outside in tents, particularly when the winter's been as cold as this one has. We're hoping (we're even pretty confident!) that you'll share our excitement about .NET Reflector Pro. .NET Reflector Pro integrates .NET Reflector into Visual Studio, allowing you to seamlessly debug into third-party code and assemblies, even if you don't have the source code for them. You can now treat decompiled assemblies much like your own code: you can step through them and use all the debugging techniques that you would use on your own code. Try the beta now. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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  • HPC Server Dynamic Job Scheduling: when jobs spawn jobs

    - by JoshReuben
    HPC Job Types HPC has 3 types of jobs http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc972750(v=ws.10).aspx · Task Flow – vanilla sequence · Parametric Sweep – concurrently run multiple instances of the same program, each with a different work unit input · MPI – message passing between master & slave tasks But when you try go outside the box – job tasks that spawn jobs, blocking the parent task – you run the risk of resource starvation, deadlocks, and recursive, non-converging or exponential blow-up. The solution to this is to write some performance monitoring and job scheduling code. You can do this in 2 ways: manually control scheduling - allocate/ de-allocate resources, change job priorities, pause & resume tasks , restrict long running tasks to specific compute clusters Semi-automatically - set threshold params for scheduling. How – Control Job Scheduling In order to manage the tasks and resources that are associated with a job, you will need to access the ISchedulerJob interface - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.hpc.scheduler.ischedulerjob_members(v=vs.85).aspx This really allows you to control how a job is run – you can access & tweak the following features: max / min resource values whether job resources can grow / shrink, and whether jobs can be pre-empted, whether the job is exclusive per node the creator process id & the job pool timestamp of job creation & completion job priority, hold time & run time limit Re-queue count Job progress Max/ min Number of cores, nodes, sockets, RAM Dynamic task list – can add / cancel jobs on the fly Job counters When – poll perf counters Tweaking the job scheduler should be done on the basis of resource utilization according to PerfMon counters – HPC exposes 2 Perf objects: Compute Clusters, Compute Nodes http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc720058(v=ws.10).aspx You can monitor running jobs according to dynamic thresholds – use your own discretion: Percentage processor time Number of running jobs Number of running tasks Total number of processors Number of processors in use Number of processors idle Number of serial tasks Number of parallel tasks Design Your algorithms correctly Finally , don’t assume you have unlimited compute resources in your cluster – design your algorithms with the following factors in mind: · Branching factor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_factor - dynamically optimize the number of children per node · cutoffs to prevent explosions - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_of_a_sequence - not all functions converge after n attempts. You also need a threshold of good enough, diminishing returns · heuristic shortcuts - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic - sometimes an exhaustive search is impractical and short cuts are suitable · Pruning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruning_(algorithm) – remove / de-prioritize unnecessary tree branches · avoid local minima / maxima - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_minima - sometimes an algorithm cant converge because it gets stuck in a local saddle – try simulated annealing, hill climbing or genetic algorithms to get out of these ruts   watch out for rounding errors – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-off_error - multiple iterations can in parallel can quickly amplify & blow up your algo ! Use an epsilon, avoid floating point errors,  truncations, approximations Happy Coding !

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  • From Trailer to Cloud: Skire acquisition expands Oracle’s on-demand project management options.

    - by Melissa Centurio Lopes
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} By Alison Weiss Whether building petrochemical facilities in the Middle East or managing mining operations in Australia, project managers face significant challenges. Local regulations and currencies, contingent labor, hybrid public/private funding sources, and more threaten project budgets and schedules. According to Mike Sicilia, senior vice president and general manager for the Oracle Primavera Global Business Unit, there will be trillions of dollars invested in industrial projects around the globe between 2012 and 2016. But even with so much at stake, project leads don’t always have time to look for new and better enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) software solutions to manage large-scale capital initiatives across the enterprise. Oracle’s recent acquisition of Skire, a leading provider of capital program management and facilities management applications available both in the cloud and on premises, gives customers outstanding new EPPM options. By combining Skire’s cloud-based solutions for managing capital projects, real estate, and facilities with Oracle’s Primavera EPPM solutions, project managers can quickly get a solution running that is interoperable across an extended enterprise. Staff can access the EPPM solution within days, rather than waiting for corporate IT to put technology in place. “Staff can access the EPPM solution within days, rather than waiting for corporate IT to put technology in place,” says Sicilia. This applies to a problem that has, according to Sicilia, bedeviled project managers for decades: extending EPPM functionality into the field. Frequently, large-scale projects are remotely located, and the lack of communications and IT infrastructure threatened the accuracy of project reporting and scheduling. Read the full version of this article in the November 2012 edition of Oracle's Profit Magazine: Special Report on Project Management

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  • OrbitFX: JavaFX 8 3D & NetBeans Platform in Space!

