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• Windows Phone 7 Series - Tools and Resources

  - by TechTwaddle

  Unless you've been living in the caves of Lascaux for the past couple of days, you probably know what's happening in the world of Windows Phone. Microsoft unveiled the developer tools required to develop applications and games for Windows Phone 7 at MIX10 a couple of days back. Silverlight and XNA being the major frameworks, no big surprise there. And the best news of all is that all the development tools are free! So if you are planning to develop apps for Windows Phone 7, read on. The first place, or more appropriately hub, for you is the Windows Phone Developer Portal. It has most of the information you need to get you started. Now there is a ton of information available at other places too. In this post, I take time to put all the information that I found useful at one place, and I'll keep updating this as and when I find new stuff.   Setting up the development environment 1. Install Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (Community Technology Preview) This will install Visual Studio 2010 Express, Silverlight, XNA framework and emulator for Windows Phone 7. It also installs a few support tools. 2. Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone:     - Install Expression Blend 4 beta     - Install Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone     - Install Expression Blend SDK Preview for Windows Phone Installing the above tools should set your machine up for development. I installed the tools on my Windows Vista SP1 machine and the process went smoothly without running into any major hitch. Note that the tools won't install on Windows XP, read the release notes of the CTP. Resources and Documentation 1. Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Training Kit 2. Programming Windows Phone 7 Series by Charles Petzold. Contains few chapters only. Gives a good preview. 3. MSDN documentation for Windows Phone 7 Development 4. A sample chapter from Learning Windows Phone Programming [PDF] by Yochay Kiriaty and Jaime Rodriguez. Complete book will be available at a later time. 5. Windows Phone 7 Developer Forum - where you can ask questions and problems you run into and the experts are there to help you. 6. For Silverlight visit silverlight.net and for XNA game development, the XNA Creators Club is the place to go, also make sure you follow Michael Klutcher's and Shawn Hargreaves' blog. 7. And finally the MIX'10 website. Most of the sessions will be available for download later (some are already available). Click on the Windows Phone tag to get all the session details and downloads.   If you are completely new to Silverlight and XNA (like me), and C# makes some sense to you then I suggest you go through the Developer Training Kit. It gives a good start and ramps you up pretty quickly.

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• So You Want to Be a Social Media Director

  - by Mike Stiles

  Do you want to be a Social Media Director? Some say the title is already losing its relevance; that social should be a basic skill that is required and used no matter what your position is inside the enterprise. I suppose that’s visionary, and a fun thing for thought leaders to say. But in the vast majority of business organizations, we’re so far away from that reality that the thought of not having someone driving social’s implementation and guiding its proper usage conjures up images of anarchy. That said, social media has become so broad, so catch-all, and so extended across business functions, that today’s Social Media Director, depending on the size of their staff, must make jacks-of-all-trades look like one-trick-ponies. Just as the purview of the CMO has grown all-encompassing, the disciplines required of their heads of social are stacking up. Master of Content Every social pipeline you build must stay filled, with quantity and quality. Content takes time, and the job never stops. Never. And no, it’s not true that anybody can write. Master of Customer Experience You must have a passion for hearing from customers and making them really happy. Master of PR You must know how to communicate and leverage the trust you’ve built when crises strike. Couldn’t hurt to be a Master of Politics. Master of Social Technology So many social management tools on the market. You have to know what social tech ecosystem makes sense and avoid piecemeal point solutions. Master of Business Development Social for selling and prospecting is hot, and you have to know how to use social to do it. Master of Analytics Nothing else matters if you can’t prove social is helping the brand. That’s right, creative content guy has to also be a math and stats geek. Good luck with that. Master of Paid Media You’ve got to learn the language, learn the tactics, learn the vendors and learn how to measure results. Master of Education Guess who gets to teach everyone who has no clue how to use social for business. Master of Personal Likability You’ll be leading the voice, tone, image and personality of the brand. If you don’t instinctively know how to be liked by actual people, the brand will be starting from a deficit. How deep must you go in this parade of masteries? Again, that depends on your employer’s maturity level in social. Serious players recognize these as distinct disciplines requiring true experts for maximum effect. Less serious players will need you to execute personally in many of these areas. Do the best you can, and try to grow quickly at each. If you’re the sole person executing all social…well…you’re in the game of managing expectations and trying to socially educate your employer. The good news is, you should be making a certifiable killing. If you’re alone and your salary is modest, time to understand how many brands out there crave what you’ve mastered. Not to push back against thought leaders, but the need for brand social leadership has not gone away…not even a little bit. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Stefan Wagner, freeimages.com

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• #iPad at One Week: A Great Device Made with a Heavy Hand

  - by andrewbrust

  I have now had my iPad for a little over a week. In that time, Apple introduced the world to its iPhone OS 4 (and the SDK agreement’s draconian new section 3.3.1), HP introduced is Slate, and Microsoft got ready to launch Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. And through it all I have used my iPad. I've used it for email, calendar, controlling my Sonos, and writing an essay. I've used it for getting on TripIt and Twitter, and surfing the Web. I've used it for online banking, and online ordering and delivery of food. And the verdict? Honestly? I think it's a great device and I thoroughly enjoy using it. The screen is bright and vibrant. I am surprisingly fast and accurate when I type on it. The touch screen's responsiveness is nearly flawless. The software, including a number of third party applications, include pleasing animations and use of color that make it fun to get work done. And speaking of work, the Exchange integration is, dare I say it, robust. Not as full-featured as on a PC or Windows Mobile device, but still offering core functionality and, so far at least, without bugs. The UI is intuitive, not just to me, but also to my 5 1/2 year old, and also to my nearly-3-year-old son. They picked it up and, with just just a few pointers from me, they almost immediately knew what to do, whether they were looking at photos (and swiping/flicking along as they did so), using a drawing program, playing a game, or watching YouTube videos. The younger of the two of them even tried to get up on a chair and grab the thing today. He dropped it, from about 4 feet off the ground. And it's still fine. (Meanwhile, I'll be keeping it on a higher shelf.) I cannot fully describe yet what makes this form factor and this product so appealing. Maybe it's that it's an always-on device. Maybe it's just being able to hold such a nice, relatively large display so close. Maybe it's the design sensibility, that seems to pervade throughout the app ecosystem. Or maybe it's that one's fingers, and not pens or mice, are the software's preferred input device. Whatever the attraction, it's strong. And no matter how much I tend to root for Microsoft and against Apple, Cupertino has, in my mind, scored big, Can Microsoft compete? Yes, but not with the Windows 7 standard UI (nor with individual OEMs’ own UIs on top). I hope Microsoft builds a variant of the Windows Phone 7 specifically for tablet devices. And I hope they make it clear that all developers, and programming languages, are welcome to the platform. Once that’s established, the OEMs have to build great hardware with fast, responsive touch screens, under Microsoft's watchful eye. That may be the hardest part of getting this right. No matter what, Microsoft's got a fight on its hands. I don't know if it can count on winning that fight, either. But Silverlight and Live Tiles could certainly help. And so can treating developers like adults.  Apple seems intent on treating their devs like kids, and then giving the kids a curfew.  For that, dev-friendly Microsoft may one day give thanks.

