patch management - Page 458

TalkTalk Business Succeeds with Engaging Conversations on an Eloqua platform

- by Richard Lefebvre

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 “Everybody from online, CRM and data, channel management, communications, and content had to pull together to deliver one campaign and Eloqua was the glue that held it all together.” says Paul Higgins, Marketing Director, TalkTalk Business (UK, telco) in this 2'23 video. Challenges Nurturing multiple sales channels with very diverse customers. Generating leads qualified to a very high standard. Engaging a fatigued and apathetic target audience. Positioning the brand as industry thought leaders. Solutions “What’s Your Business Grade?” campaign Eloqua automated email nurture strategy Eloqua Partner Network – Stein IAS Results ROI of 20:1. 40% uplift in sales opportunities in the smaller end with a 25% reduction in costs. 20–25% increase in sales qualified leads for mid-market, corporate, and enterprise customer sets. Open rate highs of 61.84% and click to open highs of 15.97%. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2010: Tips for delaying the Visual Upgrade

- by Kelly Jones

My most recent project has been to migrate a bunch of sites from WSS 3.0 (SharePoint 2007) to SharePoint Server 2010. The users are currently working with WSS 3.0 and Office 2003, so the new ribbon based UI in 2010 will be completely new. My client wants to avoid the new SharePoint 2010 look and feel until they’ve had time to train their users, so we’ve been testing the upgrades by keeping them with the 2007 user interface. Permission to perform the Visual Upgrade One of the first things we noticed was the default permissions for who was allowed to switch the UI from 2007 to 2010. By default, site collection administrators and site owners can do this. Since we wanted to more tightly control the timing of the new UI, I added a few lines to the PowerShell script that we are using to perform the migration. This script creates the web application, sets the User Policy, and then does a Mount-SPDatabase to attach the old 2007 content database to the 2010 farm. I added the following steps after the Mount-SPDatabase step: #Remove the visual upgrade option for site owners # it remains for Site Collection administrators foreach ($sc in $WebApp.Sites){ foreach ($web in $sc.AllWebs){ #Visual Upgrade permissions for the site/subsite (web) $web.UIversionConfigurationEnabled = $false; $web.Update(); } } These script steps loop through each Site Collection in a particular web application ($WebApp) and then it loops through each subsite ($web) in the Site Collection ($sc) and disables the Site Owner’s permission to perform the Visual Upgrade. This is equivalent to going to the Site Collection administrator settings page –> Visual Upgrade and selecting “Hide Visual Upgrade”. Since only IT people have Site Collection administrator privileges, this will allow IT to control the timing of the new 2010 UI rollout. Newly created subsites Our next issue was brought to our attention by SharePoint Joel’s blog post last week (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=524 ). In it, he lists some updates about the 2010 upgrade, and his fourth point was one that I hadn’t seen yet: 4. If a 2007 upgraded site has not been visually upgraded, the sites created underneath it will look like 2010 sites – While this is something I’ve been aware of, I think many don’t realize how this impacts common look and feel for master pages, and how it impacts good navigation and UI. As well depending on your patch level you may see hanging behavior in the list picker. The site and list creation Silverlight control in Internet Explorer is looking for resources that don’t exist in the galleries in the 2007 site, and hence it continues to spin and spin and eventually time out. The work around is to upgrade to SP1, or use Chrome or Firefox which won’t attempt to render the Silverlight control. When the root site collection is a 2007 site and has it’s set of galleries and the children are 2010 sites there is some strange behavior linked to the way that the galleries work and pull from the parent. Our production SharePoint 2010 Farm has SP1 installed, as well as the December 2011 Cumulative Update, so I think the “hanging behavior” he mentions won’t affect us. However, since we want to control the roll out of the UI, we are concerned that new subsites will have the 2010 look and feel, no matter what the parent site has. Ok, time to dust off my developer skills. I first looked into using feature stapling, but I couldn’t get that to work (although I’m pretty sure I had everything wired up correctly). Then I stumbled upon SharePoint 2010’s web events – a great way to handle this. Using Visual Studio 2010, I created a new SharePoint project and added a Web Event Receiver: In the Event Receiver class, I used the WebProvisioned method to check if the parent site is a 2007 site (UIVersion = 3), and if so, then set the newly created site to 2007: /// <summary> /// A site was provisioned. /// </summary> public override void WebProvisioned(SPWebEventProperties properties) { base.WebProvisioned(properties); try { SPWeb curweb = properties.Web; if (curweb.ParentWeb != null) { //check if the parent website has the 2007 look and feel if (curweb.ParentWeb.UIVersion == 3) { //since parent site has 2007 look and feel // we'll apply that look and feel to the current web curweb.UIVersion = 3; curweb.Update(); } } } catch (Exception) { //TODO: Add logging for errors } } This event is part of a Feature that is scoped to the Site Level (Site Collection). I added a couple of lines to my migration PowerShell script to activate the Feature for any site collections that we migrate. Plan Going Forward The plan going forward is to perform the visual upgrade after the users for a particular site collection have gone through 2010 training. If we need to do several site collections at once, we’ll use a PowerShell script to loop through each site collection to update the sites to 2010. If it’s just one or two, we’ll be using the “Update All Sites” button on the Visual Upgrade page for Site Collection Administrators. The custom code for newly created sites won’t need to be changed, since it relies on the UI version of the parent site. If the parent is 2010, then the new site will look 2010.

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What if you could work on anything you wanted?

