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• log4j performance

  - by Bob

  Hi, I'm developing a web app, and I'd like to log some information to help me improve and observe the app. (I'm using Tomcat6) First I thought I would use StringBuilders, append the logs to them and a task would persist them into the database like every 2 minutes. Because I was worried about the out-of-the-box logging system's performance. Then I made some test. Especially with log4j. Here is my code: Main.java public static void main(String[] args) { Thread[] threads = new Thread[LoggerThread.threadsNumber]; for(int i = 0; i < LoggerThread.threadsNumber; ++i){ threads[i] = new Thread(new LoggerThread("name - " + i)); } LoggerThread.startTimestamp = System.currentTimeMillis(); for(int i = 0; i < LoggerThread.threadsNumber; ++i){ threads[i].start(); } LoggerThread.java public class LoggerThread implements Runnable{ public static int threadsNumber = 10; public static long startTimestamp; private static int counter = 0; private String name; public LoggerThread(String name) { this.name = name; } private Logger log = Logger.getLogger(this.getClass()); @Override public void run() { for(int i=0; i<10000; ++i){ log.info(name + ": " + i); if(i == 9999){ int c = increaseCounter(); if(c == threadsNumber){ System.out.println("Elapsed time: " + (System.currentTimeMillis() - startTimestamp)); } } } } private synchronized int increaseCounter(){ return ++counter; } } } log4j.properties log4j.logger.main.LoggerThread=debug, f log4j.appender.f=org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender log4j.appender.f.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout log4j.appender.f.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ABSOLUTE} %5p %c{1}:%L - %m%n log4j.appender.f.File=c:/logs/logging.log log4j.appender.f.MaxFileSize=15000KB log4j.appender.f.MaxBackupIndex=50 I think this is a very common configuration for log4j. First I used log4j 1.2.14 then I realized there was a newer version, so I switched to 1.2.16 Here are the figures (all in millisec) LoggerThread.threadsNumber = 10 1.2.14: 4235, 4267, 4328, 4282 1.2.16: 2780, 2781, 2797, 2781 LoggerThread.threadsNumber = 100 1.2.14: 41312, 41014, 42251 1.2.16: 25606, 25729, 25922 I think this is very fast. Don't forget that: in every cycle the run method not just log into the file, it has to concatenate strings (name + ": " + i), and check an if test (i == 9999). When threadsNumber is 10, there are 100.000 loggings and if tests and concatenations. When it is 100, there are 1.000.000 loggings and if tests and concatenations. (I've read somewhere JVM uses StringBuilder's append for concatenation, not simple concatenation). Did I missed something? Am I doing something wrong? Did I forget any factor that could decrease the performance? If these figures are correct I think, I don't have to worry about log4j's performance even if I heavily log, do I?

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• The Math of a Jump in a 2D game.

  - by ONi

  I have been all around with this question and I can't find the correct answer! So, behold, the description of my question: I'm working in J2ME, I have my gameloop that do the following: public void run() { Graphics g = this.getGraphics(); while (running) { long diff = System.currentTimeMillis() - lastLoop; lastLoop = System.currentTimeMillis(); input(); this.level.doLogic(); render(g, diff); try { Thread.sleep(10); } catch (InterruptedException e) { stop(e); } } } so it's just a basic gameloop, the doLogic() function calls for all the logic functions of the characters in the scene and render(g, diff) calls the animateChar function of every character on scene, following this, the animChar function in the Character class sets up everything in the screen as this: protected void animChar(long diff) { this.checkGravity(); this.move((int) ((diff * this.dx) / 1000), (int) ((diff * this.dy) / 1000)); if (this.acumFrame > this.framerate) { this.nextFrame(); this.acumFrame = 0; } else { this.acumFrame += diff; } } This ensures me that everything must to move according to the time that the machine takes to go from cycle to cycle (remember it's a phone, not a gaming rig). I'm sure it's not the most efficient way to achieve this behavior so I'm totally open for criticism of my programming skills in the comments, but here my problem: When I make I character jump, what I do is that I put his dy to a negative value, say -200 and I set the boolean jumping to true, that makes the character go up, and then I have this function called checkGravity() that ensure that everything that goes up has to go down, checkGravity also checks for the character being over platforms so I will strip it down a little for the sake of your time: public void checkGravity() { if (this.jumping) { this.jumpSpeed += 10; if (this.jumpSpeed > 0) { this.jumping = false; this.falling = true; } this.dy = this.jumpSpeed; } if (this.falling) { this.jumpSpeed += 10; if (this.jumpSpeed > 200) this.jumpSpeed = 200; this.dy = this.jumpSpeed; if (this.collidesWithPlatform()) { this.falling = false; this.standing = true; this.jumping = false; this.jumpSpeed = 0; this.dy = this.jumpSpeed; } } } So, the problem is, that this function updates the dy regardless of the diff, making the characters fly like Superman in slow machines, and I have no idea how to implement the diff factor so that when a character is jumping, his speed decrement in a proportional way to the game speed. Can anyone help me fix this issue? or give me pointers on how to make a 2D Jump in J2ME the right way. Thank you very much for your time.

