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• In the Cloud, Everything Costs Money

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been teaching my daughter about budgeting. I’ve explained that most of the time the money coming in is from only one or two sources – and you can only change that from time to time. The money going out, however, is to many locations, and it changes all the time. She’s made a simple debits and credits spreadsheet, and I’m having her research each part of the budget. Her eyes grow wide when she finds out everything has a cost – the house, gas for the lawnmower, dishes, water for showers, food, electricity to run the fridge, a new fridge when that one breaks, everything has a cost. She asked me “how do you pay for all this?” It’s a sentiment many adults have looking at their own budgets – and one reason that some folks don’t even make a budget. It’s hard to face up to the realities of how much it costs to do what we want to do. When we design a computing solution, it’s interesting to set up a similar budget, because we don’t always consider all of the costs associated with it. I’ve seen design sessions where the new software or servers are considered, but the “sunk” costs of personnel, networking, maintenance, increased storage, new sizes for backups and offsite storage and so on are not added in. They are already on premises, so they are assumed to be paid for already. When you move to a distributed architecture, you'll see more costs directly reflected. Store something, pay for that storage. If the system is deployed and no one is using it, you’re still paying for it. As you watch those costs rise, you might be tempted to think that a distributed architecture costs more than an on-premises one. And you might be right – for some solutions. I’ve worked with a few clients where moving to a distributed architecture doesn’t make financial sense – so we didn’t implement it. I still designed the system in a distributed fashion, however, so that when it does make sense there isn’t much re-architecting to do. In other cases, however, if you consider all of the on-premises costs and compare those accurately to operating a system in the cloud, the distributed system is much cheaper. Again, I never recommend that you take a “here-or-there-only” mentality – I think a hybrid distributed system is usually best – but each solution is different. There simply is no “one size fits all” to architecting a solution. As you design your solution, cost out each element. You might find that using a hybrid approach saves you money in one design and not in another. It’s a brave new world indeed. So yes, in the cloud, everything costs money. But an on-premises solution also costs money – it’s just that “dad” (the company) is paying for it and we don’t always see it. When we go out on our own in the cloud, we need to ensure that we consider all of the costs.

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• Windows 7 - traceroute hop with high latency! [closed]

  - by Mac

  I've been experiencing this problem for quite a while, and it's quite frustrating. I'll do a traceroute, to www.l.google.com, for example. This is the result (please note: I will replace some parts of personal information with text - i.e. ISP.IP is in reality an actual IP address, and ISPNAME replaces the actual ISP name): Tracing route to www.l.google.com [173.194.34.212] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1 2 9 ms 8 ms 10 ms ISP.EXCHANGE.NAME [ISP.IP.172.205] 3 161 ms 171 ms 177 ms host-ISP.IP.215.246.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.215.246] 4 12 ms 9 ms 10 ms host-ISP.IP.215.246.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.215.246] 5 10 ms 9 ms 17 ms host-ISP.IP.224.165.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.224.165] 6 10 ms 9 ms 10 ms 10.42.0.3 7 9 ms 9 ms 10 ms host-ISP.IP.202.129.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.202.129] 8 10 ms 9 ms 9 ms host-ISP.IP.209.33.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.209.33] 9 77 ms 129 ms 164 ms host-ISP.IP.198.162.ISPNAME.net [ISP.IP.198.162] 10 43 ms 42 ms 43 ms 72.14.212.13 11 42 ms 42 ms 42 ms 209.85.252.36 12 59 ms 59 ms 59 ms 209.85.241.210 13 60 ms 76 ms 68 ms 72.14.237.124 14 59 ms 59 ms 58 ms mad01s08-in-f20.1e100.net [173.194.34.212] Trace complete. Notice that there is a spike on the 3rd hop, but also notice that the 3rd and 4th hop are to the exact same destination. Furthermore, when I ping the offended hop separately, I get the low latency I would expect to that server: Pinging ISP.IP.215.246 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253 Reply from ISP.IP.215.246: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=253 Ping statistics for ISP.IP.215.246: Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 12ms, Average = 9ms I'm baffled as to why or how this is happening, and it seems to "fix itself" at random times. Here is an example of where it was working as expected: http://i.imgur.com/bysno.png Notice how many fewer hops were taken. Please note that all the posted results occurred within 10 minutes of testing. I've tried contacting my ISP, and they seem clueless; in their eyes, as long as "the download speed is not slow", then they're doing everything right. Any insight would be very much appreciated, and thanks in advanced!

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• Bad Data is Really the Monster