- by Nick Harrison

What if you could work on anything you wanted? Redgate is doing an experiment of sorts this week. Called Down Tools Week. The idea is that they stopped working on their regular projects for a week and strike out on something that catches their attention and drives their passion. Evidently in many cases, these projects have turned out to be new features in their existing products that individual were interested in, some were internal iniatives and some where evidently off the wall new ideas. Today is show and tell where they will share with each other what they have been working on. There may well be some interesting announcements coming out of this. The prospects are exciting. I understand that Google does something similar allowing their employees a specified amount of time to work on projects of their own choosing. This has been the breeding ground for some of my favorite services. It is a shame that more companies do not follow such practices. Now I know that most companies cannot afford to shut down everything for a week and sometimes you can't really explore an interesting idea in 8 hours a week or however much time Google allocates, but still it may be worth while. What would happen if your company gave you as an individual 1 week each quarter to work on a project of your own design and see what happens? I would be happen if you still had to get approval for before your week long adventure. Personally, I think that this could be a very effective use of training budgets. Give me a week to research something on my own and you would be amazed at what I can find out. Maybe this should be the prerequisite before starting a new project. Stagger the team onboarding but have everyone spend a week long sabbatical studying BizTalk before starting a project that will hinge on BizTalk. The show and tell afterwards is a great way to keep everyone honest or at least reassure management that everyone is honest. If your goal was to spend a week researching and exploring a new technology and you had to do a show and tell afterwards to show off what you had learned, then everyone can learn a bit of what you just learned. Sounds like a promising win win for me. Maybe it is a pipe dream, but what if .... What would you work on if given the opportunity to work on anything you wanted?

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ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for July 2, 2013

- by Bob Rhubart

One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing - July 9, 2013, Redwood Shores, CA. The first OTN Architect Day event of 2013 happens in just one week, on Tuesday July 9 at the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, CA. Registration is free and you get three sessions by three experts on cloud computing in the real world — plus a panel Q&A for answers to all of your questions. Register now! Oracle Database 12c: Flashback Moving Forward | Lucas Jellema Oracle ACE Director Lucas Jellema's latest of several recent blog posts dealing with various aspects of the recently released Oracle Database 12c. Detroit, Embracing New Auto Technologies, Seeks App Builders This story from the New York Times paints a rosy picture indeed for app developers as the internet of things continues to evolve. Advanced View Criteria Implementation in ADF BC | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis' post focuses on advanced declarative View Criteria features. JDeveloper: Showing a Popup when Selecting an af:selectOneRadio | Timo Hahn Oracle ACE Timo Hahn illustrates a use case in which a popup is displayed each time the user clicks on one of the radio buttons of a button group. Can Technology Innovation Save The New York Times? One of the standout keynotes from the recent QCon New York event, this presentation by New York Times Sr. VP/CIO Marc Frons and CTO/VP Rajiv Pant paints a detailed portrait of the complete transformation of an organization -- not just the IT. Enterprise architects will find this particularly interesting. Video: Meet Growing IT Demand for Databases with Private DBaaS Do you understand the difference between traditional database deployment and database as a service? If not, you'll want to check out this video, which includes an overview of Oracle Enterprise Manager's capabilities for rapid deployment of DBaaS. S Webcast: Zero-Downtime Migration to Oracle Exadata Using Oracle GoldenGate: A Customer Case Study Presenters Alok Pareek (VP, Product Management/Development, Oracle Data Integration) and John F. Martin (CEO of Emerging Markets and CTO IQNavigator) discuss how IQNavigator is using Oracle GoldenGate with Oracle Exadata. Free eBook: Building a Database Cloud for Dummies This free quick-reference guide, organized into six short chapters and supplemented with helpful illustrations, provides a clear overview of the cloud and step-by-step instructions on deploying database as a service. (Registration required.) Thought for the Day "My motto is: Live every day to the fullest – in moderation." — Lindsay Lohan (Born July 2, 1986) Source: brainyquote.com

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Oracle HCM Cloud Customer Q&A with WAXIE Sanitary Supply

- by HCM-Oracle

At this year’s Oracle HCM User Group (OHUG) Global conference, we had the opportunity to sit down with Oracle HCM Cloud customers for a short Q&A. We got to hear about what brought them to the OHUG conference, some of the benefits they are receiving from their Oracle HCM Cloud solutions, and advice they would give other businesses looking to move to the cloud. Below is a discussion we had with Melissa Halverson, Benefits & HRIS Manager at WAXIE Sanitary Supply. Q: What made you attend the OHUG Global Conference this year? Halverson: The biggest reason is networking. It allows me to connect with others in the Oracle HCM Cloud community. I was able to speak at the HCM Cloud SIG (Special Interest Group) on the first day and share my experiences as well as hear the experiences of other Oracle HCM Cloud users. It also allows me to get face-time with key people within Oracle. Q: What Oracle HCM solutions are you currently using? Halverson: Global HR, Benefits, Workforce Compensation, and Performance Management. Q: Do you plan to invest further in Oracle HCM? Halverson: Yes, we are interested in Time and Labor. We would also like to get Recruiting at some point in the future. Q: What would you say is the most significant benefit you’ve realized from your use of Oracle HCM solutions? Halverson: First and foremost would be process improvement. Before we had Oracle HCM Cloud we relied on a paper process where something as simple as an employee address change required changes to be made manually in 9 different systems. Obviously that was extremely inefficient, but also increased the likelihood of errors being made. The other huge benefit we have seen was in making information visible to the people that need it. Prior to implementing Oracle HCM Cloud, it was very difficult for anyone to access and make use of the information in our systems. Now, we can provide this information to those who need it to make better decisions. Q: What advice would you give an organization looking to move their HR systems to the cloud? Halverson: One thing I think many organizations don't spend enough time doing is thoroughly vetting their implementation partner. I believe you should be vetting your implementation partner as much as you did the system itself. Also, manpower is so important. Involve as large a team as possible because you don’t want to get stuck having too few bodies to help out. And set realistic time frames. Biting off more than you can chew will inevitably result in failure. Having a phased approach is always best rather than trying to do everything at once. Thanks for the tips Melissa. Enjoy the rest of the conference!

