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  • ORACLE RIGHTNOW DYNAMIC AGENT DESKTOP CLOUD SERVICE - Putting the Dynamite into Dynamic Agent Desktop

    - by Andreea Vaduva
    Untitled Document There’s a mountain of evidence to prove that a great contact centre experience results in happy, profitable and loyal customers. The very best Contact Centres are those with high first contact resolution, customer satisfaction and agent productivity. But how many companies really believe they are the best? And how many believe that they can be? We know that with the right tools, companies can aspire to greatness – and achieve it. Core to this is ensuring their agents have the best tools that give them the right information at the right time, so they can focus on the customer and provide a personalised, professional and efficient service. Today there are multiple channels through which customers can communicate with you; phone, web, chat, social to name a few but regardless of how they communicate, customers expect a seamless, quality experience. Most contact centre agents need to switch between lots of different systems to locate the right information. This hampers their productivity, frustrates both the agent and the customer and increases call handling times. With this in mind, Oracle RightNow has designed and refined a suite of add-ins to optimize the Agent Desktop. Each is designed to simplify and adapt the agent experience for any given situation and unify the customer experience across your media channels. Let’s take a brief look at some of the most useful tools available and see how they make a difference. Contextual Workspaces: The screen where agents do their job. Agents don’t want to be slowed down by busy screens, scrolling through endless tabs or links to find what they’re looking for. They want quick, accurate and easy. Contextual Workspaces are fully configurable and through workspace rules apply if, then, else logic to display only the information the agent needs for the issue at hand . Assigned at the Profile level, different levels of agent, from a novice to the most experienced, get a screen that is relevant to their role and responsibilities and ensures their job is done quickly and efficiently the first time round. Agent Scripting: Sometimes, agents need to deliver difficult or sensitive messages while maximising the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell. After all, contact centres are now increasingly viewed as revenue generators. Containing sophisticated branching logic, scripting helps agents to capture the right level of information and guides the agent step by step, ensuring no mistakes, inconsistencies or missed opportunities. Guided Assistance: This is typically used to solve common troubleshooting issues, displaying a series of question and answer sets in a decision-tree structure. This means agents avoid having to bookmark favourites or rely on written notes. Agents find particular value in these guides - to quickly craft chat and email responses. What’s more, by publishing guides in answers on support pages customers, can resolve issues themselves, without needing to contact your agents. And b ecause it can also accelerate agent ramp-up time, it ensures that even novice agents can solve customer problems like an expert. Desktop Workflow: Take a step back and look at the full customer interaction of your agents. It probably spans multiple systems and multiple tasks. With Desktop Workflows you control the design workflows that span the full customer interaction from start to finish. As sequences of decisions and actions, workflows are unique in that they can create or modify different records and provide automation behind the scenes. This means your agents can save time and provide better quality of service by having the tools they need and the relevant information as required. And doing this boosts satisfaction among your customers, your agents and you – so win, win, win! I have highlighted above some of the tools which can be used to optimise the desktop; however, this is by no means an exhaustive list. In approaching your design, it’s important to understand why and how your customers contact you in the first place. Once you have this list of “whys” and “hows”, you can design effective policies and procedures to handle each category of problem, and then implement the right agent desktop user interface to support them. This will avoid duplication and wasted effort. Five Top Tips to take away: Start by working out “why” and “how” customers are contacting you. Implement a clean and relevant agent desktop to support your agents. If your workspaces are getting complicated consider using Desktop Workflow to streamline the interaction. Enhance your Knowledgebase with Guides. Agents can access them proactively and can be published on your web pages for customers to help themselves. Script any complex, critical or sensitive interactions to ensure consistency and accuracy. Desktop optimization is an ongoing process so continue to monitor and incorporate feedback from your agents and your customers to keep your Contact Centre successful.   Want to learn more? Having attending the 3-day Oracle RightNow Customer Service Administration class your next step is to attend the Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Design and 2-day Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration class. Here you’ll learn not only how to leverage the Agent Desktop tools but also how to optimise your self-service pages to enhance your customers’ web experience.   Useful resources: Review the Best Practice Guide Review the tune-up guide   About the Author: Angela Chandler joined Oracle University as a Senior Instructor through the RightNow Customer Experience Acquisition. Her other areas of expertise include Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management.  She currently delivers the following Oracle RightNow courses in the classroom and as a Live Virtual Class: RightNow Customer Service Administration (3 days) RightNow Customer Portal Design and Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration (2 days) RightNow Analytics (2 days) Rightnow Chat Cloud Service Administration (2 days)

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  • Will it hurt my website's SEO friendliness if I host a french targetted website at, let's say, godaddy.com?

