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• 3 Trends for SMBs around Social, Mobile, and Sensor

  - by Socially_Aware_Enterprise

  While I often am talking to big companies or discussing enterprise solutions. There are times when individuals ask me about Small or Medium sized business trends.  Interestingly,  the Enterprise Social, Mobile, and Sensor initiatives I regularly discuss are in fact related to even the Mom and Pop storefront. The eco-system of new service players in the Social-Mobile-Sensor space generally emerge developing partnerships with enterprises as they develop and bring economy to scale to their services for the larger market. And of course Oracle has an entire division dedicated for delivering products and support to help emerging companies compete without the need to open an industrial strength credit line.. So here are some trends that we are helping large enterprises to deploy today, but small and medium businesses should be able to take advantage of by the end of this year and starting into 2015. 1) The typical small business is generally "Localized". But the ability to be "Hyper-Localized" will come as location based services become ubiquitous. Many small businesses have one or several storefronts and theirs are typically within a single regional economic footprint. While the internet provides global reach, it will be the businesses that invest in social, mobile and local that will win in the end.  Of course I am a huge SoMoLo evangelist. The SMBs' content and targeting with platforms for Geo-Fencing, Geo-Conquesting and Path-Matching to HHI are all going to be accessible to them, if not for Mobile Apps, then via Mobile messaging in Social Networks that offer it.. Expect to be able to target FaceBook messaging not by city, but by store or mall… This makes being able to be "Hyper-Local" even more important. And with new proximity services coming online more than ever before, SMBs will operate and service customers with pinpoint accuracy right down to where they stand in an aisle. Geo-Conquesting will be huge for small players to place ads when customers pass through competitors regions. Car Dealers are doing this now.. But also of course iBeacons are now very cheap and getting easier to put in retail stores. The ability for sales to happen anywhere in the store via a mobile phone or tablet is huge, as it will give the small shop the flexibility to not have to "Guard the Register" as more or most transactions will be digital. Thus, M-Commerce and T-Commerce will change the job of cashier dramatically.. 2) Intra-Brand Advocacy, the idea now is that rather than just depend on your trusty social media manager and his team, you are going to push more and more individuals with expertise inside the organization to help manage, reach-out, and utilize social channels to manage the incoming questions and answers customers need. While for years CRM was the tool of the enterprise, today CRMs enable this now "Salesforce et al" capability to trickle throughout the company. This gives greater pressure to organize roles, but also flatten out the organization. Internal collaboration around topics and customer needs is going to be the key for SMBs to finally get serious about customer experiences. Their customers are online and in social networks. This includes not just B2C SMBs but also B2B companies as well. Don't believe me? To find the players just use hashtag #SocialSelling and you will see… 3) The Visual Networks will begin to move from Content Aggregators to Content Collaboration platforms, which means Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, & others will begin to move to add more features brands want, first marketing platforms, rather than unique brand partnerships as they do today, but this will open ways for SMBs to engage with clear brand messaging and metrics. Eventually providing more "Collaboration" between Brand and Consumer.. Don't think for a minute Facebook bought Oculus Rift so you could see your timeline in 3-D. The Social Networks I advise customers to invest in are ones that are audio and visual intrinsically. Players from SoundCloud to Pinterest are deploying ways for brands to harness their interactive visual or audio based social networks to sell ad units aka brand messaging. While the Social Media revolution is going on, the emphasis was on the social, today it more and more about the media in social, that enterprises soon small and medium businesses will be connected to. 

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 14 &ndash; Insuring Integrity &amp; Availability

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Identify the characteristics of a network that keep data safe from loss or damage Protect an enterprise-wide network from viruses Explain network and system level fault tolerance techniques Discuss issues related to network backup and recovery strategies Describe the components of a useful disaster recovery plan and the options for disaster contingencies What are integrity and availability? Integrity – the soundness of a networks programs, data, services, devices, and connections Availability – How consistently and reliably a file or system can be accessed by authorized personnel A number of phenomena can compromise both integrity and availability including… security breaches natural disasters malicious intruders power flaws human error users etc Although you cannot predict every type of vulnerability, you can take measures to guard against the most damaging events. The following are some guidelines… Allow only network administrators to create or modify NOS and application system users. Monitor the network for unauthorized access or changes Record authorized system changes in a change management system’ Install redundant components Perform regular health checks on the network Check system performance, error logs, and the system log book regularly Keep backups Implement and enforce security and disaster recovery policies These are just some of the basics… Malware Malware refers to any program or piece of code designed to intrude upon or harm a system or its resources. Types of Malware… Boot sector viruses Macro viruses File infector viruses Worms Trojan Horse Network Viruses Bots Malware characteristics Some common characteristics of Malware include… Encryption Stealth Polymorphism Time dependence Malware Protection There are various tools available to protect you from malware called anti-malware software. These monitor your system for indications that a program is performing potential malware operations. A number of techniques are used to detect malware including… Signature Scanning Integrity Checking Monitoring unexpected file changes or virus like behaviours It is important to decide where anti-malware tools will be installed and find a balance between performance and protection. There are several general purpose malware policies that can be implemented to protect your network including… Every compute in an organization should be equipped with malware detection and cleaning software that regularly runs Users should not be allowed to alter or disable the anti-malware software Users should know what to do in case the anti-malware program detects a malware virus Users should be prohibited from installing any unauthorized software on their systems System wide alerts should be issued to network users notifying them if a serious malware virus has been detected. Fault Tolerance Besides guarding against malware, another key factor in maintaining the availability and integrity of data is fault tolerance. Fault tolerance is the ability for a system to continue performing despite an unexpected hardware or software malfunction. Fault tolerance can be realized in varying degrees, the optimal level of fault tolerance for a system depends on how critical its services and files are to productivity. Generally the more fault tolerant the system, the more expensive it is. The following describe some of the areas that need to be considered for fault tolerance. Environment (Temperature and humidity) Power Topology and Connectivity Servers Storage Power Typical power flaws include Surges – a brief increase in voltage due to lightening strikes, solar flares or some idiot at City Power Noise – Fluctuation in voltage levels caused by other devices on the network or electromagnetic interference Brownout – A sag in voltage for just a moment Blackout – A complete power loss The are various alternate power sources to consider including UPS’s and Generators. UPS’s are found in two categories… Standby UPS – provides continuous power when mains goes down (brief period of switching over) Online UPS – is online all the time and the device receives power from the UPS all the time (the UPS is charged continuously) Servers There are various techniques for fault tolerance with servers. Server mirroring is an option where one device or component duplicates the activities of another. It is generally an expensive process. Clustering is a fault tolerance technique that links multiple servers together to appear as a single server. They share processing and storage responsibilities and if one unit in the cluster goes down, another unit can be brought in to replace it. Storage There are various techniques available including the following… RAID Arrays NAS (Storage (Network Attached Storage) SANs (Storage Area Networks) Data Backup A backup is a copy of data or program files created for archiving or safekeeping. Many different options for backups exist with various media including… These vary in cost and speed. Optical Media Tape Backup External Disk Drives Network Backups Backup Strategy After selecting the appropriate tool for performing your servers backup, devise a backup strategy to guide you through performing reliable backups that provide maximum data protection. Questions that should be answered include… What data must be backed up At what time of day or night will the backups occur How will you verify the accuracy of the backups Where and for how long will backup media be stored Who will take responsibility for ensuring that backups occurred How long will you save backups Where will backup and recovery documentation be stored Different backup methods provide varying levels of certainty and corresponding labour cost. There are also different ways to determine which files should be backed up including… Full backup – all data on all servers is copied to storage media Incremental backup – Only data that has changed since the last full or incremental backup is copied to a storage medium Differential backup – Only data that has changed since the last backup is coped to a storage medium Disaster Recovery Disaster recovery is the process of restoring your critical functionality and data after an enterprise wide outage has occurred. A disaster recovery plan is for extreme scenarios (i.e. fire, line fault, etc). A cold site is a place were the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exist but they are not appropriately configured. A warm site is a place where the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exists with some appropriately configured devices. A hot site is a place where the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exists and all are appropriately configured.

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• career advice for PhD scientist seeking to program?

