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• Responding to Invites

  - by Daniel Moth

  Following up from my post about Sending Outlook Invites here is a shorter one on how to respond. Whatever your choice (ACCEPT, TENTATIVE, DECLINE), if the sender has not unchecked the "Request Response" option, then send your response. Always send your response. Even if you think the sender made a mistake in keeping it on, send your response. Seriously, not responding is plain rude. If you knew about the meeting, and you are happy investing your time in it, and the time and location work for you, and there is an implicit/explicit agenda, then ACCEPT and send it. If one or more of those things don't work for you then you have a few options. Send a DECLINE explaining why. Reply with email to ask for further details or for a change to be made. If you don’t receive a response to your email, send a DECLINE when you've waited enough. Send a TENTATIVE if you haven't made up your mind yet. Hint: if they really require you there, they'll respond asking "why tentative" and you have a discussion about it. When you deem appropriate, instead of the options above, you can also use the counter propose feature of Outlook but IMO that feature has questionable interaction model and UI (on both sender and recipient) so many people get confused by it. BTW, two of my outlook rules are relevant to invites. The first one auto-marks as read the ACCEPT responses if there is no comment in the body of the accept (I check later who has accepted and who hasn't via the "Tracking" button of the invite). I don’t have a rule for the DECLINE and TENTATIVE cause typically I follow up with folks that send those.   The second rule ensures that all Invites go to a specific folder. That is the first folder I see when I triage email. It is also the only folder which I have configured to show a count of all items inside it, rather than the unread count - when sending a response to an invite the item disappears from the folder and hence it is empty and not nagging me. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• More details on America's Cup use of Oracle Data Mining

  - by charlie.berger

  BMW Oracle Racing's America's Cup: A Victory for Database Technology BMW Oracle Racing's victory in the 33rd America's Cup yacht race in February showcased the crew's extraordinary sailing expertise. But to hear them talk, the real stars weren't actually human. "The story of this race is in the technology," says Ian Burns, design coordinator for BMW Oracle Racing. Gathering and Mining Sailing DataFrom the drag-resistant hull to its 23-story wing sail, the BMW Oracle USA trimaran is a technological marvel. But to learn to sail it well, the crew needed to review enormous amounts of reliable data every time they took the boat for a test run. Burns and his team collected performance data from 250 sensors throughout the trimaran at the rate of 10 times per second. An hour of sailing alone generates 90 million data points.BMW Oracle Racing turned to Oracle Data Mining in Oracle Database 11g to extract maximum value from the data. Burns and his team reviewed and shared raw data with crew members daily using a Web application built in Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX). "Someone would say, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could look at some new combination of numbers?' We could quickly build an Oracle Application Express application and share the information during the same meeting," says Burns. Analyzing Wind and Other Environmental ConditionsBurns then streamed the data to the Oracle Austin Data Center, where a dedicated team tackled deeper analysis. Because the data was collected in an Oracle Database, the Data Center team could dive straight into the analytics problems without having to do any extract, transform, and load processes or data conversion. And the many advanced data mining algorithms in Oracle Data Mining allowed the analytics team to build vital performance analytics. For example, the technology team could remove masking elements such as environmental conditions to give accurate data on the best mast rotation for certain wind conditions. Without the data mining, Burns says the boat wouldn't have run as fast. "The design of the boat was important, but once you've got it designed, the whole race is down to how the guys can use it," he says. "With Oracle database technology we could compare the incremental improvements in our performance from the first day of sailing to the very last day. With data mining we could check data against the things we saw, and we could find things that weren't otherwise easily observable and findable."

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• Best Platform/Engine for turn based Client/Server Android game

  - by Paradine

  I'm currently designing a turn based game for tablets. Initially for Android with porting to iOS later considered in design. I'm having trouble narrowing down the available technologies to even know where to spend my research time. I am hoping that if I explain what I am trying to achieve someone may be able to suggest a platform and/or engine. I've looked into some of the open source Engines ( http://www.cuteandroid.com/ten-open-source-android-2d-or-3d-game-engine-for-android-developers ) and some appear to handle much of what I might require - although with a higher focus on graphics than i need. Mages looks interesting although development appears to have ceased. If I could somehow leverage GoogleApps that would be excellent. Here is what I am trying to achieve: PvP turn based strategy game over internet - minimal animation and bandwidth required Players match up online using MetaGame system MatchID created on Resolution Server and Game starts Clients have 30 second countdown to select MoveString Clients sends small secure timestamped and MatchIDed MoveString to Resolution server Resolution server looks up Move String for each player, Resolves and Updates Players status in MatchID on Server Resolution server updates Client Views Repeat until victory conditions met - MatchID Closed, Rewards earned in MetaGame There will also need to be a full social and account system and metagame backend - but this could be running on separate system(s) Tablet in Offline mode would be catalog browsing and perhaps single player AI - bum I'm focusing on the Resolution Server at this point I'm not even certain if I would be looking at an Android App or a WebApp at this stage! I want a custom GUI so I guess an app - but maybe as I have little animation a WebApp might also work. Probably some combination of both. There will be very small overhead in data between client server - essentially a small text string every 30 seconds sent to the Resolution server which looks up the Effect and applies it to the Opponents string and determines some results to apply to the match. The client view is updated minimally with the results (only 5 in game Integers tracked) - perhaps triggering small animations/popups on the client to show the end result. e.g Explosion. If you have suggestions for a good technology or platform to best achieving the Resolution Server I'd love to hear. Also if you have experience with open source Engines - and could narrow down which (if any ) might be most suitable that would be a big help. Thanks in advance

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• Refreshing imported MySQL data with MySQL for Excel