    - by Suraj
    Hi guys, I have read that the server location is important for a website to be SEO friendly. I am planning to build a website from scratch which is targetted mainly to french audience (in france), but I am planning to host the web site at godaddy.com. My concern is will it hurt the website SEO friendliness? Or do you recommend me to host the website in france itself? I have also read that I need to have a static IP Address. If it's true, can anyone explain me for what reason? Can anyone suggest me some good web hosting companies, prefereable in france? Thanks in advance!

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  • Inside Red Gate - Be Reasonable!

    - by Simon Cooper
    As I discussed in my previous posts, divisions and project teams within Red Gate are allowed a lot of autonomy to manage themselves. It's not just the teams though, there's an awful lot of freedom given to individual employees within the company as well. Reasonableness How Red Gate treats it's employees is embodied in the phrase 'You will be reasonable with us, and we will be reasonable with you'. As an employee, you are trusted to do your job to the best of you ability. There's no one looking over your shoulder, no one clocking you in and out each day. Everyone is working at the company because they want to, and one of the core ideas of Red Gate is that the company exists to 'let people do the best work of their lives'. Everything is geared towards that. To help you do your job, office services and the IT department are there. If you need something to help you work better (a third or fourth monitor, footrests, or a new keyboard) then ask people in Information Systems (IS) or Office Services and you will be given it, no questions asked. Everyone has administrator access to their own machines, and you can install whatever you want on it. If there's a particular bit of software you need, then ask IS and they will buy it. As an example, last year I wanted to replace my main hard drive with an SSD; I had a summer job at school working in a computer repair shop, so knew what to do. I went to IS and asked for 'an SSD, a SATA cable, and a screwdriver'. And I got it there and then, even the screwdriver. Awesome. I screwed it in myself, copied all my main drive files across, and I was good to go. Of course, if you're not happy doing that yourself, then IS will sort it all out for you, no problems. If you need something that the company doesn't have (say, a book off Amazon, or you need some specifications printing off & bound), then everyone has a expense limit of £100 that you can use without any sign-off needed from your managers. If you need a company credit card for whatever reason, then you can get it. This freedom extends to working hours and holiday; you're expected to be in the office 11am-3pm each day, but outside those times you can work whenever you want. If you need a half-day holiday on a days notice, or even the same day, then you'll get it, unless there's a good reason you're needed that day. If you need to work from home for a day or so for whatever reason, then you can. If it's reasonable, then it's allowed. Trust issues? A lot of trust, and a lot of leeway, is given to all the people in Red Gate. Everyone is expected to work hard, do their jobs to the best of their ability, and there will be a minimum of bureaucratic obstacles that stop you doing your work. What happens if you abuse this trust? Well, an example is company trip expenses. You're free to expense what you like; food, drink, transport, etc, but if you expenses are not reasonable, then you will never travel with the company again. Simple as that. Everyone knows when they're abusing the system, so simply don't do it. Along with reasonableness, another phrase used is 'Don't be a ***'. If you act like a ***, and abuse any of the trust placed in you, even if you're the best tester, salesperson, dev, or manager in the company, then you won't be a part of the company any more. From what I know about other companies, employee trust is highly variable between companies, all the way up to CCTV trained on employee's monitors. As a dev, I want to produce well-written & useful code that solves people's problems. Being able to get whatever I need - install whatever tools I need, get time off when I need to, obtain reference books within a day - all let me do my job, and so let Red Gate help other people do their own jobs through the tools we produce. Plus, I don't think I would like working for a company that doesn't allow admin access to your own machine and blocks Facebook!

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  • Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

    - by Roger Hart
    Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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  • Over a million COBOL programmers in the world?

