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  • Book Review (Book 10) - The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

    - by BuckWoody
    This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for March 2012 was: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick. I was traveling at the end of last month so I’m a bit late posting this review here. Why I chose this book: My personal belief about computing is this: All computing technology is simply re-arranging data. We take data in, we manipulate it, and we send it back out. That’s computing. I had heard from some folks about this book and it’s treatment of data. I heard that it dealt with the basics of data - and the semantics of data, information and so on. It also deals with the earliest forms of history of information, which fascinates me. It’s similar I was told, to GEB which a favorite book of mine as well, so that was a bonus. Some folks I talked to liked it, some didn’t - so I thought I would check it out. What I learned: I liked the book. It was longer than I thought - took quite a while to read, even though I tend to read quickly. This is the kind of book you take your time with. It does in fact deal with the earliest forms of human interaction and the basics of data. I learned, for instance, that the genesis of the binary communication system is based in the invention of telegraph (far-writing) codes, and that the earliest forms of communication were expensive. In fact, many ciphers were invented not to hide military secrets, but to compress information. A sort of early “lol-speak” to keep the cost of transmitting data low! I think the comparison with GEB is a bit over-reaching. GEB is far more specific, fanciful and so on. In fact, this book felt more like something fro Richard Dawkins, and tended to wander around the subject quite a bit. I imagine the author doing his research and writing each chapter as a book that followed on from the last one. This is what possibly bothered those who tended not to like it, I think. Towards the middle of the book, I think the author tended to be a bit too fragmented even for me. He began to delve into memes, biology and more - I think he might have been better off breaking that off into another work. The existentialism just seemed jarring. All in all, I liked the book. I recommend it to any technical professional, specifically ones involved with data technology in specific. And isn’t that all of us? :)

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  • Fast Data: Go Big. Go Fast.

    - by J Swaroop
    Cross-posting Dain Hansen's excellent recap of the Big Data/Fast Data announcement during OOW: For those of you who may have missed it, today’s second full day of Oracle OpenWorld 2012 started with a rumpus. Joe Tucci, from EMC outlined the human face of big data with real examples of how big data is transforming our world. And no not the usual tried-and-true weblog examples, but real stories about taxi cab drivers in Singapore using big data to better optimize their routes as well as folks just trying to get a better hair cut. Next we heard from Thomas Kurian who talked at length about the important platform characteristics of Oracle’s Cloud and more specifically Oracle’s expanded Cloud Services portfolio. Especially interesting to our integration customers are the messaging support for Oracle’s Cloud applications. What this means is that now Oracle’s Cloud applications have a lightweight integration fabric that on-premise applications can communicate to it via REST-APIs using Oracle SOA Suite. It’s an important element to our strategy at Oracle that supports this idea that whether your requirements are for private or public, Oracle has a solution in the Cloud for all of your applications and we give you more deployment choice than any vendor. If this wasn’t enough to get the juices flowing, later that morning we heard from Hasan Rizvi who outlined in his Fusion Middleware session the four most important enterprise imperatives: Social, Mobile, Cloud, and a brand new one: Fast Data. Today, Rizvi made an important step in the definition of this term to explain that he believes it’s a convergence of four essential technology elements: Event Processing for event filtering, business rules – with Oracle Event Processing Data Transformation and Loading - with Oracle Data Integrator Real-time replication and integration – with Oracle GoldenGate Analytics and data discovery – with Oracle Business Intelligence Each of these four elements can be considered (and architect-ed) together on a single integrated platform that can help customers integrate any type of data (structured, semi-structured) leveraging new styles of big data technologies (MapReduce, HDFS, Hive, NoSQL) to process more volume and variety of data at a faster velocity with greater results.  Fast data processing (and especially real-time) has always been our credo at Oracle with each one of these products in Fusion Middleware. For example, Oracle GoldenGate continues to be made even faster with the recent 11g R2 Release of Oracle GoldenGate which gives us some even greater optimization to Oracle Database with Integrated Capture, as well as some new heterogeneity capabilities. With Oracle Data Integrator with Big Data Connectors, we’re seeing much improved performance by running MapReduce transformations natively on Hadoop systems. And with Oracle Event Processing we’re seeing some remarkable performance with customers like NTT Docomo. Check out their upcoming session at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday to hear more how this customer is using Event processing and Big Data together. If you missed any of these sessions and keynotes, not to worry. There's on-demand versions available on the Oracle OpenWorld website. You can also checkout our upcoming webcast where we will outline some of these new breakthroughs in Data Integration technologies for Big Data, Cloud, and Real-time in more details.

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  • Blender DirectX exporter to Panda3D

    - by jakebird451
    I have been experimenting with Panda3D lately. I have a character made in Blender with various bones and currently with one animation that I wish to export to a *.x format for Panda3D. My current attempt was to export the model was to first export with bones [Armatures] by checking the "Export Armatures" button in the export menu (file name: char.x). Thanks to the *.x file format, I read the file and it seems to have the same bone structure format as the model (with parenting and matrix positional data). The second export was selecting Animations - Full Animation to provide just the animation (file name: char_idle.x). The models exported just fine. I am not sure about the animation yet, but the file seems to be just fine. This is my code for loading the model into python & Panda3D: self.model = Actor("char.x",{"char_idle.x"}) When I run the program the command line provides a couple of errors, the main errors of interest are: :Actor(warning): char.x is not a character! and ... File "C:\Panda3D-1.8.0\direct\actor\Actor.py", line 284, in __init__ if (type(anims[anims.keys()[0]])==type({})): AttributeError: 'set' object has no attribute 'keys' The first error is the most interesting to me. The model works if I leave the animation dictionary blank. With no animations loaded the character appears in its un-animated T position, however the actor warning still shows up. The character should include the various bones when I exported the model right? I am not that experienced with blender, I'm just a programmer. So if the problem lies in blender please try to keep that in mind when posting a reply. I'll try my best to keep up. I also tried to print out the bone structure without any animations loaded and it provides a similar error with the line print self.model.listJoints(): File "C:\Panda3D-1.8.0\direct\actor\Actor.py", line 410, in listJoints Actor.notify.error("no part named: %s" % (partName)) File "C:\Panda3D-1.8.0\direct\directnotify\Notifier.py", line 132, in error raise exception(errorString) StandardError: no part named: modelRoot I really hope it is a simple exporting fix.