  - by Dain C. Hansen

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Bad Data is really the monster – is an article written by Bikram Sinha who I borrowed the title and the inspiration for this blog. Sinha writes: “Bad or missing data makes application systems fail when they process order-level data. One of the key items in the supply-chain industry is the product (aka SKU). Therefore, it becomes the most important data element to tie up multiple merchandising processes including purchase order allocation, stock movement, shipping notifications, and inventory details… Bad data can cause huge operational failures and cost millions of dollars in terms of time, resources, and money to clean up and validate data across multiple participating systems. Yes bad data really is the monster, so what do we do about it? Close our eyes and hope it stays in the closet? We’ve tacked this problem for some years now at Oracle, and with our latest introduction of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality along with our integrated Oracle Master Data Management products provides a complete, best-in-class answer to the bad data monster. What’s unique about it? Oracle Enterprise Data Quality also combines powerful data profiling, cleansing, matching, and monitoring capabilities while offering unparalleled ease of use. What makes it unique is that it has dedicated capabilities to address the distinct challenges of both customer and product data quality – [different monsters have different needs of course!]. And the ability to profile data is just as important to identify and measure poor quality data and identify new rules and requirements. Included are semantic and pattern-based recognition to accurately parse and standardize data that is poorly structured. Finally all of the data quality components are integrated with Oracle Master Data Management, including Oracle Customer Hub and Oracle Product Hub, as well as Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition and Oracle CRM. Want to learn more? On Tuesday Nov 15th, I invite you to listen to our webcast on Reduce ERP consolidation risks with Oracle Master Data Management I’ll be joined by our partner iGate Patni and be talking about one specific way to deal with the bad data monster specifically around ERP consolidation. Look forward to seeing you there!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, December 16, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, December 16, 2010Popular ReleasesSharpDropBox Client for .NET: WP7 SharpDropBox Client - 0.1 Technology Preview: I decided to go ahead and release this. It works well for simple browsing folder structure/downloading files (and login works). See samples for an example of how to use it. I am in progress with a couple other methods which aren't currently working.SQL Monitor: SQL Monitor 2.9: 1. automatically set sql for new query if a object is selected(table/sp/function/view)uComponents: uComponents v2.0.1: This release: Fixes a critical issue with IIS 6. Removes various script error issues in Internet Explorer Supports the media picker with advanced dialog and preview. uComponents is a collaborative project for creating components for Umbraco including data types, XSLT extensions, controls and more. Containing 20 data-types, 7 XSLT extension libraries, keyboard short-cuts, drag-n-drop functionality, as well as great developer utilities - uComponents is one of the must-have packages for a...SplendidCRM: SplendidCRM 5.0 Community Edition: SplendidCRM Software has adopted the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (AGPLv3) for its Community Edition. This release includes the full set of SQL source code in the Community Edition, something that was previously only available in the Professional and Enterprise Editions. An article on the subject of Commercial Open-Source licensing has been posted at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/splendid-guide-article6.aspx.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 12-15-2010: This release contains a few minor bug fixes and hopefully the GDAL libraries for the 3.5 x86 build actually built to the correct directory this time.DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01 Beta: This is the initial Beta of DotNetNuke 5.6.1. See the DotNetNuke Roadmap a full list of changes in this release.MSBuild Extension Pack: December 2010: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack December 2010 release provides a collection of over 380 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GU...Access Control Service Samples and Documentation (Labs): Samples-R3: Contains latest ACS samples (corresponding to R3 release) that show how to integrate ACS with web services, ASP.NET websites (Web Forms and MVC) and on how to interact with the ACS Management Service. The Readmes for these samples are available here.TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 5: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 5 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous ...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.2 ALPHA: 2.2.2 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - The spirit ...Silverlight Contrib: Silverlight Contrib 2010.1.0: 2010.1.0 New FeaturesCompatibility Release for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010FlickrNet API Library: 3.1.4000: Newest release. Now contains dedicated Windows Phone 7 DLL as well as all previous DLLs. Also contains Windows Help file documentation now as standard.mojoPortal: 2.3.5.8: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2358-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-12-13: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.9 Beta: - Aqua or brushed metal style for Mac OS X - Shows selection count beside ID - Game list selection mode via settings - Compare Files <-> WBFS game lists - Verify game images/DVD/WBFS - WIT command line for log (via settings) - Cancel possibility for loading games process - Progress infos while loading games - Localization for dates - UTF-8 support - Shortcuts added - View game infos in browser - Transfer infos for log - All transfer routines rewritten - Extract image from image/WBFS - Support....NETTER Code Starter Pack: v1.0.beta: '.NETTER Code Starter Pack ' contains a gallery of Visual Studio 2010 solutions leveraging latest and new technologies and frameworks based on Microsoft .NET Framework. Each Visual Studio solution included here is focused to provide a very simple starting point for cutting edge development technologies and framework, using well known Northwind database (for database driven scenarios). The current release of this project includes starter samples for the following technologies: ASP.NET Dynamic...NuGet (formerly NuPack): NuGet 1.0 Release Candidate: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. This new build targets the newer feed (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669) and package format. See http://nupack.codeplex.com/documentation?title=Nuspe...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire Silverlight, WPF Charts v3.6.5 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.5 with the following new feature: * New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. You can visit Visifire documentation to know more. http://www.visifire.com/visifirechartsdocumentation.php Also this release includes few bug fixes: * Chart threw exception while adding new Axis in Chart using Vi...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.5 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2010-12-10: ?????All-In-One Code Framework（??） 2010?12??????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????release?，???????ASP.NET, WinForm, Silverlight????12?Sample Code。???，??????????sample code。 ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2010/12/13/6072675.aspx ??，??????MSDN????????????。 http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/zh-CN/codezhchs/threads ?????????????????，??Email ????New ProjectsAchievement Information System: AchIS is a software which documented all about student's prestigeAutoMock: AutoMock saves you time when writing unit tests by wiring up all the dependencies as mocks for the class under test.Basic samples: Basic C# samplesBCrypt.Net: A .Net port of jBCrypt implemented in C#. It uses a variant of the Blowfish encryption algorithm’s keying schedule, and introduces a work factor, which allows you to determine how expensive the hash function will be, allowing the algorithm to be "future-proof".Desafio Dot.Net: Projeto para o Desafio DotNetEDAFramework: This is a Estimation of Distribution Algorithm framework.Fluxions: Fluxions is a 3D Graphics Engine designed to make writing simple graphics or visualization projects easy. It is ideal for writing computer games or scientific type work where you need to easily prototype an idea. It includes support for writing OpenGL apps with GLUT or SDL.Guruzan.Com: Guruzan.Com is a new way to share your ideas and especially your claims.. We are about the create a next generation social network which will bring improved standarts and innovations for internet sharing. Our project includes many students from different countries...HotCold: This game loads a board of squares, of which one is randomly selected as the "HOT" square. The goal is to find the "HOT" square in the fewest clicks possible. .InSim.NET: A .NET InSim library for the racing simulator Live for Speed.Javascript Utils: JavaScript Utilitieskoppees: Mingi veebiliidesKVB-Abfahrtstafel: Die KVB-Abfahrtstafel erlaubt es, sich einige Haltestellentafeln im Netz der Kölner Verkehrsbetriebe - inklusive Störungsmeldungen - schon vor dem Verlassen des Büros/Hauses/Hotels am PC anzusehen. Besonders bei miesem Wetter eine echte Erleichterung.Lessons in PivotViewer: The Silverlight PivotViewer is a great control with a great deal of potential. However, there are a lot of questions on how to use and customize the PivotViewer. This project will attempt to answer those questions by providing a series of lessons on the PivotViewer.Liuyi: liuyiLiuyi.network: Liuyi.networkMiniDouBan: MiniDouBanN2F Yverdon Database Helper: A class to aid in performing simple database queries within N2F Yverdon. Also provides the capability to store queries for later use.N2F Yverdon Form Helper: A system that allows interaction with web forms in a fashion similar to that of ASP.NET MVC model binding.N2F Yverdon Sanitizers: A system to help ease the pain of sanitizing data. The system comes with some basic sanitizers as well as the framework necessary to enable easy development of custom sanitizers.Next Question: By Relavance: Next Question makes it easier for System Users, Administrators, Business Analysts, etc to run ad-hoc queries on any data store. Regardless of the type or location of the information, Next Question removes the need for T-SQL programmers to write explicit queries to answer businessNPicConvertDemo: azure test/demo/example projectOpenSprints: OpenSprints for WindowsPML_FahrradVerleih: PML_FahrradVerleih PMS ProjektPowerLib: PowerLib extends .NET Base Class Library functionality with algorithms and data structures. First release would be at next week.ProJect Manager Software: Project Manager Softwareqxtplatform: qxtplatformSencha Direct Stack based on ASP.NET MVC: This project focuses on creating ExtJS/Sencha Direct server stack using ASP.NET MVC.SqlExecuter: Simply run sql scripts against a SQL Server databaseSystem8: Experimental Silverlight project to help understand system 8's behavior (mehod of calibration bottom-quark tagging).TeamManager: Team management software based on silverlight application. It use PRISM and MEF to have flexible and extensible architecture.Umbraco Single Item Picker: Extention to the Umbraco, needs to pick: - Content pages, - Media items, - File System Objects, - Member Items in more "better way" additionally control returns not only item name(title) but also extended information (path, icon). WebSharper Community Samples: WebSharper Community SamplesWindows Phone 7 Charts: Charting component for Windows Phone 7 applications.Windows Phone 7 Silverlight ZXing Barcode Scanning Library: ZXing (pronounced "zebra crossing") is an open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library originally implemented by Google in Java. This is a Silverlight port of the csharp ZXing port created by Suraj Supekar at revision 1202 in the SVN repository. WPF RCON: WPF RCON is a RCON client for COD4 servers. It's RCON library + WPF GUI. It's developed in C#. It's far from being complete.