    - by Geertjan
    Here is a collection of screenshots from a proof of concept tool being developed by Nickolas Sabey and Sean Phillips from a.i. solutions. Before going further, read a great new article here written on java.net by Kevin Farnham, in light of the Duke's Choice Award (DCA) recently received at JavaOne 2013 by the a.i. solutions team. Here's Sean receiving the award on behalf of the a.i. solutions team, surrounded by the DCA selection committee and other officials: They won the DCA for helping facilitate and deploy the 2014 launch of NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, using JDK 7, the NetBeans Platform, and JavaFX to create the GEONS Ground Support System, helping reduce software development time by approximately 35%. The prototype tool that Nicklas and Sean are now working on uses JavaFX 3D with the NetBeans Platform and is nicknamed OrbitFX. Much of the early development is being done to experiment with different patterns, so that accuracy is currently not the goal. For example, you'll notice in the screenshots that the Earth is really close to the Sun, which is obviously not correct. The screenshots are generated using Java 8 build 111, together with NetBeans Platform 7.4. Inspired by various JavaOne demos using JavaFX 3D, Nick began development integrating them into their existing NetBeans Platform infrastructure. The 3D scene showing the Sun and Earth objects is all JavaFX 8 3D, demonstrating the use of Phong Material support, along with multiple light and camera objects. Each JavaFX component extends a JFXPanel type, so that each can easily be added to NetBeans Platform TopComponents. Right-clicking an item in the explorer view offers a context menu that animates and centers the 3D scene on the selected celestial body.  With each JavaFX scene component wrapped in a JFXPanel, they can easily be integrated into a NetBeans Platform Visual Library scene.  In this case, Nick and Sean are using an instance of their custom Slipstream PinGraphScene, which is an extension of the NetBeans Platform VMDGraphScene. Now, via the NetBeans Platform Visual Library, the OrbitFX celestial body viewer can be used in the same space as a WorldWind viewer, which is provided by a previously developed plugin. "This is a clear demonstration of the power of the NetBeans Platform as an application development framework," says Sean Phillips. "How else could you have so much rich application support placed literally side by side so easily?"

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  • American Modern Insurance Group recognized at 2010 INN VIP Best Practices Awards

    - by [email protected]
    Below: Helen Pitts (right), Oracle Insurance, congratulates Bruce Weisgerber, Munich Re, as he accepts a VIP Best Practices Award on behalf of American Modern Insurance Group.     Oracle Insurance Senior Product Marketing Manager Helen Pitts is attending the 2010 ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, and will be providing updates from the show floor. This is one of my favorite seasons of the year--insurance trade show season. It is a time to reconnect with peers, visit with partners, make new industry connections, and celebrate our customers' achievements. It's especially meaningful when we can share the experience of having one of our Oracle Insurance customers recognized for being an innovator in its business and in the industry. Congratulations to American Modern Insurance Group, part of the Munich Re Group. American Modern earned an Insurance Networking News (INN) 2010 VIP Best Practice Award yesterday evening during the 2010 ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum. The award recognizes an insurer's best practice for use of a specific technology and the role, if feasible, that ACORD data standards played as a part of their business and technology. American Modern received an Honorable Mention for leveraging the Oracle Documaker enterprise document automation solution to: Improve the quality of communications with customers in high value, high-touch lines of business Convert thousands of page elements or "forms" from their previous system, with near pixel-perfect accuracy Increase efficiency and reusability by storing all document elements (fonts, logos, approved wording, etc.) in one place Issue on-demand documents, such as address changes or policy transactions to multiple recipients at once Consolidate all customer communications onto a single platform Gain the ability to send documents to multiple recipients at once, further improving efficiency Empower agents to produce documents in real time via the Web, such as quotes, applications and policy documents, improving carrier-agent relationships Munich Re's Bruce Weisgerber accepted the award on behalf of American Modern from Lloyd Chumbly, vice president of standards at ACORD. In a press release issued after the ceremony Chumbly noted, "This award embodies a philosophy of efficiency--working smarter with standards, these insurers represent the 'best of the best' as chosen by a body of seasoned insurance industry professionals." We couldn't agree with you more, Lloyd. Congratulations again to American Modern on your continued innovation and success. You're definitely a VIP in our book! To learn more about how American Modern is putting its enterprise document automation strategy into practice, click here to read a case study. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance.

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  • BI&EPM in Focus June 2013

    - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM
    Analyst Report from Ovum: BI bites into a bigger slice of Oracle’s Red Stack Customers INC Research Ensures 24/7 Enterprise Application Availability and Supports Rapid Expansion in Asia with Managed Cloud Services – Hyperion Planning, PeopleSoft, E-Business Suite, SOA Suite PL Developments Improves Quality and Demand Planning Accuracy, Streamlines Compliance as It Moves into Manufacturing – Hyperion Planning, OBIEE, E-Business Suite Release 12.1, Agile, Demantra Kiabi Provides Store Managers with Monthly Earnings Statements in Four Business Days to Support Continued Retail Growth – Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Reporting, Hyperion Smart View for Office Speedy Cash Improves Global Financial Budgeting and Forecasting to Support Continued Company Growth - Hyperion Planning, Essbase, Hyperion Smart View for Office, Hyperion Financial Management Grupo Sports World Automates and Reduces Budget Consolidation Time by 33% for 30 Fitness Centers – Hyperion Planning Jupiter Shop Channel Automates Budgeting Processes, Enhances Visibility of Project Investments to Support Strategic Decision-Making – Hyperion Planning GENBAND Saves US$1.25 Million Annually with Automated Global Trade Management, Gains Compliance Assurance – Hyperion Financial Management, E-Business Suite Aldar Properties Consolidates and Simplifies Group Planning and Reporting for Business and Finance Structures with Integrated ERP and Business Intelligence – Hyperion Planning, Essbase, Data Integrator, OBIEE, E-Business Suite, SUN Link to Complete Archive Enterprise Performance Management Hyperion EPM 11.1.2.3 Webcast Tutorials EPM Blog: Three Technologies CFOs Need to Know About The CFO as Catalyst for Change - Part 1 The CFO as Catalyst for Change - Part 2 Actions Speak Louder in Scorecards Unlocking Business Potential with Enterprise Performance Management Business Intelligence Oracle Database 12c is launched Analysis: How to Take Big Data Advantage of Oracle Database 12c by Data-informed.com 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-qformat:yes; 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;}