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• General ORM design question

  - by Calvin

  Suppose you have 2 classes, Person and Rabbit. A person can do a number of things to a rabbit, s/he can either feed it, buy it and become its owner, or give it away. A rabbit can have none or at most 1 owner at a time. And if it is not fed for a while, it may die. Class Person { Void Feed(Rabbit r); Void Buy(Rabbit r); Void Giveaway(Person p, Rabbit r); Rabbit[] rabbits; } Class Rabbit { Bool IsAlive(); Person pwner; } There are a couple of observations from the domain model: Person and Rabbit can have references to each other Any actions on 1 object can also change the state of the other object Even if no explicit actions are invoked, there can still be a change of state in the objects (e.g. Rabbit can be starved to death, and that causes it to be removed from the Person.rabbits array) As DDD is concerned, I think the correct approach is to synchronize all calls that may change the states in the domain model. For instance, if a Person buys a Rabbit, s/he would need to acquire a lock in Person to make a change to the rabbits array AND also another lock in Rabbit to change its owner before releasing the first one. This would prevent a race condition where 2 Persons claim to be the owner of the little Rabbit. The other approach is to let the database to handle all these synchronizations. Who makes the first call wins, but then the DB needs to have some kind of business logics to figure out if it is a valid transaction (e.g. if a Rabbit already has an owner, it cannot change its owner unless the Person gives it away). There are both pros/cons in either approach, and I’d expect the “best” solution would be somewhere in-between. How would you do it in real life? What’s your take and experience? Also, is it a valid concern that there can be another race condition the domain model has committed its change but before it is fully committed in the database? And for the 3rd observation (i.e. state change due to time factor). How will you do it?

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• Which programming language to choose? (for a specific problem/domain, details inside)

  - by Bijan

  I am building a trading portfolio management system that is responsible for production, optimization, and simulation of non-high frequency trading portfolios (dealing with 1min or 3min bars of data, not tick data). I plan on employing Amazon web services to take on the entire load of the application. I have four choices that I am considering as language. a) Java b) C++ c) C# d) Python Here is the scope of the extremes of the project scope. This isn't how it will be, maybe ever, but it's within the scope of the requirements: Weekly simulation of 10,000,000 trading systems. (Each trading system is expected to have its own data mining methods, including feature selection algorithms which are extremely computationally-expensive. Imagine 500-5000 features using wrappers. These are not run often by any means, but it's still a consideration) Real-time production of portfolio w/ 100,000 trading strategies Taking in 1 min or 3 min data from every stock/futures market around the globe (approx 100,000) Portfolio optimization of portfolios with up to 100,000 strategies. (rather intensive algorithm) Speed is a concern, but I believe that Java can handle the load. I just want to make sure that Java CAN handle the above requirements comfortably. I don't want to do the project in C++, but I will if it's required. The reason C# is on there is because I thought it was a good alternative to Java, even though I don't like Windows at all and would prefer Java if all things are the same. Python - I've read somethings on PyPy and pyscho that claim python can be optimized with JIT compiling to run at near C-like speeds.... That's pretty much the only reason it is on this list, besides that fact that Python is a great language and would probably be the most enjoyable language to code in, which is not a factor at all for this project, but a perk. To sum up: - real time production - weekly simulations of a large number of systems - weekly/monthly optimizations of portfolios - large numbers of connections to collect data from There is no dealing with millisecond or even second based trades. The only consideration is if Java can possibly deal with this kind of load when spread out of a necessary amount of EC2 servers. Thank you guys so much for your wisdom.