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• Strange Happenings

  - by MOSSLover

  There are weeks we go about our life thinking nothing is going to change nothing will happen.  Then there are other weeks a billion things happen at once.  Friday started off very weird for me.  I flew into Atlanta and I met some cool people for another SharePoint event.  I had some good conversations.  Saturday then hit me and my virtual machine bombed in my presentation after the auto updater ran.  I was writing code on the board and describing everything in notepad.  I would say as presentations go it was the best and the worst presentation all wrapped into one.  The next day I was in Baltimore and I hung out with my aunt which was relatively uneventful and great.  Then Monday hit and half my presentations failed or succeeded and my screen freezes so I start describing the code.  I was on top of my game until Monday night.  On top of the world.  I'm exhausted I get into Raleigh and one of the craziest stories of my life happens.  So my boss has been renting cars through Priceline this week I got a different company than the other weeks. The company gives me a Ford Focus and I plug in the coordinates on my IPhone where I want go.  I head out and then I get to the destination hotel (or I thought I did). I go inside it's the wrong hotel the other one is a few miles away.  I walk outside hop into the car and it sounds like a gunshot.  Nothing is starting...Am I doing something wrong?  No I'm not the car is completely dead in the water.  I call the rental car facility and they tell me to call roadside they are closing for the night.  Roadside says they can't give me a new car but they can get me a jump then I have to take it up with the facility.  They send me a tow truck to give me a jump the guy can't jump the car.  He tells me this vehicle was towed about an hour ago.  He shows me a copy of a slip from when he towed it.  We also notice the rental car company left one of there price scanning guns in the vehicle.  I call up roadside and now they are interested in getting me a car because I need to be onsite tomorrow.  They get the manager of the facility on the phone he apologizes profusely and he says he'll be there in 10 minutes.  About 30 minutes pass and him plus another dude show up with a Ford Escape leather interior.  At this point I hand him the gun tell him someone left it in the vehicle and that I'm not so happy with them.  I ask them to comp my rental they can't due to Priceline, however if I call him again this week he can get me a voucher.  It's about 2 am and I'm ready to get to the hotel I don't make it in the next morning until 10 am.  I would say this was a crazy week all forms of technology are trying to tell me something.  What I have no idea, but we'll see the outcome soon.  I feel so weird tons of change is about to happen.  I don't know if it's good or bad.  I think this week is some form of omen.

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• What Counts For A DBA: ESP

  - by Louis Davidson

  Now I don’t want to get religious here, and I’m not going to, but what I’m going to describe in this ‘What Counts for a DBA’ installment sometimes feels like magic. Often  I will spend hours thinking about the solution to a design issue or coding problem, working diligently to try to come up with a solution and then finally just give up with the feeling that I’m not even qualified to be a data entry clerk, much less a data architect.  At this point I often take a walk (or sometimes a nap), and then it hits me. I realize that I have the answer just sitting in my brain, ready to implement.  This phenomenon is not limited to walks either; it can happen almost any time after I stop my obsession about a problem. I call this phenomena ESP (or Extra-Sensory Programming.)  Another term for this could be ‘sleeping on it’, and while the idiom tends to mean to let time pass to actively think about a problem, sleeping on a problem also lets you relax and let your brain do the work. I first noticed this back in my college days when I would play video games for hours on end. We would get stuck deep in some dungeon unable to find a way out, playing for days on end until we were beaten down tired. Once we gave up and walked away, the solution would usually be there waiting for one of us before we came back to play the next day.  Sometimes it would be in the form of a dream, and sometimes it would just be that the problem was now easy to solve when we started to play again.  While it worked great for video games, it never occurred when I studied English Literature for hours on end, or even when I worked for the same sort of frustrating hours attempting to solve a homework problem in Calculus.  I believe that the difference was that I was passionate about the video game, and certainly far less so about homework where people used the word “thou” instead of “you” or x to represent a number. This phenomenon occurs somewhat more often in my current work as a professional data programmer, because I am very passionate about SQL and love those aspects of my career choice.  Every day that I get to draw a new data model to solve a customer issue, or write a complex SELECT statement to ferret out the answer to a complex data question, is a great day. I hope it is the same for any reader of this blog.  But, unfortunately, while the day on a whole is great, a heck of a lot of noise is generated in work life. There are the typical project deadlines, along with the requisite project manager sitting on your shoulders shouting slogans to try to make you to go faster: Add in office politics, and the occasional family issues that permeate the mind, and you lose the ability to think deeply about any problem, not to mention occasionally forgetting your own name.  These office realities coupled with a difficult SQL problem staring at you from your widescreen monitor will slowly suck the life force out of your body, making it seem impossible to solve the problem This is when the walk starts; or a nap. Maybe you hide from the madness under your desk like George Costanza hides from Steinbrenner on Seinfeld.  Forget about the problem. Free your mind from the insanity of the problem and your surroundings. Then let your training and education deep in your brain take over and see if it will passively do the rest for you. If you don’t end up with a solution, the worst case scenario is that you have a bit of exercise or rest, and you won’t have heard the phrase “better is the enemy of good enough” even once…which certainly will do your brain some good. Once you stop expecting whipping your brain for information, inspiration may just strike and instead of a humdrum solution you find a solution you hadn’t even considered, almost magically. So, my beloved manager, next time you have an urgent deadline and you come across me taking a nap, creep away quietly because I’m working, doing some extra-sensory programming.

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• Heading out to Dallas GiveCamp 2011

  - by dotgeek

  The day has finally arrived for twelve local charities here in the Dallas area, when they’ll get some help from various local Developers with their website initiative needs at this years Dallas GiveCamp. I’m really looking forward to helping out at this year event and what I hope will be the start of many more GiveCamps to follow. Similar to Habitat for Humanity, where people gather to help build and improve homes for people in need, GiveCamp brings together programmers and equips them with the virtual tools they need to build and improve their existing websites. Tonight is when things will kickoff for this weekends events and teams will start working on their various projects. The building continues on through the night then and all the way through until Sunday afternoon. The end goal for the teams and charities is to have a completed and working website for each charity to begin using and turn over all the production code and digital assets to them. None of this would be possible with out the great sponsors we have returning once again and their donations of various products to help these charities out with their projects, like Telerik's CMS product Sitefinity 4.0, paired with a year of hosting from Verio to mention just a few of them. Just like the skilled builders who might help train volunteers in the use of a nail gun in building a house. Training is also available here on site for the Developers and these local Charities. Giving them all the skills in how to manage and use these products, from site development and then into actual production is a key to the success of this weekends event.     Tonight's training sessions will kick off with a real treat from Giovanni Gallucci, as he speaks about Social Media for NPOs and then later Gabe Sumner from Telerik will begin a training session on Sitefinity for Developers. These training sessions will continue through out the weekend with .Net Nuke and Mojo Portal sessions also planned as well. If you’re a developer and would like to help out in the future, then check in your area and with your local User Groups to find out if you already have a GiveCamp near you to help out. If you don’t have one available, then consider starting up a local GiveCamp and then you too can help Code it Forward. About GiveCamp GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend. During GiveCamp, developers are welcome to go home in the evenings or camp out all weekend long. There are usually food and drink provided at the event. There are sometimes even game systems set up for when you and your need a little break! Overall, it’s a great opportunity for people to work together, developing new friendships, and doing something important for their community. At GiveCamp, there is an expectation of “What Happens at GiveCamp, Stays at GiveCamp”. Therefore, all source code must be turned over to the charities at the end of the weekend (developers cannot ask for payment) and the charities are responsible for maintaining the code moving forward (charities cannot expect the developers to maintain the codebase).