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SOA Community Newsletter June 2012

- by JuergenKress

Dear SOA partner community member Happy New fiscal Year FY13 - thanks for the FY12 middleware business! Our SOA & BPM Partner Community continued to grow to almost 4000 members. Additional we launched the WebLogic Partner Community which grew very fast to 800+ members! To continue our joint successful business in the new fiscal year our Top priorities FY13 are: Become trained:the next opportunity are the summer camps in Lisbon & Munich or our on-demand training SOA & BPM and see our detailed training calendar below. Run your marketing & sales campaign: sales kits, marketing kits, solution catalog add your services to oracle.com, add your events to oracle.com and advertisement Get recognized: OFM awards, partner excellence awards & references & plaques Become Specialized: All of the above makes the Oracle Specialization! Make sure you get your Specialization benefits! Topics: Key product focus areas will be: SOA as the foundation for clouds, integration platform 2.0 for industrial SOA including BAM & CEP, BPM & adaptive case management & migrate legacy solutions to the strategic offerings. The new Oracle VM VirtualBox image is available to test SOA Suite and BPM Suite. To start your BPM 11g project a new BPM Standard Edition a license entry version is available. EAIESB published a post with all BPMN2.0 notations. If you want to learn more please visit the Oracle Learning Library. We want to promote your SOA 11g & BPM 11g success let us know where you are in production! And nominate this success for our Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012. Douwe P. van den Bos published at his blog a SOA governance series: Principles of Service-Oriented Architecture & The Maturity of a Service-Oriented Architecture & SOA Maturity Models. Please let us know if you published interesting papers! Would be great to see you at the SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium by Thomas Erl. Please feel free to get your conference pass with the oracle discount code “DJMXZ370”. See you in Lisbon & London at our summer camps! Jürgen Kress Oracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/soanewsJune2012 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please register at http://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 Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community newsletter,SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress,SOA Demo System,BPM

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Learn programming backwards, or "so I failed the FizzBuzz test. Now what?"

- by moraleida

A Little Background I'm 28 today, and I've never had any formal training in software development, but I do have two higher education degrees equivalent to a B.A in Public Relations and an Executive MBA focused on Project Management. I've worked on those fields for about 6 years total an then, 2,5 years ago I quit/lost my job and decided to shift directions. After a month thinking things through I decided to start freelancing developing small websites in WordPress. I self-learned my way into it and today I can say I run a humble but successful career developing themes and plugins from scratch for my clients - mostly agencies outsourcing some of their dev work for medium/large websites. But sometimes I just feel that not having studied enough math, or not having a formal understanding of things really holds me behind when I have to compete or work with more experienced developers. I'm constantly looking for ways to learn more but I seem to lack the basics. Unfortunately, spending 4 more years in Computer Science is not an option right now, so I'm trying to learn all I can from books and online resources. This method is never going to have NASA employ me but I really don't care right now. My goal is to first pass the bar and to be able to call myself a real programmer. I'm currently spending my spare time studying Java For Programmers (to get a hold on a language everyone says is difficult/demanding), reading excerpts of Code Complete (to get hold of best practices) and also Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (to grasp the inner workings of computers). TL;DR So, my current situation is this: I'm basically capable of writing any complete system in PHP (with the help of Google and a few books), integrating Ajax, SQL and whatnot, and maybe a little slower than an experienced dev would expect due to all the research involved. But I was stranded yesterday trying to figure out (not Google) a solution for the FizzBuzz test because I didn't have the if($n1 % $n2 == 0) method modulus operator memorized. What would you suggest as a good way to solve this dilemma? What subjects/books should I study that would get me solving problems faster and maybe more "in a programmers way"? EDIT - Seems that there was some confusion about what did I not know to solve FizzBuzz. Maybe I didn't express myself right: I knew the steps needed to solve the problem. What I didn't memorize was the modulus operator. The problem was in transposing basic math to the program, not in knowing basic math. I took the test for fun, after reading about it on Coding Horror. I just decided it was a good base-comparison line between me and formally-trained devs. I just used this as an example of how not having dealt with math in a computer environment before makes me lose time looking up basic things like modulus operators to be able to solve simple problems.

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A "First" at Oracle OpenWorld

- by Kathryn Perry

A guest post by Adam May, Director, Fusion CRM, Oracle Applications Development There are always firsts at OpenWorld. These firsts keep the conference fresh and are the reason people come back year after year. An important first this year is our Fusion CRM customers who are using the product and deriving real benefit from Fusion CRM. Everyone can learn from and interact with them -- including us! We love talking to customers, especially those who are using our solutions in unexpected ways because they challenge us! At previous OpenWorlds, we presented our overall Fusion vision and our plans for Fusion CRM. Those presentations helped customers plan their strategies and map out their new release uptakes. Fast forward to March of this year when the first Fusion CRM customer went live. Since then we've watched the pace of go-lives accelerate every single month. Now we're at the threshold of another OpenWorld -- with over 45,000 attendees, 2,500 sessions and LOTS of other activities. To avoid having our customers curl into a ball with sensory overload, we designed a Focus On Document to outline the most important Fusion CRM activities. Here are some of the highlights: Anthony Lye's "Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Overview/Strategy/Customer Experiences/Roadmap" on Monday at 3:15 p.m. The CRM Pavilion, open in Moscone West from Monday through Wednesday; features our strategic Fusion CRM partners and provides live demonstrations of their capabilities General Session: "Oracle Fusion CRM--Improving Sales Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ease of Use" on Tuesday at 11:45 a.m.; features Anthony Lye and Deloitte "Meet the Fusion CRM Experts" on Tuesday at 5:00 p.m.; this session gives customers the opportunity to interact one-on-one with Fusion experts divided into eight categories of expertise CRM Social Reception on Tuesday from 6-8 p.m.; there's no better way to spend the early evening than discussing Fusion CRM with Oracle experts and strategic partners over appetizers and drinks Wednesday night is Oracle's Customer Appreciation event; enjoy Pearl Jam, Kings of Leon, etc. beginning at 7:30 p.m. at Treasure Island Be sure to drink plenty of water before sleeping Wednesday night and don't stay out too late because we have lots of great content on Thursday; at the top of the list is "Oracle Fusion Social CRM Strategy and Roadmap: Future of Collaboration and Social Engagement" at 11:15 a.m. We hope you have a fantastic experience at OpenWorld 2012! And here's a little video treat to whet your appetite: http://www.youtube.com/user/FusionAppsAtOracle