  - by C SD

  I'm largely a self-taught programmer. In fact, I first started programming about half way through biophysics grad school, and even though I think I've done some pretty nice work, I've never worked as part of a 'serious' development team that had more than one or two other developers (and I wouldn't hesitate to call them equally inexperienced in software development as a profession). After finishing my PhD I applied to Google, on a lark, since I had some confidence in my abilities, if not necessarily my experience, and I was hoping to maybe slip in and absorb all the experience and talent I'd be surrounded with and become productive enough, quickly enough, that they wouldn't immediately regret their decision. I was excited to actually get invited to interview up at Mountain View (this was ~ mid 2008). Overall, my memory of the interview was very positive, but after close to a three month wait (is that normal?) they ended up turning me down. I wasn't too surprised or disappointed (aside from the uncomfortably long wait) given my unusual background and admitted lack of experience. I decided to continue as a postdoc, but focus on improving my skills rather than doing research. I've done about three years of that, and my honest assessment is that I've learned a ton more, but I really need more of a peer group to maintain or accelerate my growth. Google invited me to interview again about eight months ago, and the interview process went even better than the first time around (I thought), though they again declined to give me an offer. I have to admit this second rejection was much more discouraging. They had insisted I interview even after I mentioned to them that a move on my part was unlikely given that I had bought a house, gotten married, etc. since the first interview. I guess I was hoping they'd at least give me an offer that I could parlay into a more conventional, but still interesting, programming position close to home. So here I am, going on my third year out of grad school, a glorified postdoc and I'm starting to get pretty discouraged. Even though I could technically get 'back-on-track' for a career in science, I have been focusing the vast majority of this time on gaining programming experience rather than on research and publications. The problem is, whenever I look, most job listings have requirements that seem impossibly grandiose and I hesitate to apply. That, or the job/project seems incredibly dull. Ironically, applying to Google struck me as less intimidating. I suspect that either most people are just a lot less realistic than I am when it comes to assessing how long it will take for them to get up to speed, or they don't care; my fear is that I'm just woefully unqualified for any interesting, well paying work. IE: I'm confident I could switch fully back into C++ mode with a couple weeks work (I mostly use C,Python,C# daily) but I don't list myself as being 'proficient' in C++ on my CV, or applying for jobs that 'require' such knowledge. The few applications for which I did feel I was a legitimately good match have not elicited a response. I suspect the following things are potential problems with my application/CV and I would like feedback on: I don't have a CS degree. My BS was in biochemistry and molecular biology, my PhD in biophysics. I took a undergrad and grad level CS course at UCSD and completely killed them, but I don't know how to translate that to my CV effectively. I have a PhD, but it's not in CS... I've been debating if I should remove it from my CV, and wether or not it would then be misleading to list at least some of those years as some kind of 'programming' job (in many respects it was). I think there are sometimes strong stigmas associated with 'self-taught' programmers. I am certainly one of those. I even recognize that some of those stigmas hold a hint of truth, but I really do want to be an asset to a team. How do I communicate that even though I have been largely self-directing for ~8 years I can still take marching orders when needed? Do I just say so outright? Should I just become a lot less scrupulous about the whole process? anecdote: I have a friend who applied for positions where he completely fudged his qualifications to get past the first culling. He was much more honest and forthcoming about his actual qualifications when contacted and he still managed to get invited to a couple of interviews and even got some offers. His balls are larger than mine though.

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• Gamification at OOW

  - by erikanollwebb

  Last week was Oracle OpenWorld, and for those of you not in tech or downtown San Francisco, that might not mean a whole lot.  However, if you are familiar with it, Oracle OpenWorld is our premier customer event.  This year, more than 50,000 people attended.  It's not a good week to visit San Francisco on vacation because Oracle customers take over all the hotels in town!  It was crazy, but a lot of fun and it's a great opportunity for the Apps UX group to do customer research with a range of customers.  This year, more than 100+ customers and partners took the time to team up with our UX experts and provide feedback on new designs and ideas. Over three days,  UX teams conducted 8  one-on-one user feedback sessions, 4 focus groups and 7 surveys. In addition, we conducted a voice capture activity and were able to collect close to 70 speech samples at the lab and DEMOgrounds. This was a great opportunity for us to do some testing on some specific gamification concepts with a set of business analysts.  We pulled in 8 folks for a focus group on gamification concepts and whether they thought those would work for their teams. To get ready for this, my designer extraordinaire, Andrea Cantú, flew into town and we spent almost a week locked in a room together brainstorming design ideas.  We killed a few trees trying to get all of our concepts and other examples together in the process, but in the end, we put together a whole series of examples of how you might gamify an Oracle app (in this case, CRM).  Andrea is a genius for this kind of thing and the comps she created looked great.  Here's a picture of her hard at work!  We also had the good fortune to have my boss, Laurie Pattison and my usability contractor, Shobana Subramanian there to note take and observe as well.  Here's a few shots of us, hard at work preparing for the day (or checking out something on Laurie's iPhone...) To start things off, we gave an overview of gamification and I talked about what it's used for.  Then we gave the participants a scenario about our sales person and what we were trying to get her to do. It was a great opportunity to highlight what our business goals might be and why we might want to add game mechanics.  It was also a good way to get them thinking about how that might work for them in their environments and workplaces. There were some surprises for the day.  We asked how many of them were already familiar with the concept of gamification--only two people had heard of it and only one was using game mechanics in his work.  That's in contrast to a survey we just ran internally with folks in a dev org where almost 50% of about 450 respondents had heard of gamification.  As we discussed the ways game mechanics could be used, it became clear that many of the folks had seen some game mechanics in action but didn't know that's what they were.  We also noticed that the folks in this group felt that if they were trying to sell the concept in their orgs, they wouldn't call it gamification.  That's not a huge surprise to me--they said what we've heard in the past, that gamification does not seem like a serious term for enterprise software.  They said they'd sell it with the goals--as a means to increase behaviors by rewarding users for activities.  It's a funny problem.  The word puts some folks off, but at the same time, I haven't seen another one word description that quite captures the range of things that "gamification" can cover.  My guess is that the more mainstream the term becomes, the more desensitized we'll become to the idea the it's trivializing enterprise software in some way.  Still, it was interesting to note that this group still felt that they would not take this concept to their bosses or teams and call it "gamification".  They focused on the goals, and how we could incentivize desired behaviors with game mechanics.  As I have already stated in other posts, I feel like my org is more receptive to discussing how this is just a more transparent type of usability and user experience methods than talking about gamification.  That's the argument they said they would use. All in all, it was a good session.  I love getting to talk to customers, present ideas and concepts, and get their feedback and input.  It's the type of thing that really helps drive our designs and keeps us grounded in what our customers need/want.  We're already planning where to get more feedback opportunities in the coming months. 

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• Educause Top-Ten IT Issues - the most change in a decade or more

  - by user739873

  The Education IT Issue Panel has released the 2012 top-ten issues facing higher education IT leadership, and instead of the customary reshuffling of the same deck, the issues reflect much of the tumult and dynamism facing higher education generally.  I find it interesting (and encouraging) that at the top of this year's list is "Updating IT Professionals' Skills and Roles to Accommodate Emerging Technologies and Changing IT Management and Service Delivery Models."  This reflects, in my view, the realization that higher education IT must change in order to fully realize the potential for transforming the institution, and therefore it's people must learn new skills, understand and accept new ways of solving problems, and not be tied down by past practices or institutional inertia. What follows in the remaining 9 top issues all speak, in some form or fashion, to the need for dramatic change, but not just in the areas of "funding IT" (code for cost containment or reduction), but rather the need to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the institution through the use of technology—leveraging the wave of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to the institution's advantage, rather than viewing it as a threat and a problem to be contained. Although it's #10 of 10, IT Governance (and establishment and implementation of the governance model throughout the institution) is key to effectively acting upon many of the preceding issues in this year's list.  In the majority of cases, technology exists to meet the needs and requirements to effectively address many of the challenges outlined in top-ten issues list. Which brings me to my next point. Although I try not to sound too much like an Oracle commercial in these (all too infrequent) blog posts, I can't help but point out how much confluence there is between several of the top issues this year and what my colleagues and I have been evangelizing for some time. Starting from the bottom of the list up: 1) I'm gratified that research and the IT challenges it presents has made the cut.  Big Data (or Large Data as it's phased in the report) is rapidly going to overwhelm much of what exists today even at our most prepared and well-equipped research universities.  Combine large data with the significantly more stringent requirements around data preservation, archiving, sharing, curation, etc. coming from granting agencies like NSF, and you have the brewing storm that could result in a lot of "one-off" solutions to a problem that could very well be addressed collectively and "at scale."   2) Transformative effects of IT – while I see more and more examples of this, there is still much more that can be achieved. My experience tells me that culture (as the report indicates or at least poses the question) gets in the way more than technology not being up to task.  We spend too much time on "context" and not "core," and get lost in the weeds on the journey to truly transforming the institution with technology. 3) Analytics as a key element in improving various institutional outcomes.  In our work around Student Success, we see predictive "academic" analytics as essential to getting in front of the Student Success issue, regardless of how an institution or collections of institutions defines success.  Analytics must be part of the fabric of the key academic enterprise applications, not a bolt-on.  We will spend a significant amount of time on this topic during our semi-annual Education Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington, D.C. later this month. 4) Cloud strategy for the broad range of applications in the academic enterprise.  Some of the recent work by Casey Green at the Campus Computing Survey would seem to indicate that there is movement in this area but mostly in what has been termed "below the campus" application areas such as collaboration tools, recruiting, and alumni relations.  It's time to get serious about sourcing elements of mature applications like student information systems, HR, Finance, etc. leveraging a model other than traditional on-campus custom. I've only selected a few areas of the list to highlight, but the unifying theme here (and this is where I run the risk of sounding like an Oracle commercial) is that these lofty goals cry out for partners that can bring economies of scale to bear on the problems married with a deep understanding of the nuances unique to higher education.  In a recent piece in Educause Review on Student Information Systems, the author points out that "best of breed is back". Unfortunately I am compelled to point out that best of breed is a large part of the reason we have made as little progress as we have as an industry in advancing some of the causes outlined above.  Don't confuse "integrated" and "full stack" for vendor lock-in.  The best-of-breed market forces that Ron points to ensure that solutions have to be "integratable" or they don't survive in the marketplace. However, by leveraging the efficiencies afforded by adopting solutions that are pre-integrated (and possibly metered out as a service) allows us to shed unnecessary costs – as difficult as these decisions are to make and to drive throughout the organization. Cole

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – My First Conference!