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• How to Make the Gnome Panels in Ubuntu Totally Transparent

  - by The Geek

  We all love transparency, since it makes your desktop so beautiful and lovely—so today we’re going to show you how to apply transparency to the panels in your Ubuntu Gnome setup. It’s an easy process, and here’s how to do it. This article is the first part of a multi-part series on how to customize the Ubuntu desktop, written by How-To Geek reader and ubergeek, Omar Hafiz. Making the Gnome Panels Transparent Of course we all love transparency, It makes your desktop so beautiful and lovely. So you go for enabling transparency in your panels , you right click on your panel, choose properties, go to the Background tab and make your panel transparent. Easy right? But instead of getting a lovely transparent panel, you often get a cluttered, ugly panel like this: Fortunately it can be easily fixed, all we need to do is to edit the theme files. If your theme is one of those themes that came with Ubuntu like Ambiance then you’ll have to copy it from /usr/share/themes to your own .themes directory in your Home Folder. You can do so by typing the following command in the terminal cp /usr/share/themes/theme_name ~/.themes Note: don’t forget to substitute theme_name with the theme name you want to fix. But if your theme is one you downloaded then it is already in your .themes folder. Now open your file manager and navigate to your home folder then do to .themes folder. If you can’t see it then you probably have disabled the “View hidden files” option. Press Ctrl+H to enable it. Now in .themes you’ll find your previously copied theme folder there, enter it then go to gtk-2.0 folder. There you may find a file named “panel.rc”, which is a configuration file that tells your panel how it should look like. If you find it there then rename it to “panel.rc.bak”. If you don’t find don’t panic! There’s nothing wrong with your system, it’s just that your theme decided to put the panel configurations in the “gtkrc” file. Open this file with your favorite text editor and at the end of the file there is line that looks like this “include “apps/gnome-panel.rc””. Comment out this line by putting a hash mark # in front of it. Now it should look like this “# include “apps/gnome-panel.rc”” Save and exit the text editor. Now change your theme to any other one then switch back to the one you edited. Now your panel should look like this: Stay tuned for the second part in the series, where we’ll cover how to change the color and fonts on your panels. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The Legend of Zelda – 1980s High School Style [Video] Suspended Sentence is a Free Cross-Platform Point and Click Game Build a Batman-Style Hidden Bust Switch Make Your Clock Creates a Custom Clock for your Android Homescreen Download the Anime Angels Theme for Windows 7 CyanogenMod Updates; Rolls out Android 2.3 to the Less Fortunate

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• Sneak Peak: Social Developer Program at JavaOne

  - by Mike Stiles

  By guest blogger Roland Smart We're just days away from what is gunning to be the most exciting installment of OpenWorld to date, so how about an exciting sneak peak at the very first Social Developer Program? If your first thought is, "What's a social developer?" you're not alone. It’s an emerging term and one we think will gain prominence as social experiences become more prevalent in enterprise applications. For those who keep an eye on the ever-evolving Facebook platform, you'll recall that they recently rebranded their PDC (preferred developer consultant) group as the PMD (preferred marketing developer), signaling the importance of development resources inside the marketing organization to unlock the potential of social. The marketing developer they're referring to could be considered a social developer in a broader context. While it's true social has really blossomed in the marketing context and CMOs are winning more and more technical resources, social is starting to work its way more deeply into the enterprise with the help of developers that work outside marketing. Developers, like the rest of us, have fallen in "like" with social functionality and are starting to imagine how social can transform enterprise applications in the way it has consumer-facing experiences. The thesis of my presentation is that social developers will take many pages from the marketing playbook as they apply social inside the enterprise. To support this argument, lets walk through a range of enterprise applications and explore how consumer-facing social experiences might be interpreted in this context. Here's one example of how a social experience could be integrated into a sales enablement application. As a marketer, I spend a great deal of time collaborating with my sales colleagues, so I have good insight into their working process. While at Involver, we grew our sales team quickly, and it became evident some of our processes broke with scale. For example, we used to have weekly team meetings at which we'd discuss what was working and what wasn't from a messaging perspective. One aspect of these sessions focused on "objections" and "responses," where the salespeople would walk through common objections to purchasing and share appropriate responses. We tried to map each context to best answers and we'd capture these on a wiki page. As our team grew, however, participation at scale just wasn't tenable, and our wiki pages quickly lost their freshness. Imagine giving salespeople a place where they could submit common objections and responses for their colleagues to see, sort, comment on, and vote on. What you'd get is an up-to-date and relevant repository of information. And, if you supported an application like this with a social graph, it would be possible to make good recommendations to individual sales people about the objections they'd likely hear based on vertical, product, region or other graph data. Taking it even further, you could build in a badging/game element to reward those salespeople who participate the most. Both these examples are based on proven models at work inside consumer-facing applications. If you want to learn about how HR, Operations, Product Development and Customer Support can leverage social experiences, you’re welcome to join us at JavaOne or join our Social Developer Community to find some of the presentations after OpenWorld.

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• How Can I Start an Incognito/Private Browsing Window from a Shortcut?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Sometimes you just want to pop the browser open for a quick web search without reloading all your saved tabs; read on as we show a fellow reader how to make a quick private-browsing shortcut. Dear How-To Geek, I came up with a solution to my problem, but I need your help implementing it. I typically have a ton of tabs open in my web browser and, when I need to free up system resources when gaming or using a resource intense application, I shut down the web browser. The problem arises when I find myself needing to do quick web search while the browser is shut down. I don’t want to open it up, load all the tabs, and waste the resources in doing so all for a quick Google search. The perfect solution, it would seem, is to open up one of Chrome’s Incognito windows: it loads separate, it won’t open up all the old tabs, and it’s perfect for a quick Google search. Is there a way to launch Chrome with a single Incognito window open without having to open the browser in the normal mode (and load the bazillion tabs I have sitting there)? Sincerely, Tab Crazy That’s a rather clever work around to your problem. Since you’ve already done the hard work of figuring out the solution you need, we’re more than happy to help you across the finish line. The magic you seek is available via what are known as “command line options” which allow you to add additional parameters and switches onto a command.   By appending the command the Chrome shortcut uses, we can easily tell it to launch in Incognito mode. (And, for other readers following along at home, we can do the same thing with other browsers like Firefox). First, let’s look at Chrome’s default shortcut: If you right click on it and select the properties menu, you’ll see where the shortcut points: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" If you run that shortcut, you’ll open up normal browsing mode in Chrome and your saved tabs will all load. What we need to do is use the command line switches available for Chrome and tell it that we want it to launch an Incognito window instead. Doing so is as simple as appending the end of the “Target” box’s command line entry with -incognito, like so: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" -incognito We’d also recommend changing the icon to it’s easy to tell the default Chrome shortcut apart from your new Incognito shortcut. When you’re done, make sure to hit OK/Apply at the button to save the changes. You can recreate the same private-browsing-shortcut effect with other major web browsers too. Repeat shortcut editing steps we highlighted above, but change out the -incognito with -private (for Firefox and Internet Explorer) and -newprivatetab (for Opera). With just a simple command line switch applied, you can now launch a lightweight single browser window for those quick web searches without having to stop your game and load up all your saved tabs. Have a pressing tech question? Email us at [email protected] and we’ll do our best to answer it.