  - by Javier Rivera

  Welcome to another blog post from the MySQL for Excel Team. Today we're going to talk about a new feature included since MySQL for Excel 1.3.0, you can install the latest GA or maintenance version using the MySQL Installer or optionally you can download directly any GA or non-GA version from the MySQL Developer Zone.As some users suggested in our forums we should be maintaining the link between tables and Excel not only when editing data through the Edit MySQL Data option, but also when importing data via Import MySQL Data. Before 1.3.0 this process only provided you with an offline copy of the Table's data into Excel and you had no way to refresh that information from the DB later on. Now, with this new feature we'll show you how easy is to work with the latest available information at all times. This feature is transparent to you (it doesn't require additional steps to work as long as the users had the Create an Excel Table for the imported MySQL table data option enabled. To ensure you have this option checked, click over Advanced Options... after the Import Data dialog is displayed). The current blog post assumes you already know how to import data into excel, you could always take a look at our previous post How To - Guide to Importing Data from a MySQL Database to Excel using MySQL for Excel if you need further reference on that topic. After importing Data from a MySQL Table into Excel, you can refresh the data in 3 ways.1. Simply right click over the range of the imported data, to show the pop-up menu: Click over the Refresh button to obtain the latest copy of the data in the table. 2. Click the Refresh button on the Data ribbon: 3. Click the Refresh All button in the Data ribbon (beware this will refresh all Excel tables in the Workbook): Please take a note of a couple of details here, the first one is about the size of the table. If by the time you refresh the table new columns had been added to it, and you originally have imported all columns, the table will grow to the right. The same applies to rows, if the table has new rows and you did not limit the results , the table will grow to to the bottom of the sheet in Excel. The second detail you should take into account is this operation will overwrite any changes done to the cells after the table was originally imported or previously refreshed: Now with this new feature, imported data remains linked to the data source and is available to be updated at all times. It empowers the user to always be able to work with the latest version of the imported MySQL data. We hope you like this this new feature and give it a try! Remember that your feedback is very important for us, so drop us a message with your comments, suggestions for this or other features and follow us at our social media channels: MySQL on Windows (this) Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/MySqlOnWindows/ MySQL for Excel forum: http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?172 Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mysql YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MySQLChannel Thanks!

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• Silverlight Cream for December 29, 2010 -- #1018

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Arik Poznanski, Derik Whittaker(-2-), Alex Knight, Maurice de Beijer, Jesse Liberty, Jason Ginchereau, Jeff Blankenburg, Mike Snow, and Peter Kuhn. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight: Reading from a File Contained in your XAP" Mike Snow WP7: "A ReorderListBox for Windows Phone 7" Jason Ginchereau Expression Blend: "PathListBox: making rockin' animations" Alex Knight From SilverlightCream.com: Order in Chaos: Dependency Property Value Resolution Arik Poznanski sent me the link to his blog with this Dependency property value resolution post which demonstrates in successive detail xaml for each of the scenarios. Closing the Virtual Keyboard (SIP) and forcing binding in WP7 Derik Whittaker has a couple new posts up... this first is about how to close the SIP and forcing binding in a WP7 app... if you've run many WP7 apps I'm sure you understand the issue. Help my Slider control does not work inside a Grid in WP7 In Derik Whittaker's next post he details a problem he had with a Slider in a Grid that went AWOL... and how he resolved it.. also is asking why the solution works. PathListBox: making rockin' animations Holy Crap ... Alex Knight has his second PathListBox tutorial up and just stop reading and go check it out... dang! ... I'll still be here when you come back! Windows Phone 7, Animations and Data Binding Maurice de Beijer details an interesting problem he ran into where his databinding was hampering a page animation, what the root problem was and how he resolved it.. good information. Windows Phone From Scratch – Navigation Jesse Liberty has the next episode in the Windows Phone from Scratch series up and is talking about Navigation... he demos an ap with 3 pages and simple navigation this time. A ReorderListBox for Windows Phone 7 Found in Jeff Blankenburg's number 11, this post by Jason Ginchereau is a description of a Drag/Drop reodering ListBox drop-in for WP7 ... very cool, and source is on the post. What I Learned In WP7 – #Issue 11 Jeff Blankenburg's number 11 is a couple links itself... one to Jeff Wilcox for Silverlight UnitTest Framework, and one to Jason Ginchereau for Listbox Drag/Drop reordering... going to have to look that one up. Silverlight: Reading from a File Contained in your XAP Mike Snow's latest is on how to load up an extraneous file into your xap for loading at run-time and how to get that to actually work. XNA: Sophisticated primitives Peter Kuhn has a post up on using the XNA PrimitiveBatch class... he had trouble with it at first, and explains how to use it. XNA you say? ... think WP7. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• XNA running slow when making a texture

  - by Anthony

  I'm using XNA to test an image analysis algorithm for a robot. I made a simple 3D world that has a grass, a robot, and white lines (that are represent the course). The image analysis algorithm is a modification of the Hough line detection algorithm. I have the game render 2 camera views to a render target in memory. One camera is a top down view of the robot going around the course, and the second camera is the view from the robot's perspective as it moves along. I take the rendertarget of the robot camera and convert it to a Color[,] so that I can do image analysis on it. private Color[,] TextureTo2DArray(Texture2D texture, Color[] colors1D, Color[,] colors2D) { texture.GetData(colors1D); for (int x = 0; x < texture.Width; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < texture.Height; y++) { colors2D[x, y] = colors1D[x + (y * texture.Width)]; } } return colors2D; } I want to overlay the results of the image analysis on the robot camera view. The first part of the image analysis is finding the white pixels. When I find the white pixels I create a bool[,] array showing which pixels were white and which were black. Then I want to convert it back into a texture so that I can overlay on the robot view. When I try to create the new texture showing which ones pixels were white, then the game goes super slow (around 10 hz). Can you give me some pointers as to what to do to make the game go faster. If I comment out this algorithm, then it goes back up to 60 hz. private Texture2D GenerateTexturesFromBoolArray(bool[,] boolArray,Color[] colorMap, Texture2D textureToModify) { for(int i =0;i < screenWidth;i++) { for(int j =0;j<screenHeight;j++) { if (boolArray[i, j] == true) { colorMap[i+(j*screenWidth)] = Color.Red; } else { colorMap[i + (j * screenWidth)] = Color.Transparent; } } } textureToModify.SetData<Color>(colorMap); return textureToModify; } Each Time I run draw, I must set the texture to null, so that I can modify it. public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { Vector2 topRightVector = ((SimulationMain)Game).spriteRectangleManager.topRightVector; Vector2 scaleFactor = ((SimulationMain)Game).config.scaleFactorScreenSizeToWindow; this.spriteBatch.Begin(); // Start the 2D drawing this.spriteBatch.Draw(this.textureFindWhite, topRightVector, null, Color.White, 0, Vector2.Zero, scaleFactor, SpriteEffects.None, 0); this.spriteBatch.End(); // Stop drawing. GraphicsDevice.Textures[0] = null; } Thanks for the help, Anthony G.