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• A big flat text file or a HTML site for language documentation?

  - by Bad Sector

  A project of mine is a small embeddable Tcl-like scripting language, LIL. While i'm mostly making it for my own use, i think it is interesting enough for others to use, so i want it to have a nice (but not very "wordy") documentation. So far i'm using a single flat readme.txt file. It explains the language's syntax, features, standard functions, how to use the C API, etc. Also it is easy to scan and read in almost every environment out there, from basic text-only terminals to full-fledged high-end graphical desktop environments. However, while i tried to keep things nicely formatted (as much as this is possible in plain text), i still think that being a big (and growing) wall of text, it isn't as easy on the eyes as it could be. Also i feel that sometimes i'm not writing as much as i want in order to avoid expanding the text too much. So i thought i could use another project of mine, QuHelp, which is basically a help site generator for sites like this one with a sidebar that provides a tree of topics/subtopics and offline full text search. With this i can use HTML to format the documentation and if i use QuHelp for some other project that uses LIL, i can import LIL's documentation as part of the other project's documentation. However converting the existing documentation to QuHelp/HTML isn't a small task, especially when it comes to functions (i'll need to put more detail on them than what currently exists in the readme.txt file). Also it loses the wide range of availability that it currently has (even if QuHelp's generated code degrades gracefully down to console-only web browsers, plain text is readable from everywhere, including from popular editors such as Vim and Emacs - i had someone once telling me that he likes LIL's documentation because it is readable without leaving his editor). So, my question is simply this: should i keep the documentation as it is now in the form of a single readme.txt file or should i convert it to something like the site i mentioned above? There is also the option to do both, but i'm not sure if i'll be able to always keep them in sync or if it is worth the effort. After asking around in IRC i've got mixed answers: some liked the wide availability of the single text file, others said that it is looks as bad as a man page (personally i don't mind that - i can read man pages just fine - but other people might have issues reading them). What do you think?

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• Finding work as a college student

  - by lightburst

  I'm a 3rd year CS student. I'm currently really, really, bored and tired of cheap school programming(I go to a fairly respectable(albeit not top) university in my country, but, really, it's not MIT) so I've been thinking about getting a part-time dev job for a long while now. I'm not some hotshot programmer or anything, but "Add/Delete XYZ class objects to list" or "Do this web feature/pattern in PHP" does get old after a few semesters. I also only learned(heard?) of programming when I entered college, so the duration of me being in contact with any code is short. I can't really apply as an intern as I have not accumulated the necessary credits yet to do that so I was thinking of selling myself as a part-time dev. I still need to go to school, and don't want to subject myself to living two lives. Plus, I think I'd have better chances considering my lack of things to write on the resume. The only language I know at heart is C (I've written several pointer-oriented stuff on my freshman year, which is apparently pretty leet(for some reason), or so Joel says. That sort of boosted my morale a bit) but I've worked with several other languages only for the sake of course work such as C#/Java/PHP/ASM. My only user-worthy project was a recursive quicksort simulator I wrote for class using GTK+ that used a textbox to output the progress. I also have not taken the compiler theory class yet, or my thesis. All that being said, I wonder if any legitimate software company(big or small) would hire somebody like me considering all that. If there are companies that do accept anybody like me, would I be doing programming or maybe just be a tester or something? Would anybody hire me as a dev at all? I know I don't have much(not even a degree) but what I lack in experience, I compensate with interest? I am less interested in websites and 'management' software(no offense or anything. also, most of the places here ONLY have those), and more into 'process driven'(I'm not sure how to call it) and system software. I have my eyes on a startup that sells basically an extension of Google Drive, but I feel like I'm too 'risky' for them. Oh, I'm also 19 if that means anything. We're not K-12 so kids go to college earlier than in the US.

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• Own a KINECT for MS-XBOX before anyone does

  Following is the announced by Richik Nandi from Microsoft team. Dear Customer, We believe that our privileged customers shouldn't have to wait for good things. So, here's a special offer exclusively for you. Be one of the first in India to own and experience Kinect for XBOX 360, few days before it is even launched in stores. Introducing the new Kinect for XBOX 360®. Kinect needs no controllers. You are the controller. Kinect brings games and entertainment to life in extraordinary new ways without using a controller. The sensor recognizes your face, eyes and body movements to deliver a superb gaming experience. Easy to use and great fun, Kinect gets everyone off the couch. See a ball? Kick it. Want to join a friend in the fun? Simply jump in. Imagine controlling movies and music with the wave of a hand or the sound of your voice! Kinect is all about fun for you and your family. And the best part is Kinect works with every Xbox 360®. There are two options you can choose from: •  Kinect sensor + 4GB Xbox 360 bundle + Kinect Adventures game at Rs 22,990/-and get Dance Central game worth Rs 1999 from Redington, 20% discount voucher from Starwood on food and beverages, T-shirt from PUMA and a Kinect adventure live card absolutely free using your unique promo code : XbTXXZl2Sb •  Kinect Sensor at Rs 9,500/-and get 20% discount voucher from Starwood on food and beverages, T-shirt from PUMA and a Kinect adventure live card absolutely free using your unique promo code : lDg6o8SuYh We want you to own your Kinect before the official launch. The promotion closes by 10th November. To know more about Kinect click here. To book your Kinect PRE-ORDER now! Enter your details along with the above mentioned promo code to avail of the free gifts offer. We will have your Kinect delivered by 19th November 2010. Enjoy being the controller. Enjoy the Kinect. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Arrive steering behavior