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• Microsoft Build 2012 Day 1 Keynote Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  So I have finally dried the tears after watching the Keynote for Build 2012.  This wasn’t because it was an emotional presentation, but because for the second year I missed the goodies.  Each on site attendee got a Surface RT, a Lumia 920 and a voucher for 100GB of SkyDrive storage. The event was opened with the announcement that in the three days since the launch of Windows 8 over 4 million upgrades have been sold.  I don’t care who you are that is an impressive stat.  Ballmer then spent a fair amount of time remaking the case for the Windows and Windows Phone platforms similar to what we have heard over the last to launch events. There were some cool, but non-essential demos.  The one that was the most fun was the Perceptive Pixel 82” slate device.  At first glance I wondered why I would ever want such a device, but then Ballmer explained it’s possible use for schools and boardrooms.  The actually made sense. Then things got strange.  Steve started explaining features that developers could leverage.  Usually this type of information is left to the product leads.  He focused on the integration with the Charms features such as Search and Share. Steve “Guggs” Guggenheim showed off an app that would appeal to my kids from Disney called “Agent P” which is base on Phineas and Ferb.  Then he got to the meat of the presentation.  We found out that you could add a tile that can be used to sell ad space.  In the same vein we also found out that you could use Microsoft’s, Paypal’s or any commerce engine of your own creation or choosing. For those who are interested in sports and especially developing sports apps you would have found the small presentation from Michael Bayle of ESPN.  He introduced the ESPN app which has tons of features.  For the developers in the crowd he also mentioned that ESPN has an API available at developer.espn.com. During the launch events we were told apps were coming.  In this presentation we were actually shown a scrolling list of logos and told about a couple of them.  Ballmer mentioned specifically Twitter, SAP and DropBox.  These are impressive names that were just a couple of the list impressive names. Steve Ballmer addressed the question of why you should develop for the Windows 8 platform.  He feels that Microsoft has the best commercial terms for developers, a better way to build apps than other platforms and a variety of form factors.  His key point though was the available volume of customers given the current Windows install base and assuming even a flat growth of the platform.  This he backed with a promise that Microsoft is going to do better at marketing and you won’t be able to avoid the ads that they are bringing out. The last section of the key note was present by Kevin Gallo from the Windows Phone team.  This was the real reason I tuned into the webcast.  He impressed upon those watching that the strength of developing for the Microsoft platform is the common programming model that now exist.  While there are difference between form factor implementations you can leverage code across them. He claimed that 90% of developer requests for Windows Phone 8 had been implemented.  These include: More controls with better performance Better live tiles including lock screen integration Speech support in custom apps Easier submission to the market place App camera integration VOIP and chat support Bluetooth and NFC support Native C++ development Direct 3D development   The quote from Kevin that stood out for me was that “Take your Dramamine and buckle your seatbelt type of games are coming to Windows Phone 8”.  He back this up by displaying a list of game development frameworks and then having Unity come out and do a demo. Ok, almost done … The last two things of note for me were the announcement that the SDK is immediately available at dev.windowsphone.com and that they were reducing the cost of an individual developer account to $8 for the next 8 days. Let the development commence. del.icio.us Tags: Build 2012,Windows 8,Windows Phone 8,Windows Phone

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• Silverlight Cream for January 15, 2011 -- #1028

  - by Dave Campbell

  Note to #1024 Swag Winners: I'm sending emails to the vendors Sunday night, thanks for your patience (a few of you have not contacted me yet) In this Issue: Ezequiel Jadib, Daniel Egan(-2-), Page Brooks, Jason Zander, Andrej Tozon, Marlon Grech, Jonathan van de Veen, Walt Ritscher, Jesse Liberty, Jeremy Likness, Sacha Barber, William E. Burrows, and WindowsPhoneGeek. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Building a Radar Control in Silverlight - Part 1" Page Brooks WP7: "Tutorial: Dynamic Tile Push Notification for Windows Phone 7" Jason Zander Training: "WP7 Unleashed Session I–Hands on Labs" Daniel Egan From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Rough Cut Editor SP1 Released Ezequiel Jadib has an announcement about the Rough Cut Editor SP1 release, and he walks you through the content, installation and a bit of the initial use. WP7 Unleashed Session I–Hands on Labs Daniel Egan posted Part 1 of 3 of a new WP7 HOL ... video online and material to download... get 'em while they're hot! WP7 Saving to Media Library Daniel Egan has another post up as well on saving an image to the media library... not the update from Tim Heuer... all good info Building a Radar Control in Silverlight - Part 1 This freakin' cool post from Page Brooks is the first one of a series on building a 'Radar Control' in Silverlight ... seriously, go to the bottom and run the demo... I pretty much guarantee you'll take the next link which is download the code... don't forget to read the article too! Tutorial: Dynamic Tile Push Notification for Windows Phone 7 Jason Zander has a nice-looking tutorial up on dynamic tile notifications... good diagrams and discussion and plenty of code. Reactive.buffering.from event. Andrej Tozon is continuing his Reactive Extensions posts with this one on buffering: BufferWithTime and BufferWIthCount ... good stuff, good write-up, and the start of a WP7 game? MEFedMVVM with PRISM 4 Marlon Grech combines his MEFedMVVM with Prism 4, and says it was easy... check out the post and the code. Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application part #40 Jonathan van de Veen has a discussion up about things you need to pay attention to as your project gets close to first deployment... lots of good information to think about Silverlight or not. Customize Windows 7 Preview pane for XAML files Walt Ritscher has a (very easy) XAML extension for Windows 7 that allows previewing of XAML files in an explorer window... as our UK friends say "Brilliant!" Entity Framework Code-First, oData & Windows Phone Client From the never-ending stream of posts that is Jesse Liberty comes this one on EF Code-First... so Jesse's describing Code-First and OData all wrapped up about a WP7 app Sterling Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Database Triggers and Auto-Identity Sterling and Database Triggers sitting in a tree... woot for WP7 from Jeremy Likness... provides database solutions including Validation, Data-specific concerns such as 'last modified', and post-save processing ... all good, Jeremy! A Look At Fluent APIs Sacha Barber has a great post up that isn't necessarily Silverlight, but is it? ... we've been hearing a lot about Fluent APIs... read on to see what the buzz is. Windows Phone 7 - Part 3 - Final Application William E. Burrows has Part 3 of his WP7 tutorial series up... this one completing the Golf Handicap app by giving the user the ability to manage scores. User Control vs Custom Control in Silverlight for WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek has a great diagram and description-filled post up on User Controls and Custom Controls in WP7... good external links too. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

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• Introducing the First Global Web Experience Management Content Management System