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  • Leveraging Social Networks for Retail

    - by David Dorf
    For retailers, social media is all about B2C2C. That is, Business to Consumer to Consumer, or more specifically, retailer to influencer to consumer. Traditional marketing targeted mass media, trying to expose the message to as many people as possible. While effective, this approach has never been very efficient, with high costs for relatively low penetration. Then it was thought that marketers should focus their efforts on a relative few super-influencers that would then sway the masses. History shows a few successes with this approach but lacked any consistency or predictability. After all, if super-influencers were easy to find, most campaigns would easily go viral. Alas, research shows that most wide-spread trends were the result of several fortunate events, including some luck. So do people exert influence over each other when it comes to purchase decisions? Of course they do, all the time. But that influence is usually limited to a small set of friends and specific specialization. For instance, although I have 165 friends on Facebook, I am only able to influence my close friends and family on PC purchases, and I have no sway at all for fashion purchases. People trust my knowledge on technology, but nobody asks my advice on shoes. How then should retailers leverage social networks in order to reinforce brand image and push promotions? Two obvious ways are Like and Share. Online advertisements or wall-postings receive more clicks when the viewer sees that friends have "liked" the posting. That's our modern-day version of word-of-mouth advertising. Statistics show that endorsements from friends make it more likely a person will engage. If my friends and I liked it, then I might also "share" (or "retweet" in the case of Twitter) it with other friends. In that case the retailer has paid for X showings of the advertisement, but sharing has pushed it to an additional Y people at no cost. And further, the implicit endorsement by the sharer makes it more likely the recipient will engage. So a good first step is to find people active in social networks that will Like and Share in order to exert influence. Its still tough to go viral, but doubling engagement is still a big step in the right direction. More complex social graph analysis would be a second step, but I'll leave that topic for another day. If you're interested in the academic side of social dynamics, I suggest reading Duncan Watts' work.

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  • Silverlight Cream for November 22, 2011 -- #1172

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: XAMLGeek, WindowsPhoneGeek, Nigel Sampson, Jesse Liberty, Sumit Dutta(-2-), Dave Bost, Jared Bienz, Joost van Schaik, and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 7 of 10)" Michael Crump WP7: "Using MVVMLight, ItemsControl, Blend and behaviors to make a ‘heads up compass’" Joost van Schaik Metro/WinRT/W8: "“Badevand” for Windows 8" XAMLGeek Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up From SilverlightCream.com:“Badevand” for Windows 8XAMLGeek posted a Metro app that shows water and air temperature and rain level for 5 beaches in Copenhagen, Denmark... no source, but good to see people posting appsGetting Started with Windows Phone RemindersWindowsPhoneGeek digs into Reminders in this WP7.1 post... the code you need, description, and a project to downloadHelp my app has been revoked!Nigel Sampson had a surprise when his latest app was revoked on his device, and then another... read what the solution wasA Dozen Windows Phone Videos… And CountingJesse Liberty posted his 12th WP7.1 video on Channel 9 - all about Reminders in MangoPart 23 - Windows Phone 7 - Detect Operator and Network InformationSumit Dutta has 2 more parts to his WP7 quest up... this part 23 is about getting mobile operator information and hot to get network capabilities using Microsoft.Phone.Net.DeviceNetworkInformationPart 24 - Windows Phone 7 - Microphone RepeaterIn part 24, Sumit Dutta uses the Microsoft.Xna.Framework Microphone class to record and play back voice.31 Days of Mango | Day #13: Marketplace Test KitDave Bost is at the helm of Jeff Blankenburg's Day 13 in his 31 day quest, discussing the Marketplace Test Kit and showing how to use it to determine if your app is ready for certification31 Days of Mango | Day #12; Beta DistributionJeff Blankenburg's Day 12 is written by guest author Jared Bienz, and shows how to submit an application for Beta testingUsing MVVMLight, ItemsControl, Blend and behaviors to make a ‘heads up compass’Joost van Schaik has a tutorial up showing how to make a WP7 Compass app using MVVMLight, Expression Blend, and then shows his thoughts on using the ItemsControl and Behaviors... code, descriptions and a project to download.... and I think I got your name right for the first time, Joost :)10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 7 of 10)Michael Crump put out part 7 of his Silverlight 5 series at SilverlightShow... this is actually part 2 of OS Integration with Silverlight covering, among other things, 64-bit browser support and Power AwarenessStay in the 'Light!Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCreamJoin me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User GroupTechnorati Tags:Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows PhoneMIX10

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  • Book Review (Book 11) - Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform

    - by BuckWoody
    This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for April 2012 was: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform. I was traveling at the end of last month so I’m a bit late posting this review here. Why I chose this book: I actually know a few of the authors on this book, so when they told me about it I wanted to check it out. The premise of the book is exactly as it states in the title - to learn how to solve a problem using products from Microsoft. What I learned: I liked the book - a lot. They've arranged the content in a "Solution Decision Framework", that presents a few elements to help you identify a need and then propose alternate solutions to solve them, and then the rationale for the choice. But the payoff is that the authors then walk through the solution they implement and what they ran into doing it. I really liked this approach. It's not a huge book, but one I've referred to again since I've read it. It's fairly comprehensive, and includes server-oriented products, not things like Microsoft Office or other client-side tools. In fact, I would LOVE to have a work like this for Open Source and other vendors as well - would make for a great library for a Systems Architect. This one is unashamedly aimed at the Microsoft products, and even if I didn't work here, I'd be fine with that. As I said, it would be interesting to see some books on other platforms like this, but I haven't run across something that presents other systems in quite this way. And that brings up an interesting point - This book is aimed at folks who create solutions within an organization. It's not aimed at Administrators, DBA's, Developers or the like, although I think all of those audiences could benefit from reading it. The solutions are made up, and not to a huge level of depth - nor should they be. It's a great exercise in thinking these kinds of things through in a structured way. The information is a bit dated, especially for Windows and SQL Azure. While the general concepts hold, the cloud platform from Microsoft is evolving so quickly that any printed book finds it hard to keep up with the improvements. I do have one quibble with the text - the chapters are a bit uneven. This is always a danger with multiple authors, but it shows up in a couple of chapters. I winced at one of the chapters that tried to take a more conversational, humorous style. This kind of academic work doesn't lend itself to that style. I recommend you get the book - and use it. I hope they keep it updated - I'll be a frequent customer. :)  

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  • JCP EC Nomination Materials for 2012

    - by heathervc
    The nomination period of the 2012 Annual JCP EC Elections will begin at the end of September 2012.  The JCP will be accept self-nominations for 2 seats on what will become the merged JCP EC, starting 28 September, with the nomination period ending on Thursday, 11 October. JCP Members (JSPA 2 primary contacts) will receive messages with instructions for nominating and their login credentials via email.  You will need this credential information to login and complete the nomination.The JCP EC Special Election schedule is posted online in the JCP calendar, highlights are below:Nominations for elected seats: 28 September-11 OctoberBallot (ratified and elected): 16-29 OctoberNew members take office: 13 November The ballot with nominees for ratified and nominated seats begins on 16 October. The results will also be available on jcp.org on 30 October. If you are attending JavaOne 2012 in San Francisco, there are several events happening that you may be interested in attending, in particular the following BOF session.Meet the JCP Executive Committee CandidatesSession ID: BOF6307Location: Hilton San Francisco - Golden Gate 3/4/5Date and Time: 10/2/12, 4:30 PM - 5:15 PM We will also be hosting a call for all of the candidates following the nomination period.  The following information is required for self-nomination.1) Contact information/Biography Each EC seat is represented by two people - a primary and alternate representative. Provide the following information for each representative: - Name - Title - Email Address - Mailing Address - Phone Number - Fax - A brief biography (3-5 sentences/~100-200 words) for primary contact - Photograph (prefer jpg format, head only shot) for primary contactBios and photos for the EC members are posted here:http://jcp.org/en/press/news/ec-feature_MEhttp://jcp.org/en/press/news/ec-feature_SE2) Qualification StatementA brief (2-3 paragraph) description of your qualifications for an EC seat; this is a Qualification Statement for the organization you represent. It should include the value and perspective you bring to the EC, your interests in the JCP program, as well as a summary of your current participation or planned participation in the JCP program (your entire organization)--JSRs, participation on Expert Groups, meetings/events attended, etc.  This statement will appear on the ballot and will convince community members that they should vote for you, so please include relevant information about your experience within the JCP program and your investments in Java technology.A few sample qualification statements are available here.3) Position PaperOne of the pieces of information we make available to the JCP membership for voting purposes is a position paper.  If you would like to provide this type of information for the ballot, please prepare in pdf format for posting.  This would be more detail on areas that you would put focus into during your tenure on the JCP EC.You can read more about some of the topics under discussion in the EC here, including links to JCP.Next materials. If you have an interest in participating in the JCP EC, please start preparing these materials now.  We look forward to a successful election process.

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  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to server where ASP.NET MVC 3 is not installed

    - by mbridge
    You can built sample application on ASP.NET MVC 3 for deploying it to your hosting first. To try it out first put it to web server where ASP.NET MVC 3 installed. In this posting I will tell you what files you need and where you can find them. Here are the files you need to upload to get application running on server where ASP.NET MVC 3 is not installed. Also you can deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to server where ASP.NET MVC 3 is not installed like this example: you can change reference to System.Web.Helpers.dll to be the local one so it is copied to bin folder of your application. First file in this list is my web application dll and you don’t need it to get ASP.NET MVC 3 running. All other files are located at the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Pages\v1.0\Assemblies\ If there are more files needed in some other scenarios then please leave me a comment here. And… don’t forget to convert the folder in IIS to application. While developing an application locally, this isn’t a problem. But when you are ready to deploy your application to a hosting provider, this might well be a problem if the hoster does not have the ASP.NET MVC assemblies installed in the GAC. Fortunately, ASP.NET MVC is still bin-deployable. If your hosting provider has ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 installed, then you’ll only need to include the MVC DLL. If your hosting provider is still on ASP.NET 3.5, then you’ll need to deploy all three. It turns out that it’s really easy to do so. Also, ASP.NET MVC runs in Medium Trust, so it should work with most hosting providers’ Medium Trust policies. It’s always possible that a hosting provider customizes their Medium Trust policy to be draconian. Deployment is easy when you know what to copy in archive for publishing your web site on ASP.NET MVC 3 or later versions. What I like to do is use the Publish feature of Visual Studio to publish to a local directory and then upload the files to my hosting provider. If your hosting provider supports FTP, you can often skip this intermediate step and publish directly to the FTP site. The first thing I do in preparation is to go to my MVC web application project and expand the References node in the project tree. Select the aforementioned three assemblies and in the Properties dialog, set Copy Local to True. Now just right click on your application and select Publish. This brings up the following Publish wizard Notice that in this example, I selected a local directory. When I hit Publish, all the files needed to deploy my app are available in the directory I chose, including the assemblies that were in the GAC. Another ASP.NET MVC 3 article: - New Features in ASP.NET MVC 3 - ASP.NET MVC 3 First Look