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  • Going Inside the Store

    - by David Dorf
    Location was the first "killer-tech" for smartphones, and innovators have found several ways to use it. For retail, apps exist to find nearby stores, provide coupons, and give directions to the front door. But once you enter the store, location-finding ceases to work. That's because your location is usually found by finding GPS satellites in they sky, and the store's roof blocks the signal. But it won't take technology long to solve that problem. The first problem to solve is a lack of indoor maps. Navteq and others provide very accurate maps of the outdoors, enabling navigation for cars and pedestrians. Micello is building a business creating digital maps of indoor locations like malls, convention centers, office buildings. They have over 500 live maps, including maps of IKEA stores. They claim it took them only four hours to create a map of the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto with its 1.4 million square feet and 140 retail stores. And within stores, retailers are producing more accurate plan-o-grams. I'm always impressed watching demos of our space planning from AVT. It uses CAD software to allow you to walk the virtual store and see products on the shelves. The second problem is being able to determine location inside the store so it can be overlayed on the map. There are several goals for this endeavor. Your smartphone might direct you straight to particular products, it might summon a sales associate to your location for immediate assistance, and it might send you coupons based on the aisle you're viewing. Companies like Nearbuy, ZuluTime, and Skyhook are working to master indoor location using a combination of GPS signals, WiFi, and cell tower positioning to calculate a location. (Skyhook calls this WPS, as depicted in the chart.) Today they can usually hit 10 meters accuracy, but that number is improving all the time. When it gets inside 3 meters some the goals mentioned earlier will be in easy reach. I for one can't wait until the time my iPhone leads me directly to the sprinkler heads in Lowes and Home Depot.

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  • Newbie worried about CASE tool.

    - by Jason Evans
    Hi there. I'm looking for some guidance on CASE tools and whether my concerns are valid. Recently I was in a meeting between my employer and an external software company which have a CASE tool currently in beta. They demonstrated this tool to us, showing how you build a UML model in Enterprise Architect (or something like it) and then, through their tool, that UML model is transformed into a Visual Studio project, with C# files, stored procedures for SQL Server, code for the data layer, WCF stuff, logging code and allsorts. Now, admittedly, I don't see the point in this, as in I'm not convinced it will save that much time (plus it feels like overkill). The tool authors said that a trial of the tool at another company had saved a team there 5 weeks of development time (from 6 weeks down to about 1 week) using this tool. I find the accuracy of that estimate hard to believe. My main concern is whether using this tool is going slow down my productivity. For example - Say I have a UML model which I built a VS solution from. Now, I want to rename a class method to something else; will this mean having to update the UML model first and then rebuilding the code? Is this how case tools normally work? Something I will need to check with the authors is the structure of the generated VS solution. I like the Domain Driven Design way of project structure - Infrstructure, Services, Model, etc. I doubt very much this tool will do that. Also, I've been playing around with Entity Framework Code First and think it's a great way to build the data model. I have nice repositories, unit of work classes and other design patterns that work well with EF. I have data anootations and stuff like that working great. By not having EF (the CASE tool uses it's own data layer code) I'm concerned that this tool's data layer code might not be a nice to integrate in the UoW pattern, repositories, etc. This I will need to verify when I get a closer look at the generated code. What are other people's experiences with CASE tools? Am I being paranoid about nothing? Am I being unfair - are my negativities unfounded? EDIT: I like to use TDD/BDD for building my code, and using a CASE tool looks like it will make this difficult. Again, any feedback on this would be great. Cheers. Jas.

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  • Coding different states in Adventure Games

    - by Cardin
    I'm planning out an adventure game, and can't figure out what's the right way to implement the behaviour of a level depending on state of story progression. My single-player game features a huge world where the player has to interact with people in a town at various points in the game. However, depending on story progression, different things would be presented to the player, for e.g. the Guild Leader will change locations from the town square to various locations around the city; Doors would only unlock at certain times of the day after finishing a particular routine; Different cut-screen/trigger events happen only after a particular milestone has been reached. I naively thought of using a switch{} statement initially to decide what the NPC should say or which he could be found at, and making quest objectives interact-able only after checking a global game_state variable's condition. But I realised I would quickly run into a lot of different game states and switch-cases in order to change the behaviour of an object. That switch statement would also be massively hard to debug, and I guess it might also be hard to use in a level editor. So I thought, instead of having a single object with multiple states, maybe I should have multiple instances of the same object, with a single state. That way, if I use something like a level editor, I can put an instance of the NPC at all the different locations he could ever appear at, and also an instance for each conversation state he has. But that means there'll be a lot of inactive, invisible game objects floating around the level, which might be trouble for memory, or simply hard to see in a level editor, i don't know. Or simply, make an identical, but separate level for each game state. This feels the cleanest and bug-free way to do things, but it feels like massive manual work making sure each version of the level is really identical to each other. All my methods feel so inefficient, so to recap my question, is there a better or standardised way to implement behaviour of a level depending on state of story progression? PS: I don't have a level editor yet - thinking of using something like JME SDK or making my own.

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  • Space partitioning when everything is moving