  - by dbostream

  I bought a book called Programming game AI by example and I am trying to implement the arrive steering behavior. The problem I am having is that my objects oscillate around the target position; after oscillating less and less for awhile they finally come to a stop at the target position. Does anyone have any idea why this oscillating behavior occur? Since the examples accompanying the book are written in C++ I had to rewrite the code into C#. Below is the relevant parts of the steering behavior: private enum Deceleration { Fast = 1, Normal = 2, Slow = 3 } public MovingEntity Entity { get; private set; } public Vector2 SteeringForce { get; private set; } public Vector2 Target { get; set; } public Vector2 Calculate() { SteeringForce.Zero(); SteeringForce = SumForces(); SteeringForce.Truncate(Entity.MaxForce); return SteeringForce; } private Vector2 SumForces() { Vector2 force = new Vector2(); if (Activated(BehaviorTypes.Arrive)) { force += Arrive(Target, Deceleration.Slow); if (!AccumulateForce(force)) return SteeringForce; } return SteeringForce; } private Vector2 Arrive(Vector2 target, Deceleration deceleration) { Vector2 toTarget = target - Entity.Position; double distance = toTarget.Length(); if (distance > 0) { //because Deceleration is enumerated as an int, this value is required //to provide fine tweaking of the deceleration.. double decelerationTweaker = 0.3; double speed = distance / ((double)deceleration * decelerationTweaker); speed = Math.Min(speed, Entity.MaxSpeed); Vector2 desiredVelocity = toTarget * speed / distance; return desiredVelocity - Entity.Velocity; } return new Vector2(); } private bool AccumulateForce(Vector2 forceToAdd) { double magnitudeRemaining = Entity.MaxForce - SteeringForce.Length(); if (magnitudeRemaining <= 0) return false; double magnitudeToAdd = forceToAdd.Length(); if (magnitudeToAdd > magnitudeRemaining) magnitudeToAdd = magnitudeRemaining; SteeringForce += Vector2.NormalizeRet(forceToAdd) * magnitudeToAdd; return true; } This is the update method of my objects: public void Update(double deltaTime) { Vector2 steeringForce = Steering.Calculate(); Vector2 acceleration = steeringForce / Mass; Velocity = Velocity + acceleration * deltaTime; Velocity.Truncate(MaxSpeed); Position = Position + Velocity * deltaTime; } If you want to see the problem with your own eyes you can download a minimal example here. Thanks in advance.

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• URL protocol handlers in basic Ubuntu Desktop

  - by Hibou57

  There was a way to register URL protocol handlers with Gconf, which is now obsolete and there seems to be no way to do the same with DConf (or Gsettings, its recommended wrapper). How do one properly register an URL protocol handlers since DConf? Additionally, something looks strange to me (as I don't understand it), on my Ubuntu 12.04 The protocol apt:// should be handled by the apturl command. It is so with my Opera browser, but only because I added this specific association using the browser's configuration facility. Otherwise, in the rest of the environment: Running xdg-open apt://foo.bar opens elinks (my www-browser alternative). Running gnome-open apt://foo.bar opens the Software?Center. Opening gcong-editor, I see a key /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/apt whose value is apturl "%s" and its enable. This configuration seems to be ignored, which is reasonably expected, as GConf is considered obsolete. Opening dconf-editor, I can't see anything related to URL handlers or protocols in /desktop/gnome It looks a bit messy to my eyes (just teasing with this wording, nothing bad) What's underneath? Side note: I'm looking for something which preferably works even when the full desktop environment is not loaded, like when running an i3wm session with only gsettings-daemon (and other stuffs unrelated to this case) is loaded. Update Another way to “register” a protocol handler is with *.desktop files and their MIME-Type; ex. MimeType=application/<the-protocol>;. I found a /usr/share/applications/ubuntu-software-center.desktop with this content: [Desktop Entry] Name=Ubuntu Software Center GenericName=Software Center Comment=Lets you choose from thousands of applications available for Ubuntu Exec=/usr/bin/software-center %u Icon=softwarecenter Terminal=false Type=Application Categories=PackageManager;GTK;System;Settings; MimeType=application/x-deb;application/x-debian-package;x-scheme-handler/apt; StartupNotify=true X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=software-center Keywords=Sources;PPA;Install;Uninstall;Remove;Purchase;Catalogue;Store; This one explains why gnome-open apt://foo.bar opens the Software?Center instead of apturl. So I installed this apturl.desktop in ~/.local/share/applications: [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=1.0 Type=Application Terminal=false Exec=/usr/bin/apturl %u Name=APT-URL Comment=APT-URL handler Icon= Categories=Application;Network; MimeType=x-scheme-handler/apt; After update-desktop-database and even after rebooting, both xdg-open and gnome-open still do the same and ignore this user desktop file, which is usual, should override the other in /usr/share/applications/. May be there is something special with desktop files specifying x-scheme-handler MIME type and they are not handled the usual way. The desktop-file way does not answer the question.

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• What are the arguments against parsing the Cthulhu way?

  - by smarmy53

  I have been assigned the task of implementing a Domain Specific Language for a tool that may become quite important for the company. The language is simple but not trivial, it already allows nested loops, string concatenation, etc. and it is practically sure that other constructs will be added as the project advances. I know by experience that writing a lexer/parser by hand -unless the grammar is trivial- is a time consuming and error prone process. So I was left with two options: a parser generator à la yacc or a combinator library like Parsec. The former was good as well but I picked the latter for various reasons, and implemented the solution in a functional language. The result is pretty spectacular to my eyes, the code is very concise, elegant and readable/fluent. I concede it may look a bit weird if you never programmed in anything other than java/c#, but then this would be true of anything not written in java/c#. At some point however, I've been literally attacked by a co-worker. After a quick glance at my screen he declared that the code is uncomprehensible and that I should not reinvent parsing but just use a stack and String.Split like everybody does. He made a lot of noise, and I could not convince him, partially because I've been taken by surprise and had no clear explanation, partially because his opinion was immutable (no pun intended). I even offered to explain him the language, but to no avail. I'm positive the discussion is going to re-surface in front of management, so I'm preparing some solid arguments. These are the first few reasons that come to my mind to avoid a String.Split-based solution: you need lot of ifs to handle special cases and things quickly spiral out of control lots of hardcoded array indexes makes maintenance painful extremely difficult to handle things like a function call as a method argument (ex. add( (add a, b), c) very difficult to provide meaningful error messages in case of syntax errors (very likely to happen) I'm all for simplicity, clarity and avoiding unnecessary smart-cryptic stuff, but I also believe it's a mistake to dumb down every part of the codebase so that even a burger flipper can understand it. It's the same argument I hear for not using interfaces, not adopting separation of concerns, copying-pasting code around, etc. A minimum of technical competence and willingness to learn is required to work on a software project after all. (I won't use this argument as it will probably sound offensive, and starting a war is not going to help anybody) What are your favorite arguments against parsing the Cthulhu way?* *of course if you can convince me he's right I'll be perfectly happy as well