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  • Hello From South Florida

    - by Sam Abraham
    Fellow Blog Readers: I figured I use my first blog post on GeeksWithBlogs to introduce myself.   I recently relocated from Long Island, NY to South Florida where I joined a local company as Software Engineer specializing in technologies such as C#, ASP.Net 3.5, WCF, Silverlight, SQL Server 2008 and LINQ, to name a few. I am an MCP and MCTS ASP.Net 3.5, looking to get my .Net 4.0 certification soon.   Having been in industry for a few years so far, I figured I would share with you my take on the importance of being involved(at least attending) in local user groups.   I am a firm believer that besides using a certain technology, the best way to expand one’s knowledge is by sharing it with others and being equally open to learn from others just as much as you are willing to share what you know.   In my opinion, an important factor that makes a good developer stand-out is his/her ability to keep abreast with the latest and greatest even in areas outside his/her direct expertise.   Additionally, having spoken to various recruiters, technical user group attendees are always favorably looked upon as genuinely interested in their field and willing to take the initiative to expand their knowledge which offers job candidates good leverage when competing for jobs.   I believe I am very blessed to be in an area with a very strong and vibrant developer community. I found in the local .Net community leadership a genuine interest in constantly extending the opportunity to all developers to get more involved and encouraging those who are willing to take that initiative achieve their goal: Speak in meetings, volunteer at events or write and publish articles/blogs about latest and greatest technologies.   With Vishal Shukla (Site director for the West Palm Beach .Net User Group) traveling overseas, I have been extended the opportunity to come on board as site coordinator for FladotNet's WPB .Net User Group along with Venkata Subramanian, an opportunity which I gratefully accepted.   Being involved in running a .Net User Group will surely help me personally and professionally, but my real hope is to use this opportunity to assist in delivering the ultimate common-goal: spread the word about new .Net Technologies, help everybody get more involved and simply have fun learning new things.   With my introduction out of the way, in the next few days I will be posting some notes on an upcoming talk I will be giving about MVC2 and VS2010 in mid-April.   Environment.Exit(0); --Sam

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  • Registering InputListener in libGDX

    - by JPRO
    I'm just getting started with libGDX and have run into a snag registering an InputListener for a button. I've gone through many examples and this code appears correct to me but the associated callback never triggers ("touched" is not printed to console). I'm just posting the code with the abstract game screen and the implementing screen. The application starts successfully with a label of "Exit" in the bottom left hand corner, but clicking the button/label does nothing. I'm guessing the fix is something simple. What am I overlooking? public abstract class GameScreen<T> implements Screen { protected final T game; protected final SpriteBatch batch; protected final Stage stage; public GameScreen(T game) { this.game = game; this.batch = new SpriteBatch(); this.stage = new Stage(0, 0, true); } @Override public final void render(float delta) { update(delta); // Clear the screen with the given RGB color (black) Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0f, 0f, 0f, 1f); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); stage.act(delta); stage.draw(); } public abstract void update(float delta); @Override public void resize(int width, int height) { stage.setViewport(width, height, true); } @Override public void show() { Gdx.input.setInputProcessor(stage); } // hide, pause, resume, dipose } public class ExampleScreen extends GameScreen<MyGame> { private TextButton exitButton; public ExampleScreen(MyGame game) { super(game); } @Override public void show() { super.show(); TextButton.TextButtonStyle buttonStyle = new TextButton.TextButtonStyle(); buttonStyle.font = Font.getFont("Origicide", 32); buttonStyle.fontColor = Color.WHITE; exitButton = new TextButton("Exit", buttonStyle); exitButton.addListener(new InputListener() { @Override public void touchUp (InputEvent event, float x, float y, int pointer, int button) { System.out.println("touched"); } }); stage.addActor(exitButton); } @Override public void update(float delta) { } }

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  • Dawn of the Enterprise Social Developer

    - by Mike Stiles
    Social is not just for poking friends, posting videos of cats playing pianos, or even just for brand marketing anymore. It has become a key form of communication internally and externally across every area of the enterprise. As a Java developer, are you positioning yourself for the integration of social into enterprise business systems that’s on the near horizon? Because it’s the work you do and the applications you build that will influence what the social-enabled enterprise is going to look like and how it’s going to operate. But as a social developer, step one is wrapping your arms around all the things that are possible. Traditionally, the best exploration, brainstorming and innovation come from collaborating with other developers. That’s how the big questions can be hashed (or hacked) out. Is Java the best social development environment? If not, what is? What’s already being done in terms of application integration? The JavaOne Social Developer Program will offer up a series of talks and events on those very issues Tuesday, October 2 at the San Francisco Hilton. If you’re interested in embarking on this newest frontier of enterprise social development, you can connect with others who are thinking the same thing and get moving on your first project.Talks will include: Emergence Of The Social EnterpriseExtending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business ProcessesIntro to Open Graph and Facebook's APIs Building the Next Wave of Social Commerce Platforms Social Data and the Enterprise LinkedIn: A Professional Network Built with Java Technologies and Agile Practice Social Developer Hackathon In addition to these learning and discussion opportunities, you might consider joining the new Oracle Social Developer Community (OSDC), where the interaction and collaboration can continue indefinitely. It doesn’t take a lot of tea leaf reading to know that the cloud will house the enterprise technology of the future, and social (as well as the rich data it brings) is going to be a major part of that as social integrates across every business function as there’s proven value for consumer facing initiatives. The next phase of social development is going to involve combining enterprise data from multiple sources, new and existing, social and traditional, in order to tell compelling and usable stories. And social is coming to the enterprise quickly, meaning you as a development leader should seek to understand not just what's worked on the consumer side, but what aspects of those successes can be applied inside the organization. Get educated, get connected, and consider registering for this forward-looking event now to get started with enterprise social development.