    - by Roy T.
    Background Together with a friend I'm working on a 2D game that is set in space. To make it as immersive and interactive as possible we want there to be thousands of objects freely floating around, some clustered together, others adrift in empty space. Challenge To unburden the rendering and physics engine we need to implement some sort of spatial partitioning. There are two challenges we have to overcome. The first challenge is that everything is moving so reconstructing/updating the data structure has to be extremely cheap since it will have to be done every frame. The second challenge is the distribution of objects, as said before there might be clusters of objects together and vast bits of empty space and to make it even worse there is no boundary to space. Existing technologies I've looked at existing techniques like BSP-Trees, QuadTrees, kd-Trees and even R-Trees but as far as I can tell these data structures aren't a perfect fit since updating a lot of objects that have moved to other cells is relatively expensive. What I've tried I made the decision that I need a data structure that is more geared toward rapid insertion/update than on giving back the least amount of possible hits given a query. For that purpose I made the cells implicit so each object, given it's position, can calculate in which cell(s) it should be. Then I use a HashMap that maps cell-coordinates to an ArrayList (the contents of the cell). This works fairly well since there is no memory lost on 'empty' cells and its easy to calculate which cells to inspect. However creating all those ArrayLists (worst case N) is expensive and so is growing the HashMap a lot of times (although that is slightly mitigated by giving it a large initial capacity). Problem OK so this works but still isn't very fast. Now I can try to micro-optimize the JAVA code. However I'm not expecting too much of that since the profiler tells me that most time is spent in creating all those objects that I use to store the cells. I'm hoping that there are some other tricks/algorithms out there that make this a lot faster so here is what my ideal data structure looks like: The number one priority is fast updating/reconstructing of the entire data structure Its less important to finely divide the objects into equally sized bins, we can draw a few extra objects and do a few extra collision checks if that means that updating is a little bit faster Memory is not really important (PC game)

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  • WebCenter Customer Spotlight: College of American Pathologists

    - by me
    Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution Summary College of American Pathologists Goes Live with OracleWebCenter - Imaging, AP Invoice Automation, and EBS Managed Attachment with Support for Imaging ContentThe College of American Pathologists (CAP), the leading organization of board-certified pathologists serving more then 18,000 physician members, 7,000 laboratories are accredited by the CAP, and approximately 22,000 laboratories are enrolled in the College’s proficiency testing programs. The business objective was to content-enable their Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) enterprise application by combining the best of Imaging and Manage Attachment functionality providing a unique opportunity for the business to have unprecedented access to both structure and unstructured content from within their enterprise application. The solution improves customer services turnaround time, provides better compliance and improves maintenance and management of the technology infrastructure. Company OverviewThe College of American Pathologists (CAP), celebrating 50 years as the gold standard in laboratory accreditation, is a medical society serving more than 17,000 physician members and the global laboratory community. It is the world’s largest association composed exclusively of board certified pathologists and is the worldwide leader in laboratory quality assurance. The College advocates accountable, high-quality, and cost-effective patient care. The more than 17,000 pathologist members of the College of American Pathologists represent board-certified pathologists and pathologists in training worldwide. More than 7,000 laboratories are accredited by the CAP, and approximately 23,000 laboratories are enrolled in the College’s proficiency testing programs.  Business ChallengesThe CAP business objective was to content-enable their Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) enterprise application by combining the best of Imaging and Manage Attachment functionality providing a unique opportunity for the business to have unprecedented access to both structure and unstructured content from within their enterprise application.  Bring more flexibility to systems and programs in order to adapt quickly Get a 360 degree view of the customer Reduce cost of running the business Solution DeployedWith the help of Oracle Consulting, the customer implemented Oracle WebCenter Content as the centralized E-Business Suite Document Repository.  The solution enables to capture, present and manage all unstructured content (PDFs,word processing documents, scanned images, etc.) related to Oracle E-Business Suite transactions and exposing the related content using the familiar EBS User Interface. Business ResultsThe CAP achieved following benefits from the implemented solution: Managed Attachment Solution Align with strategic Oracle Fusion Middleware platform Integrate with the CAP existing data capture capabilities Single user interface provided by the Managed Attachment solution for all content Better compliance and improved collaboration  Account Payables Invoice Processing Imaging Solution Automated invoice management eliminating dependency on paper materials and improving compliance, collaboration and accuracy A single repository to house and secure scanned invoices and all supplemental documents Greater management visibility of invoice entry process Additional Information CAP OpenWorld Presentation Oracle WebCenter Content Oracle Webcenter Capture Oracle WebCenter Imaging Oracle  Consulting

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  • Is it possible to have multiple sets of key columns in a table?

    - by Peter Larsson
    Filtered indexes is one of my new favorite things with SQL Server 2008. I am currently working on designing a new datawarehouse. There are two restrictions doing this It has to be fed from the old legacy system with both historical data and new data It has to be fed from the new business system with new data When we incorporate the new business system, we are going to do that for one market only. It means the old legacy business system still will produce new data for other markets (together with historical data for all markets) and the new business system produce new data to that one market only. Sounds interesting this far? To accomplish this I did a thorough research about the business requirements about the business intelligence needs. Then I went on to design the sucker. How does this relate to filtered indexes you ask? I'll give one example, the Stock transaction table. Well, the key columns for the old legacy system are different from the key columns from the new business system. The old legacy system has a key of 5 columns Movement date Movement time Product code Order number Sequence number within shipment And to all thing, I found out that the Movement Time column is not really a time. It starts out like a time HH:MM:SS but seconds are added for each delivery within the shipment, so a Movement Time can look like "12:11:68". The sequence number is ordered over the distributors for shipment. As I said, it is a legacy system. The new business system has one key column, the Movement DateTime (accuracy down to 100th of nanosecond). So how to deal with this? On thing would be to have two stock transaction tables, one for legacy system and one for the new business system. But that would lead to a maintenance overhead and using partitioned views for getting data out of the warehouse. Filtered index will be of a great use here. MovementDate DATETIME2(7) MovementTime CHAR(8) NULL ProductCode VARCHAR(15) NOT NULL OrderNumber VARCHAR(30) NULL SequenceNumber INT NULL The sequence number is not even used in the new system, so I created a clustered index for a new IDENTITY column to make a new identity column which can be shared by both systems. Then I created one unique filtered index for old system like this CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_Legacy (MovementDate, MovementTime, ProductCode, SequenceNumber) INCLUDE (OrderNumber, Col5, Col6, ... ) WHERE SequenceNumber IS NOT NULL And then I created a new unique filtered index for the new business system like this CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_Business (MovementDate) INCLUDE (ProductCode, OrderNumber, Col12, ... ) WHERE SequenceNumber IS NULL This way I can have multiple sets of key columns on same base table which is shared by both systems.