    - by Lucas McCoy
    I think I heard on a previous StackOverflow podcast that COBOL was used as the programming language for traffic lights (or something like that), so this got me interested. I did a quick Google search and found this little article: Today, Cobol is everywhere, yet largely unheard of by millions of people who interact with it daily when using the ATM, stopping at traffic lights or buying a product online. The statistics on Cobol attest to its huge influence on the business world: There are over 220 billion lines of Cobol in existence, a figure which equates to about 80 per cent of the world’s actively used code. There over a million Cobol programmers in the world. There are 200 times as many Cobol transactions that take place each day than Google searches. I didn't really trust the source seeing as how it's on some random PHPBB forum. So how accurate are these figures? Are there really 220 billion lines of COBOL? I assume a few people/companies still use COBOL, but how many?

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  • Apt-get update through tor

    - by Alexander
    I'm trying to update my apt-get list. In my country a lot of sites are blocked or have been blocked from companies. When I use a proxy for the whole system I get errors, tor works perfectly when browsing. My question is can I update apt-get through a connection from tor? I mean I want to unblock the blocked sites using tor connection so I can perform "apt-get update" without errors ... Thanks in advance. Edit BTW : I'm using Ubuntu 13.10 and Tor 0.2.21 alexander@Alexander-PC:~$ sudo apt-get update [sudo] password for alexander: Ign http://extras.ubuntu.com saucy InRelease Ign http://security.ubuntu.com saucy-security InRelease Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com saucy InRelease Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com saucy Release.gpg Get:1 http://dl.google.com stable InRelease [1,540 B] 100% [1 InRelease gpgv 1,540 B] [Waiting for headers] [Waiting for headers] [WaSplitting up/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/dl.google.com_linux_chrome_deb_dists_stabIgn http://dl.google.com stable InRelease E: GPG error: http://dl.google.com stable InRelease: Clearsigned file isn't valid, got 'NODATA' (does the network require authentication?

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  • SUPINFO International University in Mauritius

    Since a while I'm considering to pick up my activities as a student and I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science. Personal motivation I mean after all this years as a professional software (and database) developer I have the personal urge to complete this part of my education. Having various certifications by Microsoft and being awarded as an Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) twice looks pretty awesome on a resume but having a "proper" degree would just complete my package. During the last couple of years I already got in touch with C-SAC (local business school with degree courses), the University of Mauritius and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT to check the options to enroll as an experienced software developer. Quite frankly, it was kind of alienating to receive that feedback: Start from scratch! No seriously? Spending x amount of years to sit for courses that might be outdated and form part of your daily routine? Probably being in an awkward situation in which your professional expertise might exceed the lecturers knowledge? I don't know... but if that's path to walk... Well, then I might have to go for it. SUPINFO International University Some weeks ago I was contacted by the General Manager, Education Recruitment and Development of Medine Education Village, Yamal Matabudul, to have a chat on how the local IT scene, namely the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC), could assist in their plans to promote their upcoming campus. Medine went into partnership with the French-based SUPINFO International University and Mauritius will be the 36th location world-wide for SUPINFO. Actually, the concept of SUPINFO is very likely to the common understanding of an apprenticeship in Germany. Not only does a student