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• Commerce, Anyway You Want It

  - by David Dorf

  I believe our industry is finally starting to realize the importance of letting consumers determine how, when, and where to interact with retailers.  Over the last few months I've seen several articles discussing the importance of removing the barriers between existing channels. Paula Rosenblum of RSR first brought the term omni-channel to my attention back in September. She stated, "omni-channel retail isn’t the merging of channels – rather, it’s the use of all possible channels (present and future) to enhance the customer experience in a profitable way." I added to her thoughts in this blog posting in which I said, "For retailers to provide an omni-channel experience, there needs to be one logical representation of products, prices, promotions, and customers across all channels. The only thing that varies is the presentation of the content based on the delivery mechanism (e.g. shelf labels, mobile phone, web site, print, etc.) and often these mechanisms can be combined in various ways." More recently Brian Walker of Gartner suggested we stop using the term multi-channel and begin thinking more about consumer touch-points. "It is time for organizations to leave their channel-oriented ways behind, and enter the era of agile commerce--optimizing their people, processes and technology to serve today's empowered, ever-connected customers across this rapidly evolving set of customer touch points." Now Jason Goldberg, better known as RetailGeek, says we should start breaking down the channel silos by re-casting the VP of E-Commerce as the VP of Digital Marketing, and change his/her focus to driving sales across all channels using digital media. This logic is based on the fact that consumers switch between channels, or touch-points as Brian prefers, as part of their larger buying process. Today's smart consumer leverages the Web, mobile, and stores to provide the best shopping experience, so retailers need to make this easier. Regardless of what we call it, the key take-away is that "multi-channel" is not only an antiquated term but also an idea who's time has passed.  Today, retailers must look at e-commerce, m-commerce, f-commerce, catalogs, and traditional store sales collectively and through the consumers' eyes.  The goal is not to drive sales through each channel but rather to just drive sales -- using whatever method the customer prefers.  There really should be just one cart.

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar’s Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a ‘perfect storm’ of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one’s work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven’t far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it’s a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it’s more important not to let such fears lead to writer’s block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn’t always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what’s involved in getting an application that is ‘done’ ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we’d love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to ‘throw your hat into the ring’, drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• Retail in New York - a walk down 5th Avenue

  - by sarah.taylor(at)oracle.com

  It's the week of the NRF Big Show and all eyes in the retail industry are on New York. The Big Apple is famous for Big Retail -with a proliferation of incredibly iconic stores. The environment is exciting and familiar even to people visiting this small island for the first time. Most of us have travelled down Fifth Avenue watching movies and TV even if we have never set foot on American soil. I find it one of the most exciting retail cities in the world and I am thrilled this year to be here with so many of Oracle's International retail customers who are joining us for the Retail Exchange. The Oracle program brings retailers from all over the planet together to share ideas and be inspired by New York retail and the NRF event. The show celebrates its 100th year in 2011 and New York itself has been recognized globally as the capital of innovative retail for just as long.  Fifth Avenue is where many global brands have placed their flagship stores, and businesses are in constant competition to set themselves apart from their competitors - both in the store and from the street.  These flag ship retail destinations present what today's customers are finding most exciting and delightful about retail. For the tourist market, they may only visit these stores once, but the impression that a trip to a flagship store leaves with a customer can last a lifetime.  One of the stores that is currently turning heads on Fifth Avenue is Hollister, sister brand to Abercrombie and Fitch, which has filled its shop front with a massive live video (and audio) feed of surfers on the beach in California.  To complete the effect, they also have troughs of water in front of the video screens to bring the sea to the street.  And this isn't the only kind of surfing that retailers are considering today and multi-channel retail is a hot topic that all of the retailers joining the Retail Exchange are considering.   The rest of the world looks to the brands along Fifth Avenue for inspiration - how they take advantage of new opportunities, how they set themselves apart from their competitors and how they keep their products fresh and desirable. With these inspiring pioneers in New York, it's little wonder that NRF's Big Show is so popular, and that New York is viewed as one of the retail capitals of the world. It is a pleasure to be here with so many of the world's greatest international retailers.

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• Impressions from VMworld - Clearing up Misconceptions

  - by Monica Kumar

  Gorgeous sunny weather…none of the usual summer fog…the Oracle Virtualization team has been busy at VMworld in San Francisco this week. From the time exhibits opened on Sunday, our booth staff was fully engaged with visitors. It was great to meet with customers and prospects, and there were many…most with promises to meet again in October at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Interests and questions ran the gamut - from implementation details to consolidating applications to how does Oracle VM enable rapid application deployment to Oracle support and licensing. All good stuff! Some inquiries are poignant and really help us get at the customer pain points. Some are just based on misconceptions. We’d like to address a couple of common misconceptions that we heard: 1) Rapid deployment of enterprise applications is great but I don’t do this all the time. So why bother? While production applications don’t get updated or upgraded as often, development and QA staging environments are much more dynamic. Also, in today’s Cloud based computing environments, end users expect an entire solution, along with the virtual machine, to be provisioned instantly, on-demand, as and when they need to scale. Whether it’s adding a new feature to meet customer demands or updating applications to meet business/service compliance, these environments undergo change frequently. The ability to rapidly stand up an entire application stack with all the components such as database tier, mid-tier, OS, and applications tightly integrated, can offer significant value. Hand patching, installation of the OS, application and configurations to ensure the entire stack works well together can take days and weeks. Oracle VM Templates provide a much faster path to standing up a development, QA or production stack in a matter of hours or minutes. I see lots of eyes light up as we get to this point of the conversation. 2) Oracle Software licensing on VMware vSphere In the world of multi-vendor IT stacks, understanding license boundaries and terms and conditions for each product in the stack can be challenging.  Oracle’s licensing, though, is straightforward.  Oracle software is licensed per physical processor in the server or cluster where the Oracle software is installed and/or running.  The use of third party virtualization technologies such as VMware is not allowed as a means to change the way Oracle software is licensed.  Exceptions are spelled out in the licensing document labeled “Hard Partitioning". Here are some fun pictures! Visitors to our booth told us they loved the Oracle SUV courtesy shuttles that are helping attendees get to/from hotels. Also spotted were several taxicabs sporting an Oracle banner! Stay tuned for more highlights across desktop and server virtualization as we wrap up our participation at VMworld.