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  • Producing a smooth mesh from density cloud and marching cubes

    - by Wardy
    Based on my results from this question I decided to build myself a 3D noise map containing float values in place of my existing boolean point values. The effect I'm trying to produce is something like this, rather than typical rolling hills; which should explain the "missing cubes" in the image below. If I render my density map in normal "minecraft mode" (1 block per point in the density map) varying the size of the cube based on the value in my density map (floats in the range 0 to 1) I get something like this: I'm now happy that I can produce a density map for the marching cubes algorithm (which will need a little tweaking) but for some reason when I run it through my implementation it's not producing what I expect. My problem is that I'm getting something like the first image in this answer to my previous question, when I want to achieve the effect in the second image. Upon further investigation I can't see how marching cubes does the "move vertex along the edge" type logic (i.e. the difference between the two images on my previous link). I see that it does do some interpolation, but I'm not convinced I have the correct understanding of what I think it should do, because the code in question appears to give the same result regardless of whether I use boolean or float values. I took the code from here which is a C# implementation of marching cubes, but instead of using the MarchingCubesPrimitive I modified it to accept an object of type IDrawable, containing lists for the various collections (vertices, normals, UVs, indices), the logic was otherwise untouched. My understanding is that given a very low isovalue the accuracy level of the surface being rendered should increase, so in short "less 45 degree slows more rolling hills" type mesh output. However this isn't what I'm seeing. Have I missed something or is the implementation flawed and need to be fixed? EDIT: A little more detail on what I am seeing when I "marching cube" the data. Ok so firstly, ignore the fact that the meshes created by the chunks don't "connect" (i'll probably raise another question about this later). Then look at the shaping of the island, it's too ... square, from the voxels rendered as boxes you get the impression there's a clean soft gradual hill and yet from the image there are sharp falling edges even in the most central areas where the gradient in the first image looks the most smooth. The data is "regenerated" each time I run this so no 2 islands come out the same, and it's purely random so not based on noise, but still, how can it look so smooth in 1 image and so not smooth in the other?

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  • BI&EPM in Focus April 2012

    - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM
    General News Oracle OpenWorld call for papers now open, now through April 9 (link) Oracle Announces Availability of Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine (link) Oracle EPM and BI Support Newsletter Current Edition - Volume 3 : March 2012 (link) Customers Asiana Airlines Improves Passenger Management with Near-Real-Time Reservation and Ticketing Information  Centraal Boekhuis Delivers Faster with Oracle BI 11g Essatto Software Speeds Data Aggregation Tenfold; Integrates BI, Performance Management, and Data Warehousing for Midsize Businesses Grupo WTorre Supports Management's Decision-Making with OBIEE, Ensuring Uniform, Reliable, and Consistent Data Indian Overseas Bank Cuts Planning Schedule by 45 Worker Days per Year, Assesses Market Risk Instantly with Business Intelligence System Kentucky Community and Technical College System Enables Data-Driven Decision-Making Using Integrated System with Management Dashboards National Australia Bank Achieves 200% ROI, Improves Data Quality and Reporting Integrity with Oracle Hyperion DRM R.L. Polk & Co. Enhances Business Intelligence Capabilities, Optimizes System Performance with Extreme Analytics Machine Test ResCare, Inc. Transforms Reporting to Improve Healthcare Service Performance with Oracle Business Analytics  Rochester City School District Uses OBIEE to Track Student Achievement, Identify Areas for Improvement, Accelerate Reporting  Société Générale Standardizes, Accelerates, and Improves Budget Planning Accuracy across Global Enterprise The State Accounting Office of Georgia Integrates Financial Information, Shortens Financial Closings and Streamlines Reporting across 175 Organizations   Events 4-day Oracle Real-Time Decisions Hands-on Technical Workshop for Partners (PTS, Free) May 14-17, 2012: Colombes, Paris, France Nordic events : “Latest Release of Oracle Hyperion EPM and BI Suites Helps Organizations Plan through Uncertainty, Improve Decision-Making and Meet Regulatory Requirements” (April 17, Sweden | April 18, Norway | April 19, Denmark | April 24, Finland) Webcast Replay from Balaji Yelamanchili and Paul Rodwick: “Analytics Without Limits - The Latest on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Business Intelligence”  (link)  Wednesday, April 04, 2012: Business Analytics launch webcast: Invite your customers to register (link) Big Data Online Forum now available on Demand (link)  Enterprise Performance Management Webcast Replay: Accurate Forecasting within the Business Planning Cycle (link) Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) Master Support Note (link) Business  Intelligence Whitepaper: Driving Innovation Through Analytics (link) Gartner: CIOs Identify BI as the No. 1 Technology Priority for 2012 (link) Webcast Replay: Exalytics in Action: Airlines, US Census and Federal Spending Demo Applications  (link) NEWLY RELEASED Walk-in Video for Exalytics - Use This to Start Customer/Partner Meetings! (link) IDC Insight Paper: “Oracle's All-Out Assault on the Big Data Market: Offering Hadoop, R, Cubes, and Scalable IMDB in Familiar Packages” (link) System Requirements and Supported Platforms for Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 11gR1 Certification Matrix now published to include OBIEE 11.1.1.6.0 (link) Maintenance Release Guide (List of Bugs Fixed) for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11.1.1.6.0  (link) OBIEE 11.1.1.6: Is OBIEE 11.1.1.6 Certified With OBI Apps 7.9.6.3?  (link) Information Center: Troubleshooting Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (support login req'd)  (link)      

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  • Robust line of sight test on the inside of a polygon with tolerance