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• Setting custom UITableViewCells height

  - by Vijayeta

  I am using a custum UITableViewCell , which has some labels , buttons imageviews to be displayed.There is one label in the cell whose text is a NSString object and the length of string could be variable , due to this i cannot set a constant height to the cell in UITableViews : heightForCellAtIndex method.The ceels height depends on the labels height , whcich can be determined using the NSStrings sizeWithFont method . i tried using it , but looks like i m going wrong somewhere . Can anyone help me out in this , adding the code used in iniatilizing the cell if (self = [super initWithFrame:frame reuseIdentifier:reuseIdentifier]) { self.selectionStyle = UITableViewCellSelectionStyleNone; UIImage *image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"dot.png"]; imageView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:image]; imageView.frame = CGRectMake(45.0,10.0,10,10); headingTxt = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame: CGRectMake(60.0,0.0,150.0,post_hdg_ht)]; [headingTxt setContentMode: UIViewContentModeCenter]; headingTxt.text = postData.user_f_name; headingTxt.font = [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:13]; headingTxt.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentLeft; headingTxt.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; dateTxt = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(55.0,23.0,150.0,post_date_ht)]; dateTxt.text = postData.created_dtm; dateTxt.font = [UIFont italicSystemFontOfSize:11]; dateTxt.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentLeft; dateTxt.textColor = [UIColor grayColor]; NSString * text1 = postData.post_body; NSLog(@"text length = %d",[text1 length]); CGRect bounds = [UIScreen mainScreen].bounds; CGFloat tableViewWidth; CGFloat width = 0; tableViewWidth = bounds.size.width/2; width = tableViewWidth - 40; //fudge factor //CGSize textSize = {width, 20000.0f}; //width and height of text area CGSize textSize = {245.0, 20000.0f}; //width and height of text area CGSize size1 = [text1 sizeWithFont:[UIFont systemFontOfSize:11.0f] constrainedToSize:textSize lineBreakMode:UILineBreakModeWordWrap]; CGFloat ht = MAX(size1.height, 28); textView = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(55.0,42.0,245.0,ht)]; textView.text = postData.post_body; textView.font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:11]; textView.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentLeft; textView.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; textView.lineBreakMode = UILineBreakModeWordWrap; textView.numberOfLines = 3; textView.autoresizesSubviews = YES; [self.contentView addSubview:imageView]; [self.contentView addSubview:textView]; [self.contentView addSubview:webView]; [self.contentView addSubview:dateTxt]; [self.contentView addSubview:headingTxt]; [self.contentView sizeToFit]; [imageView release]; [textView release]; [webView release]; [dateTxt release]; [headingTxt release]; } textView = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(55.0,42.0,245.0,ht)]; this is the label whose height and widh are going wrong

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• Performing full screen grab in windows