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• Be Careful When Referencing SPList.Items

  - by Brian Jackett

  Be very careful how you reference your SPListItem objects through the SharePoint API.  I’ll say it again.  Be very careful how you reference your SPListItem objects through the SharePoint API.  Ok, now that you get the point that this will be a “learn from my mistakes and don’t do unsmart things like I did” post, let’s dig into what it was that I did poorly. Scenario     For the past year I’ve been building custom .Net applications that are hosted through SharePoint.  These application involve a number of SharePoint lists, external databases, custom web parts, and other SharePoint elements to provide functionality.  About two weeks ago I received a message from one of our end users that a custom application was performing slowly.  Specifically performance was slow when users were performing actions that interacted with the primary SharePoint list storing data for that app. The Problem     I took a copy of the production site into a dev environment to investigate the code that was executing.  After attaching the debugger and running through the code I quickly found pieces of code referencing SPListItem objects (like below) that were performing very poorly: SPListItem myItem = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["List Name"].Items.GetItemById(value); // do updates on SPListItem retrieved     As it turns out the SPList I was referencing was fairly large at ~1000 items and weighing in over 150 MB.  You see the problem with my above code is that I retrieved the SPListItem by first (unnecessarily) going through the Items member of the list.  As I understand it, when doing so the executing code will attempt to resolve that entity and pull it from the database and into RAM (all 150 MB.)  This causes the equivalent of a 50 car pile up in terms of performance with a single update taking more than 15 seconds. The Solution     The solution is actually quite simple and I wish I had realized this during development.  Instead of going through the Items member it is possible to call GetItemById(…) directly on the SPList as in the example below: SPListItem myItem = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["List Name"].GetItemById(value); // do updates on SPListItem retrieved     After making this simple change performance skyrocketed and updates were back to less than a second.   Conclusion     When given the option between two solutions, usually the simplest is the best solution.  In my scenario I was adding extra complexity going through the API the long way around to get to the objects I needed and it ended up hurting performance greatly.  Luckily we were able to find and resolve the performance issue in a relatively short amount of time.  Like I said at the beginning of the post, learn from my mistakes and hope it helps you.         -Frog Out   Image linked from http://www.freespirit.com/files/IMAGE/COVER/LARGE/BeCarefulSafe.jpg

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• JRockit Virtual Edition Debug Key

  - by changjae.lee

  There are a few keys that can help the debugging of the JRVE env in console. you can type in each keys in JRVE console to see what's happening under the hood. key '0' : System information key '5' : Enable shutdown key '7' : Start JRockit Management Server (port 7091) key '8' : Statistics Counters key '9' : Full Thread Dump key '0' : Status of Debug-key Below is the sample out from each keys. Debug-key '1' pressed ============ JRockitVE System Information ============ JRockitVE version : 11.1.1.3.0-67-131044 Kernel version : 6.1.0.0-97-131024 JVM version : R27.6.6-28_o-125824-1.6.0_17-20091214-2104-linux-ia32 Hypervisor version : Xen 3.4.0 Boot state : 0x007effff Uptime : 0 days 02:04:31 CPU : uniprocessor @2327 Mhz CPU usage : 0% ctx/s: 285 preempt/s: 0 migrations/s: 0 Physical pages : 82379/261121 (321/1020 MB) Network info : 10.179.97.64 (10.179.97.64/255.255.254.0) GateWay : 10.179.96.1 MAC address : 00:16:3e:7e:dc:78 Boot options : vfsCwd : /application/user_projects/domains/wlsve_domain mainArgs : java -javaagent:/jrockitve/services/sshd/sshd.jar -cp /jrockitve/jrockit/lib/tools.jar:/jrockitve/lib/common.jar:/application/patch_wls1032/profiles/default/sys_manifest_classpath/weblogic_patch.jar:/application/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/weblogic.jar -Dweblogic.Name=WlsveAdmin -Dweblogic.Domain=wlsve_domain -Dweblogic.management.username=weblogic -Dweblogic.management.password=welcome1 -Dweblogic.management.GenerateDefaultConfig=true weblogic.Server consLog : /jrockitve/log/jrockitve.log mounts : ext2 / dev0; posixLocale : en_US posixTimezone : Asia/Seoul posixEncoding : ISO-8859-1 Local disk : Size: 1024M, Used: 728M, Free: 295M ======================================================== Debug-key '5' pressed Shutdown enabled. Debug-key '7' pressed [JRockit] Management server already started. Ignoring request. Debug-key '8' pressed Starting stat recording Debug-key '8' pressed ========= Statistics Counters for the last second ========= dev.eth0_rx.cnt : 22 packets dev.eth0_rx_bytes.cnt : 2704 bytes dev.net_interrupts.cnt : 22 interrupts evt.timer_ticks.cnt : 123 ticks hyper.priv_entries.cnt : 144 entries schedule.context_switches.cnt : 271 switches schedule.idle_cpu_time.cnt : 997318849 nanoseconds schedule.idle_cpu_time_0.cnt : 997318849 nanoseconds schedule.total_cpu_time.cnt : 1000031757 nanoseconds time.system_time.cnt : 1000 ns time.timer_updates.cnt : 123 updates time.wallclock_time.cnt : 1000 ns ======================================= Debug-key '9' pressed ===== FULL THREAD DUMP =============== Fri Jun 4 08:22:12 2010 BEA JRockit(R) R27.6.6-28_o-125824-1.6.0_17-20091214-2104-linux-ia32 "Main Thread" id=1 idx=0x4 tid=1 prio=5 alive, in native, waiting -- Waiting for notification on: weblogic/t3/srvr/T3Srvr@0x646ede8[fat lock] at jrockit/vm/Threads.waitForNotifySignal(JLjava/lang/Object;)Z(Native Method) at java/lang/Object.wait(J)V(Native Method) at java/lang/Object.wait(Object.java:485) at weblogic/t3/srvr/T3Srvr.waitForDeath(T3Srvr.java:919) ^-- Lock released while waiting: weblogic/t3/srvr/T3Srvr@0x646ede8[fat lock] at weblogic/t3/srvr/T3Srvr.run(T3Srvr.java:479) at weblogic/Server.main(Server.java:67) at jrockit/vm/RNI.c2java(IIIII)V(Native Method) -- end of trace "(Signal Handler)" id=2 idx=0x8 tid=2 prio=5 alive, in native, daemon Open lock chains ================ Chain 1: "ExecuteThread: '0' for queue: 'weblogic.socket.Muxer'" id=23 idx=0x50 tid=20 waiting for java/lang/String@0x630c588 held by: "ExecuteThread: '1' for queue: 'weblogic.socket.Muxer'" id=24 idx=0x54 tid=21 (active) ===== END OF THREAD DUMP =============== Debug-key '0' pressed Debug-keys enabled Happy Cloud Walking :)