    - by David Gouveia
    Foreword This is a followup to this question and the main problem I'm trying to solve. My current solution is an hack which involves inflating the polygon, and doing most calculations on the inflated polygon instead. My goal is to remove this step completely, and correctly solve the problem with calculations only. Problem Given a concave polygon and treating all of its edges as if they were walls in a level, determine whether two points A and B are in line of sight of each other, while accounting for some degree of floating point errors. I'm currently basing my solution on a series of line-segment interection tests. In other words: If any of the end points are outside the polygon, they are not in line of sight. If both end points are inside the polygon, and the line segment from A to B crosses any of the edges from the polygon, then they are not in line of sight. If both end points are inside the polygon, and the line segment from A to B does not cross any of the edges from the polygon, then they are in line of sight. But the problem is dealing correctly with all the edge cases. In particular, it must be able to deal with all the situations depicted below, where red lines are examples that should be rejected, and green lines are examples that should be accepted. I probably missed a few other situations, such as when the line segment from A to B is colinear with an edge, but one of the end points is outside the polygon. One point of particular interest is the difference between 1 and 9. In both cases, both end points are vertices of the polygon, and there are no edges being intersected, but 1 should be rejected while 9 should be accepted. How to distinguish these two? I could check some middle point within the segment to see if it falls inside or not, but it's easy to come up with situations in which it would fail. Point 7 was also pretty tricky and I had to to treat it as a special case, which checks if two points are adjacent vertices of the polygon directly. But there are also other chances of line segments being col linear with the edges of the polygon, and I'm still not entirely sure how I should handle those cases. Is there any well known solution to this problem?

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  • Games at Work Part 2: Gamification and Enterprise Applications

    - by ultan o'broin
    Gamification and Enterprise Applications In part 1 of this article, we explored why people are motivated to play games so much. Now, let's think about what that means for Oracle applications user experience. (Even the coffee is gamified. Acknowledgement @noelruane. Check out the Guardian article Dublin's Frothing with Tech Fever. Game development is big business in Ireland too.) Applying game dynamics (gamification) effectively in the enterprise applications space to reflect business objectives is now a hot user experience topic. Consider, for example, how such dynamics could solve applications users’ problems such as: Becoming familiar or expert with an application or process Building loyalty, customer satisfaction, and branding relationships Collaborating effectively and populating content in the community Completing tasks or solving problems on time Encouraging teamwork to achieve goals Improving data accuracy and completeness of entry Locating and managing the correct resources or information Managing changes and exceptions Setting and reaching targets, quotas, or objectives Games’ Incentives, Motivation, and Behavior I asked Julian Orr, Senior Usability Engineer, in the Oracle Fusion Applications CRM User Experience (UX) team for his thoughts on what potential gamification might offer Oracle Fusion Applications. Julian pointed to the powerful incentives offered by games as the starting place: “The biggest potential for gamification in enterprise apps is as an intrinsic motivator. Mechanisms include fun, social interaction, teamwork, primal wiring, adrenaline, financial, closed-loop feedback, locus of control, flow state, and so on. But we need to know what works best for a given work situation.” For example, in CRM service applications, we might look at the motivations of typical service applications users (see figure 1) and then determine how we can 'gamify' these motivations with techniques to optimize the desired work behavior for the role (see figure 2). Description of Figure 1 Description of Figure 2 Involving Our Users Online game players are skilled collaborators as well as problem solvers. Erika Webb (@erikanollwebb), Oracle Fusion Applications UX Manager, has run gamification events for Oracle, including one on collaboration and gamification in Oracle online communities that involved Oracle customers and partners. Read more... However, let’s be clear: gamifying a user interface that’s poorly designed is merely putting the lipstick of gamification on the pig of work. Gamification cannot replace good design and killer content based on understanding how applications users really work and what motivates them. So, Let the Games Begin! Gamification has tremendous potential for the enterprise application user experience. The Oracle Fusion Applications UX team is innovating fast and hard in this area, researching with our users how gamification can make work more satisfying and enterprises more productive. If you’re interested in knowing more about our gamification research, sign up for more information or check out how your company can get involved through the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Your thoughts? Find those comments.

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  • Pro SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Solutions

    - by Sahil Malik
    Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). Oh yeah baby, it’s out finally! This book is what I wanted to write for so long now, but never really got a chance to. For SharePoint 2007, I authored the SharePoint section of “Smart BI Solutions with SQL Server 2008” for MS Press. But never really got the time, to author a full book that this topic deserved. Until SharePoint 2010, we actually have a full book on this topic. So first things first, I didn’t actually write it. My role was limited to the overall concept, the outline, the layout, completion of it, code samples, identifying what we need in here, vouching for technical accuracy, identifying authors etc. The real work was done by Srini (5 chapters), and Steve (1 chapter). So credit given where it is due. But, with that said, this is a pretty good book. It has always been a challenge to find the superman that knows both, data ware housing concepts, and SharePoint concepts. The data ware housing concepts include basic stuff you need to know to work in the BI area such as cubes, MDX queries, etc. So chapter 1 covers that – and if you’re a hardcore DBA, feel free to skip Chapter 1. Then beyond that, we take every single SharePoint 2010 BI topic, and slice and dice it in detail. The topics we deal with are - Visio Services Reporting services Business Connectivity Services Excel Services PerformancePoint Services And in covering each of these topics, we ensure that a general layout was followed for each topic, to ensure completeness of content. We make sure we cover Setup related issues and advice Point and click usage Code usage, i.e. extensibility using visual studio and a walkthrough of the administration side of things, including powershell. (Yes, I insisted on that in being there in every chapter). Writing a book is always a lot of work, so we hope you find it useful. And it should go very well with the other book I just reviewed, which is Microsoft ADO.NET 4, step by step. Comment on the article ....