enroll into the programme but will also be placed into various internships as part of the curriculum. It's a big advantage in my opinion as the person stays in touch with the daily procedures and workflows in the real world of IT. Statements like "We just received a 'crash course' of information and learned new technology which is equivalent to 1.5 months of lectures at the university" wouldn't form part of the experience of such an education. Open Day at the Medine Education Village Last Saturday, Medine organised their Open Day and it was the official inauguration of the SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. It's now listed on their website, too - but be warned, the site is mainly in French language although the courses are all done in English. Not only was it a big opportunity to "hang out" on the campus of Medine but it was great to see the first professional partners for their internship programme, too. Oh, just for the records, IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. will also be among the future employers for SUPINFO students. More about that in an upcoming blog entry. Open Day at Medine Education Village - SUPINFO International University in Mauritius Mr Alick Mouriesse, President of SUPINFO, arrived the previous day and he gave all attendees a great overview of the roots of SUPINFO, the general development of the educational syllabus and their high emphasis on their partnerships with local IT companies in order to assist their students to get future jobs but also feel the heartbeat of technology live. Something which is completely missing in classic institutions of tertiary education in Computer Science. And since I was on tour with my children, as usual during weekends, he also talked about the outlook of having a SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. Apart from the close connection to IT companies and providing internships to students, SUPINFO clearly works on an international level. Meaning students of SUPINFO can move around the globe and can continue their studies seamlessly. For example, you might enroll for your first year in France, then continue to do 2nd and 3rd year in Canada or any other country with a SUPINFO campus to earn your bachelor degree, and then live and study in Mauritius for the next 2 years to achieve a Master degree. Having a chat with Dale Smith, Expand Technologies, after his interesting session on Technological Entrepreneurship - TechPreneur More questions by other craftsmen of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community And of course, this concept works in any direction, giving Mauritian students a huge (!) opportunity to live, study and work abroad. And thanks to this, Medine already announced that there will be new facilities near Cascavelle to provide dormitories and other facilities to international students coming to our island. Awesome! Okay, but why SUPINFO? Well, coming back to my original statement - I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science - SUPINFO has a process called Validation of Acquired Experience (VAE) which is tailor-made for employees in the field of IT, and allows you to enroll in their course programme. I already got in touch with their online support chat but was only redirected to some FAQs on their website, unfortunately. So, during the Open Day I seized the opportunity to have an one-on-one conversation with Alick Mouriesse, and he clearly encouraged me to gather my certifications and working experience. SUPINFO does an individual evaluation prior to their assignment regarding course level, and hopefully my chances of getting some modules ahead of studies are looking better than compared to the other institutes. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to go down the easy route but why should someone sit for "Database 101" or "Principles of OOP" when applying and preaching database normalisation and practicing Clean Code Developer are like flesh and blood? Anyway, I'll be off to get my transcripts of certificates together with my course assignments from the old days at the university. Yes, I studied Applied Chemistry for a couple of years before intersecting into IT and software development particularly... ;-)