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  By Calvin Scharffs, VP of Marketing and Product Development, Lingotek Globalizing online content is more important than ever. The total spending power of online consumers around the world is nearly $50 trillion, a recent Common Sense Advisory report found. Three years ago, enterprises would have to translate content into 37 language to reach 98 percent of Internet users. This year, it takes 48 languages to reach the same amount of users.  For companies seeking to increase global market share, “translate frequently and fast” is the name of the game. Today’s content is dynamic and ever-changing, covering the gamut from social media sites to company forums to press releases. With high-quality translation and localization, enterprises can tailor content to consumers around the world.  Speed and Efficiency in Translation When it comes to the “frequently and fast” part of the equation, enterprises run into problems. Professional service providers provide translated content in files, which company workers then have to manually insert into their CMS. When companies update or edit source documents, they have to hunt down all the translated content and change each document individually.  Lingotek and Oracle have solved the problem by making the Lingotek Collaborative Translation Platform fully integrated and interoperable with Oracle WebCenter Sites Web Experience Management. Lingotek combines best-in-class machine translation solutions, real-time community/crowd translation and professional translation to enable companies to publish globalized content in an efficient and cost-effective manner. WebCenter Sites Web Experience Management simplifies the creation and management of different types of content across multiple channels, including social media.  Globalization Without Interrupting the Workflow The combination of the Lingotek platform with WebCenter Sites ensures that process of authoring, publishing, targeting, optimizing and personalizing global Web content is automated, saving companies the time and effort of manually entering content. Users can seamlessly integrate translation into their WebCenter Sites workflows, optimizing their translation and localization across web, social and mobile channels in multiple languages. The original structure and formatting of all translated content is maintained, saving workers the time and effort involved with inserting the text translation and reformatting.  In addition, Lingotek’s continuous publication model addresses the dynamic nature of content, automatically updating the status of translated documents within the WebCenter Sites Workflow whenever users edit or update source documents. This enables users to sync translations in real time. The translation, localization, updating and publishing of Web Experience Management content happens in a single, uninterrupted workflow.  The net result of Lingotek Inside for Oracle WebCenter Sites Web Experience Management is a system that more than meets the need for frequent and fast global translation. Workflows are accelerated. The globalization of content becomes faster and more streamlined. Enterprises save time, cost and effort in translation project management, and can address the needs of each of their global markets in a timely and cost-effective manner.  About Lingotek Lingotek is an Oracle Gold Partner and is going to be one of the first Oracle Validated Integrator (OVI) partners with WebCenter Sites. Lingotek is also an OVI partner with Oracle WebCenter Content.  Watch a video about how Lingotek Inside for Oracle WebCenter Sites works! Oracle WebCenter will be hosting a webinar, “Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter," tomorrow, September 13th. To attend the webinar, please register now! For more information about Lingotek for Oracle WebCenter, please visit http://www.lingotek.com/oracle.

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• Cloud Apps News @#OOW12

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  All eyes were on Oracle this past week and the news cycle was in full swing. What better time to make some key announcements that were guaranteed to create buzz ... and so we did. The name of the game was Cloud! Here are the key Cloud announcements for Apps, which included Fusion Tap that enables mobility across all Cloud Apps, HCM customer momentum in the Cloud, and our very first ERP Cloud Services customer. Oracle Unveils Oracle Fusion Tap for the iPadOracle Fusion Tap - Productivity Amplified Anywhere, Anytime "Both the enterprise and technology providers must recognize the need to innovate and adapt for the increasing mobility of the workforce - not just for sales teams, but across the organization," said Carter Lusher, Research Fellow and Chief Analyst of Enterprise Applications Ecosystem, Ovum. "A mobile application that quickly and powerfully allows employees to make connections, analyze data, and complete activities at any time and wherever they may be located drives new levels of business value and enhances efficiency. Frankly, mobile access is no longer a 'nice to have' but a 'must have.'"  "The mobile workforce is a business reality, and Oracle Fusion Tap is an example of how Oracle delivers mobile and cloud innovations that fundamentally improve productivity and how we work," said Chris Leone, Senior Vice President of Application Development, Oracle. "With Oracle Fusion Tap users will have an all-in-one, easily extensible app that puts mission-critical data and colleague connection at their fingertips." The entire release is available here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1855392 Customers Live on Oracle Fusion Human Capital ManagementOracle HCM Cloud Service Helps Power HR's Contribution to the Business "More than 25 of the 100-plus customers who have selected Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) are already live. Ardent Leisure, Peach Aviation, Toshiba Medical Systems and Zillow have deployed Oracle HCM Cloud Service and are using it to transform their HR operations. They join companies such as Principal Financial Group and Elizabeth Arden, who are already using Oracle HCM Cloud Service to help manage international growth and deliver pervasive, role-based, configurable solutions to their employees. With these recent go-lives, Oracle takes a leading position in successfully bringing live HCM customers in the cloud."  "As a technology company, Zillow looked to a partner who could scale with us. Zillow has gone live on Oracle HCM Cloud Service, which will give us the ability automate and streamline HR operations for our employees in the near future," said Sarah Bilton, Senior Director HR, Zillow. Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859573 Lending Club Selects Oracle ERP Cloud Service to Help Increase Insight and EfficienciesOracle ERP Cloud Service Provides an Open Architecture, Best-of-Breed Decision-Making, and Scalability in the Cloud "Lending Club, the leading platform for investing in and obtaining personal loans, has selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service to help improve decision-making and workflow, implement robust reporting, and take advantage of the inherent scalability and cost savings provided by the cloud. With more than 76,000 borrowers and 90,000 investors Lending Club utilizes technology and innovation to reduce the cost of traditional banking and offer borrowers better rates and investors better returns.  After an extensive search, Lending Club selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service due to the breadth and depth of capabilities and ongoing innovation of Oracle ERP Cloud Service, as well as Oracle's open architecture, industry leadership and commitment to partners." "Lending Club is an innovative, data-intensive, high-growth company and we needed a solution and partner that could match us," said Carrie Dolan, CFO, Lending Club. "We conducted a thorough review of our options, and Oracle ERP Cloud Service was the clear winner in terms of capabilities and business value as well as commitment to us as a customer." Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859020

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• Clever memory usage through the years

  - by Ben Emmett

  A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

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• SQLAuthority News – Advantages of Distance Learning