  - by Chris George

  I’d like to give you a bit of background first… so please bear with me! In 1996, whilst studying for my final year of my degree, I applied for a job as a C++ Developer at a small software house in Hertfordshire  After bodging up the technical part of the interview I didn’t get the job, but was offered a position as a QA Engineer instead. The role sounded intriguing and the pay was pretty good so in the absence of anything else I took it. Here began my career in the world of software testing! Back then, testing/QA was often an afterthought, something that was bolted on to the development process and very much a second class citizen. Test automation was rare, and tools were basic or non-existent! The internet was just starting to take off, and whilst there might have been testing communities and resources, we were certainly not exposed to any of them. After 8 years I moved to another small company, and again didn’t find myself exposed to any of the changes that were happening in the industry. It wasn’t until I joined Red Gate in 2008 that my view of testing and software development as a whole started to expand. But it took a further 4 years for my view of testing to be totally blown open, and so the story really begins… In May 2012 I was fortunate to land the role of Head of Test Engineering. Soon after, I received an email with details for the “Agile Testi However, in my new role, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and at least go to one conference. Perhaps I could get some new ideas to supplement and support some of the ideas I already had.ng Days” conference in Potsdam, Germany. I looked over the suggested programme and some of the talks peeked my interest. For numerous reasons I’d shied away from attending conferences in the past, one of the main ones being that I didn’t see much benefit in attending loads of talks when I could just read about stuff like that on the internet. So, on the 18th November 2012, myself and three other Red Gaters boarded a plane at Heathrow bound for Potsdam, Germany to attend Agile Testing Days 2012. Tutorial Day – “Software Testing Reloaded” We chose to do the tutorials on the 19th, I chose the one titled “Software Testing Reloaded – So you wanna actually DO something? We’ve got just the workshop for you. Now with even less powerpoint!”. With such a concise and serious title I just had to see what it was about! I nervously entered the room to be greeted by tables, chairs etc all over the place, not set out and frankly in one hell of a mess! There were a few people in there playing a game with dice. Okaaaay… this is going to be a long day! Actually the dice game was an exercise in deduction and simplification… I found it very interesting and is certainly something I’ll be using at work as a training exercise! (I won’t explain the game here cause I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag…) The tutorial consisted of several games, exploring different aspects of testing. They were all practical yet required a fair amount of thin king. Matt Heusser and Pete Walen were running the tutorial, and presented it in a very relaxed and light-hearted manner. It was really my first experience of working in small teams with testers from very different backgrounds, and it was really enjoyable. Matt & Pete were very approachable and offered advice where required whilst still making you work for the answers! One of the tasks was to devise several strategies for testing some electronic dice. The premise was that a Vegas casino wanted to use the dice to appeal to the twenty-somethings interested in tech, but needed assurance that they were as reliable and random as traditional dice. This was a very interesting and challenging exercise that forced us to challenge various assumptions, determine/clarify requirements but most of all it was frustrating because the dice made a very very irritating beeping noise. Multiple that by at least 12 dice and I was dreaming about them all that night!! Some of the main takeaways that were brilliantly demonstrated through the games were not to make assumptions, challenge requirements, and have fun testing! The tutorial lasted the whole day, but to be honest the day went very quickly! My introduction into the conference experience started very well indeed, and I would talk to both Matt and Pete several times during the 4 days. Days 1,2 & 3 will be coming soon…  

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• Extra Life 2012 - The Final Plea ... Until the Next One

  - by Chris Gardner

  I thought I'd share the email stream that my friends and family get about the event.So, here we are again. We scream closer to the event, and the goal is not met.I was approached by the ghost of feral platypii past last night. Well, approached is putting it lightly. I was mugged by the ghost of platypii past last night. He reminded me, in no uncertain terms that I have only reached the midway point of my fundraising goal. He then reminded me, in even less uncertain terms, that we are one week away from the event. There were other reminders past that, but this is a family broadcast. *shudder*Now, let us be serious for a moment. The event organizers claim a personal story helps to tug heart strings, whatever those are...I've been to Children's Hospital of Birmingham. I had to take Spawn, the Latter, there to verify she was not going to die. Instead, she's just a ticking time bomb for the next generation, but I digress.While I was there, I saw things. I saw child after child after child waiting for their appointment. I saw the most sublime displays of children's art juxtaposed with hospital sterilization that I could ever possibly imagine. I saw and heard things that only occur in the nightmares of parents, and I was only in the waiting rooms.But I will never forget the 10-ish year old girl that came in for her regularly scheduled dialysis appointment ... as if it was just another Friday afternoon. She had her school books, a little snack, a book to read for pleasure, and a DVD, in case she finished her homework a little early. You know, everything you'd need for an afternoon hooked up to a huge medical machine that going to clean out all the toxins in your blood. As she entered the secured area, she warmly greeted all the doctors and nurses with the same familiarity that I would greet the staff of my favorite coffee shop as I stopped in for my morning cup of coffee.I don't know the status of that little girl. I don't know if she's healthy or, quite frankly, alive. I don't even know her name, as I only heard it in passing for the 37 seconds our paths crossed. However, I do remember being incredibly moved and touched by her upbeat attitude about the situations, and I hope that my efforts last two Octobers got her, in some way, a little comfort.And, if she is still with us, I hope we can get her a little more.=== PREVIOUS MESSAGE FOLLOWS ===Greetings (Again),If you are receiving this updated message, then you didn't feel generous the first time. Now, I tried to be nice the first time. I tried to send a simple, unobtrusive email message to get you into the spirit. Well, much like the bell ringers that I ignore in front of the Wal-Mart, you ignored me.I probably should have seen that coming...However, unlike those poor souls, I know how to contact you. And I can find out where you live. So, so, so, you better feel lucky that I'm too lazy to terrorize you people, but cause I could do it.Remember, it's not for me, it's for those poor kids... and the feral platypii.  Because, we can make more children, but platypii are hard to come by.=== ORIGINAL MESSAGE FOLLOWS ===It's that time of year again. The time when I beg you for money for charity. See, unlike those bell ringers outside Wal-Mart, I don't do it when you have ten bazillion holiday obligations...Once again, I will be enduring a 24-hour marathon of gaming to raise money for Children Hospital in Birmingham. All the money goes straight to them, and you get to tell Uncie Samuel that you're good for that money. I'd REALLY like to break $1000 this year, as I have come REALLY close for the past 2 year to doing so.This year, the event will take place on October 20th, beginning at 8 A.M. Once again, I will try to provide some web streams, etc, if you want to point and laugh (especially if I have to result to playing Dance Central at 4 AM to stay awake for the last part.)Look at it this way, I'm going to badger you about this for the next month. You might as well donate some money so you can righteously tell me to shut the Smurf up.You can place your bid at the link below. Feel free to spread the word to anyone and everyone.I thank you. The children thank you. Several breeds of feral platypus thank you. Maybe, just maybe, doing so will help you feel the love felt by re-fried beans when lovingly hugged in a warm tortilla.Enjoy your burrito.http://www.extra-life.org/participant/cgardner

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• Knowing your user is key--Part 1: Motivation

  - by erikanollwebb

  I was thinking where the best place to start in this blog would be and finally came back to a theme that I think is pretty critical--successful gamification in the enterprise comes down to knowing your user.  Lots of folks will say that gamification is about understanding that everyone is a gamer.  But at least in my org, that argument won't play for a lot of people.  Pun intentional.  It's not that I don't see the attraction to the idea--really, very few people play no games at all.  If they don't play video games, they might play solitaire on their computer.  They may play card games, or some type of sport.  Mario Herger has some great facts on how much game playing there is going on at his Enterprise-Gamification.com website. But at the end of the day, I can't sell that into my organization well.  We are Oracle.  We make big, serious software designed run your whole business.  We don't make Angry Birds out of your financial reporting tools.  So I stick with the argument that works better.  Gamification techniques are really just good principals of user experience packaged a little differently.  Feedback?  We already know feedback is important when using software.  Progress indicators?  Got that too.  Game mechanics may package things in a more explicit way but it's not really "new".  To know how to use game mechanics, and what a user experience team is important for, is totally understanding who our users are and what they are motivated by. For several years, I taught college psychology courses, including Motivation.  Motivation is generally broken down into intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  There's intrinsic, which comes from within the individual.  And there's extrinsic, which comes from outside the individual.  Intrinsic motivation is that motivation that comes from just a general sense of pleasure in the doing of something.  For example, I like to cook.  I like to cook a lot.  The kind of cooking I think is just fun makes other people--people who don't like to cook--cringe.  Like the cake I made this week--the star-spangled rhapsody from The Cake Bible: two layers of meringue, two layers of genoise flavored with a raspberry eau de vie syrup, whipped cream with berries and a mousseline buttercream, also flavored with raspberry liqueur and topped with fresh raspberries and blueberries. I love cooking--I ask for cooking tools for my birthday and Christmas, I take classes like sushi making and knife skills for fun.  I like reading about you can make an emulsion of egg yolks, melted butter and lemon, cook slowly and transform them into a sauce hollandaise (my use of all the egg yolks that didn't go into the aforementioned cake).  And while it's nice when people like what I cook, I don't do it for that.  I do it because I think it's fun.  My former boss, Ultan Ó Broin, loves to fish in the sea off the coast of Ireland.  Not because he gets prizes for it, or awards, but because it's fun.  To quote a note he sent me today when I asked if having been recently ill kept him from the beginning of mackerel season, he told me he had already been out and said "I can fish when on a deathbed" (read more of Ultan's work, see his blogs on User Assistance and Translation.). That's not the kind of intensity you get about something you don't like to do.  I'm sure you can think of something you do just because you like it. So how does that relate to gamification?  Gamification in the enterprise space is about uncovering the game within work.  Gamification is about tapping into things people already find motivating.  But to do that, you need to know what that user is motivated by. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of those areas where over-the-top gamification seems to work (not to plug a competitor in this space, but you can search on what Bunchball* has done with a company just a little north of us on 101 for the CRM crowd).  Sales people are naturally competitive and thrive on that plus recognition of their sales work.  You can use lots of game mechanics like leaderboards and challenges and scorecards with this type of user and they love it.  Show my whole org I'm leading in sales for the quarter?  Bring it on!  However, take the average accountant and show how much general ledger activity they have done in the last week and expose it to their whole org on a leaderboard and I think you'd see a lot of people looking for a new job.  Why?  Because in general, accountants aren't extraverts who thrive on competition in their work.  That doesn't mean there aren't game mechanics that would work for them, but they won't be the same game mechanics that work for sales people.  It's a different type of user and they are motivated by different things. To break this up, I'll stop here and post now.  I'll pick this thread up in the next post. Thoughts? Questions? *Disclosure: To my knowledge, Oracle has no relationship with Bunchball at this point in time.