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  • Scheduling Jobs in SQL Server Express

    As we all know SQL Server 2005 Express is a very powerful free edition of SQL Server 2005. However it does not contain SQL Server Agent service. Because of this scheduling jobs is not possible. So if we want to do this we have to install a free or commercial 3rd party product. This usually isn't allowed due to the security policies of many hosting companies and thus presents a problem. Maybe we want to schedule daily backups, database reindexing, statistics updating, etc. This is why I wanted to have a solution based only on SQL Server 2005 Express and not dependent on the hosting company. And of course there is one based on our old friend the Service Broker.

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  • I need to develop a parser. Can I use Lex and Yacc for the purpose?

    - by Scrooge
    I need to extract very particular data from log files(of different types and formats). Since I am a recent college passout; my mind ran to using Lex and Yacc for the purpose. Now I have the following Questions 1. Will it be legal to do so ? (This product I am working for belongs to one of the biggest tech companies in the world.) 2. Also ; I would like to know if I am being too afraid to write my own parser? 3. How can I use Lex and Yacc if my product is Windows based? Please tell me if you need any clarification or extra information.

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  • Open World Day 3

    - by Antony Reynolds
    A Day in the Life of an Oracle OpenWorld Attendee Part IV My third day was exhibition day for me!  I took the opportunity to wander around the JavaOne and OpenWorld exhibitions to see what might be useful for me when selling WebLogic, Coherence & SOA Suite.  I found a number of interesting vendors and thought I would share what I found here.  These are not necessarily endorsements, but observations on companies that I thought had interesting looking products that fill a need I have seen at customers. Highly Available EBS Upgrades A few years ago I worked with a customer that was a port authority.  They wanted to tie E-Business Suite into their operations to provide faster processing of cargo and passengers.  However they only had a 2 hour downtime window to perform upgrades.  This was not a problem for core database and middleware technology, this could accommodate those upgrade timescales easily.  It was a problem for EBS however so I intrigued to find Rapid E-Suite Inc offering an 11i to 12i upgrade service that claims to require no outage.  This could be a real boon to EBS customers like my port friends that need to upgrade without disruption to their business. Mobile on WebLogic I have come across a number of customers who want a comprehensive mobile solution, connected and disconnected operation and so forth.  ADF only addresses part of these requirements currently so I was excited to discover mFrontiers Inc offering an apparently comprehensive solution that should integrate easily with Oracle SOA Suite to mobile enable a SOA infrastructure.  The ability to operate without a network is important for many applications, particularly in industries that require their engineers to enter buildings to perform maintenance or repairs, because network access is not always available – many of my colleagues don’t have mobile access from their homes because they live in the middle of nowhere – and disconnected support is crucial in these situations. Sharepoint Connector for WebCenter Content Obviously Sharepoint is an evil pernicious intrusion into a companies IT estate but it is widely deployed and many people like it but also would like to take advantage of Oracle products such as WebCenter Content.  So I was encouraged to see that Fishbowl Solutions have created a connector for Sharepoint that allows it to bring in content from WebCenter, it looks like a valuable way to maintain the Sharepoint interface end users are used to but extend the range of content by pulling stuff (technical term for content) from WebCenter.   Load Balancing The Enterprise Deployment Guides are Oracles bible on building highly available FMW environments, and each of them requires a front end load balancer.  I have been asked to help configure F5 Load Balancers on a number of occasions over my time at Oracle and each time I come back to it I find more useful features have been added to the BigIP line of load balancers that F5 sell, many of their documents are tailored to FMW.  I like F5, they provide (relatively) easy to use products that do what they say on the side of the box.  They may not have all the bells and whistles of some of their more expensive competitors but they do the job and do it well!  Besides which I like their logo! Other Stuff I saw lots of other interesting products and services, such as a lightweight monitoring tool for Coherence, Forms migration services, JCAPS migration services and lots of cool freebies to take home to the children! A Quiet Night Wednesday night was the partner appreciation event and I had decided to go back to the hotel and have an early night.  I decided to attend the last session of the day – a Maven/Hudson/WebLogic tutorial.  I got the wrong hotel for the session and snuck in 20 minutes late at the back and starting working on the hands on workshop.  One of my co-attendees raised his hand for help and as the presenter came over to help he suddenly stopped and yelled – “Is that Antony”!  It was my old friend Steve Button who used to be based in Redwood Shores but is now a WebLogic guru PM in Australia.  It was good to catch up with him.  As he yelled out a guy with really bad posture turned around to see who he was talking to, this turned out to be my friend Simon Haslan, Oracle ACE from the UK.  After the tutorial Simon and I retired to the coffee shop to catch up and share stories.  2 and half hours later we decided it was time to retire, so much for an early night but great to renew old friendships and find out what real customers are worrying about.

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  • Software Craftsman Pilgrimage Comes Together

    - by Liam McLennan
    Last week on Software Craftsman Pilgrimage I was trying to organise where I will be travelling, and the companies I will be pairing with. I now have a confirmed itinerary. 9 - 11th April Alt.NET Seattle 12th April Craftsman visit with Didit (Long Island) 13th April rest day :) 14th April Craftsman visit with Obtiva (Chicago) 15th – 16th April Craftsman visit with 8th Light (Chicago) 17th – 18th April Seattle Code Camp I am looking forward to all of my visits and talking to all the smart people who work there. I will be blogging my progress and hopefully shooting some video. If you are in Seattle, New York or Chicago and would like to meet up to chat about craftsmanship, programming, ruby or .NET please email me.

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  • How do people get around the Carmack's Reverse patent?

    - by Rei Miyasaka
    Apparently, Creative has a patent on Carmack's Reverse, and they successfully forced Id to modify their techniques for the source drop, as well as to include EAX in Doom 3. But Carmack's Reverse is discussed quite often and apparently it's a good choice for deferred shading, so it's presumably used in a lot of other high-budget productions too. Even though it's unlikely that Creative would go after smaller companies, I'm wondering how the bigger studios get around this problem. Do they just cross their fingers and hope Creative doesn't troll them, or do they just not use Carmack's Reverse at all?