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WiFi connected to router, but no internet connection

- by Quetzacotl

I just got a new notebook, a ThinkPad Edge E530, and installed Ubuntu on it. I'm pretty new to Ubuntu. On the same laptop, running Windows 7, the Wi-Fi connection works fine. Ethernet connection works both on Win7 and on Ubuntu. Only Wi-Fi on Ubuntu does not work; it connects to the Wi-Fi access point but I don't have Internet access. My wireless card is Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230. What can fix the problem? EDIT: ifconfig -a eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr b8:88:e3:30:72:34 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) Interrupt:43 Base address:0x8000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:163 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:163 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:10124 (10.1 KB) TX bytes:10124 (10.1 KB) usb0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 02:15:e0:ec:01:00 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 68:5d:43:43:71:e1 inet addr:192.168.2.101 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::6a5d:43ff:fe43:71e1/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:40 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:220 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:2801 (2.8 KB) TX bytes:26230 (26.2 KB) route -n Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 0.0.0.0 192.168.2.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 wlan0 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 wlan0 192.168.2.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 2 0 0 wlan0 cat /etc/resolv.conf # Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8) # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN nameserver 127.0.0.1 iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. usb0 no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"SATELITE" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: 00:1F:1F:8D:CC:08 Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=16 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=60/70 Signal level=-50 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:93 Invalid misc:243 Missed beacon:0 eth0 no wireless extensions.

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Cloud Computing: Start with the problem

- by BuckWoody

At one point in my life I would build my own computing system for home use. I wanted a particular video card, a certain set of drives, and a lot of memory. Not only could I not find those things in a vendor’s pre-built computer, but those were more expensive – by a lot. As time moved on and the computing industry matured, I actually find that I can buy a vendor’s system as cheaply – and in some cases far more cheaply – than I can build it myself. This paradigm holds true for almost any product, even clothing and furniture. And it’s also held true for software… Mostly. If you need an office productivity package, you simply buy one or use open-sourced software for that. There’s really no need to write your own Word Processor – it’s kind of been done a thousand times over. Even if you need a full system for customer relationship management or other needs, you simply buy one. But there is no “cloud solution in a box”. Sure, if you’re after “Software as a Service” – type solutions, like being able to process video (Windows Azure Media Services) or running a Pig or Hive job in Hadoop (Hadoop on Windows Azure) you can simply use one of those, or if you just want to deploy a Virtual Machine (Windows Azure Virtual Machines) you can get that, but if you’re looking for a solution to a problem your organization has, you may need to mix Software, Infrastructure, and perhaps even Platforms (such as Windows Azure Computing) to solve the issue. It’s all about starting from the problem-end first. We’ve become so accustomed to looking for a box of software that will solve the problem, that we often start with the solution and try to fit it to the problem, rather than the other way around. When I talk with my fellow architects at other companies, one of the hardest things to get them to do is to ignore the technology for a moment and describe what the issues are. It’s interesting to monitor the conversation and watch how many times we deviate from the problem into the solution. So, in your work today, try a little experiment: watch how many times you go after a problem by starting with the solution. Tomorrow, make a conscious effort to reverse that. You might be surprised at the results.

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Gauging Maturity of your BPM Strategy - part 1 / 2

- by Sanjeev Sharma

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:"Times New Roman","serif";} In this post I will discuss the essence of maturity assessment and the business imperative for doing the same in the context of BPM. Social psychology purports that an individual progresses from being a beginner to an expert in a given activity or task along four stages of self-awareness: Unconscious Incompetence where the individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit and may even deny the usefulness of the skill. Conscious Incompetence where the individual recognizes the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. Conscious Competence where the individual understands or knows how to do something but demonstrating the skill requires explicit concentration. Unconscious Competence where the individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and serves as a basis of developing other complementary skills. We can extend the above thinking to an organization as a whole by measuring an organization’s level of competence in a specific area or capability, as an aggregate of the competence levels of individuals it is comprised of. After all organizations too like individuals, evolve through experience, develop “memory” and capabilities that are shaped through a constant cycle of learning, un-learning and re-learning. Hence the key to organizational success lies in developing these capabilities to enable execution of its strategy in-line with the external environment i.e. demand, competition, economy etc. However developing a capability merits establishing a base line in order to Assess the magnitude of improvement from past investments Identify gaps and short-comings Prioritize future investments in the right areas A maturity assessment is essentially an organizational self-awareness check that is aimed at depicting the “as-is” snapshot of an existing capability in-order to guide future investments to develop that capability in-line with business goals. This effectively is the essence of a maturity Organizational capabilities stem through its architecture, routines, culture and intellectual resources that are implicitly and explicitly embedded in its business processes. Given that business processes underpin realization of organizational capabilities, is what has prompted business transformation and process management efforts. Thus, the BPM capability of an organization needs to be measured on an on-going basis to ensure delivery of its planned benefits. In my next post I will describe Oracle’s BPM Maturity assessment methodology.

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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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ITT Corporation Goes Live on Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM)!