  - by Steven Lu

  I am working an idea that involves getting a full capture of the screen including windows and apps, analyzing it, and then drawing items back onto the screen, as an overlay. I want to learn image processing techniques and I could get lots of data to work with if I can directly access the Windows screen. I could use this to build automation tools the likes of which have never been seen before. More on that later. I have full screen capture working for the most part. HWND hwind = GetDesktopWindow(); HDC hdc = GetDC(hwind); int resx = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXSCREEN); int resy = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CYSCREEN); int BitsPerPixel = GetDeviceCaps(hdc,BITSPIXEL); HDC hdc2 = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc); BITMAPINFO info; info.bmiHeader.biSize = sizeof(BITMAPINFOHEADER); info.bmiHeader.biWidth = resx; info.bmiHeader.biHeight = resy; info.bmiHeader.biPlanes = 1; info.bmiHeader.biBitCount = BitsPerPixel; info.bmiHeader.biCompression = BI_RGB; void *data; hbitmap = CreateDIBSection(hdc2,&info,DIB_RGB_COLORS,(void**)&data,0,0); SelectObject(hdc2,hbitmap); Once this is done, I can call this repeatedly: BitBlt(hdc2,0,0,resx,resy,hdc,0,0,SRCCOPY); The cleanup code (I have no idea if this is correct): DeleteObject(hbitmap); ReleaseDC(hwind,hdc); if (hdc2) { DeleteDC(hdc2); } Every time BitBlt is called it grabs the screen and saves it in memory I can access thru data. Performance is somewhat satisfactory. BitBlt executes in 50 milliseconds (sometimes as low as 33ms) at 1920x1200x32. What surprises me is that when I switch display mode to 16 bit, 1920x1200x16, either through my graphics settings beforehand, or by using ChangeDisplaySettings, I get a massively improved screen grab time between 1ms and 2ms, which cannot be explained by the factor of two reduction in bit-depth. Using CreateDIBSection (as above) offers a significant speed up when in 16-bit mode, compared to if I set up with CreateCompatibleBitmap (6-7ms/f). Does anybody know why dropping to 16bit causes such a speed increase? Is there any hope for me to grab 32bit at such speeds? if not for the color depth, but for not forcing a change of screen buffer modes and the awful flickering.

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• Generate lags R

  - by Btibert3

  Hi All, I hope this is basic; just need a nudge in the right direction. I have read in a database table from MS Access into a data frame using RODBC. Here is a basic structure of what I read in: PRODID PROD Year Week QTY SALES INVOICE Here is the structure: str(data) 'data.frame': 8270 obs. of 7 variables: $ PRODID : int 20001 20001 20001 100001 100001 100001 100001 100001 100001 100001 ... $ PROD : Factor w/ 1239 levels "1% 20qt Box",..: 335 335 335 128 128 128 128 128 128 128 ... $ Year : int 2010 2010 2010 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2010 ... $ Week : int 12 18 19 14 15 16 17 18 19 9 ... $ QTY : num 1 1 0 135 300 270 300 270 315 315 ... $ SALES : num 15.5 0 -13.9 243 540 ... $ INVOICES: num 1 1 2 5 11 11 10 11 11 12 ... Here are the top few rows: head(data, n=10) PRODID PROD Year Week QTY SALES INVOICES 1 20001 Dolie 12" 2010 12 1 15.46 1 2 20001 Dolie 12" 2010 18 1 0.00 1 3 20001 Dolie 12" 2010 19 0 -13.88 2 4 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 14 135 243.00 5 5 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 15 300 540.00 11 6 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 16 270 486.00 11 7 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 17 300 540.00 10 8 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 18 270 486.00 11 9 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 19 315 567.00 11 10 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2010 9 315 569.25 12 I simply want to generate lags for QTY, SALES, INVOICE for each product but I am not sure where to start. I know R is great with Time Series, but I am not sure where to start. I have two questions: 1- I have the raw invoice data but have aggregated it for reporting purposes. Would it be easier if I didn't aggregate the data? 2- Regardless of aggregation or not, what functions will I need to loop over each product and generate the lags as I need them? In short, I want to loop over a set of records, calculate lags for a product (if possible), append the lags (as they apply) to the current record for each product, and write the results back to a table in my database for my reporting software to use. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated! Many thanks in advance, Brock

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• How to move a kinect skeleton to another position