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• Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook book review

  - by Chris Muir

  I recently received a free copy of Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook published by Packt Publishing for review. Readers of technical cookbooks would know this genre of text includes problems that developers will hit and the prescribed solutions, in this case for Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF).  Books like this excel themselves on excellent coverage, a logical progress of solutions through out the book, and providing a readable narrative around the numerous steps and code. This book progresses well through ADF application assembly, ADF Business Components, the view layer, security, deployment and tuning.  Each recipe had a clear introduction and I especially enjoyed the "There's more" follow up sections for some recipes that leads the reader onto related ideas and issues the reader really needs to be aware of. Also worthy of comment having worked with ADF for over 5 years, there certainly was recipes and solutions I hadn't encountered before, this book gets bonus points for that. As a reviewer what negatives can I give this text? The book has cast it's net too wide by trying to cover "everything from design and construction, to deployment, testing, debugging and optimization."  ADF is such a large and sophistication technology, this book with 100 recipes barely scrapes the surface.  Don't expect all your ADF problems to be solved here. In turn there is inconsistency in the level of problems and solutions.  I felt at the beginning the book was pitching itself at advanced problems to solve (that's great for me), but then it introduces topics like building a static View Object or train.  These topics in my opinion are fairly simple and are covered by the Oracle documentation just as well, they shouldn't have been included here.  In conclusion, ADF beginners will find this book worthwhile as it will open your eyes to the wider problems and solutions required for ADF, and experts for just the fact they can point junior programmers at the book for certain problems and say "get on with it". Is there scope for more ADF tombs like this?  Yes!  I'd love to see a cookbook specializing on ADF Business Components (hint hint to budding authors).

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• Multiple country-specific domains or one global domain [closed]

  - by CJM

  Possible Duplicate: How should I structure my urls for both SEO and localization? My company currently has its main (English) site on a .com domain with a .co.uk alias. In addition, we have separate sites for certain other countries - these are also hosted in the UK but are distinct sites with a country-specific domain names (.de, .fr, .se, .es), and the sites have differing amounts of distinct but overlapping content, For example, the .es site is entirely in Spanish and has a page for every section of the UK site but little else. Whereas the .de site has much more content (but still less than the UK site), in German, and geared towards our business focus in that country. The main point is that the content in the additional sites is a subset of the UK, is translated into the local language, and although sometimes is simply only a translated version of UK content, it is usually 'tweaked' for the local market, and in certain areas, contains unique content. The other sites get a fraction of the traffic of the UK site. This is perfectly understandable since the biggest chunk of work comes from the UK, and we've been established here for over 30 years. However, we are wanting to build up our overseas business and part of that is building up our websites to support this. The Question: I posed a suggestion to the business that we might consider consolidating all our websites onto the .com domain but with /en/de/fr/se/etc sections, as plenty of other companies seem to do. The theory was that the non-english sites would benefit from the greater reputation of the parent .com domain, and that all the content would be mutually supporting - my fear is that the child domains on their own are too small to compete on their own compared to competitors who are established in these countries. Speaking to an SEO consultant from my hosting company, he feels that this move would have some benefit (for the reasons mentioned), but they would likely be significantly outweighed by the loss of the benefits of localised domains. Specifically, he said that since the Panda update, and particularly the two sets of changes this year, that we would lose more than we would gain. Having done some Panda research since, I've had my eyes opened on many issues, but curiously I haven't come across much that mentions localised domain names, though I do question whether Google would see it as duplicated content. It's not that I disagree with the consultant, I just want to know more before I make recommendations to my company. What is the prevailing opinion in this case? Would I gain anything from consolidating country-specific content onto one domain? Would Google see this as duplicate content? Would there be an even greater penalty from the loss of country-specific domains? And is there anything else I can do to help support the smaller, country-specific domains?

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• Advice for how to handle company pride

  - by user17971

  We have this "amazing" little product using the latest development methodologies, components with all the bells and whistles. I took over this product maybe 6 months ago and struggled with it from day one. Even though it is supposedly is state of the art because of all its amazing structure, using dependency injections, inversion of control from the unity framework, hibernation and is domain driven in a .net mvvm xaml application to make it streamlined and modular. I knew from the moment I saw the monolith that it was going to be an uphill struggle for me. A lot of little code-bits scattered all around in neatly organized paradigms. Debugging is difficult, tracing the code is difficult, making new code is difficult, although some modifications is surprisinly easy but it doesn't out weight the problems I have with the code by a long shot. When I took over the project I was told that the new management console was ready for delivery and all I had to do was compile it and drop it. This was the beginning of a uphill struggle, our customer didn't agree at all that this was the functionality they had asked for so I had to do modifications to the program to their specifications. Since the project pretty much has been overdue since I took over it it has always been important that we didn't add or change much to the original system. I could modify the existing bits. fast forward until today where I finally completed all their comments and issues with the program but now I think that the users has opened their eyes (even though they saw this program many times) that they will be going backwards with this new system, that it will be much worse than the tool they got today (for a long time due to the fact that I'm the only resource on the project, project manager, tester, developer, integration specialist etc) My problem is that I lost faith in this system quite early due to the nature of the program. Although I made many changes and improvements to the system I wholeheartedly sympathize with the poor users who are going to start using this system. Its not nearly doing all the things it should do. I had this conversation internally with my boss where I told him what I thought about it, that if I were the customer I wouldn't have spent money developing it. So what do I do now? The system in ready, on a staging system and nobody likes it, its too slow and boring and does maybe do 50% of what they need it to do. Despite how much energy and working around the clock I've done to this project: I won't mind scrapping the system but we've spent much money (well my salaries) developing it and my company wants us to be proud of everything we do and advocate it. How will I tackle the contractor when he asks for advice? Surely I can tell him, this is what we agreed upon based on your use case scenarios, and be done with it? How will I inform my boss about this progress? He knows what I feel about it but I always get the feeling he let my criticism pass him by as just hot air, gone tomorrow,.