- by Richard Lefebvre

Back in Q2 of FY12, a division of ITT invited Oracle to demo our CRM On Demand product while the group was considering Salesforce.com. Chris Porter, our Oracle Direct sales representative learned the players and their needs and began to develop relationships. We lost that deal, but not Chris's persistence. A few months passed and Chris called on the ITT Shape Cutting Division's Director of Sales to see how things were going. Chris was told that the plan was for the division to buy more Salesforce.com. In fact, he informed Chris that he had just sent his team to Salesforce.com training. During the conversation, Chris mentioned that our new Oracle Sales Cloud Service could run with Outlook. This caused the ITT Sales Director to reconsider the plan to move forward with our competition. Oracle was invited back to demo the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM) and after it concluded, the Director stated, "That just blew your competition away." The deal closed on June 5th , 2012 Our Oracle Platinum Partner, Intelenex, began the implementation with ITT on July 30th. We are happy to report that on September 18th, the ITT Shape Cutting Division successfully went live on Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM). About: ITT is a diversified leading manufacturer of highly engineered critical components and customized technology solutions for growing industrial end-markets in energy infrastructure, electronics, aerospace and transportation. Building on its heritage of innovation, ITT partners with its customers to deliver enduring solutions to the key industries that underpin our modern way of life. Founded in 1920, ITT is headquartered in White Plains, NY, with 8,500 employees in more than 30 countries and sales in more than 125 countries. The ITT Shape Cutting Division provides plasma lasers and controls with the Burny, Kaliburn, and AMC brands. Oracle Fusion Products: Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM) including: • Fusion CRM Base • Fusion Sales Cloud • Fusion Mobile and Desktop Integration • Automated Forecasting Adoption Model: SaaS Partner: Intelenex Business Drivers: The ITT Shape Cutting Division wanted to: better enable its Sales Force with email and mobile CRM capabilities simplify and automate its complex sales processes centrally manage and maintain customer contact information Why We Won: ITT was impressed with the feature-rich capabilities of Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM), including sales performance management and integration. The company also liked the product's flexibility and scalability for future growth. Expected Benefits: Streamlined accurate forecasting Increased customer manageability Improved sales performance Better visibility to customer information

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best way to "introduce" OOP/OOD to team of experienced C++ engineers

- by DXM

I am looking for an efficient way, that also doesn't come off as an insult, to introduce OOP concepts to existing team members? My teammates are not new to OO languages. We've been doing C++/C# for a long time so technology itself is familiar. However, I look around and without major infusion of effort (mostly in the form of code reviews), it seems what we are producing is C code that happens to be inside classes. There's almost no use of single responsibility principle, abstractions or attempts to minimize coupling, just to name a few. I've seen classes that don't have a constructor but get memset to 0 every time they are instantiated. But every time I bring up OOP, everyone always nods and makes it seem like they know exactly what I'm talking about. Knowing the concepts is good, but we (some more than others) seem to have very hard time applying them when it comes to delivering actual work. Code reviews have been very helpful but the problem with code reviews is that they only occur after the fact so to some it seems we end up rewriting (it's mostly refactoring, but still takes lots of time) code that was just written. Also code reviews only give feedback to an individual engineer, not the entire team. I am toying with the idea of doing a presentation (or a series) and try to bring up OOP again along with some examples of existing code that could've been written better and could be refactored. I could use some really old projects that no one owns anymore so at least that part shouldn't be a sensitive issue. However, will this work? As I said most people have done C++ for a long time so my guess is that a) they'll sit there thinking why I'm telling them stuff they already know or b) they might actually take it as an insult because I'm telling them they don't know how to do the job they've been doing for years if not decades. Is there another approach which would reach broader audience than a code review would, but at the same time wouldn't feel like a punishment lecture? I'm not a fresh kid out of college who has utopian ideals of perfectly designed code and I don't expect that from anyone. The reason I'm writing this is because I just did a review of a person who actually had decent high-level design on paper. However if you picture classes: A - B - C - D, in the code B, C and D all implement almost the same public interface and B/C have one liner functions so that top-most class A is doing absolutely all the work (down to memory management, string parsing, setup negotiations...) primarily in 4 mongo methods and, for all intents and purposes, calls almost directly into D. Update: I'm a tech lead(6 months in this role) and do have full support of the group manager. We are working on a very mature product and maintenance costs are definitely letting themselves be known.

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Why would you dual-run an app on Azure and AWS?

- by Elton Stoneman

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/11/10/why-would-you-dual-run-an-app-on-azure-and-aws.aspxI had this question from a viewer of my Pluralsight course, Implementing the Reactive Manifesto with Azure and AWS, and thought I’d publish the response. So why would you dual-run your cloud app by hosting it on Azure and AWS? Sounds like a lot of extra development and management overhead. Well the most compelling reasons are reliability and portability. In 2012 I was working for a client who was making a big investment in the cloud, and at the end of the year we published their first external API for business partners. It was hosted in Azure and used some really nice features to route back into existing on-premise services. We were able to publish a clean, simple API to partners, and hide away the underlying complexity of the internal services while still leveraging them to do all the work. Two days after we went live, we were hit by the Azure SSL certificate expiry outage, and our API was unavailable for the best part of 3 days. Fortunately we had planned a gradual roll-out to partners, so the impact was minimal, but we’d been intending to ramp up quickly, and if the outage had happened a week or two later we would have been in a very bad place. Not least because our app could only run on Azure, we couldn’t package it up for another service without going back and reworking the code. More recently AWS had an issue with a networking device in one of their data centres which caused an outage that took the best part of a day to resolve. In both scenarios the SLAs are worthless, as you’ll get back a small percentage of your cloud expenditure, which is going to be negligible compared to your costs in dealing with the outage. And if your app is built specifically for AWS or Azure then if there’s an extended outage you can’t just deploy it onto a new set of kit from a different supplier. And the chances are pretty good there will be another extended outage, both for Microsoft and for Amazon. But the chances are small that it will happen to both at the same time. So my basic guidance has been: ignore the SLAs, go for better uptime by using two clouds. As soon as you need to scale beyond a single instance, start by scaling out to another cloud. Then scale out to different data centres in both clouds. Then you’ve got dual-cloud, quadruple-datacentre redundancy, so any more scaling you need can be left to the clouds to auto-scale themselves. By running in both clouds, you’ve made your app portable, so in the highly unlikely event that both AWS and Azure go down in multiple regions, you’ll have a deployment package which will let you spin up a new stack on yet another cloud, without having to rework your solution.

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Workflow 4.5 is Awesome, cant wait for 5.0!