  - by Pinal Dave

  Distance education is extremely popular – almost overnight, it seems.  Almost everyone has taken an online course, or knows someone who has, or is considering joining an online school.  There are many advantages and disadvantages to attending an online school – but the same can be said of attending a physical school!  Let’s take a look at the top reasons to use distance education. 1) Flexibility.  Physical universities are usually willing to make some concessions to student – like night classes, study hours, and online networks.  However, nothing is going to beat the flexibility of distance education.  You can attend classes and take notes anytime, anywhere, wearing anything you’d like! 2) Affordability.  We don’t need to get into hard numbers to understand how an expensive university can be.  Students are taking on more and more debt just to get an education.  Many of these fees pay for room, board, and facilities.   Distance education cuts out all these costs, and makes attending school much more affordable for the average student. 3) Try before you buy.  Did you know that the average college student changes his or her major 10 times before they graduate?  You can imagine that this kind of indecision plays a huge part in WHEN you graduate – not being able to make up your mind can cost you big bucks if you have to stay in school for extra years!  Distance education allows you to take different classes from a wide range of disciplines.  Do you want to study forensic science or English literature?  Now you don’t have to pay for classes you can’t afford just to find out. 4) Pace yourself.  Some students struggle in a traditional classroom setting – classes can be taught too fast, too slow, or there are too many distractions.  Distance education allows mature students to set the pace themselves.  They can rewatch lectures they didn’t catch the first time, or go through classes quickly if they are already familiar with the material – cutting out the chance of burning out or getting bored. 5) Lifelong learning.  Maybe you already have a degree, but would like to learn more about your field, or a related field, or maybe even about something completely unrelated – just because you are curious!  Distance education allows you to learn whatever you want ,whenever you want (and yes, wearing anything you’d like!). 6) Attend whatever college you want.  Because of the popularity of distance education, physical campuses are getting in on the game by offering online courses – often just uploaded versions of classes already taught at their campus.  Ever wanted to attend Harvard, but knew you couldn’t get in?  Take a class online!  Of course, you probably should not attempt to lie and say you have a Harvard degree, but Ivy League colleges are prestigious because they are the best in their field – take advantage of the best by taking an online course! I am a big believer in continuing education, whether it is online courses, returning to school, or even take informal classes online.  Distance education can be a great way to accomplish these goals and become a lifelong learner. My friends at provides training through virtual classrooms for students who want to avoid travelling. Distance learning course allows IT aspirants to connect with trainers using the internet.  I encourage everyone to check it out! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 21-27, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for the week of October 21-27, 2012. OTN Architect Day: Los Angeles This is your brain on IT architecture. Stuff your cranium with architecture by attending Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles, October 25, 2012, at the Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Technical sessions, panel Q&A, and peer roundtables—plus a free lunch. [NOTE: The event was last week, of course. Big thanks to the session presenters and especially to those Angelinos who came out for the event.] WebLogic Server 11gR1 Interactive Quick Reference"The WebLogic Server 11gR1 Administration interactive quick reference," explains Juergen Kress, "is a multimedia tool for various terms and concepts used in WebLogic Server architecture. This tool is available for administrators for online or offline use. This is built as a multimedia web page which provides descriptions of WebLogic Server Architectural components, and references to relevant documentation. This tool offers valuable reference information for any complex concept or product in an intuitive and useful manner." Podcast: Are You Future Proof? The latest OTN ArchBeat Podcast series features Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra, Basheer Khan, and Ronald van Luttikhuizen, three practicing architects in an open discussion about how changes in enterprise IT are raising the bar for success for software architects and developers. Play Oracle Vanquisher Here's a little respite from whatever it is you normally spend your time on. Oracle Vanquisher is an online diversion that makes a game of data center optimization. According to the description: "Armed with a cool Oracle vacuum pack suit and a strategic IT roadmap, you will thwart threats and optimize your data center to increase your company’s stock price and boost your company’s position." Mainly you avoid electric shock and killer birds. The current high score belongs to someone identified as 'TEN." My score? Never mind. Advanced Oracle SOA Suite OOW 2012 PresentationsThe Oracle SOA Product Management team has compiled a complete list of all twelve of their Oracle SOA Suite presentations from Oracle OpenWorld 2012, with links to the slide decks. OAM and OIM 11g Academies Looking for technical how-to content covering Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager? The people behind the Oracle Middleware Security blog have indexed relevant blog posts into what they call "Academies." "These indexes contain the articles we’ve written that we believe provide long lasting guidance on OAM and OIM. Posts covered in these series include articles on key aspects of OAM and OIM 11g, best practice architectural guidance, integrations, and customizations." Oracle’s Analytics, Engineered Systems, and Big Data Strategy | Mark Rittman Part 1 of 3 in Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman's series on Oracle Exalytics, Oracle R Enterprise and Endeca. Oracle ACE Directors Nordic Tour 2012 : Venues and BI Presentations | Mark RittmanOracle ACE Director Mark Rittman shares information on the Oracle ACE Director Tour, as the community leaders make their way through the land of the midnight sun, with events in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki. Following the Thread in OSB | Antony Reynolds Antony Reynolds recently led an Oracle Service Bus POC in which his team needed to get high throughput from an OSB pipeline. "Imagine our surprise when, on stressing the system, we saw it lock up, with large numbers of blocked threads." He shares the details of the problem and the solution in this extensive technical post. OW12: Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices | Andrejus Baranovskis The Oracle OpenWorld presentations keep coming! Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis shares the slides from "Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices," co-presented with Danilo Schmiedel from Opitz Consulting. Thought for the Day "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." — Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) Source: Quotes For Software Engineers

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• Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise – Part 2

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President, Oracle  On September 13, 2012, I sat down with Altimeter Analyst Jeremiah Owyang to talk about how enterprise businesses are approaching the management of both their social media strategies and internal structures. There’s no longer any question as to whether companies are adopting social full throttle. That’s exactly the way it should be, because it’s a top online behavior across all age groups. For your consumers, it’s an ingrained, normal form of communication. And beyond connecting with friends, social users are reaching out for information and service from brands. Jeremiah tells us 29% of Twitter followers follow a brand and 58% of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand. Even on the B2B side, people act on reviews and recommendations. Just as in the early 90’s we saw companies move from static to dynamic web sites, businesses of all sizes are moving from just establishing a social presence to determining effective and efficient ways to use it. I like to say we’re in the 2nd or 3rd inning of a 9-inning game. Corporate social started out as a Facebook page, it’s multiple channels servicing customers wherever they are. Social is also moving from merely moderating to analyzing so that the signal can be separated from the noise, so that impactful influencers can be separated from other users. Organizationally, social started with the marketers. Now we’re getting into social selling, commerce, service, HR, recruiting, and collaboration. That’s Oracle’s concept of enterprise social relationship management, a framework to extend social across the entire organization real-time in as holistic a way as possible. Social requires more corporate coordination than ever before. One of my favorite statistics is that the average corporation at enterprise has 178 social accounts, according to Altimeter. Not all of them active, not all of them necessary, but 178 of them. That kind of fragmentation creates risk, so the smarter companies will look for solutions (as opposed to tools) that can organize, scale and defragment, as well as quickly integrate other networks and technologies that will come along. Our conversation goes deep into the various corporate social structures we’re seeing, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. There are also a couple of great examples of how known brands used an integrated, holistic approach to achieve stated social goals. What’s especially exciting to me is the Oracle SRM framework for the enterprise provides companywide integration into one seamless system. This is not a dream. This is going to have substantial business impact in the next several years.

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• Oracle MAA Part 1: When One Size Does Not Fit All