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• Finding it Hard to Deliver Right Customer Experience: Think BPM!

  - by Ajay Khanna

  Our relationship with our customers is not a just a single interaction and we should not treat it like one. A customer’s relationship with a vendor is like a journey which starts way before customer makes a purchase and lasts long after that. The journey may start with customer researching a product that may lead to the eventual purchase and may continue with support or service needs for the product. A typical customer journey can be represented as shown below: As you may notice, customers tend to use multiple channels to interact with a company throughout their journey.  They also expect that they should get consistent experience, no matter what interaction channel they may choose. Customers do not like to repeat the information they have already provided and expect companies to remember their preferences, and offer them relevant products and services. If the company fails to meet this expectation, customers not only will abandon the purchase and go to the competitor but may also influence others’ purchase decision. Gone are the days when word of mouth was the only medium, and the customer could influence “Six” others. This is the age of social media and customer’s good or bad experience, especially bad get highly amplified and may influence hundreds of others. Challenges that face B2C companies today include: Delivering consistent experience: The reason that delivering consistent experience is challenging is due to fragmented data, disjointed systems and siloed multichannel interactions. Customers tend to get different service quality if they use web vs. phone vs. store. They get different responses from different service agents or get inconsistent answers if they call sales vs. service group in the company. Such inconsistent experiences result in lower customer satisfaction or NPS (net promoter score) numbers. Increasing Revenue: To stay competitive companies frequently introduce new products and services. Delay in launching such offerings has a significant impact on revenue realization. In addition to new product revenue, there are multiple opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell that impact bottom line. If companies are not able to identify such opportunities, bring a product to market quickly, or not offer the right product to the right customer at the right time, significant loss of revenue may occur. Ensuring Compliance: Companies must be compliant to ever changing regulations, these could be about Know Your Customer (KYC), Export/Import regulations, or taxation policies. In addition to government agencies, companies also need to comply with the SLA that they have committed to their customers. Lapse in meeting any of these requirements may lead to serious fines, penalties and loss in business. Companies have to make sure that they are in compliance will all such regulations and SLA commitments, at any given time. With the advent of social networks and mobile technology, companies not only need to focus on process efficiency but also on customer engagement. Improving engagement means delivering the customer experience as the customer is expecting and interacting with the customer at right time using right channel. Customers expect to be able to contact you via any channel of their choice (web, email, chat, mobile, social media), purchase via any viable channel (web, phone, store, mobile). Customers expect companies to understand their particular needs and remember their preferences on repeated visits. To deliver such an integrated, consistent, and contextual experience, power of BPM in must. Your company may be organized in departments like Marketing, Sales, Service. You may hold prospect data in SFA, order information in ERP, customer issues in CRM. However, the experience delivered to the customer must not be constrained by your system legacy. BPM helps in designing the right experience for the right customer and integrates all the underlining channels, systems, applications to make sure right information will be delivered to the right knowledge worker or to the customer every single time.     Orchestrating information across all systems (MDM, CRM, ERP), departments (commerce, merchandising, marketing service) and channels (Email, phone, web, social)  is the key, and that’s what BPM delivers. In addition to orchestrating systems and channels for consistency, BPM also provides an ability for analysis and decision management. By using data from historical transactions, social media and from other systems, users can determine the customer preferences, customer value, and churn propensity. This information, in the context, is then used while making a decision at a process step. Working with real-time decision management system can also suggest right up-sell or cross-sell offers, discounts or next-best-action steps for a particular customer. Timely action on customer issues or request is also a key tenet of a good customer experience. BPM’s complex event processing capabilities help companies to take proactive actions before issues get escalated. BPM system can be designed to listen to a certain event patters then deduce from those customer situations (credit card stolen, baggage lost, change of address) and do a triage before situation goes out of control. If such a situation arises you can send alerts to right people or immediately invoke corrective actions. Last but not least one of BPM’s key values is to drive continuous improvement. Learning about customers past experiences, interactions and social conversations, provide valuable insight. Such insight can be used to improve products, customer facing processes, and customer experience. You may take these insights as an input to design better more efficient and customer friendly sales, contact center or self-service processes. If customer experience is important for your business, make sure you have incorporated BPM as a part of your strategy to design, orchestrate and improve your customer facing processes.

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• Best Practices Generating WebService Proxies for Oracle Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM)

  - by asantaga

  I've recently been building a REST Service wrapper for Oracle Sales Cloud and initially all was going well, however as soon as I added all of my Web Service proxies I started to get weird errors..  My project structure looks like this What I found out was if I only had the InteractionsService & OpportunityService WebService Proxies then all worked ok, but as soon as I added the LocationsService Proxy, I would start to see strange JAXB errors. Example of the error message Exception in thread "main" javax.xml.ws.WebServiceException: Unable to create JAXBContextat com.sun.xml.ws.model.AbstractSEIModelImpl.createJAXBContext(AbstractSEIModelImpl.java:164)at com.sun.xml.ws.model.AbstractSEIModelImpl.postProcess(AbstractSEIModelImpl.java:94)at com.sun.xml.ws.model.RuntimeModeler.buildRuntimeModel(RuntimeModeler.java:281)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.buildRuntimeModel(WSServiceDelegate.java:762)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate.buildRuntimeModel(WLSProvider.java:982)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.createSEIPortInfo(WSServiceDelegate.java:746)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.addSEI(WSServiceDelegate.java:737)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.getPort(WSServiceDelegate.java:361)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate.internalGetPort(WLSProvider.java:934)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate$PortClientInstanceFactory.createClientInstance(WLSProvider.java:1039)...... Looking further down I see the error message is related to JAXB not being able to find an objectFactory for one of its types Caused by: java.security.PrivilegedActionException: com.sun.xml.bind.v2.runtime.IllegalAnnotationsException: 6 counts of IllegalAnnotationExceptionsThere's no ObjectFactory with an @XmlElementDecl for the element {http://xmlns.oracle.com/apps/crmCommon/activities/activitiesService/}AssigneeRsrcOrgIdthis problem is related to the following location:at protected javax.xml.bind.JAXBElement com.oracle.xmlns.apps.crmcommon.activities.activitiesservice.ActivityAssignee.assigneeRsrcOrgId at com.oracle.xmlns.apps.crmcommon.activities.activitiesservice.ActivityAssignee This is very strange... My first thoughts are that when I generated the WebService Proxy I entered the package name as "oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.servicename" and left the generated types as blank. This way all the generated types get put into the same package hierarchy and when deployed they get merged... Sounds resaonable and appears to work but not in this case..  To resolve this I regenerate the proxy but this time setting : Package name : To the name of my package eg. oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.interactionsRoot Package for Generated Types :  Package where the types will be generated to, e.g. oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.SalesParty.types When I ran the application now, it all works , awesome eh???? Alas no, there is a serious side effect. The problem now is that to help coding I've created a collection of helper classes , these helper classes take parameters which use some of the "generic" datatypes, like FindCriteria. e.g. This wont work any more public static FindCriteria createCustomFindCriteria(FindCriteria pFc,String pAttributes) Here lies a gremlin of a problem.. I cant use this method anymore, this is because the FindCriteria datatype is now being defined two, or more times, in the generated code for my project. If you leave the Root Package for types blank it will get generated to com.oracle.xmlns, and if you populate it then it gets generated to your custom package.. The two datatypes look the same, sound the same (and if this were a duck would sound the same), but THEY ARE NOT THE SAME... Speaking to development, they recommend you should not be entering anything in the Root Packages section, so the mystery thickens why does it work.. Well after spending sometime with some colleagues of mine in development we've identified the issue.. Alas different parts of Oracle Fusion Development have multiple schemas with the same namespace, when the WebService generator generates its classes its not seeing the other schemas properly and not generating the Object Factories correctly...  Thankfully I've found a workaround Solution Overview When generating the proxies leave the Root Package for Generated Types BLANK When you have finished generating your proxies, use the JAXB tool XJC and generate Java classes for all datatypes  Create a project within your JDeveloper11g workspace and import the java classes into this project Final bit.. within the project dependencies ensure that the JAXB/XJC generated classes are "FIRST" in the classpath Solution Details Generate the WebServices SOAP proxies When generating the proxies your generation dialog should look like this Ensure the "unwrap" parameters is selected, if it isn't then that's ok, it simply means when issuing a "get" you need to extract out the Element Generate the JAXB Classes using XJC XJC provides a command line switch called -wsdl, this (although is experimental/beta) , accepts a HTTP WSDL and will generate the relevant classes. You can put these into a single batch/shell script xjc -wsdl https://fusionservername:443/appCmmnCompInteractions/InteractionService?wsdlxjc -wsdl https://fusionservername443/opptyMgmtOpportunities/OpportunityService?wsdl Create Project in JDeveloper to store the XJC "generated" JAXB classes Within the project folder create a filesystem folder called "src" and copy the generated files into this folder. JDeveloper11g should then see the classes and display them, if it doesnt try clicking the "refresh" button In your main project ensure that the JDeveloper XJC project is selected as a dependancy and IMPORTANT make sure it is at the top of the list. This ensures that the classes are at the front of the classpath And voilà.. Hopefully you wont see any JAXB generation errors and you can use common datatypes interchangeably in your project, (e.g. FindCriteria etc)