- by JoshReuben

About 2 years ago I wrote a blog post describing what I would like to see in Workflow vnext: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2010/08/25/workflow-4.0---not-there-yet.aspx At the time WF 4.0 was a little rough around the edges – the State Machine was on codeplex and people were simulating state machines with Flowcharts. Last year I built a near- realtime machine management system using WF 4.0.1 – its managing the internal operations of this device: http://landanano.com/products/commercial Well WF 4.5 has come a long way – many of my gripes have been addressed: C# expressions - no more VB 'AndAlso' clauses state machine awesomeness - can query current state many designer improvements - Document Outline is so much more succinct than Designer! Separate WCF Service Contract interfaces and ability to generate activities from contract operations ability to rehydrate to updated flow definitions via DynamicUpdateMap and WorkflowIdentity you can read about the new features here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh305677(VS.110).aspx 2013 could be the year of Workflow evangelism for .NET, as it comes together as the DSL language. Eg on Azure it could be used to graphically orchestrate between WebRoles, WorkerRoles and AppFabric Queues and the ServiceBus – that would be grand. Here’s a list of things I’d like to see in Workflow 5.0: Stronger Parallelism support for true multithreaded workflows . A Workflow executes on a single thread – wouldn’t it be great if we had the ability to model TPL DataFlow? Parallel is not really parallel, just allows AsyncCodeActivity. support for recursion an ExpressionTree activity with an editor design surface a math activity pack return of application level protocol (3.51 WF services) – automatically expose a state machine as a WCF service with bookmark Receive activities generated from OperationContract automatically placed in state transition triggers. A new HTML5 ActivityDesigner control – support with different CSS3 skinnable hooks, remote connectivity (had to roll my own) A data flow view – crucial to understanding the big picture Ability to refactor a Sequence to custom activity in a separate .xaml file – like Expression Blend does for UserControl state machine global error handling - if all states goto an error state, you quickly get visual spagetti. Now you could nest a state machine, but what if you want an application level protocol whereby each state exposes certain WCF ops. DSL RAD editing - Make the Document Outline into a DSL editor for adding activities – For WF to really succeed as a higher level of abstraction, It needs to be more productive than raw coding - drag & drop on the designer is currently too slow compared to just typing code. Extensible Wizard API - for pluggable WF editor experience other execution models beyond Sequence, Flowchart & StateMachine: SSIS, Behavior Trees, Wolfram Model tool – surprise us! improvements to Designer debugging API - SourceLocation is tied to XAML file line number and char position, and ModelService access seems convoluted - why not leverage WPF LogicalTreeHelper / VisualTreeHelper ? Workflow Team , keep on rocking!

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Should I install ubuntu on USB instead of HDD dual-boot?

- by user2147243

I had Ubuntu 12.04 installed as dual-boot OS on top of Vista on my laptop. Hacked the grub settings to default to Vista (instead of the default Ubuntu -- pain) on startup, and all was OK for occasional Ubuntu use for past 6 months. Then last week I got a strange message about 'lack of disk space' (~50MB free) when installing pxyplot, even though there was still about 6GB free disk space when I checked later. Then today the Ubuntu wouldn't load at all, and checking the HDD partitions in Vista it looked like the 15GB Ubuntu partition was now three smaller partitions! So, I got rid of those partitions and expanded the Vista partition to use the reclaimed space. Now can't restart ('grub rescue' appears and doesn't 'rescue' anything), so I'll have to do a boot recovery using a Vista installation CD. (Not a particularly user-friendly failure mode of the dual-boot installation!) I now have to decide to either a) try installing ubuntu on the HDD again, but don't want to stuff up my Vista ever again, as that is my most used OS, or b) install Ubuntu on a 16GB USB 3.0 stick. Apparently performance from USB won't be as good as from HDD, and running OS from USB stick does lots of r/w so the stick may fail after a few years! Perhaps installing Ubuntu on live USB and setup to then run in RAM would alleviate the performance/USB lifespan problems? If I create a live-USB for Ubuntu OS, will it boot off that when I restart the laptop with it plugged in? Or will I have to change the laptop setting for boot-order whenever I want to boot Ubuntu instead of Vista (that would be even more painful than the grub default boot order putting Ubuntu ahead of the existing Vista OS!) -- update: I recovered my Vista setup using Iolo SystemMechanic Disaster Recovery Tool, and created a bootable USB of Ubuntu 13.10 on an 8GB USB3.0 pendrive, with 4GB of 'persistence' to allow saving of settings, install some packages etc. It worked OK for a couple of test boots, but once I changed the time and desktop wallpaper, the next Ubuntu reboot crashed and I then couldn't get it to boot successfully. So I decided to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a dual-boot again, but this time instead of partitioning the HDD and installing from an ISO DVD I used the wubi.exe tool to install Ubuntu as a dual-boot. Worked very well, although one oddity was that, despite asking how big the make the partition (20GB), the installed Ubuntu appears to be happily installed somewhere within the Vista NTFS file system (no partition shows up in Windows disk manager, and in Ubuntu disk management tool the entire 133 GB of HDD is showing, with ~40GB free space). A nice feature of installing the dual-boot using wubi is that the laptop now uses Windows boot manager on startup, with Vista as the default OS and Ubuntu happily listed as second on the list. So far so good.

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I owe you an explanation

- by Blueberry Coder

Welcome to my blog! I am Frédéric Desbiens, a new member of the ADF Product Management team. I joined Oracle only a few weeks ago. My boss is Grant Ronald, and I have the privilege to work in the same team as Susan Duncan, Frank Nimphius, Lynn Munsinger and Chris Muir. I share with them a passion for all things Java and ADF. With this blog, I hope to help you be more successful with our products – whether you are a customer or a partner. You may have heard of me before. Maybe you have my book in your bookshelf; or maybe we met at a conference. I went to JavaOne, ODTUG Kaleidoscope and Oracle OpenWorld in the past, when I worked for a major consulting firm. I will spare you all the details of my career; you can have a look at my LinkedIn profile if you are curious about my past. Usually, my posts will be of a technical nature, and will focus on Oracle ADF and Oracle JDeveloper. SOA and portals have always been two topics of interest for me, however, and I will write about them. Over time, you will probably get acquainted with my « strategic » side as well. I devour history books, and always had a tendency to look at the big picture. I will probably not resist to the temptation of mixing IT and history, but this will be occasional, I promise! At this point, I owe you an explanation about the title of the blog. I am French-Canadian, and wanted to evoke my roots in an obvious yet unobtrusive way. I was born in Chicoutimi, which is one of the main cities found in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. Traditionally, a large part of the wild blueberry production of the province of Québec come from there. A common nickname for the inhabitants is thus Les Bleuets, « The Blueberries » in English. I hope to see you around. You can also follow me on Twitter under @BlueberryCoder.