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  • Advantages And Disadvantages Of Resource Serialization

    - by CPP_Person
    A good example is let's say I'm making a pong game. I have a PNG image for the ball and another PNG image for the paddles. Now which would be better, loading the PNG images with a PNG loader, or loading them in a separate program, serializing it, and de-serializing it in the game itself for use? The reason why this may be good to know is because it seems like game companies (or anyone in the long run) build all of their resources into some sort of file. For example, in the game Fallout: New Vegas the DLCs are loaded as a .ESM file, which includes everything it needs, all the game does is find it, serialize it, and it has the resources. Games like Penumbra: Black Plague take a different approch and add a folder which contains all the textures, sounds, scrips, ect that it needs, but not serialized (it does this with the game itself, and the DLC). Which is the better approch and why?

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  • are keywords in URLs good SEO or needlessly redundant?

    - by Blazemonger
    A coworker and I are locked in a debate over the value of SEO keywords in the URL of a page. She wants to change all the filenames of the HTML pages of a fencing company so they look like residential-home-chicago.html, contact-chicago-contractor.html, and so on. She is convinced that because Google highlights keywords in URLS in search results, that means that putting keywords here is more valuable. My position is that these do not improve SEO, since Google doesn't seem to give keywords in the URL any more weight than keywords in the body of the page, and might even give them less weight. In the meantime, they make it harder for me to find the pages I want when its time to edit them, and the site as a whole looks cheap and spammy. Google's own SEO guide suggests to me that yes, keywords in URLs are useful, but not superior, and that they are more useful for human readability than search engine rankings. I'm looking for authoritative sources that support either position, not blog articles from SEO optimization companies trying to promote themselves.

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  • Why is Adobe Air so underrated for building mobile apps?

    - by Marcelo de Assis
    I worked with Adobe Flash related technologies for the last 5 years, although not being a big fan of Adobe. I see some little bugs happening in some apps, but I cannot imagine why a lot of big companies do not even think to use use Adobe Air as a good technology for their mobile apps. I see a lot of mobile developer positions asking for experts in Android or iOS , but very much less positions asking for Adobe Air, even when Adobe Air apps have the advantage of being multi-plataform, with the same app working in Blackberry, iOS and Android. Is so much easier to develop a game using Flash, than using Android SDK, for example. It really have flaws (that I never saw) or it is just some kind of mass prejudgement? I also would like to hear what a project manager or a indie developer takes when choosing a plataform for building apps.

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  • Should the Joel Test be essential for every software company? [closed]

    - by Mahbubur R Aaman
    Joel Test has 12 steps for better code. They are: Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds? Do you have a bug database? Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you have a spec? Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Do you use the best tools money can buy? Do you have testers? Do new candidates write code during their interview? Do you do hallway usability testing? Should these steps mandatory for every software companies? While recruiting programmers, then programmers should ask the company, as they follow joel steps?

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  • Preview - Profit, May 2010

    - by Aaron Lazenby
    Whew! Last Friday, we put the finishing touches on the May 2010 edition of Profit, Oracle's quarterly business and technology journal. The issue will be back from the printer and live on the website in mid-April. Here's a preview: 0 0 0 Turning Crisis into OpportunityDuring the depths of the financial crisis, San Francisco California-based Wells Fargo &Company launched a bold acquisition of Wachovia Bank--one of the largest financial services mergers in history. Learn how Oracle software helped Wells Fargo CFO Howard Atkins prepare his office for the merger--and assisted with the integration of the companies once the deal was done.Building on SuccessGlobal construction firm Hill International takes project management to new heightswith Oracle's Primavera solutions.?Product Management, In Black and whiteCatch up with Zebra Technologies to see how Oracle's Agile applications connectwith an existing Oracle E-Business Suite system. A Perfect MatchLearn how technology makes good medicine in this interview with National MarrowDonor Program CIO Michael Jones. The IT Ties the BindHow information systems are help­ing manage knowledge workers in a post-9-to-5work world.I'll post a link to the new edition once it's live. Hope you enjoy!