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  • Selectively Exposing Functionallity in .Net

    - by David V. Corbin
    Any developer should be aware of the principles of encapsulation, cross-tier isolation, and cross-functional separation of concerns. However, it seems the few take the time to consider the adage of "minimal yet complete"1 when developing the software. Consider the exposure of "business objects" to the user interface. Some common situations occur: Accessing a given element requires a compound set of calls that do not "make sense" to the User Interface. More information than absolutely required is exposed to the user interface It would be much cleaner if a custom interface was provided that exposed exactly (and only) the information that is required by the consumer. Achieving this using conventional techniques would require the creation (and maintenance!) of custom classes to filter and transpose the information into the ideal format. Determining the ROI on this approach can be very difficult to ascertain, and as a result it is often ignored completely. There is another approach, which is largely made practical by virtual of the Action and Func delegates. From a callers point of view, the following two samples can be used interchangeably:     interface ISomeInterface     {         void SampleMethod1(string param);         string SamepleMethod2(string param);     }       class ISomeInterface     {         public Action<string> SampleMethod1 {get; }         public Func<string,string> SamepleMethod2 {get; }     }   The capabilities this simple changes enable are significant (and remember it does not cange the syntax at the call site): The delegates can be initialized to directly call the proper method of any target class. The delegates can be dynamically updated based on the current state. The "interface" can NOT be cast to the concrete class (which often exposes more functionallity). This patterns By limiting the interface to the exact functionallity required, the reduced surface area will typically result in lower development, testing and maintenance costs. We are currently in the process of posting a project on CodePlex which illustrates this (and many other) techniques which have proven helpful in creating robust yet flexible solutions that are highly efficient2 and maintainable. This post will be updated as soon as the project is published. 1) Credit: Scott  Meyers, Effective C++, Addison-Wesley 1992 2) For those who read my previous post on performance it should be noted that the use of delegates is on the same order of magnitude (actually a tiny amount faster) as conventional interfaces.

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  • An update on using Rosetta Stone: Studio now isn't very useful and is not great value as an add-on option

    - by Greg Low
    I had a surprisingly large number of responses from my previous posting about learning Chinese. An update for those considering Rosetta Stone (www.rosettastone.com) for Chinese, Spanish or any other language that they offer:I had to renew my "Studio" subscription today and it's now a much worse deal than it was.It's now $75 for 6 months for Studio sessions. Online classes used to be 45 mins. Recently they reduced them to 20 mins. Given how often people have connection issues, etc. that 20 mins can disappear very quickly.They've also reduced the number you can attend. You used to be able to have 2 scheduled at any point in time. Now they limit you to 2 "group sessions" per month during the period. (You can pay for additional private sessions). The combination of these two changes now makes it much less useful. Two x 20 min sessions per month is an almost meaningless amount of practice. They also now automatically change you to auto-renew when you subscribe. They tell you where to remove this auto-renewal but the first 4 or 5 times that I went into that screen, no such option appeared. Later, an option did appear and I used it.Overall, things just aren't what they used to be at Rosetta Stone. It's now pretty hard to recommend the Studio option where it was a no-brainer before.FURTHER UPDATE: <sigh>Even after I renewed, I could not even connect to their "new" service. Although the system processed the renewal, it still tells me it's expired. My online chat person "Siva S" tells me that the problem is that I've purchased all 5 levels of the program. I can't wait till they explain to me how making an extra purchase from them stops me from logging on. Siva told me that they had "renewed" the program. I'd have to speak to Customer Care; they aren't available and then disconnected himself. Impressive (not).Their website is now full of issues too. It insists that my billing address is in the USA, even though it pretends to accept changes to it.Overall, it's gone from something that could be recommended (with some limitations) to now being an app to avoid. That's a pity as I liked much of it before.

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  • Arcball 3D camera - how to convert from camera to object coordinates

    - by user38873
    I have checked multiple threads before posting, but i havent been able to figure this one out. Ok so i have been following this tutorial, but im not using glm, ive been implementing everything up until now, like lookat etc. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming/Modern_OpenGL_Tutorial_Arcball So i can rotate with the click and drag of the mouse, but when i rotate 90º degrees around Y and then move the mouse upwards or donwwards, it rotates on the wrong axis, this problem is demonstrated on this part of the tutorial An extra trick is converting the rotation axis from camera coordinates to object coordinates. It's useful when the camera and object are placed differently. For instace, if you rotate the object by 90° on the Y axis ("turn its head" to the right), then perform a vertical move with your mouse, you make a rotation on the camera X axis, but it should become a rotation on the Z axis (plane barrel roll) for the object. By converting the axis in object coordinates, the rotation will respect that the user work in camera coordinates (WYSIWYG). To transform from camera to object coordinates, we take the inverse of the MV matrix (from the MVP matrix triplet). What i have to do acording to the tutorial is convert my axis_in_camera_coordinates to object coordinates, and the rotation is done well, but im confused on what matrix i use to do just that. The tutorial talks about converting the axis from camera to object coordinates by using the inverse of the MV. Then it shows these 3 lines of code witch i havent been able to understand. glm::mat3 camera2object = glm::inverse(glm::mat3(transforms[MODE_CAMERA]) * glm::mat3(mesh.object2world)); glm::vec3 axis_in_object_coord = camera2object * axis_in_camera_coord; So what do i aply to my calculated axis?, the inverse of what, i supose the inverse of the model view? So my question is how do you transform camera axis to object axis. Do i apply the inverse of the lookat matrix? My code: if (cur_mx != last_mx || cur_my != last_my) { va = get_arcball_vector(last_mx, last_my); vb = get_arcball_vector( cur_mx, cur_my); angle = acos(min(1.0f, dotProduct(va, vb)))*20; axis_in_camera_coord = crossProduct(va, vb); axis.x = axis_in_camera_coord[0]; axis.y = axis_in_camera_coord[1]; axis.z = axis_in_camera_coord[2]; axis.w = 1.0f; last_mx = cur_mx; last_my = cur_my; } Quaternion q = qFromAngleAxis(angle, axis); Matrix m; qGLMatrix(q,m); vi = mMultiply(m, vi); up = mMultiply(m, up); ViewMatrix = ogLookAt(vi.x, vi.y, vi.z,0,0,0,up.x,up.y,up.z);