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• Joining on NULLs

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  A problem I see on a fairly regular basis is that of dealing with NULL values.  Specifically here, where we are joining two tables on two columns, one of which is ‘optional’ ie is nullable.  So something like this: i.e. Lookup where all the columns are equal, even when NULL.   NULL’s are a tricky thing to initially wrap your mind around.  Statements like “NULL is not equal to NULL and neither is it not not equal to NULL, it’s NULL” can cause a serious brain freeze and leave you a gibbering wreck and needing your mummy. Before we plod on, time to setup some data to demo against. Create table #SourceTable ( Id integer not null, SubId integer null, AnotherCol char(255) not null ) go create unique clustered index idxSourceTable on #SourceTable(id,subID) go with cteNums as ( select top(1000) number from master..spt_values where type ='P' ) insert into #SourceTable select Num1.number,nullif(Num2.number,0),'SomeJunk' from cteNums num1 cross join cteNums num2 go Create table #LookupTable ( Id integer not null, SubID integer null ) go insert into #LookupTable Select top(100) id,subid from #SourceTable where subid is not null order by newid() go insert into #LookupTable Select top(3) id,subid from #SourceTable where subid is null order by newid() If that has run correctly, you will have 1 million rows in #SourceTable and 103 rows in #LookupTable.  We now want to join one to the other. First attempt – Lets just join select * from #SourceTable join #LookupTable on #LookupTable.id = #SourceTable.id and #LookupTable.SubID = #SourceTable.SubID OK, that’s a fail.  We had 100 rows back,  we didn’t correctly account for the 3 rows that have null values.  Remember NULL <> NULL and the join clause specifies SUBID=SUBID, which for those rows is not true. Second attempt – Lets deal with those pesky NULLS select * from #SourceTable join #LookupTable on #LookupTable.id = #SourceTable.id and isnull(#LookupTable.SubID,0) = isnull(#SourceTable.SubID,0) OK, that’s the right result, well done and 99.9% of the time that is where its left. It is a relatively trivial CPU overhead to wrap ISNULL around both columns and compare that result, so no problems.  But, although that’s true, this a relational database we are using here, not a procedural language.  SQL is a declarative language, we are making a request to the engine to get the results we want.  How we ask for them can make a ton of difference. Lets look at the plan for our second attempt, specifically the clustered index seek on the #SourceTable   There are 2 predicates. The ‘seek predicate’ and ‘predicate’.  The ‘seek predicate’ describes how SQLServer has been able to use an Index.  Here, it has been able to navigate the index to resolve where ID=ID.  So far so good, but what about the ‘predicate’ (aka residual probe) ? This is a row-by-row operation.  For each row found in the index matching the Seek Predicate, the leaf level nodes have been scanned and tested using this logical condition.  In this example [Expr1007] is the result of the IsNull operation on #LookupTable and that is tested for equality with the IsNull operation on #SourceTable.  This residual probe is quite a high overhead, if we can express our statement slightly differently to take full advantage of the index and make the test part of the ‘Seek Predicate’. Third attempt – X is null and Y is null So, lets state the query in a slightly manner: select * from #SourceTable join #LookupTable on #LookupTable.id = #SourceTable.id and ( #LookupTable.SubID = #SourceTable.SubID or (#LookupTable.SubID is null and #SourceTable.SubId is null) ) So its slightly wordier and may not be as clear in its intent to the human reader, that is what comments are for, but the key point is that it is now clearer to the query optimizer what our intention is. Let look at the plan for that query, again specifically the index seek operation on #SourceTable No ‘predicate’, just a ‘Seek Predicate’ against the index to resolve both ID and SubID.  A subtle difference that can be easily overlooked.  But has it made a difference to the performance ? Well, yes , a perhaps surprisingly high one. Clever query optimizer well done. If you are using a scalar function on a column, you a pretty much guaranteeing that a residual probe will be used.  By re-wording the query you may well be able to avoid this and use the index completely to resolve lookups. In-terms of performance and scalability your system will be in a much better position if you can.

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• From the Classroom to the Boardroom

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Pens and Paper...these are the only things being a student and being a graduate / professional have in common. Walking in to the offices of Oracle South Africa as a graduate the first thing you notice is how polished and sleek all the people who work here look. 80% of the ladies wear sky-scraper heels and walk with the greatest grace. This was the first of many rude awakenings to remind me that I am no longer a student but a graduate. My first struggle was having to wake up at wee hours of the morning to prepare for work. As a student going to class was almost an optional thing, if you missed a morning class you could always attend an evening class to make up for it or simply attend with another group. But in the workplace, you HAVE to show up every single morning at the same time, with no option of coming in when it suits you and there is definitely no coming in with the evening class/shift. As a student, the earliest hour I ever woke up was 7:00am, anything earlier than that was considered inhumane torture. My reason for waking up every morning as a student was “you have a degree to go get” but as a graduate having to go to work I have to say to myself “here’s to a new day of learning and growing”. My second struggle has come in having to change my beloved wardrobe. Everyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about fashion and shopping. For me Shopping is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT, that should not be messed with. Therefore it was with great sadness that I swopped my rippled skinny jeans for pin-striped formal pants, my long chandelier earrings for simple studs, my flat shoes for heels, my sheer blouses for crisp white shirts, even my beloved wild hair had to make way for a simple ponytail. Our looks as ladies also came under great scrutiny, we had to acquaint ourselves with some serious grooming tools: the mascara, blush, lip-gloss, blush, a touch of lipstick and a manicure set. Language was a struggle of its own as well. Being a student you learn to relate to your peers in a informal way. In the workplace you have to address everyone with the same respect, including your peers. Words like “Hey buddy” had to make way for “good morning friend”. The month long winter school holiday was one of the things I looked forward to as a student. This was a time where we got to be at home and avoid the coldest month of the year, July. It was the most amazing thing ever, just sleeping and snuggling up to all sorts of warm things but sadly it is now a thing of the past. It is currently winter in South Africa and going to work has become the most unfashionable thing with all the jackets, boots, scarves and gloves. But summer is coming and I will miss those holidays too. As a student the school holidays were like a gift for us to catch a break and not think for a while which was why it was imaginable how someone would go on for the entire year without a break, with only the promise of a mere 21 days annual leave!! Right now I am sure we are all looking forward to taking that annual leave when the time is right. The worst rude awakening I must say, has to be presenting in front of clients and managers. As a student you have the same class mates for almost four years therefore presenting in front of them becomes the norm over the years and your lecturer will always go gently on you. What they don’t tell you at University is that in the real world, time is money and clients pay money to see you present therefore there is no room for error. Clients are not there to give you a score and boost your ego, they expect nothing less than 100% and they will let you know without a second thought. For a graduate this can feel like you are being fed to the sharks, you either get eaten or you swim for your life. At the end of the day, it is all an experience that is meant to groom us into better professional and make us a part of the Red Team. All the sacrifices are worth it and they lead us to being better and more polished professionals. So if you are interested in joining the ECEMEA Sales and Presales Internship Programme, please have a look at http://campus.oracle.com for more information and for our latest vacancies and internships. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-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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• Clouds, Clouds, Clouds Everywhere, Not a Drop of Rain!

  - by sxkumar

  At the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld 2012, the center of discussion was clearly Cloud. Over the five action packed days, I got to meet a large number of customers and most of them had serious interest in all things cloud.  Public Cloud - particularly the Oracle Cloud - clearly got a lot of attention and interest. I think the use cases and the value proposition for public cloud is pretty straight forward. However, when it comes to private cloud, there were some interesting revelations.  Well, I shouldn’t really call them revelations since they are pretty consistent with what I have heard from customers at other conferences as well as during 1:1 interactions. While the interest in enterprise private cloud remains to be very high, only a handful of enterprises have truly embarked on a journey to create what the purists would call true private cloud - with capabilities such as self-service and chargeback/show back. For a large majority, today's reality is simply consolidation and virtualization - and they are quite far off from creating an agile, self-service and transparent IT infrastructure which is what the enterprise cloud is all about.  Even a handful of those who have actually implemented a close-to-real enterprise private cloud have taken an infrastructure centric approach and are seeing only limited business upside. Quite a few were frank enough to admit that chargeback and self-service isn’t something that they see an immediate need for.  This is in quite contrast to the picture being painted by all those surveys out there that show a large number of enterprises having already implemented an enterprise private cloud.  On the face of it, this seems quite contrary to the observations outlined above. So what exactly is the reality? Well, the reality is that there is undoubtedly a huge amount of interest among enterprises about transforming their legacy IT environment - which is often seen as too rigid, too fragmented, and ultimately too expensive - to something more agile, transparent and business-focused. At the same time however, there is a great deal of confusion among CIOs and architects about how to get there. This isn't very surprising given all the buzz and hype surrounding cloud computing. Every IT vendor claims to have the most unique solution and there isn't a single IT product out there that does not have a cloud angle to it. Add to this the chatter on the blogosphere, it will get even a sane mind spinning.  Consequently, most  enterprises are still struggling to fully understand the concept and value of enterprise private cloud.  Even among those who have chosen to move forward relatively early, quite a few have made their decisions more based on vendor influence/preferences rather than what their businesses actually need.  Clearly, there is a disconnect between the promise of the enterprise private cloud and the current adoption trends.  So what is the way forward?  I certainly do not claim to have all the answers. But here is a perspective that many cloud practitioners have found useful and thus worth sharing. To take a step back, the fundamental premise of the enterprise private cloud is IT transformation. It is the quest to create a more agile, transparent and efficient IT infrastructure that is driven more by business needs rather than constrained by operational and procedural inefficiencies. It is the new way of delivering and consuming IT services - where the IT organizations operate more like enablers of  strategic services rather than just being the gatekeepers of IT resources. In an enterprise private cloud environment, IT organizations are expected to empower the end users via self-service access/control and provide the business stakeholders a transparent view of how the resources are being used, what’s the cost of delivering a given service, how well are the customers being served, etc.  But the most important thing to note here is the enterprise private cloud is not just an IT project, rather it is a business initiative to create an IT setup that is more aligned with the needs of today's dynamic and highly competitive business environment. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Just remember how the business users have been at the forefront of public cloud adoption within enterprises and private cloud is no exception.   Such a broad-based transformation makes cloud more than a technology initiative. It requires people (organizational) and process changes as well, and these changes are as critical as is the choice of right tools and technology. In my next blog,  I will share how essential it is for enterprise cloud technology to go hand-in hand with process re-engineering and organization changes to unlock true value of  enterprise cloud. I am sharing a short video from my session "Managing your private Cloud" at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. More videos from this session will be posted at the recently introduced Zero to Cloud resource page. Many other experts of Oracle enterprise private cloud solution will join me on this blog "Zero to Cloud"  and share best practices , deployment tips and information on how to plan, build, deploy, monitor, manage , meter and optimize the enterprise private cloud. We look forward to your feedback, suggestions and having an engaging conversion with you on this blog.