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Meet This Year's Most Impressive WebCenter Customer Projects

- by Michael Snow

12.00 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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 12.00 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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Oracle Fusion Middleware: Meet This Year's Most Impressive Customer Projects Oracle OpenWorld Session – Tuesday Oct. 2, 2012: Moscone West, Room 3001 at 11:45AM This year – the Oracle Excellence awards had an amazing number of nominations. Each group at Oracle had a challenge to select the most innovative and game-changing nominations for their winners. The Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards, jointly sponsored by Oracle, OAUG, QUEST, ODTUG, IOUG, AUSOUG and UKOUG, honor organizations using Oracle Fusion Middleware to deliver unique business value. This year, the awards will recognize customers across eight distinct categories: Oracle Exalogic Cloud Application Foundation Service Integration (SOA) and BPM WebCenter Identity Management Data Integration Application Development Framework and Fusion Development Business Analytics (BI, EPM and Exalytics) The nominations included the pioneers in our customer base using these solutions in innovative ways to achieve significant business value. Tune in this afternoon for a listing of the WebCenter winners.

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An invitation to join a JDeveloper and ADF productivity clinic (and more!) at KScope

- by Chris Muir

Would you like a chance to influence Oracle's decisions on tool usability and productivity? If you're attending ODTUG's Kaleidoscope conference this year in San Antonio, Oracle would like to invite you to participate in our Usability Activity Research and separately our JDeveloper and ADF Productivity Clinics with our experienced user experience teams. The teams are keen to hear what you have to say about your experiences with our tools in general and specifically JDeveloper and ADF. The details of each event are described below. Invitation to Usability Activity - Sunday June 24th to Wednesday June 27th Oracle is constantly working on new tools and new features for developers, and invites YOU to become a key part of the process! As a special addition to Kscope 12, Oracle will be conducting onsite usability research in the Alyssum room, from Sunday June 24 to Wednesday June 27. Usability activities are scheduled ahead of time for participants' convenience. If you would like to take part, please fill out this form to let us know of the session(s) that you would like to attend and your development experience. You will be emailed with your scheduled session before the start of the conference. JDeveloper and ADF Productivity Clinic - Thursday June 28th Are you concerned that Java, Oracle ADF or JDeveloper is difficult? Is JDeveloper making you jump through hoops? Do you hate a particular dialog or feature of JDeveloper? Well, come and get things off your chest! Oracle is hosting a product management and user experience clinic where we want to hear about your issues and concerns. What's difficult to use? What doesn't work the way you want, and how would you want it to work? What isn't behaving like your current favorite tool? If we can't help on you the spot, we'll take your feedback and use it to improve the product experience. A great opportunity to get answers, or get improvements. Drop by the Alyssum room, anytime from 8:30 to 10:30 on Thursday, June 28. We look forward to seeing you at KScope soon!

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Confusion about inheritance

- by Samuel Adam

I know I might get downvoted for this, but I'm really curious. I was taught that inheritance is a very powerful polymorphism tool, but I can't seem to use it well in real cases. So far, I can only use inheritance when the base class is an abstract class. Examples : If we're talking about Product and Inventory, I quickly assumed that a Product is an Inventory because a Product must be inventorized as well. But a problem occured when user wanted to sell their Inventory item. It just doesn't seem to be right to change an Inventory object to it's subtype (Product), it's almost like trying to convert a parent to it's child. Another case is Customer and Member. It is logical (at least for me) to think that a Member is a Customer with some more privileges. Same problem occurred when user wanted to upgrade an existing Customer to become a Member. A very trivial case is the Employee case. Where Manager, Clerk, etc can be derived from Employee. Still, the same upgrading issue. I tried to use composition instead for some cases, but I really wanted to know if I'm missing something for inheritance solution here. My composition solution for those cases : Create a reference of Inventory inside a Product. Here I'm making an assumption about that Product and Inventory is talking in a different context. While Product is in the context of sales (price, volume, discount, etc), Inventory is in the context of physical management (stock, movement, etc). Make a reference of Membership instead inside Customer class instead of previous inheritance solution. Therefor upgrading a Customer is only about instantiating the Customer's Membership property. This example is keep being taught in basic programming classes, but I think it's more proper to have those Manager, Clerk, etc derived from an abstract Role class and make it a property in Employee. I found it difficult to find an example of a concrete class deriving from another concrete class. Is there any inheritance solution in which I can solve those cases? Being new in this OOP thing, I really really need a guidance. Thanks!

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Is 2 lines of push/pop code for each pre-draw-state too many?

- by Griffin

I'm trying to simplify vector graphics management in XNA; currently by incorporating state preservation. 2X lines of push/pop code for X states feels like too many, and it just feels wrong to have 2 lines of code that look identical except for one being push() and the other being pop(). The goal is to eradicate this repetitiveness,and I hoped to do so by creating an interface in which a client can give class/struct refs in which he wants restored after the rendering calls. Also note that many beginner-programmers will be using this, so forcing lambda expressions or other advanced C# features to be used in client code is not a good idea. I attempted to accomplish my goal by using Daniel Earwicker's Ptr class: public class Ptr<T> { Func<T> getter; Action<T> setter; public Ptr(Func<T> g, Action<T> s) { getter = g; setter = s; } public T Deref { get { return getter(); } set { setter(value); } } } an extension method: //doesn't work for structs since this is just syntatic sugar public static Ptr<T> GetPtr <T> (this T obj) { return new Ptr<T>( ()=> obj, v=> obj=v ); } and a Push Function: //returns a Pop Action for later calling public static Action Push <T> (ref T structure) where T: struct { T pushedValue = structure; //copies the struct data Ptr<T> p = structure.GetPtr(); return new Action( ()=> {p.Deref = pushedValue;} ); } However this doesn't work as stated in the code. How might I accomplish my goal? Example of code to be refactored: protected override void RenderLocally (GraphicsDevice device) { if (!(bool)isCompiled) {Compile();} //TODO: make sure state settings don't implicitly delete any buffers/resources RasterizerState oldRasterState = device.RasterizerState; DepthFormat oldFormat = device.PresentationParameters.DepthStencilFormat; DepthStencilState oldBufferState = device.DepthStencilState; { //Rendering code } device.RasterizerState = oldRasterState; device.DepthStencilState = oldBufferState; device.PresentationParameters.DepthStencilFormat = oldFormat; }

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How employable am I as a programmer?