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• What Counts for a DBA: Passion

  - by drsql

  One of my first questions, when interviewing for a DBA/Programmer position, is always: “Why do you want this job?” The answers I receive range from cheesy hyperbole (“I want to enhance your services with my vast knowledge”) to deadpan realism (“I have N kids who all have a hole in the front of their face where food goes"). Both answers are fine in their own way, at least displaying some self-confidence, humour and honesty, but once in a while, I'll hear the answer that is music to me ears... “I LOVE DATABASES!” Whenever I hear it, my nerves tingle in hopeful anticipation; have I found someone for whom working with database isn't just a job, but a passion? Inevitably, I'm often disappointed. What initially seemed like passion turns out to be rather shallow enthusiasm; the person is enthusiastic about working with databases in the same way he or she might be about eating a bag of Cajun spiced kettle chips; enjoyable, but not something to think about too deeply or take too seriously. Enthusiasm comes, and enthusiasm goes. I've seen countless technical forum users burst onto the scene in a blaze of frantic question-answering, only to fade away within days, never to be heard from again. Passion, however, is more of a longstanding commitment. The biographies of the great technologists and authors of the recent past are full of the sort of passion and engrossment that lead a person to write a novel non-stop for a fortnight with no sleep and only dog food to eat (Philip K. Dick), or refuse to leave the works of the first tunnel under the Thames, even though it was flooded (Brunel). In a similar (though more modest) way, my passion for working with databases has led me to acts that might cause someone for whom it was "just a job" to roll their eyes in disbelief. Most evenings you're more likely to find me reading a database book than watching TV. I've spent hundreds of hours of my spare time writing blogs and articles (some of which are only read by tens of people); I've spent hundreds of dollars travelling to conferences, paying my own flight and hotel expenses, so that I can share a little of what I know, and mix with some like-minded people. And I know I'm far from alone in this, in the SQL Server community. Passion isn't everything, of course, and it isn't always accompanied by any great skill, but in almost every case, that skill can be cultivated over time. If you are doing what you are passionate about, work turns into more than just a way to feed your kids; it becomes your hobby, entertainment, and preoccupation. And it is this passion that gives a DBA the obsessive stubbornness, the refusal to be beaten by even the most difficult problem, which is often so crucial. A final word of warning though: passion without limits can turn weird. Never let it get in the way of your wife, kids, bills, or personal hygiene.

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• Expanding Influence and Community

  - by Johnm

  When I was just nine years of age my father introduced me to the computer. It was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (aka: CoCo). He shared with me the nuances of writing BASIC and it wasn't long before I was in the back seat of the school bus scribbling, on a pad of paper, the code I would later type. My father demonstrated that while my friends were playing their Atari 2600 consoles, I had the unique opportunity to create my own games on the Coco. One of which provided a great friend of mine hours and hours of hilarity and entertainment. It wasn't long before my father was inviting me to tag along as he drove to the local high school where a gathering of fellow Coco enthusiasts assembled. In these meetings all in attendance would chat about their latest challenges and solutions. They would swap the labors of their sleepless nights eagerly gazing into their green and black screens. Friendships were built and business partners were developed. While these experiences at the time in my pre-teen mind were chalked up to simply sharing time with my father, it had a tremendous impact on me later in life. This past weekend I attended the Louisville SQL Saturday (#45). It was great to see that there were some who brought along their children. It is encouraging to see fresh faces in the crowd at our  monthly IndyPASS meetings. Each time I see the youthful eyes peering from the audience while the finer details of SQL Server is presented, I cannot help but to be transported back to the experiences that I enjoyed in those Coco days. It is exciting to think of how these experiences are impacting their lives and stimulating their minds. Some of these children have actually approached me asking questions about what was presented or simply bragging about their latest discovery in programming. One of the topics that arose in the "Women in Technology" session in Louisville, which was masterfully facilitated by Kathi Kellenberger, was exploring how we could ignite the spark of interest in databases among the youth. It was awesome to hear that there were some that volunteer their time to share their experiences with students. It made me wonder what user groups could achieve if we were to consider expanding our influence and community beyond our immediate peers to include those who are simply enjoying their time with their father or mother.

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• Software Tuned to Humanity

  - by Phil Factor

  I learned a great deal from a cynical old programmer who once told me that the ideal length of time for a compiler to do its work was the same time it took to roll a cigarette. For development work, this is oh so true. After intently looking at the editing window for an hour or so, it was a relief to look up, stretch, focus the eyes on something else, and roll the possibly-metaphorical cigarette. This was software tuned to humanity. Likewise, a user’s perception of the “ideal” time that an application will take to move from frame to frame, to retrieve information, or to process their input has remained remarkably static for about thirty years, at around 200 ms. Anything else appears, and always has, to be either fast or slow. This could explain why commercial applications, unlike games, simulations and communications, aren’t noticeably faster now than they were when I started programming in the Seventies. Sure, they do a great deal more, but the SLAs that I negotiated in the 1980s for application performance are very similar to what they are nowadays. To prove to myself that this wasn’t just some rose-tinted misperception on my part, I cranked up a Z80-based Jonos CP/M machine (1985) in the roof-space. Within 20 seconds from cold, it had loaded Wordstar and I was ready to write. OK, I got it wrong: some things were faster 30 years ago. Sure, I’d now have had all sorts of animations, wizzy graphics, and other comforting features, but it seems a pity that we have used all that extra CPU and memory to increase the scope of what we develop, and the graphical prettiness, but not to speed the processes needed to complete a business procedure. Never mind the weight, the response time’s great! To achieve 200 ms response times on a Z80, or similar, performance considerations influenced everything one did as a developer. If it meant writing an entire application in assembly code, applying every smart algorithm, and shortcut imaginable to get the application to perform to spec, then so be it. As a result, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool performance freak and find it difficult to change my habits. Conversely, many developers now seem to feel quite differently. While all will acknowledge that performance is important, it’s no longer the virtue is once was, and other factors such as user-experience now take precedence. Am I wrong? If not, then perhaps we need a new school of development technique to rival Agile, dedicated once again to producing applications that smoke the rear wheels rather than pootle elegantly to the shops; that forgo skeuomorphism, cute animation, or architectural elegance in favor of the smell of hot rubber. I struggle to name an application I use that is truly notable for its blistering performance, and would dearly love one to do my everyday work – just as long as it doesn’t go faster than my brain.