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• MDM Poised for Growth

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  David Nixon, an Oracle colleague of mine, was doing some research on MDM the other day. He came up with some well founded insights that I thought I’d share with you. Gartner recently published a note asking “Should Organizations Using ERP 'Do' Master Data Management?”  It may seem a bit strange but that’s a question Gartner has been asked by a number of companies as organizations are beginning to understand the importance of data governance and data stewardship.  That’s because ERP Suites typically “focus on integrating their own applications within suites, but have little interest in making their suites interoperate with the applications or suites of other vendors.”  Therefore, Gartner is advising customers that “have deployed or plan to support multiple packaged application suites (even from the same vendor) that have different semantic data and/or process models” to add an MDM solution. And it appears that customers are taking note.  In a more recent note entitled “Search Analytics Trends: Master Data Management”, Gartner noted that MDM searches on gartner.com in November 2010 “were 300% higher than [in] May 2009, indicating the increased interest an importance that businesses are placing on MDM.”  Why the increased interest?  Moving towards a single version of the truth is a familiar theme, but customers are talking more about the underlying business value that this enables.  For example, businesses are talking about the need to fix master data before they can successfully move forward on SOA initiatives.  And the growing demands for compliance continue to be a major driver.  In short, companies are talking more about specific and tangible business value, and they are looking for help creating business cases for an MDM initiative. Why This Matters Gartner’s notes make three things clear.  First, MDM is poised for growth as organizations gain a greater understanding for it and the need they have.  Many are still sorting it out, but the demand is growing and is sure to rise.  Second, any organization with a heterogeneous computing environment should invest in MDM.  Even solutions from the same vendor may have different data models and could benefit from MDM.  But the key to growth, or which vendors will benefit the most from it, is the third and perhaps most critical point: companies need help with the business case for MDM. Oracle can help your organization build a compelling business case for MDM. We have seen our 1100+ MDM customers gain competitive advantages in a wide variety of implementations. Give us a ring.

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• IDC Analyst Report Touts Oracle–Accenture Strategic Initiative

  - by kristin.jellison

  Hi there, partners! Oracle Engineered Systems have been getting some love lately, and we want to share it with you! The market intelligence and advisory firm IDC recently released a report lauding Oracle and Accenture’s strategic initiative to route the performance and flexibility of Oracle Engineered Systems to clients. The report, "Oracle and Accenture Strategic Alliance Places Big Bet on Engineered Systems,” by Steve White, reflects a largely positive analysis of the relationship. White notes that the alliance is “one of the largest in the industry.” Under the relationship, Accenture has incorporated Oracle Engineered Systems—including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle SuperCluster, and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine—into its leading datacenter transformation consulting services. Together, the two companies have also created bespoke platforms, such as the Accenture Foundation Platform for Oracle, which helps clients accelerate deployments on Oracle Fusion Middleware, running Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Oracle Engineered Systems deliver a single, engineered platform—including server to storage and networking. This makes it easier and cheaper for Accenture clients around the world to prepare their datacenters for managing, processing and analyzing the massive amounts of data they (rightly) anticipate seeing in the next decade. The new solutions can help reduce the effort and cost to migrate any vendor database to an Oracle Engineered Systems platform, which can lower the cost of ownership by up to 50 percent. For its part, Accenture has built a team of 300 consultants to implement and increase the flexibility and stability of client datacenters. This move further expands one of the fastest-growing full-service Oracle Enterprise solutions. Over 52,000 Accenture consultants are qualified to implement, upgrade and outsource the Oracle product suite. Accenture is a Diamond-level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). For Oracle Partners, this update should give you at least two things to walk away with. First, this initiative is showing signs of success. As Marty Cole, group chief executive for Accenture’s Technology growth platform, put it, “We are seeing an increasing number of clients recognizing the value of consolidating their databases and taking advantage of the cost and performance benefits delivered by these solutions.” The pipeline is there—and not just for Accenture. Use this example to show your clients that investments in Oracle Engineered Systems are on the rise. Second, recognize that Oracle Engineered Systems represent one of the biggest platforms for growth that Oracle has to offer partners. As part of the agreement, Accenture is able to provide: Platform Readiness Assessments Platform Implementation App Rationalization Database Rationalization Managed Services These are all enablement opportunities you can offer customers under Oracle’s partner programs —to continue building the value of their investments, and the value of your relationship with Oracle. Take a read through the IDC report. To learn more about the partnership, see this press release. Happy selling! The OPN Communications Team

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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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• Understanding the JSF Lifecycle and ADF Optimized Lifecycle