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  • Choosing the Right Financial Consolidation and Reporting Solution

    Financial reporting requirements for publicly-held companies are changing and getting more complex. With the upcoming convergence of US GAAP and IFRS, demand for more detailed non-financial disclosures, and the SEC mandate for XBRL financial executives are under pressure to ensure they have the right systems in place to support current and future reporting requirements. Tune into this conversation with Rich Clayton, VP of Enterprise Performance Management and BI products for Oracle, and Annette Melatti, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Financial Applications to learn about the latest market requirements, what capabilities are provided by Oracle's General Ledgers, and how customers can extend their investment in Oracle General Ledger solutions with Oracle's market-leading financial close and reporting products.

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  • Changing Platform

    - by Liam McLennan
    From time to time a developer makes a break from their platform of choice (.NET, Java, VB, Access, COBOL) and moves to perceived greener pastures. Zed Shaw did it, jumping from Ruby to Python, and Mike Gunderloy went from .NET to Rails. But it can be difficult to change platform. My clients don’t come to me looking for  a software developer, they come looking for a .NET developer. This is a tragic side effect of big software companies marketing. If your village is under attack by bandits, would you turn away the first seven samurai who offered to help because you didn’t like their swords? What matters is how effectively they can defend your village. You should not tell your carpenter what sort of hammer to use and you should not tell your software developer what platform to use.

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  • Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
    As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared.  Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it.  Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations.  Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created.  Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose.  Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience.  I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose.  The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them.  Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging.  Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities.  An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter).  Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage.  I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service.  From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets.  Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate.  As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors.  This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy.  This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies.  These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick. 

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  • A Wonderful Comment From a Very Inflential Microsoft Technology Company's Owner

    - by TheSilverlightGroup
    The Silverlight Group has been so very busy taking on state-of-the-art Silverlight development with huge, Fortune 500 companies! We have a great pool of talent, & if any of you Silverlight &/or Blend/UI/UX people are interested in joining us, our toll-free number is 1-888-863-6989. I'd like to point out that Nubifer, Inc.'s CEO, Chad Collins, http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/sureshs/Nubifer-cloud-solution-on-Windows-Azure/ , called our company "The Flagship Company for Silverlight Development"...thank you, Chad, as I see you at the same level for Cloud Computing. -See the SilverLIGHT!

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  • REST or Non-REST on Internal Services

    - by tyndall
    I'm curious if others have chosen to implement some services internally at their companies as non-REST (SOAP, Thrift, Proto Buffers, etc...) as a way to auto-generate client libraries/wrappers? I'm on a two year project. I will be writing maybe 40 services over that period with my team. 10% of those services definitely make sense as REST services, but the other 90% feel more like they could be done in REST or RPC style. Of these 90%, 100% will be .NET talking to .NET. When I think about all the effort to have my devs develop client "wrappers" for REST services I cringe. WADL or RSDL don't seem to have enough mindshare. Thoughts? Any good discussions of this "internal service" issue online? If you have struggled with this what general rules for determining REST or non-REST have you used?

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  • My Latest Hare-Brained Scheme

    - by Liam McLennan
    I have not had a significant side project for a while but I have been working on a product idea. Its an analytics application that analyses twitter data and reports on market sentiment. The target market is companies who want to track trends in consumer sentiment. My idea is to teach the application to divide relevant tweets into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ categories. If the input was the set of tweets featuring the word ‘telstra’ the application would find the following tweet:   and put it in the ‘negative’ category. Collecting data in this fashion facilitates the creation of graphs such as: which can then be correlated against events, such as a share offer or new product release. I may go ahead and build this, just because I am a programmer and it amuses me to do so. My concerns are: There  is no market for this tool There is a market, but I don’t understand it and have no way to reach it.