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  • Removing Menu Items from Window Tabs

    - by Geertjan
    So you're working on your NetBeans Platform application and you notice that when you right-click on tabs in the predefined windows, e.g., the Projects window, you see a long list of popup menus. For whatever the reason is, you decide you don't want those popup menus. You right-click the application and go to the Branding dialog. There you uncheck the checkboxes that are unchecked below: As you can see above, you've removed three features, all of them related to closing the windows in your application. Therefore, "Close" and "Close Group" are now gone from the list of popup menus: But that's not enough. You also don't want the popup menus that relate to maximizing and minimizing the predefined windows, so you uncheck those checkboxes that relate to that: And, hey, now they're gone too: Next, you decide to remove the feature for floating, i.e., undocking the windows from the main window: And now they're gone too: However, even when you uncheck all the remaining checkboxes, as shown here... You're still left with those last few pesky popup menu items that just will not go away no matter what you do: The reason for the above? Those actions are hardcoded into the action list, which is a bug. Until it is fixed, here's a handy workaround: Set an implementation dependency on "Core - Windows" (core.window). That is, set a dependency and then specify that it is an implementation dependency, i.e., that you'll be using an internal class, not one of the official APIs. In one of your existing modules, or in a new one, make sure you have (in addition to the above) a dependency on Lookup API and Window System API. And then, add the class below to the module: import javax.swing.Action; import org.netbeans.core.windows.actions.ActionsFactory; import org.openide.util.lookup.ServiceProvider; import org.openide.windows.Mode; import org.openide.windows.TopComponent; @ServiceProvider(service = ActionsFactory.class) public class EmptyActionsFactory extends ActionsFactory { @Override public Action[] createPopupActions(TopComponent tc, Action[] actions) { return new Action[]{}; } @Override public Action[] createPopupActions(Mode mode, Action[] actions) { return new Action[]{}; } } Hurray. Farewell to superfluous popup menu items on your window tabs. In the screenshot below, the tab of the Projects window is being right-clicked and no popup menu items are shown, which is true for all the other windows, those that are predefined as well as those that you add afterwards:

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  • Who should control navigation in an MVVM application?

    - by SonOfPirate
    Example #1: I have a view displayed in my MVVM application (let's use Silverlight for the purposes of the discussion) and I click on a button that should take me to a new page. Example #2: That same view has another button that, when clicked, should open up a details view in a child window (dialog). We know that there will be Command objects exposed by our ViewModel bound to the buttons with methods that respond to the user's click. But, what then? How do we complete the action? Even if we use a so-called NavigationService, what are we telling it? To be more specific, in a traditional View-first model (like URL-based navigation schemes such as on the web or the SL built-in navigation framework) the Command objects would have to know what View to display next. That seems to cross the line when it comes to the separation of concerns promoted by the pattern. On the other hand, if the button wasn't wired to a Command object and behaved like a hyperlink, the navigation rules could be defined in the markup. But do we want the Views to control application flow and isn't navigation just another type of business logic? (I can say yes in some cases and no in others.) To me, the utopian implementation of the MVVM pattern (and I've heard others profess this) would be to have the ViewModel wired in such a way that the application can run headless (i.e. no Views). This provides the most surface area for code-based testing and makes the Views a true skin on the application. And my ViewModel shouldn't care if it displayed in the main window, a floating panel or a child window, should it? According to this apprach, it is up to some other mechanism at runtime to 'bind' what View should be displayed for each ViewModel. But what if we want to share a View with multiple ViewModels or vice versa? So given the need to manage the View-ViewModel relationship so we know what to display when along with the need to navigate between views, including displaying child windows / dialogs, how do we truly accomplish this in the MVVM pattern?

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  • WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Guizhou Power Grid Company

    - by me
    Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryGuizhou Power Grid Company is responsible for power grid planning, construction, management, and power distribution in Guizhou Province, serving 39 million people. Giuzhou has 49,823 employees and an annual revenue of over $5 Billion. The business objectives were to consolidate information contained in disparate systems into a single knowledge repository and provide a safe and efficient way for staff and managers to access, query, share, manage, and store business information. Guizhou Power Grid Company saved more than US$693,000 in storage costs, reduced  average search times from 180 seconds to 5 seconds and solved 80% to 90% of technology and maintenance issues by searching the Oracle WebCenter Content management system. Company OverviewA wholly owned subsidiary of China Southern Power Grid Company Limited, Guizhou Power Grid Company is responsible for power grid planning, construction, management, and power distribution in Guizhou Province, serving 39 million people. Giuzhou has 49,823 employees and an annual revenue of over $5 Billion. Business ChallengesThe business objectives were to consolidate information contained in disparate systems, such as the customer relationship management and power grid management systems, into a single knowledge repository and provide a safe and efficient way for staff and managers to access, query, share, manage, and store business information. Solution DeployedGuizhou Power Grid Company  implemented Oracle WebCenter Content to build a content management system that enabled the secure, integrated management and storage of information, such as documents, records, images, Web content, and digital assets. The content management solution was integrated with the power grid, customer service, maintenance, and other business systems, as well as the corporate Web site. Business Results Saved more than US$693,000 in storage costs and shortened the material distribution time by integrating the knowledge management solution with the power grid, customer service, maintenance, and other business systems, as well as the corporate Web site Enabled staff to search 31,650 documents using catalogs, multidimensional attributes, and knowledge maps, reducing average search times from 180 seconds to 5 seconds and saving approximately 1,539 hours in annual search time Gained comprehensive document management, format transformation, security, and auditing capabilities Enabled users to upload new documents and supervisors to check the accuracy of these documents online, resulting in improved information quality control Solved 80% to 90% of technology and maintenance issues by searching the Oracle content management system for information, ensuring IT staff can respond quickly to users’ technical problems Improved security by using role-based access controls to restrict access to confidential documents and information Supported the efficient classification of corporate knowledge by using Oracle’s metadata functions to collect, tag, and archive documents, images, Web content, and digital assets “We chose Oracle WebCenter Content, as it is an outstanding integrated content management platform. It has allowed us to establish a system to access, query, share, manage, and store our corporate assets. This has laid a solid foundation for Guizhou Power Grid Company to improve management practices.” Luo Sixi, Senior Information Consultant, Guizhou Power Grid Company Additional Information Guizhou Power Grid Company Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Content

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  • Is there a pedagogical game engine?