  - by Ewerton

  I am working on a extension method to move one skeleton to a desired position in the kinect field os view. My code receives a skeleton to be moved and the destiny position, i calculate the distance between the received skeleton hip center and the destiny position to find how much to move, then a iterate in the joint applying this factor. My code, actualy looks like this. public static Skeleton MoveTo(this Skeleton skToBeMoved, Vector4 destiny) { Joint newJoint = new Joint(); ///Based on the HipCenter (i dont know if it is reliable, seems it is.) float howMuchMoveToX = Math.Abs(skToBeMoved.Joints[JointType.HipCenter].Position.X - destiny.X); float howMuchMoveToY = Math.Abs(skToBeMoved.Joints[JointType.HipCenter].Position.Y - destiny.Y); float howMuchMoveToZ = Math.Abs(skToBeMoved.Joints[JointType.HipCenter].Position.Z - destiny.Z); float howMuchToMultiply = 1; // Iterate in the 20 Joints foreach (JointType item in Enum.GetValues(typeof(JointType))) { newJoint = skToBeMoved.Joints[item]; // This adjust, try to keeps the skToBeMoved in the desired position if (newJoint.Position.X < 0) howMuchToMultiply = 1; // if the point is in a negative position, carry it to a "more positive" position else howMuchToMultiply = -1; // if the point is in a positive position, carry it to a "more negative" position // applying the new values to the joint SkeletonPoint pos = new SkeletonPoint() { X = newJoint.Position.X + (howMuchMoveToX * howMuchToMultiply), Y = newJoint.Position.Y, // * (float)whatToMultiplyY, Z = newJoint.Position.Z, // * (float)whatToMultiplyZ }; newJoint.Position = pos; skToBeMoved.Joints[item] = newJoint; //if (skToBeMoved.Joints[JointType.HipCenter].Position.X < 0) //{ // if (item == JointType.HandLeft) // { // if (skToBeMoved.Joints[item].Position.X > 0) // { // } // } //} } return skToBeMoved; } Actualy, only X position is considered. Now, THE PROBLEM: If i stand in a negative position, and move my hand to a positive position, a have a strange behavior, look this image To reproduce this behaviour you could use this code using (SkeletonFrame frame = e.OpenSkeletonFrame()) { if (frame == null) return new Skeleton(); if (skeletons == null || skeletons.Length != frame.SkeletonArrayLength) { skeletons = new Skeleton[frame.SkeletonArrayLength]; } frame.CopySkeletonDataTo(skeletons); Skeleton skeletonToTest = skeletons.Where(s => s.TrackingState == SkeletonTrackingState.Tracked).FirstOrDefault(); Vector4 newPosition = new Vector4(); newPosition.X = -0.03412333f; newPosition.Y = 0.0407479f; newPosition.Z = 1.927342f; newPosition.W = 0; // ignored skeletonToTest.MoveTo(newPosition); } I know, this is simple math, but i cant figure it out why this is happen. Any help will be apreciated.

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• Calculate minimum moves to solve a puzzle

  - by Luke

  I'm in the process of creating a game where the user will be presented with 2 sets of colored tiles. In order to ensure that the puzzle is solvable, I start with one set, copy it to a second set, then swap tiles from one set to another. Currently, (and this is where my issue lies) the number of swaps is determined by the level the user is playing - 1 swap for level 1, 2 swaps for level 2, etc. This same number of swaps is used as a goal in the game. The user must complete the puzzle by swapping a tile from one set to the other to make the 2 sets match (by color). The order of the tiles in the (user) solved puzzle doesn't matter as long as the 2 sets match. The problem I have is that as the number of swaps I used to generate the puzzle approaches the number of tiles in each set, the puzzle becomes easier to solve. Basically, you can just drag from one set in whatever order you need for the second set and solve the puzzle with plenty of moves left. What I am looking to do is after I finish building the puzzle, calculate the minimum number of moves required to solve the puzzle. Again, this is almost always less than the number of swaps used to create the puzzle, especially as the number of swaps approaches the number of tiles in each set. My goal is to calculate the best case scenario and then give the user a "fudge factor" (i.e. 1.2 times the minimum number of moves). Solving the puzzle in under this number of moves will result in passing the level. A little background as to how I currently have the game configured: Levels 1 to 10: 9 tiles in each set. 5 different color tiles. Levels 11 to 20: 12 tiles in each set. 7 different color tiles. Levels 21 to 25: 15 tiles in each set. 10 different color tiles. Swapping within a set is not allowed. For each level, there will be at least 2 tiles of a given color (one for each set in the solved puzzle). Is there any type of algorithm anyone could recommend to calculate the minimum number of moves to solve a given puzzle?