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  • Microsoft Virtual Academy

    Carpe Diem It's been since a while that I could write an article for this blog but alas, I was (and still am) very busy with customer's work. Which is actually good. So, what is this article going to tell you? Well, in general, just what I already tweeted, that life is constant process of learning - especially as software craftsman. Due to an upcoming new customer project in ASP.NET I had to seize the opportunity to get my head deeper into latest available technologies, like Windows Azure and SQL Azure. I know... cloud computing and so on is not a recent development and already available since quite a while but I never any means to get myself into this since roughly two weeks ago. Microsoft Virtual Academy I can't remember exactly what guided me towards the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA), oh wait... Yes, it was a posting on Facebook from an old CLIP community friend. He posted a shortened URL with #MVA tag that caught my attention. Thanks for that Thomas Kuberek. After the usual sign in or registration via Live ID I was a little bit surprised that Mauritius is not an available country option... Quick mail exchange with the MVA Decan, and yeah, apologies for the missing entry. So, currently I'm learning about Microsoft products and services, and collecting points under "Not Listed Country" until Mauritius is going to be added. Hopefully soon, as MVA honors your effort with different knowledge ranks that are compared to other students with public profiles. I think it's a nice move to add some game and competition factor into the learning game. The tracks and their different modules are mainly references to publicly available material online, namely on either MSDN, TechNet, Channel9, or other Microsoft based sites. The course material therefore also varies in different media and formats, ranging from simple online articles over downloadable documents (.docx or .pdf) to Silverlight / Windows Media streams with download options. Self-assessment and students ranking Each module in a track can be finished by taking part in a self-assessment. Up to now, the assessment I did (and passed) were limited to 10 minutes available time, and consisted of six to seven questions on the module training material. Nothing too serious but it gives you a glimpse idea how Microsoft certification exams are structured. Conclusion Nothing really new but nicely gathered, assembled and presented to the MVA students. At the moment, I wouldn't dare to compare the richness and quality of those courses with professional training offers, like Pluralsight .NET Training, LearnDevNow, VTC, etc. at all, but I think that MVA has potential. Give it a try, and let me know about your opinions.

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  • Managing Matrix Relationships: Organization Visualization and Navigation

    - by Nancy Estell Zoder
    v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle is pleased to announce the posting of our latest feature, Matrix Relationship Administration. Our continued investment in our Organization Visualization and Navigation solution is demonstrated with the release of Matrix Relationship Administration as well as the enhancements made to our Org Viewer capabilities. Some of those enhancements include the ability to export to Excel and Visio, Search, Zoom, as well as the addition of Manager Self Service transactions. Matrix relationships are relationships defined by rules or ad hoc. These relationships can include, but are not limited to, product or project affiliations, functional groups including multi dimensional relationships such as when the product, region or even the customer is the profit center. The PeopleSoft solution will enable you to configure how you work in this multi dimensional world to ensure you have the tools to be productive……. For more information, please check out the datasheet available on oracle.com, video on the feature on YouTube or contact your sales representative.

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  • Random thoughts on Monday

    - by user10760339
    I know that it has been a long time since my last post, just though that I would update you my latest thoughts of Governance. I just recently completed an executive round table series on EA and Cloud in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. The response was phenomenal. The key point of the session was that Enterprise is the key enabler of innovation - All companies want to drive to be market leaders, EA can lay the foundation for the path to deliver that at innovation. When it comes to innovation, I see two distinct types: (a) Passive innovation is where a company creates innovation thought increments improvement over time. A great example is when airlines went from paper tickets to electronic ticket. Next logical progression is to do the same with boarding passes. There are a lot of examples to choose from, thought the thing to keep in mind, is that passive innovation will only keep you in the lead, it won’t allow you to create new markets or jump from #3 to #1 in one go. For that we need another type of innovation. (b) Disruptive innovation is where you create market where none existed before. Thought very difficult to do and requires significant investment in research, product and software development and not least of all, visionary thinking and timing, if done correctly, can turn the world on it’s ear. A great example is Apple iTunes. Some might say that this is incremental innovation, but only in one aspect, the downloading of music. Other then that, it’s all disruptive innovation. Being able to buy a single song rather then the album fundamentally changed the way we get out music. Behind all of these types of innovation is Enterprise Architecture. EA creates the infrastructure foundation, then delivery systems and the end-user experience to deliver this innovation. At Oracle, we are driving that EA innovation with our private cloud offerings from “bolt-to-glass” as I like to say. For more on what Oracle has to offer in EA and cloud, have a look at Cloud Computing | Oracle and Enterprise Architecture - OracleI am working on new material that I will be posting in a couple of weeks, so check back regularly for new updates or feel free to subscript for updates.

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  • 2011 - ALMs for your development team and the people they work with.