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  • Interview with Ronald Bradford about MySQL Connect

    - by Keith Larson
    Ronald Bradford,  an Oracle ACE Director has been busy working with  database consulting, book writing (EffectiveMySQL) while traveling and speaking around the world in support of MySQL. I was able to take some of his time to get an interview on this thoughts about theMySQL Connect conference. Keith Larson: What where your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to provide the community the MySQL Conference ?Ronald Bradford: Oracle has already been providing various different local community events including OTN Tech Days and  MySQL community days. These are great for local regions both in the US and abroad.  In previous years there has been an increase of content at Oracle Open World, however that benefits the Oracle community far more then the MySQL community.  It is good to see that Oracle is realizing the benefit in providing a large scale dedicated event for the MySQL community that includes speakers from the MySQL development teams, invested companies in the ecosystem and other community evangelists.I fully expect a successful event and look forward to hopefully seeing MySQL Connect at the upcoming Brazil and Japan OOW conferences and perhaps an event on the East Coast.Keith Larson: Since you are part of the content committee, what did you think of the submissions that were received during call for papers?Ronald Bradford: There was a large number of quality submissions to the number of available presentation sessions. As with the previous years as a committee member for the annual MySQL conference, there is always a large variety of common cornerstone MySQL features as well as new products and upcoming companies sharing their MySQL experiences. All of the usual major players in the ecosystem will in presenting at MySQL Connect including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Continuent, Percona, Tokutek, Sphinx and Amazon to name a few.  This is ensuring the event will have a large number of quality speakers and a difficult time in choosing what to attend. Keith Larson: What sessions do you look forwarding to attending? Ronald Bradford: As with most quality conferences you can only be in one place at one time, so with multiple tracks per session it is always difficult to decide. The continued work and success with MySQL Cluster, and with a number of sessions I am sure will be popular. The features that interest me the most are around the optimizer, where there are several sessions on new features, and on the importance of backups. There are three presentations in this area to choose from.Keith Larson: Are you going to cover any of the content in your books at your MySQL Connect sessions?Ronald Bradford: I will be giving two presentations at MySQL Connect. The first will include the techniques available for creating better indexes where I will be touching on some aspects of the first Effective MySQL book on Optimizing SQL Statements.  In my second presentation from experiences of managing 500+ AWS MySQL instances, I will be touching on areas including SQL tuning, backup and recovery and scale out with replication.   These are the key topics of the initial books in the Effective MySQL series that focus on performance, scalability and business continuity.  The books however cover a far greater amount of detail then can be presented in a 1 hour session. Keith Larson: What features of MySQL 5.6 do you look forward to the most ?Ronald Bradford: I am very impressed with the optimizer trace feature. The ability to see exposed information is invaluable not just for MySQL 5.6, but to also apply information discerned for optimizing SQL statements in earlier versions of MySQL.  Not everybody understands that it is easy to deploy a MySQL 5.6 slave into an existing topology running an older version if MySQL for evaluation of many new features.  You can use the new mysqlbinlog streaming feature for duplicating master binary logs on an older version with a MySQL 5.6 slave.  The improvements in instrumentation in the Performance Schema are exciting.   However, as with my upcoming Replication Techniques in Depth title, that will be available for sale at MySQL Connect, there are numerous replication features, some long overdue with provide significant management benefits. Crash Save Slaves, Global transaction Identifiers (GTID)  and checksums just to mention a few.Keith Larson: You have been to numerous conferences, what would you recommend for people at the conference? Ronald Bradford: Make the time to meet and introduce yourself to the speakers that cover the topics that most interest you. The MySQL ecosystem has a very strong community.  The relationships you build with presenters, developers and architects in MySQL can be invaluable, however they are created over time. Get to know these people, interact with them over time.  This is the opportunity to learn more then just the content from a 1 hour session. Keith Larson: Any additional tips to handling the long hours ? Ronald Bradford: Conferences can be hard, especially with all the post event drinking.  This is a two day event and I am sure will include additional events on Friday and Saturday night so come well prepared, and leave work behind. Take the time to learn something new.   You can always catchup on sleep later. Keith Larson: Thank you so much for taking some time to do this I look forward to seeing you at the MySQL Connect conference.  Please stay tuned here for more updates on MySQL. 

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  • Python: Future as a major programming language?

    - by chrisw
    After reading some Python material and seeing some Python code a few years back I decided to give it a whirl. I decided to start with Python to solve the problems on Project Euler and was throughly impressed with the language. Since then I've went on to learn Django, and now use it primarily for my web applications. I would love to have a career programming in this language, however I fear the future of the language is currently in a state of uncertainness. With Google and other major companies embracing it there may be some hope, what are your thoughts on Python, do you see many job opportunities out there?

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