    - by K.G.
    I'm looking for a book, website, or other resource that gives modern 3D game engines the same treatment as Operating Systems: Design and Implementation gave operating systems. I have read Jason Gregory's Game Engine Architecture, which I enjoyed. However, by intent the author treated components of the architecture as atomic units, whereas what I'm interested in is the plumbing between those units that makes a coherent whole out of ideally loosely coupled parts. In books such as these, one usually reads that "that's academic," but that's the point! I have also read Julian Gold's Object-oriented Game Development, which likewise was good, but I feel is beginning to show its age. Since even mobile platforms these days are multicore and have fast video memory, those kinds of things (concurrency, display item buffering) would ideally be covered. There are other resources, such as the Doom 3 source code, which is highly instructive for its being a shipped product. The problem with those is as follows: float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the f***? y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration // y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed return y; } To wit, while brilliant, this kind of source requires more enlightenment than I can usually muster upon first read. In summary, here's my white whale: For an adult reader with experience in programming. I wish I could save all the trees killed by every. Single. Game Programming book ever devoting the first two chapters to "Now just what is a variable anyway?" In C or C++, very preferably C++. Languages that are more concise are fantastic for teaching, except for when what you want to learn is how to cope with a verbose language. There is also the benefit of the guardrails that C++ doesn't provide, such as garbage collection. Platform agnostic. I'm sincerely afraid that this book is out there and it's Visual C++/DirectX oriented. I'm a Linux guy, and I'd do what it takes, but I would very much like to be able to use OpenGL. Thanks for everything! Before anyone gets on my case about it, Fast inverse square root was from Quake III Arena, not Doom 3!

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  • SQL: empty string vs NULL value

    - by Jacek Prucia
    I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

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  • What is this algorithm for converting strings into numbers called?

    - by CodexArcanum
    I've been doing some work in Parsec recently, and for my toy language I wanted multi-based fractional numbers to be expressible. After digging around in Parsec's source a bit, I found their implementation of a floating-point number parser, and copied it to make the needed modifications. So I understand what this code does, and vaguely why (I haven't worked out the math fully yet, but I think I get the gist). But where did it come from? This seems like a pretty clever way to turn strings into floats and ints, is there a name for this algorithm? Or is it just something basic that's a hole in my knowledge? Did the folks behind Parsec devise it? Here's the code, first for integers: number' :: Integer -> Parser Integer number' base = do { digits <- many1 ( oneOf ( sigilRange base )) ; let n = foldl (\x d -> base * x + toInteger (convertDigit base d)) 0 digits ; seq n (return n) } So the basic idea here is that digits contains the string representing the whole number part, ie "192". The foldl converts each digit individually into a number, then adds that to the running total multiplied by the base, which means that by the end each digit has been multiplied by the correct factor (in aggregate) to position it. The fractional part is even more interesting: fraction' :: Integer -> Parser Double fraction' base = do { digits <- many1 ( oneOf ( sigilRange base )) ; let base' = fromIntegral base ; let f = foldr (\d x -> (x + fromIntegral (convertDigit base d))/base') 0.0 digits ; seq f (return f) Same general idea, but now a foldr and using repeated division. I don't quite understand why you add first and then divide for the fraction, but multiply first then add for the whole. I know it works, just haven't sorted out why. Anyway, I feel dumb not working it out myself, it's very simple and clever looking at it. Is there a name for this algorithm? Maybe the imperative version using a loop would be more familiar?

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  • Pathfinding for fleeing

    - by Philipp
    As you know there are plenty of solutions when you wand to find the best path in a 2-dimensional environment which leads from point A to point B. But how do I calculate a path when an object is at point A, and wants to get away from point B, as fast and far as possible? A bit of background information: My game uses a 2d environment which isn't tile-based but has floating point accuracy. The movement is vector-based. The pathfinding is done by partitioning the game world into rectangles which are walkable or non-walkable and building a graph out of their corners. I already have pathfinding between points working by using Dijkstras algorithm. The use-case for the fleeing algorithm is that in certain situations, actors in my game should perceive another actor as a danger and flee from it. The trivial solution would be to just move the actor in a vector in the direction which is opposite from the threat until a "safe" distance was reached or the actor reaches a wall where it then covers in fear. The problem with this approach is that actors will be blocked by small obstacles they could easily get around. As long as moving along the wall wouldn't bring them closer to the threat they could do that, but it would look smarter when they would avoid obstacles in the first place: Another problem I see is with dead ends in the map geometry. In some situations a being must choose between a path which gets it faster away now but ends in a dead end where it would be trapped, or another path which would mean that it wouldn't get that far away from the danger at first (or even a bit closer) but on the other hand would have a much greater long-term reward in that it would eventually get them much further away. So the short-term reward of getting away fast must be somehow valued against the long-term reward of getting away far. There is also another rating problem for situations where an actor should accept to move closer to a minor threat to get away from a much larger threat. But completely ignoring all minor threats would be foolish, too (that's why the actor in this graphic goes out of its way to avoid the minor threat in the upper right area): Are there any standard solutions for this problem?

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