    - by David V. Corbin
    Welcome to 2011, it is already shaping up to be a very exciting year. The title of the post is not about charitable giving, although that is also a great topic. Application Lifecycle Management and the Systems that support the environment is, and 2011 will be a year where I expect many teams to invest heavily in this area. For those not familiar with ALM, it can be simplified down to "A comprehensive view of all of the iteas, requirements, activities and artifacts that impact an application over the course of its lifecycle, from concept until decommissioning". Obviously, this encompases a large number of different areas even for relatively small and medium sized projects. In recent years, many teams have adapted methodoligies which address individual aspects of this; but the majority of this adoption has resulted in "islands of improvement" rather than the desired comprehensive outcome...Until now! Last year Microsoft released Team Foundation Server 2010 along with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition, and with these two in combination the situation has drastically changed. At last there is a single environment that is capable of handling all aspects of ALM, and is also capable of dealing with migration and integration with existing systems to make the transition to a single solution much easier. Thse possibilities (and practicalities) are nothing short of amazing, Architecture thru Testing integration? YES. Being able to correlate specific requirement items (and their history) to actual code (and code history)? YES. Identification of which tests will be potentially impacted by a given code change? YES. Resiliant Automated Testing of User Interfaces? YES. Automatic Deployment Management? YES. Integraton Level testing as part of (designated) Builds? YES. I could easily double or triple the above list, but these items should be enough to get you thinking about the "pain points" your team and organization currently face and the fact that there IS a way to relieve the pain. Over the course of the year, I am hoping to bring together some of the "best of breed" information, along with hosting (and participating in) discussions with various experts in the field. There are already a number of groups (including many on LinkedIn) that have an ALM focus, and I encourage everyone out to check them out. I will be posting a list of the ones I find most helpful in the not too distant future. As I said at the beginning, 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting (and productive) year. Why wait to start investigating and adopting ALM? ps: For those interested in becoming an "Alms Giver" in the charitable sense, I highly recommend checking out GiveCamp. A group of developers, designers and others get together to create a solution for a charity in just under 48 hours. I will be attending the GiveCamp in New York City on Jan 14-16, more information is available at nycgivecamp.org/

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  • how to convert avi (xvid) to mkv or mp4 (h264)

    - by bcsteeve
    Very noob when it comes to video. I'm trying to make sense of what I"m finding via Google... but its mostly Greek to me. I have a bunch of Avi files that won't play in my WD TV Play box. Mediainfo tells me they are xvid. Specs for the box show that should be fine... but digging through forums says its hit-and-miss. So I'd like to try converting them to h264 encoded MKV or mp4 files. I gather avconv is the tool, but reading the manual just has me really really confused. I tried the very basic example of: avconv -i file.avi -c copy file.mp4 it took less than 4 seconds. And it worked... sort of. It "played" in that something came up on the screen... but there was horrible artifacting and scenes would just sort of melt into each other. I want to preserve quality if possible. I'm not concerned about file size. I'm not terribly concerned with the time it takes either, provided I can do them in a batch. Can someone familiar with the process please give me a command with the options? Thank you for your help. I'm posting the mediainfo in case it helps: General Complete name : \\SERVER\Video\Public\test.avi Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave File size : 189 MiB Duration : 11mn 18s Overall bit rate : 2 335 Kbps Writing application : Lavf52.32.0 Video ID : 0 Format : MPEG-4 Visual Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5 Format settings, BVOP : 2 Format settings, QPel : No Format settings, GMC : No warppoints Format settings, Matrix : Default (H.263) Muxing mode : Packed bitstream Codec ID : XVID Codec ID/Hint : XviD Duration : 11mn 18s Bit rate : 2 129 Kbps Width : 720 pixels Height : 480 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate : 29.970 fps Standard : NTSC Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Compression mode : Lossy Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.206 Stream size : 172 MiB (91%) Writing library : XviD 1.2.1 (UTC 2008-12-04) Audio ID : 1 Format : MPEG Audio Format version : Version 1 Format profile : Layer 3 Mode : Joint stereo Mode extension : MS Stereo Codec ID : 55 Codec ID/Hint : MP3 Duration : 11mn 18s Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 192 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Compression mode : Lossy Stream size : 15.5 MiB (8%) Alignment : Aligned on interleaves Interleave, duration : 24 ms (0.72 video frame)

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  • Commerce Anywhere...Where the Web, Store, Mobile, Social and Call Center Come Together

    - by divya.malik
    I am pleased to introduce guest blogger, Bill Zujewski today. Bill has just joined the Oracle CRM Product Marketing team as part of our recent ATG acquisition. Based in Cambridge, MA Bill was the VP of Product Marketing for ATG and collaborated on eCommerce strategy with some of the best brands in the world. Welcome Bill!! BY BILL ZUJEWSKI "Times are a changing"...or so the song goes. Not long ago, eCommerce just meant having a cool brand and a slick website. Today, customers expect much more... what I think they really want...Commerce Anywhere...a seamless, consistent and personal way to interact or transact business with you and your products, whether they start on the web, go into a store, talk over the phone, access products via their mobile device or on their favorite social media site. They want one more thing... for you to remember them and their history with you... so they can be treated more intelligently and not have to repeat previous interactions. It makes sense to me, I want it too... it saves me time and money. I work with many companies that are trying to understand how to evolve their business structure and technology solutions to meet the challenges of Commerce Anywhere. My advice ... think differently and take a more holistic approach to the customer experience and the cross-channel selling solution. Stop integrating siloed legacy systems and start thinking about a single platform as your new foundation... the e-Commerce platform. I recently wrote a new white paper, Commerce Anywhere - A Business and Technology ! Strategy to Maximize Cross- channel Commerce Growth to help our customers better understand how to create that "Commerce Anywhere" customer experience that customers really want. The paper offers practical insights into an IT transformation that can help you leverage a commerce platform to go beyond the web store front and instead use it to enable rapid expansion into mobile apps, new in-store apps, and interact with your customers through social commerce. Let me know what you think by posting a comment on this blog.

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  • Oracle GoldenGate: Knowledge Document Series Post #1

    - by Doug Reid
    0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Over the course of the next several weeks, the Oracle GoldenGate team will be posting highlights from the knowledge base on My Oracle Support. The intent is to bring greater awareness to our user community of some fantastic best practices documents that are available to anyone with a valid CSI.   These documents were originally created for our internal teams, but the content was so good and useful that we have made them available externally for our user community.  The first in our series is the Oracle GoldenGate database Schema Profile check script (Doc ID 1296168.1). “This script is intended to query the database by schema to identify current configuration and identify any unsupported data types or types that may need special considerations for Oracle GoldenGate in an Oracle environment. This is the Oracle database profile script.  Added check for deferred constraints. Deferred constraints may cause ADD TRANDATA to select the wrong column for logging. Use KEYCOLS for tables with deferred constraints.” Click here to view the document  Check back weekly for additional new postings.