  - by JoeMeeks

  The good news is that Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) best practices combined with Oracle Database 12c (see video) introduce first-in-the-industry database capabilities that truly make unplanned outages and planned maintenance transparent to users. The trouble with such good news is that Oracle’s enthusiasm in evangelizing its latest innovations may leave some to wonder if we’ve lost sight of the fact that not all database applications are created equal. Afterall, many databases don’t have the business requirements for high availability and data protection that require all of Oracle’s ‘stuff’. For many real world applications, a controlled amount of downtime and/or data loss is OK if it saves money and effort. Well, not to worry. Oracle knows that enterprises need solutions that address the full continuum of requirements for data protection and availability. Oracle MAA accomplishes this by defining four HA service level tiers: BRONZE, SILVER, GOLD and PLATINUM. The figure below shows the progression in service levels provided by each tier. Each tier uses a different MAA reference architecture to deploy the optimal set of Oracle HA capabilities that reliably achieve a given service level (SLA) at the lowest cost.  Each tier includes all of the capabilities of the previous tier and builds upon the architecture to handle an expanded fault domain. Bronze is appropriate for databases where simple restart or restore from backup is ‘HA enough’. Bronze is based upon a single instance Oracle Database with MAA best practices that use the many capabilities for data protection and HA included with every Oracle Enterprise Edition license. Oracle-optimized backups using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) provide data protection and are used to restore availability should an outage prevent the database from being able to restart. Silver provides an additional level of HA for databases that require minimal or zero downtime in the event of database instance or server failure as well as many types of planned maintenance. Silver adds clustering technology - either Oracle RAC or RAC One Node. RMAN provides database-optimized backups to protect data and restore availability should an outage prevent the cluster from being able to restart. Gold raises the game substantially for business critical applications that can’t accept vulnerability to single points-of-failure. Gold adds database-aware replication technologies, Active Data Guard and Oracle GoldenGate, which synchronize one or more replicas of the production database to provide real time data protection and availability. Database-aware replication greatly increases HA and data protection beyond what is possible with storage replication technologies. It also reduces cost while improving return on investment by actively utilizing all replicas at all times. Platinum introduces all of the sexy new Oracle Database 12c capabilities that Oracle staff will gush over with great enthusiasm. These capabilities include Application Continuity for reliable replay of in-flight transactions that masks outages from users; Active Data Guard Far Sync for zero data loss protection at any distance; new Oracle GoldenGate enhancements for zero downtime upgrades and migrations; and Global Data Services for automated service management and workload balancing in replicated database environments. Each of these technologies requires additional effort to implement. But they deliver substantial value for your most critical applications where downtime and data loss are not an option. The MAA reference architectures are inherently designed to address conflicting realities. On one hand, not every application has the same objectives for availability and data protection – the Not One Size Fits All title of this blog post. On the other hand, standard infrastructure is an operational requirement and a business necessity in order to reduce complexity and cost. MAA reference architectures address both realities by providing a standard infrastructure optimized for Oracle Database that enables you to dial-in the level of HA appropriate for different service level requirements. This makes it simple to move a database from one HA tier to the next should business requirements change, or from one hardware platform to another – whether it’s your favorite non-Oracle vendor or an Oracle Engineered System. Please stay tuned for additional blog posts in this series that dive into the details of each MAA reference architecture. Meanwhile, more information on Oracle HA solutions and the Maximum Availability Architecture can be found at: Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture - Webcast Maximize Availability with Oracle Database 12c - Technical White Paper

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• Dallas First Regionals 2012&ndash; For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology

  - by T

  Wow!  That is all I have to say after the last 3 days. Three full fun filled days in a world that fed the geek, sparked the competitor, inspired the humanitarian, encouraged the inventor, and continuously warmed my heart.  As part of the Dallas First Regionals, I was awed by incredible students who teach as much as they learn, inventive and truly caring mentors that make mentoring look easy, and completely passionate and dedicated volunteers that bring meaning to giving all that you have and making events fun and safe for all.  If you have any interest in innovation, robotics, or highly motivated students, I can’t recommend anything any higher than visiting a First Robotics event. This is my third year with First and I was honored enough to serve the Dallas First Regionals as both a Web Site evaluator and as the East Field Volunteer Coordinator.  This was also the first year my daughter volunteered with me.  My daughter and I both recognize how different the First program is from other team events.  The difference with First is that everyone is a first class citizen.   It is a difference we can feel through experiencing and observing interactions between executives, respected engineers, students, and event staff.  Even with a veracious competition, you still find a lot of cooperation and we never witnessed any belittling between teams or individuals. First Robotics coined the term “Gracious Professionalism”.   It's a way of doing things that encourages high-quality work, emphasizes the value of others, and respects individuals and the community.1 I was introduced to this term as the Volunteer Coordinator when I was preparing the volunteer instructional speech.  Through the next few days, I discovered it is truly core to everything that First does.  One of the ways First accomplishes Gracious Professionalism is by utilizing another term they came up with which is “CoopertitionTM”. At FIRST, CoopertitionTM is displaying unqualified kindness and respect in the face of fierce competition.1   One of the things I never liked about sports was the need to “destroy” the other team.  First has really found a way to integrate CoopertitionTM  into the rules so teams can be competitive and part of that competition rewards cooperation. Oh and did I mention it has ROBOTS!!!  This year it had basket ball playing Kinect connected, remote controlled, robots!  There are not words for how exciting these games are.  You HAVE to check out this years game, Rebound Rumble, on youtube or you can view live action on Dallas First Video (as of this posting, the recording haven’t posted yet but should be there soon).  There are also some images below. Whatever it is, these students get it and exemplify it and these mentors ooze with it.  I am glad that First supports these events so we can all learn and be inspired by these exceptional students and mentors.  I know that no matter how much I give, it will never compare to what I gain volunteering at First.  Even if you don’t have time to volunteer, you owe it to yourself to go check out one of these events.  See what the future holds, be inspired, be encouraged, take some knowledge, leave some knowledge and most of all, have FUN.  That is what First is all about and thanks to First, I get it.   First Dallas Regionals 2012 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL 1.  USFirst http://www.usfirst.org/aboutus/gracious-professionalism

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• Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

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• Social Targeting: This One's Just for You

  - by Mike Stiles

  Think of social targeting in terms of the archery competition we just saw in the Olympics. If someone loaded up 5 arrows and shot them straight up into the air all at once, hoping some would land near the target, the world would have united in laughter. But sadly for hysterical YouTube video viewing, that’s not what happened. The archers sought to maximize every arrow by zeroing in on the spot that would bring them the most points. Marketers have always sought to do the same. But they can only work with the tools that are available. A firm grasp of the desired target does little good if the ad products aren’t there to deliver that target. On the social side, both Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to enhance targeting for marketers. And why not? As the demand to monetize only goes up, they’re quite motivated to leverage and deliver their incredible user bases in ways that make economic sense for advertisers. You could target keywords on Twitter with promoted accounts, and get promoted tweets into search. They would surface for your followers and some users that Twitter thought were like them. Now you can go beyond keywords and target Twitter users based on 350 interests in 25 categories. How does a user wind up in one of these categories? Twitter looks at that user’s tweets, they look at whom they follow, and they run data through some sort of Twitter secret sauce. The result is, you have a much clearer shot at Twitter users who are most likely to welcome and be responsive to your tweets. And beyond the 350 interests, you can also create custom segments that find users who resemble followers of whatever Twitter handle you give it. That means you can now use boring tweets to sell like a madman, right? Not quite. This ad product is still quality-based, meaning if you’re not putting out tweets that lead to interest and thus, engagement, that tweet will earn a low quality score and wind up costing you more under Twitter’s auction system to maintain. That means, as the old knight in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” cautions, “choose wisely” when targeting based on these interests and categories to make sure your interests truly do line up with theirs. On the Facebook side, they’re rolling out ad targeting that uses email addresses, phone numbers, game and app developers’ user ID’s, and eventually addresses for you bigger brands. Why? Because you marketers asked for it. Here you were with this amazing customer list but no way to reach those same customers should they be on Facebook. Now you can find and communicate with customers you gathered outside of social, and use Facebook to do it. Fair to say such users are a sensible target and will be responsive to your message since they’ve already bought something from you. And no you’re not giving your customer info to Facebook. They’ll use something called “hashing” to make sure you don’t see Facebook user data (beyond email, phone number, address, or user ID), and Facebook can’t see your customer data. The end result, social becomes far more workable and more valuable to marketers when it delivers on the promise that made it so exciting in the first place. That promise is the ability to move past casting wide nets to the masses and toward concentrating marketing dollars efficiently on the targets most likely to yield results.