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• UITableView's NSString memory leak on iphone when encoding with NSUTF8StringEncoding

  - by vince

  my UITableView have serious memory leak problem only when the NSString is NOT encoding with NSASCIIStringEncoding. - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"cell"; UILabel *textLabel1; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease]; textLabel1 = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(105, 6, 192, 22)]; textLabel1.tag = 1; textLabel1.textColor = [UIColor whiteColor]; textLabel1.backgroundColor = [UIColor blackColor]; textLabel1.numberOfLines = 1; textLabel1.adjustsFontSizeToFitWidth = NO; [textLabel1 setFont:[UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:19]]; [cell.contentView addSubview:textLabel1]; [textLabel1 release]; } else { textLabel1 = (UILabel *)[cell.contentView viewWithTag:1]; } NSDictionary *tmpDict = [listOfInfo objectForKey:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@",indexPath.row]]; textLabel1.text = [tmpDict objectForKey:@"name"]; return cell; } -(void) readDatabase { NSArray *documentPaths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES); NSString *documentsDir = [documentPaths objectAtIndex:0]; databasePath = [documentsDir stringByAppendingPathComponent:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@",myDB]]; sqlite3 *database; if(sqlite3_open([databasePath UTF8String], &database) == SQLITE_OK) { const char sqlStatement = [[NSString stringWithFormat:@"select id,name from %@ order by orderid",myTable] UTF8String]; sqlite3_stmt *compiledStatement; if(sqlite3_prepare_v2(database, sqlStatement, -1, &compiledStatement, NULL) == SQLITE_OK) { while(sqlite3_step(compiledStatement) == SQLITE_ROW) { NSString *tmpid = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:(char *)sqlite3_column_text(compiledStatement, 0)]; NSString *tmpname = [NSString stringWithCString:(const char *)sqlite3_column_text(compiledStatement, 1) encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; [listOfInfo setObject:[[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init] forKey:tmpid]; [[listOfInfo objectForKey:tmpid] setObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@", tmpname] forKey:@"name"]; } } sqlite3_finalize(compiledStatement); debugNSLog(@"sqlite closing"); } sqlite3_close(database); } when i change the line NSString *tmpname = [NSString stringWithCString:(const char *)sqlite3_column_text(compiledStatement, 1) encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; to NSString *tmpname = [NSString stringWithCString:(const char *)sqlite3_column_text(compiledStatement, 1) encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding]; the memory leak is gone i tried NSString stringWithUTF8String and it still leak. i've also tried: NSData *dtmpname = [NSData dataWithBytes:sqlite3_column_blob(compiledStatement, 1) length:sqlite3_column_bytes(compiledStatement, 1)]; NSString *tmpname = [[[NSString alloc] initWithData:dtmpname encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] autorelease]; and the problem remains, the leak occur when u start scrolling the tableview. i've actually tried other encoding and it seems that only NSASCIIStringEncoding works(no memory leak) any idea how to get rid of this problem?

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• Best ASP.NET E-Commerce Framework (aspDotNetStoreFront, AbleCommerce, BVCommerce, MediaChase,...)

  - by EfficionDave

  I need a full-featured asp.net E-Commerce solution for a project. It needs to be easily extensible as I need to extend it to integrate with a custom Flash based personalization engine. It should also have a great administrative back-end that handles inventory tracking, report, labels, shipping, ... so that the client can really use it as the basis for their business. I've used quite a few different E-Commerce systems including OSCommerce, Zen Cart, Catalook, and eTailer. While I was impressed with Zen Cart and eTailer, this project is big enough that I want to try a more serious, commercial offering. I'm particularly interested in thoughts on aspdotnetstorefront, BVCommerce, AbleCommerce, and MediaChase. [UPDATE] I've done quite a bit of evaluation since I posted this question and will give some of my findings below: BVCommerce - The price point is nice, the product seems fairly well regarded, and I've heard good things about customizing/extending it, it just doesn't seem like it's going to meet my needs as an Top Tier ECommerce solution. After viewing the tutorial videos, the Admin interface just seems too basic and outdated. aspDotNetStorefront - The integration with DotNetNuke was it's biggest selling point for me but after reading peoples opinions, it's integration seems quite weak. It's sounds like there's a significant learning curve and the architecture just doesn't sound like it's as clean as it should be. AbleCommerce - After a rather thorough evaluation, I have selected AbleCommerce for at least my next project. The Admin interface is beautiful and has a nice list of features. The E-Commerce portion of the user side is very well done, highly skin-able (using Master Pages and a couple other techniques), and the checkout workflow has all the features I need while still being very clean. Source to the API can be bought for $500 but you generally won't need it. There are some 3rd party modules available but there's not currently a large market for these. The biggest glaring weakness of AbleCommerce I've found is their CMS capabilities are very limited and not at all well suited for a non-technical user to make most site content updates. But I have a good solution for that that I plan adapting into AbleCommerce. They will automatically generate a site for you to play with to your heart's content for 30 days. It is defniitely worth checking out.

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• Silverlight 4.0 VisualStateManager

  - by xscape

  Can anyone please help me or is there anything I miss out? the visualstate is not triggered xmlns:swi="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Interactivity;assembly=System.Windows.Interactivity" xmlns:esi="clr-namespace:Expression.Samples.Interactivity;assembly=Expression.Samples.Interactivity" xmlns:mei="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Expression.Interactivity.Core;assembly=Microsoft.Expression.Interactions" <my:DataGridTemplateColumn IsReadOnly="True"> <my:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> <VisualStateGroup x:Name="vsgUrgency"> <VisualState x:Name="UrgencySerious"> <Storyboard> <ColorAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="orbUrgency" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Fill" To="Red"/> </Storyboard> </VisualState> <VisualState x:Name="UrgencyNormal"> <Storyboard> <ColorAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="orbUrgency" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Fill" To="Green"/> </Storyboard> </VisualState> </VisualStateGroup> </VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> <swi:Interaction.Triggers> <esi:DataTrigger Binding="{Binding Urgency}" Value="Serious"> <mei:GoToStateAction StateName="UrgencySerious"/> </esi:DataTrigger> <esi:DataTrigger Binding="{Binding Urgency}" Value="Normal"> <mei:GoToStateAction StateName="UrgencyNormal"/> </esi:DataTrigger> </swi:Interaction.Triggers> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Urgency}"/> <Path x:Name="orbUrgency" Width="14.6566" Height="14.5449" Stretch="Fill" StrokeThickness="1" StrokeLineJoin="Round" Fill="#FFE50A0A" Data="F1 M 9.3269,3.61737C 13.3742,3.61737 16.6552,6.87332 16.6552,10.8898C 16.6552,14.9063 13.3742,18.1623 9.3269,18.1623C 5.2796,18.1623 1.99862,14.9063 1.99862,10.8898C 1.99862,6.87332 5.27956,3.61737 9.3269,3.61737 Z "> </Path> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </my:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> </my:DataGridTemplateColumn>

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• Best programming aids for a quadriplegic programmer

  - by Peter Rowell

  Before you jump to conclusions, yes, this is programming related. It covers a situation that comes under the heading of, "There, but for the grace of God, go you or I." This is brand new territory for me so I'm asking for some serious help here. A young man, Honza Ripa, in a nearby town did the classic Dumb Thing two weeks after graduating from High School -- he dove into shallow water in the Russian River and had a C-4/C-5 break, sometimes called a Swimming Pool break. In a matter of seconds he went from an exceptional golfer and wrestler to a quadriplegic. (Read the story ... all of us should have been so lucky as to have a girlfriend like Brianna.) That was 10 months ago and he has regained only tiny amounts of control of his right index finger and a couple of other hand/foot motions, none of them fine-grained. His total control of his computer (currently running Win7, but we can change that as needed) is via voice command. Honza's not dumb. He had a 3.7 GPA with AP math and physics. The Problems: Since all of his input is via voice command, he is concerned that the predominance of special characters in programming will require vast amount of verbose commands. Does anyone know of any well done voice input system specifically designed for programmers? I'm thinking about something that might be modal--e.g. you say "Python input" and it goes into a macro mode for doing class definitions, etc. Given all of the RSI in programmer-land there's got to be something out there. What OS(es) does it run on? I am planning on teaching him Python, which is my preferred language for programming and teaching. Are there any applications / whatevers that are written in Python and would be a particularly good match for engaging him mentally while supporting his disability? One of his expressed interests is in stock investing, but that not might be a good starting point for a brand-new programmer. There are a lot of environments (Flash, JavaScript, etc) that are not particularly friendly to people with accessibility challenges. I vaguely remember (but cannot find) a research project that basically created an overlay system on top of a screen environment and then allowed macro command construction on top of the screen image. If we can get/train this system, we may be able to remove many hurdles to using the net. I am particularly interested in finding open source Python-based robotics and robotic prostheses projects so that he can simultaneously learn advanced programming concepts while learning to solve some of his own immediate problems. I've done a ton of googling on this, but I know there things I'm missing. I'm asking the SO community to step up to the plate here. I know this group has the answers, so let me hear them! Overwhelm me with the opportunities that any of us might have/need to still program after such a life-changing event.