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• NSNotifications vs delegate for multiple instances of same protocol

  - by Brent Traut

  I could use some architectural advice. I've run into the following problem a few times now and I've never found a truly elegant way to solve it. The issue, described at the highest level possible:I have a parent class that would like to act as the delegate for multiple children (all using the same protocol), but when the children call methods on the parent, the parent no longer knows which child is making the call. I would like to use loose coupling (delegates/protocols or notifications) rather than direct calls. I don't need multiple handlers, so notifications seem like they might be overkill. To illustrate the problem, let me try a super-simplified example: I start with a parent view controller (and corresponding view). I create three child views and insert each of them into the parent view. I would like the parent view controller to be notified whenever the user touches one of the children. There are a few options to notify the parent: Define a protocol. The parent implements the protocol and sets itself as the delegate to each of the children. When the user touches a child view, its view controller calls its delegate (the parent). In this case, the parent is notified that a view is touched, but it doesn't know which one. Not good enough. Same as #1, but define the methods in the protocol to also pass some sort of identifier. When the child tells its delegate that it was touched, it also passes a pointer to itself. This way, the parent know exactly which view was touched. It just seems really strange for an object to pass a reference to itself. Use NSNotifications. The parent defines a separate method for each of the three children and then subscribes to the "viewWasTouched" notification for each of the three children as the notification sender. The children don't need to attach themselves to the user dictionary, but they do need to send the notification with a pointer to themselves as the scope. Same as #4, but rather than using separate methods, the parent could just use one with a switch case or other branching along with the notification's sender to determine which path to take. Create multiple man-in-the-middle classes that act as the delegates to the child views and then call methods on the parent either with a pointer to the child or with some other differentiating factor. This approach doesn't seem scalable. Are any of these approaches considered best practice? I can't say for sure, but it feels like I'm missing something more obvious/elegant.

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• Combining FileStream and MemoryStream to avoid disk accesses/paging while receiving gigabytes of data?

  - by w128

  I'm receiving a file as a stream of byte[] data packets (total size isn't known in advance) that I need to store somewhere before processing it immediately after it's been received (I can't do the processing on the fly). Total received file size can vary from as small as 10 KB to over 4 GB. One option for storing the received data is to use a MemoryStream, i.e. a sequence of MemoryStream.Write(bufferReceived, 0, count) calls to store the received packets. This is very simple, but obviously will result in out of memory exception for large files. An alternative option is to use a FileStream, i.e. FileStream.Write(bufferReceived, 0, count). This way, no out of memory exceptions will occur, but what I'm unsure about is bad performance due to disk writes (which I don't want to occur as long as plenty of memory is still available) - I'd like to avoid disk access as much as possible, but I don't know of a way to control this. I did some testing and most of the time, there seems to be little performance difference between say 10 000 consecutive calls of MemoryStream.Write() vs FileStream.Write(), but a lot seems to depend on buffer size and the total amount of data in question (i.e the number of writes). Obviously, MemoryStream size reallocation is also a factor. Does it make sense to use a combination of MemoryStream and FileStream, i.e. write to memory stream by default, but once the total amount of data received is over e.g. 500 MB, write it to FileStream; then, read in chunks from both streams for processing the received data (first process 500 MB from the MemoryStream, dispose it, then read from FileStream)? Another solution is to use a custom memory stream implementation that doesn't require continuous address space for internal array allocation (i.e. a linked list of memory streams); this way, at least on 64-bit environments, out of memory exceptions should no longer be an issue. Con: extra work, more room for mistakes. So how do FileStream vs MemoryStream read/writes behave in terms of disk access and memory caching, i.e. data size/performance balance. I would expect that as long as enough RAM is available, FileStream would internally read/write from memory (cache) anyway, and virtual memory would take care of the rest. But I don't know how often FileStream will explicitly access a disk when being written to. Any help would be appreciated.

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• synchronized in java - Proper use