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• Bumblebee [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG]

  - by Lunchbox

  Though this may seem like a duplicate question, none of the suggestions I've seen have worked for me, however nearly all posters get good results. I'll start with hardware: Metabox W350ST notebook Intel Core i7 4700 16GB RAM GTX 765M (with Optimus) 128GB SSD 1TB SSHD My initial error output when trying to optirun a game is: [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the NVIDIA GPU at PCI:1:0:0. Please [133.973920] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled. If anything else is needed to troubleshoot this just let me know. Adding bumblebee.conf: # Configuration file for Bumblebee. Values should **not** be put between quotes ## Server options. Any change made in this section will need a server restart # to take effect. [bumblebeed] # The secondary Xorg server DISPLAY number VirtualDisplay=:8 # Should the unused Xorg server be kept running? Set this to true if waiting # for X to be ready is too long and don't need power management at all. KeepUnusedXServer=false # The name of the Bumbleblee server group name (GID name) ServerGroup=bumblebee # Card power state at exit. Set to false if the card shoud be ON when Bumblebee # server exits. TurnCardOffAtExit=false # The default behavior of '-f' option on optirun. If set to "true", '-f' will # be ignored. NoEcoModeOverride=false # The Driver used by Bumblebee server. If this value is not set (or empty), # auto-detection is performed. The available drivers are nvidia and nouveau # (See also the driver-specific sections below) Driver=nvidia # Directory with a dummy config file to pass as a -configdir to secondary X XorgConfDir=/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.d ## Client options. Will take effect on the next optirun executed. [optirun] # Acceleration/ rendering bridge, possible values are auto, virtualgl and # primus. Bridge=auto # The method used for VirtualGL to transport frames between X servers. # Possible values are proxy, jpeg, rgb, xv and yuv. VGLTransport=proxy # List of paths which are searched for the primus libGL.so.1 when using # the primus bridge PrimusLibraryPath=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/primus:/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/primus # Should the program run under optirun even if Bumblebee server or nvidia card # is not available? AllowFallbackToIGC=false # Driver-specific settings are grouped under [driver-NAME]. The sections are # parsed if the Driver setting in [bumblebeed] is set to NAME (or if auto- # detection resolves to NAME). # PMMethod: method to use for saving power by disabling the nvidia card, valid # values are: auto - automatically detect which PM method to use # bbswitch - new in BB 3, recommended if available # switcheroo - vga_switcheroo method, use at your own risk # none - disable PM completely # https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/Comparison-of-PM-methods ## Section with nvidia driver specific options, only parsed if Driver=nvidia [driver-nvidia] # Module name to load, defaults to Driver if empty or unset KernelDriver=nvidia PMMethod=auto # colon-separated path to the nvidia libraries LibraryPath=/usr/lib/nvidia-current:/usr/lib32/nvidia-current # comma-separated path of the directory containing nvidia_drv.so and the # default Xorg modules path XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-current/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules XorgConfFile=/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia ## Section with nouveau driver specific options, only parsed if Driver=nouveau [driver-nouveau] KernelDriver=nouveau PMMethod=auto XorgConfFile=/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nouveau DRIVER VERSION - Output of jockey-text -l: nvidia_304_updates - nvidia_304_updates (Proprietary, Enabled, Not in use)

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• Get Ready for Anytime, Anywhere Engagement

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Are you ready for 2015?  According to IDC, 2015 is the year when more users are projected to access the internet using mobile devices than with PC’s or other wired devices.  It’s no doubt that mobile devices are a critical means of communication today, and are on track to become increasingly more important in the coming years. However, device formats are so varied that delivering a mobile web experience that will engage site visitors and enhance your brand can be a daunting task. Solutions that empower organizations to easily extend their web presence to the mobile channel, while saving significant time and effort in managing mobile sites, are now essential in our ever connected mobile world. So what are some of the things organizations should look for in such a solution? Mobile device form factors, networks, protocols, and browsers vary widely, and reformatting web content for thousands of different device and software combinations is a prohibitive task. An effective mobile solution can make this process seamless by automatically formatting designated web content for mobile delivery.  By automatically detecting a site visitor’s device configuration, the selected web content can be sized and formatted for optimal display on that particular device. This can save tremendous time involved in building, formatting, and maintaining individual websites or mobile applications for different mobile devices. It’s not enough to simply support the thousands of different mobile device types that are out there. It’s also critical to make it easy for marketers and other business users to manage mobile sites and mobile content. Those responsible for maintaining an organization’s web and mobile experiences need the ability to edit content using rich text editor tools and then preview that content directly in the context of the mobile website and the traditional website, ideally from the same business user interface. Powerful capabilities such as these make managing the web experience for mobile devices easy, even with frequently changing content, across a multitude of different devices. This saves tremendous time involved in building, formatting, and maintaining individual websites or mobile applications for different mobile devices. When content or business needs change, the business user needs only to change site content once, and it is seamlessly deployed to the web and all mobile channels.Geo-location is another critical input to making the online experience engaging and relevant for web visitors who are increasingly mobile. A mobile solution should enable use of device GPS data to deliver location-based content and services to mobile website visitors. Organizations can provide mobile site visitors with location-sensitive search results, location-based offers and recommendations, integration of maps and directions into site content, and much more – all critical for meeting the needs of those on the go.To hear more about how mobile is changing the game, check out our recent webcast with Ted Schadler, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester, where he discussed why mobile is the new face of engagement, or learn more about how to extend your web presence to the mobile channel with Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle WebCenter Sites Mobility Server.

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• Perspective Is Everything

  - by juanlarios

  Sitting on a window seat on my way back from Seattle I looked out the window and saw the large body of water. I was reminded of childhood memories of running as hard as I could through burning hot sand with the anticipation of the splash of the ocean. Looking out the window the water appeared like a sheet draped over land. I couldn’t help but ponder how perspective changes everything.  Over the last several days I had a chance to attend the MVP Summit in Redmond. I had a great time with fellow MVP’s and the SharePoint Product Group. Although I can’t say much about what was discussed and what is coming in the future, I want to share some realizations I had while experiencing the MVP summit.  The SharePoint Product is ever-improving, full of innovation but also a reactionary embodiment of MVP, client and market feedback. There are several features that come to mind that clients complain about where I have felt helpless in informing them that the features are not as mature as they would like it. Together, we figure out a way to make it work and deal with the limitations. It became clear that there are features that have taken a different purpose in the market place from the original vision. The SP Product group is working hard to react to these changes in vision and make SharePoint better for real life implementations.  It is easy to think that SharePoint should be all things to all people. In reality there are products that are very detailed in specific composites, they do this one thing well but severely lack in other areas.  Its easy sometimes to say, “What was Microsoft thinking with this feature?” the Product group is doing all they can to make the moving pieces better and dealing with challenges with having all of them work together.  Sometimes the features don’t fully embody the vision because of the many challenges, but trust me when I say the product group is really focused on delivery and innovation.  As I was speaking with a fellow MVP throughout the session, we spoke about the iPad 2(ironically announced this past week during the MVP summit) and Microsoft’s possible product answer; I realized the days of reactionary products from MS is over. There are many users that will remember Vista and the painful execution in that product, but there has been a lot of success in Windows 7. There was no rush for a reactionary answer to the Nintendo Wii, as a result a ground breaking and game changing product was brought to market, the XBOX –Kinect! I can’t say much here, but it’s safe to say, expect innovation, and execution of products and technology that will change the market instead of react to them!       There are many things I learned and I would love to share that have to do with perspective, technology, etc… but this is far as I can go in details. This might not be new to you or specifically the message that was shared during the summit. These are just my impressions of the event and the spirit of future vision. Great things ahead!

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