  - by Steven Davelaar

  While coaching ADF development teams over the years, I have noticed that many developers lack a basic understanding of Java Server Faces, in particular the JSF lifecycle and how ADF optimizes this lifecycle in specific situations. As a result, ADF developers who are tasked to build a seemingly simple ADF page, can get extremely frustrated by the -in their eyes- unexpected or unlogical behavior of ADF.  They start to play with the immediate property and the partialTriggers property in a trial-and-error manner. Often, they play with these properties until their specific issue is solved, unaware of other more severe bugs that might be introduced by the values they choose for these properties. So, I decided to submit a presentation for the UKOUG entitled "What you need to know about JSF to be succesful with ADF".  The abstract was accepted, and I started putting together the presentation and demo application. I built up a demo application step-by-step, trying to cover the JSF-related  top issues and challenges I encountered over the years in a simple "Hello World" demo. This turned out to be both a very time-consuming and very interesting journey. I had never thought I would learn so much myself in preparing this presentation. I never thought I would end up with potentially controversial conclusions like "Never set immediate=true on an editable component".  I did not realize the sometimes immense implications of the ADF optimized lifecycle beforehand. I never thought that "Hello World" demo's could get so complex. But as I went on I was confident this was valuable material, even for experienced ADF developers with a good understanding of JSF. When I finished, I realized the original title and abstract was misleading, as was the target audience. Yes, it was covering the JSF lifecycle, but no other aspects of JSF you need to know for ADF development. Yes, it was covering some JSF basics as mentioned in the abstract, but all in all it had become a pretty advanced presentation. At the same time, the issues discussed are very common, novice ADF developers might easily run into them while building their first pages. I ran out of time, so I decided to just present what I had, apologizing at the beginning for the misleading title, showing a second slide with a better title "18 invaluable lessons about ADF-JSF interaction". I think the presentation was well received overall, although people who don't like it or don't understand it, usually don't come and tell you afterwards.... I am still struggling with the title, for this blog post I used yet another title, anyway, you can download the presentation-that-still-lacks-a-good-title here. The finished JDev 11.1.1.6 demo app can be downloaded here.  The 18 lessons mentioned in the presentation are summarized here. As mentioned on the last slide, print out the lessons, and learn them by heart, I am pretty sure it will save you lots of time and frustration!

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• SQL SERVER – Simple Explanation and Puzzle with SOUNDEX Function and DIFFERENCE Function

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier this week I asked a question where I asked how to Swap Values of the column without using CASE Statement. Read here: A Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement,there were more than 50 solutions proposed in the comment. There were many creative solutions. I have mentioned my personal favorite (different ones) here: Solution of Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement. However, I received lots of questions regarding one of the Solution by SIJIN KUMAR V P. He has used the function SOUNDEX in his solution. The request was to explain how SOUNDEX and DIFFERENCE works. Well, there are pretty decent documentations provided over here SOUNDEX function and DIFFERENCE over on MSDN and if I attempt to explain this function I will end up writing the same details which are available on MSDN. Instead of writing theory, we will try to learn this function by using a couple of simple puzzles. You try to solve the puzzles using the MSDN and see if you can learn something very quickly. In simple words - SOUNDEX converts an alphanumeric string to a four-character code to find similar-sounding words or names. The first character of the code is the first character of character_expression and the second through fourth characters of the code are numbers that represent the letters in the expression. Vowels incharacter_expression are ignored unless they are the first letter of the string. DIFFERENCE function returns an integer value. The  integer returned is the number of characters in the SOUNDEX values that are the same. The return value ranges from 0 through 4: 0 indicates weak or no similarity, and 4 indicates strong similarity or the same values. Learning Puzzle 1: Now let us run following four queries and observe its output. SELECT SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SLTR') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SaLaTaRa') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SaLaTaRaM') SdxValue When you look at the result set all the four values are same. The reason for all the values to be same is as for SQL Server SOUNDEX function all the four strings are similarly sounding string. Learning Puzzle 2: Now let us run following five queries and observe its output. SELECT DIFFERENCE (SOUNDEX('SLTR'),SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE (SOUNDEX('TH'),SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SQLAuthority',SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SLTR',SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SLTR','SQLAuthority') When you look at the result set you will get the result in the ranges from 1 to 4. Here is how it works if your result is 0 which means absolutely not relevant to each other and if your result is 1 which means the results are relevant to each other. Have you ever used above two functions in your business need or on production server? If yes, would you please leave a comment with use cases. I believe it will be beneficial to everyone. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Go Big or Go Special

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  Watching Shark Tank tonight and the first presentation was by Mango Mango Preserves and it highlighted an interesting contrast in business trends today and how to capitalize on opportunities.  <Spoiler Alert> Even though every one of the sharks was raving about the product samples they tried, with two of them going for second and third servings, none of them made a deal to invest in the company.</Spoiler>  In fact, one of the sharks, Kevin O’Leary, kept ripping into the owners with statements to the effect that he thinks they are headed over a financial cliff because he felt their costs were way out of line and would be their downfall if they didn’t take action to radically cut costs. He said that he had previously owned a jams and jellies business and knew the cost ratios that you had to have to make it work.  I don’t doubt he knows exactly what he’s talking about and is 100% accurate…for doing business his way, which I’ll call “Go Big”.  But there’s a whole other way to do business today that would be ideal for these ladies to pursue. As I understand it, based on his level of success in various businesses and the fact that he is even in a position to be investing in other companies, Kevin’s approach is to go mass market (Go Big) and make hundreds of millions of dollars in sales (or something along that scale) while squeezing out every ounce of cost that you can to produce an acceptable margin.  But there is a very different way of making a very successful business these days, which is all about building a passionate and loyal community of customers that are rooting for your success and even actively trying to help you succeed by promoting your product or company (Go Special).  This capitalizes on the power of social media, niche marketing, and The Long Tail.  One of the most prolific writers about capitalizing on this trend is Seth Godin, and I hope that the founders of Mango Mango pick up a couple of his books (probably Purple Cow and Tribes would be good starts) or at least read his blog.  I think the adoration expressed by all of the sharks for the product is the biggest hint that they have a remarkable product and that they are perfect for this type of business approach. Both are completely valid business models, and it may certainly be that the scale at which Kevin O’Leary wants to conduct business where he invests his money is well beyond the long tail, but that doesn’t mean that there is not still a lot of money to be made there.  I wish them the best of luck with their endeavors!