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• Addressing threats introduced by the BYOD trend

  - by kyap

  With the growth of the mobile technology segment, enterprises are facing a new type of threats introduced by the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend, where employees use their own devices (laptops, tablets or smartphones) not necessarily secured to access corporate network and information.In the past - actually even right now, enterprises used to provide laptops to their employees for their daily work, with specific operating systems including anti-virus and desktop management tools, in order to make sure that the pools of laptop allocated are spyware or trojan-horse free to access the internal network and sensitive information. But the BYOD reality is breaking this paradigm and open new security breaches for enterprises as most of the username/password based systems, especially the internal web applications, can be accessed by less or none protected device.To address this reality we can adopt 3 approaches:1. Coué's approach: Close your eyes and assume that your employees are mature enough to know what he/she should or should not do.2. Consensus approach: Provide a list of restricted and 'certified' devices to the internal network. 3. Military approach: Access internal systems with certified laptop ONLYIf you choose option 1: Thanks for visiting my blog and I hope you find the others entries more useful :)If you choose option 2: The proliferation of new hardware and software updates every quarter makes this approach very costly and difficult to maintain.If you choose option 3: You need to find a way to allow the access into your sensitive application from the corporate authorized machines only, managed by the IT administrators... but how? The challenge with option 3 is to find out how end-users can restrict access to certain sensitive applications only from authorized machines, or from another angle end-users can not access the sensitive applications if they are not using the authorized machine... So what if we find a way to store the applications credential secretly from the end-users, and then automatically submit them when the end-users access the application? With this model, end-users do not know the username/password to access the applications so even if the end-users use their own devices they will not able to login. Also, there's no need to reconfigure existing applications to adapt to the new authenticate scheme given that we are still leverage the same username/password authenticate model at the application level. To adopt this model, you can leverage Oracle Enterprise Single Sign On. In short, Oracle ESSO is a desktop based solution, capable to store credentials of Web and Native based applications. At the application startup and if it is configured as an esso-enabled application - check out my previous post on how to make Skype essso-enabled, Oracle ESSO takes over automatically the sign-in sequence with the store credential on behalf of the end-users. Combined with Oracle ESSO Provisioning Gateway, the credentials can be 'pushed' in advance from an actual provisioning server, like Oracle Identity Manager or Tivoli Identity Manager, so the end-users can login into sensitive application without even knowing the actual username and password, so they can not login with other machines rather than those secured by Oracle ESSO.Below is a graphical illustration of this approach:With this model, not only you can protect the access to sensitive applications only from authorized machine, you can also implement much stronger Password Policies in terms of Password Complexity as well as Password Reset Frequency but end-users will not need to remember the passwords anymore.If you are interested, do not hesitate to check out the Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-on products from OTN !

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• Facial Recognition for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  My son decided to do his science project on how the brain recognizes faces.  Faces are so complicated and important that the brain has a dedicated area for just that purpose.  During our research, we came across some emerging uses for facial recognition in the retail industry. If you believe the movies, recognizing faces as they walk by a camera is easy for computers but that's not the reality.  Huge investments are being made by the U.S. government in this area, with a focus on airport security.  Now, companies like Eye See are leveraging that research for marketing purposes.  They do things like track eyes while viewing newspaper ads to see which ads get more "eye time."  This can help marketers make better placement and color decisions. But what caught my eye (that was too easy) was their new mannequins that watch shoppers.  These mannequins, being tested at European retailers like Benetton, watch shoppers that walk by and identify their gender, race, and age.  This helps the retailer better understand the types of customers being attracted to the outfit on the mannequin.  Of course to be most accurate, the software has pictures of the employees so they can be filtered out.  Since the mannequins are closer to the shoppers and at eye-level, they are more accurate than traditional in-ceiling LP cameras. Marketing agency RedPepper is offering retailers the ability to recognize loyalty shoppers at their doors using Facedeal.  For customers that have opted into the program, when they enter the store their face is recognized and they are checked in.  Then, as a reward, they are sent an offer on their smartphone. It won't be long before retailers begin to listen to shoppers are they walk the aisles, then keywords can be collected and aggregated to give the retailer an idea of what people are saying about their stores and products.  Sentiment analysis based on what's said or even facial expressions can't be far off. Clearly retailers need to be cautions and respect customer privacy.  That's why these technologies are emerging slowly.  But since the next generation of shoppers are less concerned about privacy, I expect these technologies to appear sporadically in the next five years then go mainstream.  Time will tell.

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• Ray Picking Problems

  - by A Name I Haven't Decided On

  I've read so many answers on here about how to do Ray Picking, that I thought I had the idea of it down. But when I try to implement it in my game, I get garbage. I'm working with LWJGL. Here's the code: public static Ray getPick(int mouseX, int mouseY){ glPushMatrix(); //Setting up the Mouse Clip Vector4f mouseClip = new Vector4f((float)mouseX * 2 / 960f - 1, 1 - (float)mouseY * 2 / 640f ,0 ,1); //Loading Matrices FloatBuffer modMatrix = BufferUtils.createFloatBuffer(16); FloatBuffer projMatrix = BufferUtils.createFloatBuffer(16); glGetFloat(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, modMatrix); glGetFloat(GL_PROJECTION_MATRIX, projMatrix); //Assigning Matrices Matrix4f proj = new Matrix4f(); Matrix4f model = new Matrix4f(); model.load(modMatrix); proj.load(projMatrix); //Multiplying the Projection Matrix by the Model View Matrix Matrix4f tempView = new Matrix4f(); Matrix4f.mul(proj, model, tempView); tempView.invert(); //Getting the Camera Position in World Space. The 4th Column of the Model View Matrix. model.invert(); Point cameraPos = new Point(model.m30, model.m31, model.m32); //Theoretically getting the vector the Picking Ray goes Vector4f rayVector = new Vector4f(); Matrix4f.transform(tempView, mouseClip, rayVector); rayVector.translate((float)-cameraPos.getX(),(float) -cameraPos.getY(),(float) -cameraPos.getZ(), 0f); rayVector.normalise(); glPopMatrix(); //This Basically Spits out a value that changes as the Camera moves. //When the Mouse moves, the values change around 0.001 points from screen edge to edge. System.out.format("Vector: %f %f %f%n", rayVector.x, rayVector.y, rayVector.z); //return new Ray(cameraPos, rayVector); return null; } I don't really know why this isn't working. I was hoping some more experienced eyes might be able to help me out. I can get the camera position like a champ, it's the vector the rays going in that I can't seem to get right. Thanks.

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