  - by ZoharYosef

  I'm building a simple program to use in multi processes (Threads). My question is more to understand - when I have to use a reserved word synchronized? Do I need to use this word in any method that affects the bone variables? I know I can put it on any method that is not static, but I want to understand more. thank you! here is the code: public class Container { // *** data members *** public static final int INIT_SIZE=10; // the first (init) size of the set. public static final int RESCALE=10; // the re-scale factor of this set. private int _sp=0; public Object[] _data; /************ Constructors ************/ public Container(){ _sp=0; _data = new Object[INIT_SIZE]; } public Container(Container other) { // copy constructor this(); for(int i=0;i<other.size();i++) this.add(other.at(i)); } /** return true is this collection is empty, else return false. */ public synchronized boolean isEmpty() {return _sp==0;} /** add an Object to this set */ public synchronized void add (Object p){ if (_sp==_data.length) rescale(RESCALE); _data[_sp] = p; // shellow copy semantic. _sp++; } /** returns the actual amount of Objects contained in this collection */ public synchronized int size() {return _sp;} /** returns true if this container contains an element which is equals to ob */ public synchronized boolean isMember(Object ob) { return get(ob)!=-1; } /** return the index of the first object which equals ob, if none returns -1 */ public synchronized int get(Object ob) { int ans=-1; for(int i=0;i<size();i=i+1) if(at(i).equals(ob)) return i; return ans; } /** returns the element located at the ind place in this container (null if out of range) */ public synchronized Object at(int p){ if (p>=0 && p<size()) return _data[p]; else return null; }

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• Is 4-5 years the “Midlife Crisis” for a programming career?

  - by Jeffrey

  I’ve been programming C# professionally for a bit over 4 years now. For the past 4 years I’ve worked for a few small/medium companies ranging from “web/ads agencies”, small industry specific software shops to a small startup. I've been mainly doing "business apps" that involves using high-level programming languages (garbage collected) and my overall experience was that all of the works I’ve done could have been more professional. A lot of the things were done incorrectly (in a rush) mainly due to cost factor that people always wanted something “now” and with the smallest amount of spendable money. I kept on thinking maybe if I could work for a bigger companies or a company that’s better suited for programmers, or somewhere that's got the money and time to really build something longer term and more maintainable I may have enjoyed more in my career. I’ve never had a “mentor” that guided me through my 4 years career. I am pretty much blog / google / self taught programmer other than my bachelor IT degree. I’ve also observed another issue that most so called “senior” programmer in “my working environment” are really not that senior skill wise. They are “senior” only because they’ve been a long time programmer, but the code they write or the decisions they make are absolutely rubbish! They don't want to learn, they don't want to be better they just want to get paid and do what they've told to do which make sense and most of us are like that. Maybe that’s why they are where they are now. But I don’t want to become like them I want to be better. I’ve run into a mental state that I no longer intend to be a programmer for my future career. I started to think maybe there are better things out there to work on. The more blogs I read, the more “best practices” I’ve tried the more I feel I am drifting away from “my reality”. But I am not a great programmer otherwise I don't think I am where I am now. I think 4-5 years is a stage that can be a step forward career wise or a step out of where you are. I just wanted to hear what other have to say about what I’ve mentioned above and whether you’ve experienced similar situation in your past programming career and how you dealt with it. Thanks.

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• Architectural Design for a Data-Driven Silverlight WP7 app

  - by Rosarch

  I have a Silverlight Windows Phone 7 app that pulls data from a public API. I find myself doing much of the same thing over and over again: In the UI, set a loading message or loading progress bar in place of where the content is Get the content, which may be already in memory, cached in isolated file storage, or require an HTTP request If the content can not be acquired (no network connection, etc), display an error message If the content is acquired, display it in the UI Keep the content in main memory for subsequent queries The content that is displayed to the user can be taken directly from a data source, such as an ObservableCollection, or it may be a query on a data source. I would like to factor out this repetitive process into a framework where ideally only the following needs to be specified: Where to display the content in the UI The UI elements to show while loading, on failure, and on success The URI of the HTTP request How to parse the HTTP response into the data structure that will kept in memory The location of the file in isolated storage, if it exists How to parse the file contents into the data structure that will be kept in memory It may sound like a lot, but two strings, three FrameworkElements, and two methods is less than the overhead that I currently have. Also, this needs to work for however the data is maintained in memory, and needs to work for direct collections and queries on those collections. My questions are: Has something like this already been implemented? Are my thoughts about the topic above fundamentally wrong in some way? Here is a design I'm thinking of: There are two components, a View and a Model. The View is given the FrameworkElements for loading, failure, and success. It is also given a reference to the corresponding Model. The View is a UserControl that is placed somewhere in the UI. The Model a class that is given the URI for the data, a method of how to parse the data, and optionally a filename and how to parse the file. It is responsible for retrieving the data and notifying the View whenever the current status (loading/fail/success) changes. If the data downloaded from the network is different from the cache, the network data takes precedence. When the app closes or is tombstoned, the model writes the data to the cache. How does that sound?