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• flicker when drawing 4 models for the first time

  - by Badescu Alexandru

  i have some models that i only draw at a certain moment in the game (after some seconds since the game has started). The problem is that in that first second when i start to draw the models, i see a flicker (in the sence that everything besides those models, dissapears, the background gets purple). The flicker only lasts for that frame, and then everything seems to run the way it should. UPDATE I see now that regardless of the moment i draw the models, the first frame has always the flickering aspect What could this be about? i'll share my draw method: int temp = 0; foreach (MeshObject meshObj in ShapeList) { foreach (BasicEffect effect in meshObj.mesh.Effects) { #region color elements int i = int.Parse(meshObj.mesh.Name.ElementAt(1) + ""); int j = int.Parse(meshObj.mesh.Name.ElementAt(2) + ""); int getShapeColor = shapeColorList.ElementAt(i * 4 + j); if (getShapeColor == (int)Constants.shapeColor.yellow) effect.DiffuseColor = yellow; else if (getShapeColor == (int)Constants.shapeColor.red) effect.DiffuseColor = red; else if (getShapeColor == (int)Constants.shapeColor.green) effect.DiffuseColor = green; else if (getShapeColor == (int)Constants.shapeColor.blue) effect.DiffuseColor = blue; #endregion #region lighting effect.LightingEnabled = true; effect.AmbientLightColor = new Vector3(0.25f, 0.25f, 0.25f); effect.DirectionalLight0.Enabled = true; effect.DirectionalLight0.Direction = new Vector3(-0.3f, -0.3f, -0.9f); effect.DirectionalLight0.SpecularColor = new Vector3(.7f, .7f, .7f); Vector3 v = Vector3.Normalize(new Vector3(-100, 0, -100)); effect.DirectionalLight1.Enabled = true; effect.DirectionalLight1.Direction = v; effect.DirectionalLight1.SpecularColor = new Vector3(0.6f, 0.6f, .6f); #endregion effect.Projection = camera.projectionMatrix; effect.View = camera.viewMatrix; if (meshObj.isSetInPlace == true) { effect.World = transforms[meshObj.mesh.ParentBone.Index] * gameobject.orientation; // draw in original cube-placed position meshObj.mesh.Draw(); } else { effect.World = meshObj.Orientation; // draw inSetInPlace position meshObj.mesh.Draw(); } } temp++; }

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• Travelling MVP #3: Community event in Varna, Bulgaria

  - by DigiMortal

  Second stop in my DevReach 2012 trip was at Varna. We had not much time to hang around there but this problem will get fixed next year if not before. But still we had sessions there with Dimitar Georgijev and I had also chance to meet local techies. Next time we will have more tech and beers for sure! We started in the morning from Bucharest and travelled through Ruse, Razgrad and Shumen to Varna. It’s about 275km. We used cab, local bus and Dimitar father’s car. We had one food stop in Ruse and after that we went directly to Varna. Here is our route on map. Varna is Bulgarian city that locates on western coast of Black Sea. I have been there once before this trip and it’s good place to have vacation under sun. Also autumn is there milder than here in Estonia (third day of snow is going on). Bulgaria has some good beers, my favorite mankind killer called rakia and very good national cuisine. Food is made of fresh stuff and it is damn good experience. Here are some arbitrarily selected images (you can click on these to view at original size): Old bus “monument” in Razgrad Stuffed peppers, Bulgarian national cuisine Infra-red community having good time and beers We made our sessions at one study class of Varna technical university. It’s a little bit old style university but everything we needed was there and we had no problems with machinery. Sessions were same as in Bucharest. The user group in Varna is brand new and hopefully it will be something bigger one good day. At least I try to make my commits so they get on their feet quicker. As we had not much time to announce the event there was about 15 guys listening to us and I’m happy that it was not too much hyped event because still I was getting my first experiences with foreign audiences. After sessions we took our stuff to hotel and went to hang around with local techies. We had some good time there and made some new friends. Next time when I go to Varna I go back as more experienced speaker and I plan to do there one tougher and highly challenging session. Maybe somebody from Estonian community will join me and then it will be well planned surprise-attack to Varna :)

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• Recording Topics manually and automatically

  - by maria.cozzolino(at)oracle.com

  When you are recording UPK topics, the default mode for recording is manual recording, where you tell the system when to record each screen shot. This mode allows you to take the exact screen shot you need. However, it does get a bit tedious when you are recording long topics, especially if you forget to take a few screen shots. In UPK 3.5, a new version of recording was introduced - Automatic Recording. It was designed to simplify the recording process by automatically capturing screen shots as you perform your transaction. If you haven't experimented with Automatic Recording, I'd recommend you give it a try - it might make your recording life easier. If you are recording with sound, you can also narrate your topic while recording it. To turn on Automatic Recording: 1. In Tools/Options, there are two recorder tabs. The first tab, under content defaults, includes settings that you may want to share between developers, like whether keyboard shortcuts are automatically captured. 2. The second tab is the one that contains the personal preferences, like screen shot capture key and whether to record automatically or manually. On this tab, choose the option for Automatic Recording. 3. Save the settings. Note that this setting will NOT impact content defaults; this is for your user only. When you launch the recorder, you will notice a slightly different message with guidance on how to start and stop automatic recording. Once you start recording, the recorder window is hidden until the end of the recording session to allow you to capture your transaction. In the task tray, there is a series of icons that let you know that you are capturing content. You can pause the recording, as well as set and view your sound levels if you are using sound. A camera appears during each screen capture to help you know when the system is capturing a screen shot, and a context indicator appears to show the recognition. With automatic recording, you can let the system capture the necessary screen shots. It may provide a more natural recording experience, and is probably easier for the untrained developer. On the other hand, you have a bit more control with manual recording on which screen shot appears, but it also means you have to remember to capture the screen shot. :) We'd be interested in hearing which type of recording you do, and any rationale on why you made that choice. Please comment and let us know. --Maria Cozzolino, Manager of UPK Software Requirements and UI Design

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• Problems with Level Architect, Citrus Engine, Flash

  - by Idan

  I am using the Citrus Engine to make a Flash game, and the Level Architect doesn't work well for me. Firstly, when I first launch it and open my project and my level, nothing is shown, no assets and not anything I have previously done with my level. To fix it, I open another project. The other project works fine, meaning I can see the assets and the level. Then I go back to the actual project I am working on, and the problem is fixed, only it does not fix the second problem: I can't add my own assests. I follow the manual and add tags like this: [Property(value="0")] But it doesn't change a thing in the level architect window (even after I close and reopen it). Any ideas? Thanks! Here's the code of the class I want to be shown in the Level Architect: package { import com.citrusengine.objects.PhysicsObject; import com.citrusengine.objects.platformer.Sensor; import flash.utils.clearTimeout; import flash.utils.setTimeout; /** * @author Aymeric */ public class Teleporter extends Sensor { [Property(value="0")] public var endX:Number=0; [Property(value="0")] public var endY:Number=0; public var object:PhysicsObject; [Property(value="0")] public var time:Number = 0; public var needToTeleport:Boolean = false; protected var _teleporting:Boolean = false; private var _teleportTimeoutID:uint; public function Teleporter(name:String, params:Object = null) { super(name, params); } override public function destroy():void { clearTimeout(_teleportTimeoutID); super.destroy(); } override public function update(timeDelta:Number):void { super.update(timeDelta); if (needToTeleport) { _teleporting = true; _teleportTimeoutID = setTimeout(_teleport, time); needToTeleport = false; } _updateAnimation(); } protected function _teleport():void { _teleporting = false; object.x = endX; object.y = endY; clearTimeout(_teleportTimeoutID); } protected function _updateAnimation():void { if (_teleporting) { _animation = "teleport"; } else { _animation = "normal"; } } } }