- by dsimcha

I'm currently a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering with a concentration in computational biology and am starting to think about what I want to do after graduate school. I feel like I've accumulated a lot of programming skills while in grad school, but taken a very non-traditional path to learning all this stuff. I'm wondering whether I would have an easy time getting hired as a programmer and could fall back on that if I can't find a good job directly in my field, and if so whether I would qualify for a more prestigious position than "code monkey". Things I Have Going For Me Approximately 4 years of experience programming as part of my research. I believe I have a solid enough grasp of the fundamentals that I could pick up new languages and technologies pretty fast, and could demonstrate this in an interview. Good math and statistics skills. An extensive portfolio of open source work (and the knowledge that working on these projects implies): I wrote a statistics library in D, mostly from scratch. I wrote a parallelism library (parallel map, reduce, foreach, task parallelism, pipelining, etc.) that is currently in review for adoption by the D standard library. I wrote a 2D plotting library for D against the GTK Cairo backend. I currently use it for most of the figures I make for my research. I've contributed several major performance optimizations to the D garbage collector. (Most of these were low-hanging fruit, but it still shows my knowledge of low-level issues like memory management, pointers and bit twiddling.) I've contributed lots of miscellaneous bug fixes to the D standard library and could show the change logs to prove it. (This demonstrates my ability read other people's code.) Things I Have Going Against Me Most of my programming experience is in D and Python. I have very little to virtually no experience in the more established, "enterprise-y" languages like Java, C# and C++, though I have learned a decent amount about these languages from small, one-off projects and discussions about language design in the D community. In general I have absolutely no knowledge of "enterprise-y" technlogies. I've never used a framework before, possibly because most reusable code for scientific work and for D tends to call itself a "library" instead. I have virtually no formal computer science/software engineering training. Almost all of my knowledge comes from talking to programming geek friends, reading blogs, forums, StackOverflow, etc. I have zero professional experience with the official title of "developer", "software engineer", or something similar.

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What's My Problem? What's Your Problem?

- by Jacek Ziabicki

Software installers are not made for building demo environments. I can say this much after 12 years (on and off) of supporting my fellow sales consultants with environments for software demonstrations. When we release software, we include installation programs and procedures that are designed for use by our clients – to build a production environment and a limited number of testing, training and development environments. Different Objectives Your priorities when building an environment for client use vs. building a demo environment are very different. In a production environment, security, stability, and performance concerns are paramount. These environments are built on a specific server and rarely, if ever, moved to a different server or different network address. There is typically just one application running on a particular server (physical or virtual). Once built, the environment will be used for months or years at a time. Because of security considerations, the installation program wants to make these environments very specific to the organization using the software and the use case, encoding a fully qualified name of the server, or even the IP address on the network, in the configuration. So you either go through the installation procedure for each environment, or learn how to clone and reconfigure the software as a separate instance to build all your non-production environments. This may not matter much if the installation is as simple as clicking on the Setup program. But for enterprise applications, you have a number of configuration settings that you need to get just right – so whether you are installing from scratch or reconfiguring an existing installation, this requires both time and expertise in the particular piece of software. If you need a setup of several applications that are integrated to talk to one another, it is a whole new level of complexity. Now you need the expertise in all of the applications involved (plus the supporting technology products), and in addition to making each application work, you also have to configure the integration endpoints. Each application needs the URLs and credentials to call the integration layer, and the integration must be able to call each application. Then you have to make sure that each app has the right data so a business process initiated in one application can continue in the next. And, you will need to check that each application has the correct version and patch level for the integration to work. When building demo environments, your #1 concern is agility. If you can get away with a small number of long-running environments, you are lucky. More likely, you may get a request for a dedicated environment for a demonstration that is two weeks away: how quickly can you make this available so we still have the time to build the client-specific data? We are running a hands-on workshop next month, and we’ll need 15 instances of application X environment so each student can have a separate server for the exercises. We cannot connect to our data center from the client site, the client’s security policy won’t allow our VPN to go through – so we need a portable environment that we can bring with us. Our consultants need to be able to work at the hotel, airport, and the airplane, so we really want an environment that can run on a laptop. The client will need two playpen environments running in the cloud, accessible from their network, for a series of workshops that start two weeks from now. We have seen all of these scenarios and more. Here you would be much better served by a generic installation that would be easy to clone. Welcome to the Wonder Machine The reason I started this blog is to share a particular design of a demo environment, a special way to install software, that can address the above requirements, even for integrated setups. This design was created by a team at Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit, and we are using this setup for most of our demo environments. In a bout of modesty we called it the Wonder Machine. Over the next few posts – think of it as a novel in parts – I will tell you about the big idea, how it was implemented and what you can do with it. After we have laid down the groundwork, I would like to share some tips and tricks for users of our Wonder Machine implementation, as well as things I am learning about building portable, cloneable environments. The Wonder Machine is by no means a closed specification, it is under active development! I am hoping this blog will be of interest to two groups of readers – the users of the Wonder Machine we have built at Oracle Utilities, who want to get the most out of their demo environments and be able to reconfigure it to their needs – and to people who need to build environments for demonstration, testing, training, development and would like to make them cloneable and portable to maximize the reuse of their effort. Surely we are not the only ones facing this problem? If you can think of a better way to solve it, or if you can help us improve on our concept, I will appreciate your comments!

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