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• Log4r : logger inheritance, yaml configuration, alternatives ?

  - by devlearn

  Hello, I'm pretty new to ruby environments and I was looking for a nice logging framework to use it my ruby and rails applications. In my previous experiences I have successfully used log4j and log4p (the perl port) and was expecting the same level of usability (and maturity) with log4r. However I must say that there are a number of things that are not clear at all in the log4r framework. 1 Logger Inheritance The logger inheritance does not seem to be managed at all ! If I declare a logger named 'myapp' and then try to get a logger name 'myapp::engine', the lookup will end with a NameError. I would expect that the framework returns the root logger according to the naming scheme and to use the 'myapp' logger. Q1 : Of course I can work around this and manage the names by myself with a lookup method, however is there a cleaner way to do this without any extra coding ? 2 YAML configuration Second thing that confuses me is the yaml configuration. On the log4r site there are literally no information about this system, the doc links forward to missing pages, so all the info I can find about is contained in the examples directory of the gem. I was pretty confused with the fact that the yaml configuration must contain the pre_config section, and that I need to define my own levels. If I remove the pre_config secion, or replace all the “custom” levels by the standard ones ( debug, info, warn, fatal ) , the example will throw the following error : log4r/yamlconfigurator.rb:68:in `decode_yaml': Log level must be in 0..7 (ArgumentError) So there seems to be no way of using a simple file where we only declare the loggers and appenders for the framework. Q2 : I realy think that I missed something and that must be a way of providing a simple yaml conf file. Do you have any examples of such an usage ? 3 Variables substitution in XML file Q3 : The Yaml configuration system seems to provide such a feature however I was unable to find a similar feature with XML files. Any ideas ? 4 Alternatives ? I must say that I'm very disappointed by the feature level and the maturity of log4r compared to the log4j and other log4j ports. I run into this framework with a solid background of logging APIs in other languages and find myself working around in all kinds just to make 'basic things' running in a “real world application”. By that I mean a complex application composed of several gems, console/scripting apps, and a rails web front end where the configuration must be mutualized and where we make intensive usage of namespaces and inheritance. I've run several searches in order to find something more suitable or mature, but did not find anything similar. Q4 : Do you guys know any (serious) alternatives to log4r framework that could be used in a enterprise class app ? Thanks reading all of this ! I'd really appreciate any pointers, Kind Regards,

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• Java RMI (Server: TCP Connection Idle/Client: Unmarshalexception (EOFException))

  - by Perry Dahl Christensen

  I'm trying to implement Sun Tutorials RMI application that calculates Pi. I'm having some serious problems and I cant find the solution eventhough I've been searching the entire web and several javaskilled people. I'm hoping you can put an end to my frustrations. The crazy thing is that I can run the application from the cmd on my desktop computer. Trying the exact same thing with the exact same code in the exact same directories on my laptop produces the following errors. The problem occures when I try to connect the client to the server. I don't believe that the error is due to my policyfile as I can run it on the desktop. It must be elsewhere. Have anyone tried the same and can you give me a hint as to where my problem is, please? POLICYFILE SERVER: grant { permission java.security.AllPermissions; permission java.net.SocketPermission"*", "connect, resolve"; }; POLICYFILE CLIENT: grant { permission java.security.AllPermissions; permission java.net.SocketPermission"*", "connect, resolve"; }; SERVERSIDE ERRORS: Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp. C:\Documents and Settings\STUDENTcd\ C:start rmiregistry C:java -cp c:\java;c:\java\compute.jar -Djava.rmi.server.codebase=file:/c:/jav a/compute.jar -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=localhost -Djava.security.policy=c:/jav a/servertest.policy engine.ComputeEngine ComputeEngine bound Exception in thread "RMI TCP Connection(idle)" java.security.AccessControlExcept ion: access denied (java.net.SocketPermission 127.0.0.1:1440 accept,resolve) at java.security.AccessControlContext.checkPermission(Unknown Source) at java.security.AccessController.checkPermission(Unknown Source) at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkPermission(Unknown Source) at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkAccept(Unknown Source) at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport$ConnectionHandler.checkAcceptPermi ssion(Unknown Source) at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport.checkAcceptPermission(Unknown Sour ce) at sun.rmi.transport.Transport$1.run(Unknown Source) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at sun.rmi.transport.Transport.serviceCall(Unknown Source) at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport.handleMessages(Unknown Source) at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport$ConnectionHandler.run0(Unknown Sou rce) at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport$ConnectionHandler.run(Unknown Sour ce) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(Unknown Source ) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) CLIENTSIDE ERRORS: Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp. C:\Documents and Settings\STUDENTcd\ C:java -cp c:\java;c:\java\compute.jar -Djava.rmi.server.codebase=file:\C:\jav a\files\ -Djava.security.policy=c:/java/clienttest.policy client.ComputePi local host 45 ComputePi exception: java.rmi.UnmarshalException: Error unmarshaling return header; nested exception is: java.io.EOFException at sun.rmi.transport.StreamRemoteCall.executeCall(Unknown Source) at sun.rmi.server.UnicastRef.invoke(Unknown Source) at java.rmi.server.RemoteObjectInvocationHandler.invokeRemoteMethod(Unkn own Source) at java.rmi.server.RemoteObjectInvocationHandler.invoke(Unknown Source) at $Proxy0.executeTask(Unknown Source) at client.ComputePi.main(ComputePi.java:18) Caused by: java.io.EOFException at java.io.DataInputStream.readByte(Unknown Source) ... 6 more C: Thanks in advance Perry

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• What Is The Best Database For Delphi Desktop Applications That Supports Stored Procedures?

  - by Cape Cod Gunny

  I started with Turbo Pascal 3, went to TP5, Bought TP6 called Borland the next day and downgraded to TP5.5. Bought Delphi 3, and now have Delphi 5 Enterprise. I sort of lost interest in writing code about 4-5 years ago for two reasons; Spent all day writing ASP & SQL for someone else. PC Techniques magazine went away. I've got a few programs in the shareware market that are solid performers but are in need of serious updating. I love Delphi or did when it was Borland (before Borland bought DBase and all the other crap), I'd like to salvage as much of my D5E code as possible but I doubt I can. I plan on upgrading to Delphi 2010. My next software release needs to interact with a database. I'm very proficient with MS Sql and like to put all of the database code in stored procedures. What is the best database choice that interacts well with Delphi, allows stored procedures and is so easy to deploy that even the Geico gecko could deploy it? 10/25/2009 18:53 PM EST Re-Opened After Reading Install Docs for Delphi 2010 I downloaded a trial version of Delphi 2010 and unzipped the install. I've been reading the install docs included in the package. I started with the install.htm inside the zip package. install.htm wisely tells you to see the following two articles: Installation Notes: http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/39754 Release Notes: http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/39758 the release notes state the following... MSSQL driver requires the installation of the SQL Native Client. SQL Native Client 2008 is required for dbxmss.dll. SQL Native Client 2005 is required for dbxmss9.dll I checked my machine to see if SQL Native Client is installed. Nope. I wasn't done reading the docs so I made a note to install SQL Native Client. I googled dbxmss.dll and dbxmss9.dll and found a very interesting thread on the Embarcadero forums. read thread here. After reading this thread and some careful thought I don't think I will be using Microsoft SQL Express. I can't rely on my customers having the right drivers installed. So, I'm back to looking for a different solution. If I'm selling a $40 product to the general masses I need to have a bulletproof solution that doesn't require my brand new customer to update their machine before my software will work.

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• Best practices concerning view model and model updates with a subset of the fields

  - by Martin

  By picking MVC for developing our new site, I find myself in the midst of "best practices" being developed around me in apparent real time. Two weeks ago, NerdDinner was my guide but with the development of MVC 2, even it seems outdated. It's an thrilling experience and I feel privileged to be in close contact with intelligent programmers daily. Right now I've stumbled upon an issue I can't seem to get a straight answer on - from all the blogs anyway - and I'd like to get some insight from the community. It's about Editing (read: Edit action). The bulk of material out there, tutorials and blogs, deal with creating and view the model. So while this question may not spell out a question, I hope to get some discussion going, contributing to my decision about the path of development I'm to take. My model represents a user with several fields like name, address and email. All the names, in fact, on field each for first name, last name and middle name. The Details view displays all these fields but you can change only one set of fields at a time, for instance, your names. The user expands a form while the other fields are still visible above and below. So the form that is posted back contains a subset of the fields representing the model. While this is appealing to us and our layout concerns, for various reasons, it is to be shunned by serious MVC-developers. I've been reading about some patterns and best practices and it seems that this is not in key with the paradigm of viewmodel == view. Or have I got it wrong? Anyway, NerdDinner dictates using FormCollection och UpdateModel. All the null fields are happily ignored. Since then, the MVC-community has abandoned this approach to such a degree that a bug in MVC 2 was not discovered. UpdateModel does not work without a complete model in your formcollection. The view model pattern receiving most praise seems to be Dedicated view model that contains a custom view model entity and is the only one that my design issue could be made compatible with. It entails a tedious amount of mapping, albeit lightened by the use of AutoMapper and the ideas of Jimmy Bogard, that may or may not be worthwhile. He also proposes a 1:1 relationship between view and view model. In keeping with these design paradigms, I am to create a view and associated view for each of my expanding sets of fields. The view models would each be nearly identical, differing only in the fields which are read-only, the views also containing much repeated markup. This seems absurd to me. In future I may want to be able to display two, more or all sets of fields open simultaneously. I will most attentively read the discussion I hope to spark. Many thanks in advance.