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• SOA Suite 11g Releases

  - by antony.reynolds

  A few years ago Mars renamed one of the most popular chocolate bars in England from Marathon to Snickers.  Even today there are still some people confused by the name change and refer to them as marathons. Well last week we released SOA Suite 11.1.1.3 and BPM Suite 11.1.1.3 as well as OSB 11.1.1.3.  Seems that some people are a little confused by the naming and how to install these new versions, probably the same Brits who call Snickers a Marathon :-).  Seems that calling all the revisions 11g Release 1 has caused confusion.  To help these people I have created a little diagram to show how you can get the latest version onto your machine.  The dotted lines indicate dependencies. Note that SOA Suite 11.1.1.3 and BPM 11.1.1.3 are provided as a patch that is applied to SOA Suite 11.1.1.2.  For a new install there is no need to run the 11.1.1.2 RCU, you can run the 11.1.1.3 RCU directly. All SOA & BPM Suite 11g installations are built on a WebLogic Server base.  The WebLogic 11g Release 1 version is 10.3 with an additional number indicating the revision.  Similarly the 11g Release 1 SOA Suite, Service Bus and BPM Suite have a version 11.1.1 with an additional number indicating the revision.  The final revision number should match the final revision in the WebLogic Server version.  The products are also sometimes identified by a Patch Set number, indicating whether this is the 11gR1 product with the first or second patch set.  The table below show the different revisions with their alias. Product Version Base WebLogic Alias SOA Suite 11gR1 11.1.1.1 10.3.1 Release 1 or R1 SOA Suite 11gR1 11.1.1.2 10.3.2 Patch Set 1 or PS1 SOA Suite 11gR1 11.1.1.3 10.3.3 Patch Set 2 or PS2 BPM Suite 11gR1 11.1.1.3 10.3.3 Release 1 or R1 OSB 11gR1 11.1.1.3 10.3.3 Release 1 or R1 Hope this helps some people, if you find it useful you could always send me a Marathon bar, sorry Snickers!

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• Case Management API by Koen van Dijk

  - by JuergenKress

  Case Management is a new addition to Oracle BPM in release 11.1.1.1.7 (PS6). This new release contains the Case Management engine, see blog Léon at  http://leonsmiers.blogspot.nl/ for more details.  However, currently this release does not contain a case portal. The case management API's, just like the already existing Oracle BPM API's, help in developing a portal page with relative ease. This blog will use some real life examples from the EURent casemanagement application and portal application developed by Oracle. The Oracle BPM Case Management API is a Java Based API that enables developers to programmatically access the new Case Management functionalities. It is an elaborate API that can access all the functionalities of Oracle Case Management. I will describe two of those functionalities in this blog: retrieving case data as DOM (http://www.w3.org/DOM/) and attaching a document to a case. Libraries First of all when creating a Case Management project you will need to attach the following libraries: These contain all the classes that are in the Case Management API. Service client To do anything with the BPM CaseManagement API in general it is necessary to create a CaseManagementServiceClient Object. The Case Management service client is the central piece of the Case Management API. It can be used to retrieve two different types of services. The first is the case stream service and the case service. The case stream service contains functionality to upload and download documents to and from a case. The second one is the CaseService. This service contains all the other functionality acting upon a case including but not limited to: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: ACM API,adaptive Case Management,BPM,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• How to use SharePoint modal dialog box to display Custom Page Part3

  - by ybbest

  In the second part of the series, I showed you how to display and close a custom page in a SharePoint modal dialog using JavaScript and display a message after the modal dialog is closed. In this post, I’d like to show you how to use SPLongOperation with the Modal dialog box. You can download the source code here. 1. Firstly, modify the element file as follow <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"> <CustomAction Id="ReportConcern" RegistrationType="ContentType" RegistrationId="0x010100866B1423D33DDA4CA1A4639B54DD4642" Location="EditControlBlock" Sequence="107" Title="Display Custom Page" Description="To Display Custom Page in a modal dialog box on this item"> <UrlAction Url="javascript: function emitStatus(messageToDisplay) { statusId = SP.UI.Status.addStatus(messageToDisplay.message + ' ' +messageToDisplay.location ); SP.UI.Status.setStatusPriColor(statusId, 'Green'); } function portalModalDialogClosedCallback(result, value) { if (value !== null) { emitStatus(value); } } var options = { url: '{SiteUrl}' + '/_layouts/YBBEST/TitleRename.aspx?List={ListId}&amp;ID={ItemId}', title: 'Rename title', allowMaximize: false, showClose: true, width: 500, height: 300, dialogReturnValueCallback: portalModalDialogClosedCallback }; SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog(options);" /> </CustomAction> </Elements> 2. In your code behind, you can implement a close dialog function as below. This will close your modal dialog box once the button is clicked and display a status bar. Note that you need to use window.frameElement.commonModalDialogClose instead of window.frameElement.commonModalDialogClose protected void SubmitClicked(object sender, EventArgs e) { //Process stuff string message = "You clicked the Submit button"; string newLocation="http://www.google.com"; string information = string.Format("{{'message':'{0}','location':'{1}' }}", message, newLocation); var longOperation = new SPLongOperation(Page); longOperation.LeadingHTML = "Processing the  application"; longOperation.TrailingHTML = "Please wait while the application is being processed."; longOperation.Begin(); Thread.Sleep(5*1000); var closeDialogScript = GetCloseDialogScriptForLongProcess(information); longOperation.EndScript(closeDialogScript); } protected static string GetCloseDialogScriptForLongProcess(string message) { var scriptBuilder = new StringBuilder(); scriptBuilder.Append("window.frameElement.commonModalDialogClose(1,").Append(message).Append(");"); return scriptBuilder.ToString(); }   References: How to: Display a Page as a Modal Dialog Box

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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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• How to design a scalable notification system?