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  • Commerce, Anyway You Want It

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

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  • New computer hangs on shutdown/reboot, how to troubleshoot?

    - by torbengb
    Summary: My machine hangs on shutdown/restart: all windows and the menu bar disappear but the desktop wallpaper remains, and it stays like that without disk activity forever (hours). It doesn't even show the shutdown screen (the one with the animated dots) where I could hit ESC and watch the shutdown text. How can I troubleshoot this? Details: I've just received a new nettop computer (Acer Aspire Revo 3700: CPU:Atom D525, GPU:Nvidia ION2). I've just made a clean install of Ubuntu 10.10 using the standard USB pendrive method. The machine boots okay and works OK including WLAN and audio, but the graphics are not OK. Ubuntu offered to install&activate the current recommended Nvidia driver, but the machine hangs on shutdown/restart which prevents the installation of the proper Nvidia driver. I have to cycle the power to reboot. I ran the Update Manager in the hope that the updates would fix the hang-up. At the end of the update-installation it asked to reboot - and got stuck just like before. I see no obvious cause of the freeze and I don't know if it's caused by graphics problems or anything else. The only USB attachment is a mouse/keyboard; I don't have any external storage attached; and I don't have any programs running (the machine freezes even when doing restart right after login). How can I determine what is causing the freeze? How can I fix this? I'm frankly rather disappointed because I bought this new machine in the hopes of getting the graphics to work, which failed miserably on my old machine, even though Ubuntu is supposed to be good with Nvidia. Being a fresh convert from Windows, I was hoping for a happier experience this time, so I'm very much looking forward to your suggestions! ... After posting this question, I see related questions in the right sidebar: this, this, and this. Don't know why these didn't show up while I composed by question. Those questions suggest some ACPI settings but I am not experienced enough to find/change those settings. I'll try the sudo shutdown -h now command when I get home and see if that works, then update this question. I did check the system BIOS but didn't see anything out of the ordinary.

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  • 3D terrain map with Hexagon Grids (XNA)

    - by Rob
    I'm working on a hobby project (I'm a web/backend developer by day) and I want to create a 3D Tile (terrain) engine. I'm using XNA, but I can use MonoGame, OpenGL, or straight DirectX, so the answer does not have to be XNA specific. I'm more looking for some high level advice on how to approach this problem. I know about creating height maps and such, there are thousands of references out there on the net for that, this is a bit more specific. I'm more concerned with is the approach to get a 3D hexagon tile grid out of my terrain (since the terrain, and all 3d objects, are basically triangles). The first approach I thought about is to basically draw the triangles on the screen in the following order (blue numbers) to give me the triangles for terrain (black triangles) and then make hexes out of the triangles (red hex). http://screencast.com/t/ebrH2g5V This approach seems complicated to me since i'm basically having to draw 4 different types of triangles. The next approach I thought of was to use the existing triangles like I did for a square grid and get my hexes from 6 triangles as follows http://screencast.com/t/w9b7qKzVJtb8 This seems like the easier approach to me since there are only 2 types of triangles (i would have to play with the heights and widths to get a "perfect" hexagon, but the idea is the same. So I'm looking for: 1) Any suggestions on which approach I should take, and why. 2) How would I translate mouse position to a hexagon grid position (especially when moving the camera around), for example in the second image if the mouse pointer were the green circle, how would I determine to highlight that hexagon and then translating that into grid coordinates (assuming it is 0,0)? 3) Any references, articles, books, etc - to get me going in the right direction. Note: I've done hex grid's and mouse-grid coordinate conversion before in 2d. looking for some pointers on how to do the same in 3d. The result I would like to achieve is something similar to the following: http :// www. youtube .com / watch?v=Ri92YkyC3fw (sorry about the youtube link, but it will only let me post 2 links in this post... same rep problem i mention below...) Thanks for any help! P.S. Sorry for not posting the images inline, I apparently don't have enough rep on this stack exchange site.

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  • Customer Experience and BPM – From Efficiency to Engagement

    - by Ajay Khanna
    Over the last few years, focus of BPM has been mainly to improve the businesses efficiency. To create more efficient processes, to remove bottlenecks, to automate processes. That still holds true and why not? Isn’t BPM all about continuous improvement? BPM facilitates and requires business and IT collaboration. But business also requires working with customer. Do we not want to get close to and collaborate with our customers? This is where Social BPM takes BPM a step further. It not only allows people within an organization to collaborate to design exceptional processes, not only lets them collaborate on resolving a case but also let them engage with the customers. Engaging with customer means, first of all, connecting with them on their terms and turf. Take a new account opening process. Can a customer call you and initiate the process? Can a customer email you, or go to the website and initiate the process? Can they tweet you and initiate the process? Can they check the status of process via any channel they like? Can they take a picture of damaged package delivery and kick-off a returns process from their mobile device, with GIS data? Yes, these are various aspects to consider during process design if the goal is better customer experience and engagement. Of course, we want to be efficient and agile, but the focus here needs to be the customer. Now when the customer is tweeting about your products, posting on Facebook and Yelp about their experience with your company (and your process), you need to seek out that information. You need to gather and analyze the customer’s feedback on the social media and use that information to improve the processes and products. This is an excellent source of product and process ideation. So BPM is no longer only about improving back-office process efficiency, it is moving into a new and exciting phase of improving frontline customer facing processes, customer experience and engagement. Let me know how you think BPM can enhance customer experience.

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