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• NSFetchedResultsController - Delegate methods crashing under iPhone OS 3.0, but NOT UNDER 3.1

  - by Scott Langendyk

  Hey guys, so I've got my NSFetchedResultsController working fine under the 3.1 SDK, however I start getting some weird errors, specifically in the delegate methods when I try it under 3.0. I've determined that this is related to the NSFetchedResultsControllerDelegate methods. This is what I have set up. The inEditingMode stuff has to do with the way I've implemented adding another static section to the table. - (void)controllerWillChangeContent:(NSFetchedResultsController*)controller { [self.tableView beginUpdates]; } - (void)controller:(NSFetchedResultsController *)controller didChangeSection:(id <NSFetchedResultsSectionInfo>)sectionInfo atIndex:(NSUInteger)sectionIndex forChangeType:(NSFetchedResultsChangeType)type{ NSIndexSet *sectionSet = [NSIndexSet indexSetWithIndex:sectionIndex]; if(self.inEditingMode){ sectionSet = [NSIndexSet indexSetWithIndex:sectionIndex + 1]; } switch (type) { case NSFetchedResultsChangeInsert: [self.tableView insertSections:sectionSet withRowAnimation:UITableViewRowAnimationFade]; break; case NSFetchedResultsChangeDelete: [self.tableView deleteSections:sectionSet withRowAnimation:UITableViewRowAnimationFade]; break; default: [self.tableView reloadData]; break; } } - (void)controller:(NSFetchedResultsController *)controller didChangeObject:(id)anObject atIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath forChangeType:(NSFetchedResultsChangeType)type newIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)newIndexPath{ NSIndexPath *relativeIndexPath = indexPath; NSIndexPath *relativeNewIndexPath = newIndexPath; if(self.inEditingMode){ relativeIndexPath = [NSIndexPath indexPathForRow:indexPath.row inSection:indexPath.section + 1]; relativeNewIndexPath = [NSIndexPath indexPathForRow:newIndexPath.row inSection:newIndexPath.section + 1]; } switch(type) { case NSFetchedResultsChangeInsert: [self.tableView insertRowsAtIndexPaths:[NSArray arrayWithObject:relativeNewIndexPath] withRowAnimation:UITableViewRowAnimationFade]; break; case NSFetchedResultsChangeDelete: [self.tableView deleteRowsAtIndexPaths:[NSArray arrayWithObject:relativeIndexPath] withRowAnimation:UITableViewRowAnimationFade]; break; default: [self.tableView reloadData]; break; } } -(void)controllerDidChangeContent:(NSFetchedResultsController *)controller{ [self.tableView endUpdates]; } When I add an entity to the managed object context, I get the following error: Serious application error. Exception was caught during Core Data change processing: *** -[NSCFArray objectAtIndex:]: index (1) beyond bounds (1) with userInfo (null) I put a breakpoint on objc_exception_throw, and the crash seems to be occuring inside of controllerDidChangeContent. If I comment out all of the self.tableView methods, and put a single [self.tableView reloadData] inside of controllerDidChangeContent, everything works as expected. Anybody have any idea as to why this is happening?

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• OpenJPA + Tomcat JDBC Connection Pooling = stale data

  - by Julie MacNaught

  I am using the Tomcat JDBC Connection Pool with OpenJPA in a web application. The application does not see updated data. Specifically, another java application adds or removes records from the database, but the web application never sees these updates. This is quite a serious issue. I must be missing something basic. If I remove the Connection Pool from the implementation, the web application sees the updates. It's as if the web application's commits are never called on the Connection. Version info: Tomcat JDBC Connection Pool: org.apache.tomcat tomcat-jdbc 7.0.21 OpenJPA: org.apache.openjpa openjpa 2.0.1 Here is the code fragment that creates the DataSource (DataSourceHelper.findOrCreateDataSource method): PoolConfiguration props = new PoolProperties(); props.setUrl(URL); props.setDefaultAutoCommit(false); props.setDriverClassName(dd.getClass().getName()); props.setUsername(username); props.setPassword(pw); props.setJdbcInterceptors("org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.interceptor.ConnectionState;"+ "org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.interceptor.StatementFinalizer;"+ "org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.interceptor.SlowQueryReportJmx;"+ "org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.interceptor.ResetAbandonedTimer"); props.setLogAbandoned(true); props.setSuspectTimeout(120); props.setJmxEnabled(true); props.setInitialSize(2); props.setMaxActive(100); props.setTestOnBorrow(true); if (URL.toUpperCase().contains(DB2)) { props.setValidationQuery("VALUES (1)"); } else if (URL.toUpperCase().contains(MYSQL)) { props.setValidationQuery("SELECT 1"); props.setConnectionProperties("relaxAutoCommit=true"); } else if (URL.toUpperCase().contains(ORACLE)) { props.setValidationQuery("select 1 from dual"); } props.setValidationInterval(3000); dataSource = new DataSource(); dataSource.setPoolProperties(props); Here is the code that creates the EntityManagerFactory using the DataSource: //props contains the connection url, user name, and password DataSource dataSource = DataSourceHelper.findOrCreateDataSource("DATAMGT", URL, username, password); props.put("openjpa.ConnectionFactory", dataSource); emFactory = (OpenJPAEntityManagerFactory) Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("DATAMGT", props); If I comment out the DataSource like so, then it works. Note that OpenJPA has enough information in the props to configure the connection without using the DataSource. //props contains the connection url, user name, and password //DataSource dataSource = DataSourceHelper.findOrCreateDataSource("DATAMGT", URL, username, password); //props.put("openjpa.ConnectionFactory", dataSource); emFactory = (OpenJPAEntityManagerFactory) Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("DATAMGT", props); So somehow, the combination of OpenJPA and the Connection Pool is not working correctly.

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• Windows forms application blocks after station lock

  - by Silviu

  We're having a serious issue at work. We've discovered that after the station where the client was running is locked/unlocked the client is blocked. No repaint. So the UI thread is blocked with something. Looking at the callstack of the UI thread (thread 0) using windbg we see that a UserPreferenceChanged event gets raised. It is marshalled through a WindowsFormsSynchronizationContext using it's controlToSend field to the UI. It gets blocked by a call to the marshalling control. The method called is MarshaledInvoke it builds a ThreadMethodEntry entry = new ThreadMethodEntry(caller, method, args, synchronous, executionContext); This entry is supposed to do the magic. The call is a synchronous call and because of that (still in the MarshaledInvoke of the Control class) the wait call is reached: if (!entry.IsCompleted) { this.WaitForWaitHandle(entry.AsyncWaitHandle); } The last thing that i can see on the stack is the WaitOne called on the previously mentioned AsyncWaitHandle. This is very annoying because having just the callstack of the runtime and not one of our methods being invoked we cannot really point to a bug in our code. I might be wrong, but I'm guessing that the marshaling control is not "marshaling" to the ui thread. But another one...i don't really know which one because the other threads are being used by us and are blocked...maybe this is the issue. But none of the other threads are running a message loop. This is very annoying. We had some issues in the past with marshaling controls to the right ui thread. That is because the first form that is constructed is a splash form. Which is not the main form. We used to use the main form to marshal call to the ui thread. But from time to time some calls would go to a non ui thread and some grids would broke with a big red X on them. I fixed this by creating a specific class: public class WindowsFormsSynchronizer { private static readonly WindowsFormsSynchronizationContext = new WindowsFormsSynchronizationContext(); //Methods are following that would build the same interface of the synchronization context. } This class gets build as one of the first objects in the first form being constructed. We've noticed some other strange thing. Looking at the heap there are 7 WindowsFormsSynchronizationContext objects. 6 of these have the same instance of controlToSend, and the other one has some different instance of controlToSend. This last one is the one that should marshal the calls to the UI. I don't have any other idea...maybe some of you guys had this same issue?

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• Is One Tool or a Suite of Tools Better for Scrum?

  - by Rob Wells

  G'day, Edit: We've been using Scrum very successfully for several years on several projects of varying sizes. In fact, our team developed the successful iPlayer project for the BBC using a classical Scrum approach. After using various combinations of tools, some high-tech, some low-tech, across these projects we now wish to try adopting a suitable tool suite. Our manager is to some extent attempting to force the adoption of a single suite of tools for Scrum. I've looked at the SO question "Best Scrum tools" and most people seem to recommend either: a suite of low-tech solutions, e.g. whiteboards, post-its, index cards, etc., or a monolithic tool that tries to satisfy as much as possible of the process, e.g. Agilo, Mingle, ScrumWorks, Target Process, etc. Our team is currently evaluating several different Scrum tools. However, we are looking at selecting a single, monolithic tool, e.g. Agilo. All of the "one-stop" solutions have their strengths and weaknesses with the serious enterprise type solutions being the best sort of fit. But all have some short comings. After reading the paper "Peer Code Review: An Agile Process" over at SmartBear I started wondering if we were trying to force adoption of a tool on a "best fit" basis. I think you can take a couple of reference artefacts of the Scrum development process, say user stories, epics and themes, and the code base which must use a well-known SCM, e.g. SVN, Hg, etc. Then if we take that as the common reference points for the tools employed then we would be able to use a group of tools to handle the different aspects of the Scrum process rather than try forcing a fit of a single tool would is a bit like forcing a square peg into the round hole. In this way, providing you've agreed your common reference points, you can use several tools, each performing their role better than a could be done by a single component in a monolithic tool suite. Is this a more sensible approach? Are the two reference points I mentioned above suitable, or is their a better choice of points where the tools would meet? cheers,

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