  - by Trent

  I need to write a notification system manager. Here is my requirements: I need to be able to send a Notification on different platforms, which may be totally different (for exemple, I need to be able to send either an SMS or an E-mail). Sometimes the notification may be the same for all recipients for a given platform, but sometimes it may be a notification per recipients (or several) per platform. Each notification can contain platform specific payload (for exemple an MMS can contains a sound or an image). The system need to be scalable, I need to be able to send a very large amount of notification without crashing either the application or the server. It is a two step process, first a customer may type a message and choose a platform to send to, and the notification(s) should be created to be processed either real-time either later. Then the system needs to send the notification to the platform provider. For now, I end up with some though but I don't know how scalable it will be or if it is a good design. I've though of the following objects (in a pseudo language): a generic Notification object: class Notification { String $message; Payload $payload; Collection<Recipient> $recipients; } The problem with the following objects is what if I've 1.000.000 recipients ? Even if the Recipient object is very small, it'll take too much memory. I could also create one Notification per recipient, but some platform providers requires me to send it in batch, meaning I need to define one Notification with several Recipients. Each created notification could be stored in a persistent storage like a DB or Redis. Would it be a good it to aggregate this later to make sure it is scalable? On the second step, I need to process this notification. But how could I distinguish the notification to the right platform provider? Should I use an object like MMSNotification extending an abstract Notification? or something like Notification.setType('MMS')? To allow to process a lot of notification at the same time, I think a messaging queue system like RabbitMQ may be the right tool. Is it? It would allow me to queue a lot of notification and have several worker to pop notification and process them. But what if I need to batch the recipients as seen above? Then I imagine a NotificationProcessor object for which I could I add NotificationHandler each NotificationHandler would be in charge to connect the platform provider and perform notification. I can also use an EventManager to allow pluggable behavior. Any feedbacks or ideas? Thanks for giving your time. Note: I'm used to work in PHP and it is likely the language of my choice.

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• Safely deploying changes to production servers

  - by oazabir

  When you deploy incremental changes on a production server, which is running and live all the time, you some times see error messages like “Compiler Error Message: The Type ‘XXX’ exists in both…”. Sometimes you find Application_Start event not firing although you shipped a new class, dll or web.config. Sometimes you find static variables not getting initialized and so on. There are so many weird things happen on webservers when you incrementally deploy changes to the server and the server has been up and running for several weeks. So, I came up with a full proof house keeping steps that we always do whenever we deploy some incremental change to our websites. These steps ensure that the web sites are properly recycled , cached are cleared, all the data stored at Application level is initialized. First of all you should have multiple web servers behind load balancer. This way you can take one server our of the production traffic, do your deployment and house keeping tasks like restarting IIS, and then put it back. Then you can do it for the second server and so on. This ensures there’s no outage for customer. If you can do it reasonable fast, hopefully customers won’t notice discrepancy between the servers some having new code and some having old code. You should only do this when your changes aren’t drastic. For ex, you aren’t delivering a complete revamped UI. In that case, some users hitting server1 with latest UI will suddenly get a completely different experience and then on next page refresh, they might hit server2 with old code and get a totally different experience. This works for incremental non-dramatic changes only.   During deployment you should follow these steps: Take server X out of load balancer so that it does not get any traffic. Stop all windows services on the server. Stop IIS. Delete the Temporary ASP.NET folders of all .NET versions incase you have multiple .NET versions running. You can follow this link. Deploy the changes. Flush any distributed cache you have, for ex, Velocity or Memcached. Start IIS. Start the windows services on the server. Warm up all websites by hitting major URLs on the websites. You should have some automated script to do this. You can use tinyget to hit some major URLs, especially pages that take a lot of time to compile. Read my post on keeping websites warm with zero coding. Put server X back to load balancer so that it starts receiving traffic. That’s it. It should give you a clean deployment and prevent unexpected errors. You should print these steps and hang on the desk of your deployment guys so that they never forget during deployment pressure.

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• Best Platform/Engine for turn based Client/Server Android game

  - by Paradine

  I'm currently designing a turn based game for tablets. Initially for Android with porting to iOS later considered in design. I'm having trouble narrowing down the available technologies to even know where to spend my research time. I am hoping that if I explain what I am trying to achieve someone may be able to suggest a platform and/or engine. I've looked into some of the open source Engines ( http://www.cuteandroid.com/ten-open-source-android-2d-or-3d-game-engine-for-android-developers ) and some appear to handle much of what I might require - although with a higher focus on graphics than i need. Mages looks interesting although development appears to have ceased. If I could somehow leverage GoogleApps that would be excellent. Here is what I am trying to achieve: PvP turn based strategy game over internet - minimal animation and bandwidth required Players match up online using MetaGame system MatchID created on Resolution Server and Game starts Clients have 30 second countdown to select MoveString Clients sends small secure timestamped and MatchIDed MoveString to Resolution server Resolution server looks up Move String for each player, Resolves and Updates Players status in MatchID on Server Resolution server updates Client Views Repeat until victory conditions met - MatchID Closed, Rewards earned in MetaGame There will also need to be a full social and account system and metagame backend - but this could be running on separate system(s) Tablet in Offline mode would be catalog browsing and perhaps single player AI - bum I'm focusing on the Resolution Server at this point I'm not even certain if I would be looking at an Android App or a WebApp at this stage! I want a custom GUI so I guess an app - but maybe as I have little animation a WebApp might also work. Probably some combination of both. There will be very small overhead in data between client server - essentially a small text string every 30 seconds sent to the Resolution server which looks up the Effect and applies it to the Opponents string and determines some results to apply to the match. The client view is updated minimally with the results (only 5 in game Integers tracked) - perhaps triggering small animations/popups on the client to show the end result. e.g Explosion. If you have suggestions for a good technology or platform to best achieving the Resolution Server I'd love to hear. Also if you have experience with open source Engines - and could narrow down which (if any ) might be most suitable that would be a big help. Thanks in advance

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