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• Please Describe Your Struggles with Minimizing Use of Global Variables

  - by MetaHyperBolic

  Most of the programs I write are relatively flowchartable processes, with a defined start and hoped-for end. The problems themselves can be complex but do not readily lean towards central use of objects and event-driven programming. Often, I am simply churning through great varied batches of text data to produce different text data. Only occasionally do I need to create a class: As an example, to track warnings, errors, and debugging message, I created a class (Problems) with one instantiation (myErr), which I believe to be an example of the Singleton design pattern. As a further factor, my colleagues are more old school (procedural) than I and are unacquainted with object-oriented programming, so I am loath to create things they could not puzzle through. And yet I hear, again and again, how even the Singleton design pattern is really an anti-pattern and ought to be avoided because Global Variables Are Bad. Minor functions need few arguments passed to them and have no need to know of configuration (unchanging) or program state (changing) -- I agree. However, the functions in the middle of the chain, which primarily control program flow, have a need for a large number of configuration variables and some program state variables. I believe passing a dozen or more arguments along to a function is a "solution," but hardly an attractive one. I could, of course, cram variables into a single hash/dict/associative array, but that seems like cheating. For instance, connecting to the Active Directory to make a new account, I need such configuration variables as an administrative username, password, a target OU, some default groups, a domain, etc. I would have to pass those arguments down through a variety of functions which would not even use them, merely shuffle them off down through a chain which would eventually lead to the function that actually needs them. I would at least declare the configuration variables to be constant, to protect them, but my language of choice these days (Python) provides no simple manner to do this, though recipes do exist as workarounds. Numerous Stack Overflow questions have hit on the why? of the badness and the requisite shunning, but do not often mention tips on living with this quasi-religious restriction. How have you resolved, or at least made peace with, the issue of global variables and program state? Where have you made compromises? What have your tricks been, aside from shoving around flocks of arguments to functions?

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• FFmpeg extract clip - stream frame rate differs from container frame rate (x264, aac)

  - by fideli

  Summary H.264 video seems to have a really high frame rate that requires a scaling factor to the applied to the duration of video that I'm trying to extract (900x lower). Body I'm trying to extract a clip from a movie that I have in MP4 format (created using Handbrake). After trying mencoder and VLC, I decided to give FFmpeg a shot since it was the least troublesome when it came to copying the codecs. That is, compared to mencoder and VLC, the resulting file was still playable in QuickTime (I know about Perian, etc, I'm just trying to learn how all this works). Anyway, my command was as follows: ffmpeg -ss 01:15:51 -t 00:05:59 -i outofsight.mp4 \ -acodec copy -vcodec copy clip.mp4 During the copy, The following comes up: Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 45000.00 (45000/1) -> 25.00 (25/1) Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from outofsight.mp4': Duration: 01:57:42.10, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 830 kb/s Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 720x384, 25 tbr, 22500 tbn, 45k tbc Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16 Output #0, mp4, to 'out.mp4': Stream #0.0(und): Video: libx264, yuv420p, 720x384, q=2-31, 90k tbn, 22500 tbc Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: libfaac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16 Stream mapping: Stream #0.0 -> #0.0 Stream #0.1 -> #0.1 Press [q] to stop encoding frame= 2591 fps=2349 q=-1.0 size= 8144kB time=101.60 bitrate= 656.7kbits/s … Instead of a 5:59 duration clip, I get the entire rest of the movie. So, to test this, I ran the ffmpeg command with -t 00:00:01. What I got was exactly a 15:00 minute clip. So I did some black box engineering and decided to scale my -t option by calculating what value to enter given that 1 second was interpreted as 900 s. For my desired 359 s clip, I calculated 0.399 s and so my ffmpeg command became: ffmpeg -ss 01:15.51 -t 00:00:00.399 -i outofsight.mp4 \ -acodec copy -vcodec copy clip.mp4 This works, but I have no idea why the duration is scaled by 900. Investigating further, each ffmpeg run has the line: Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 45000.00 (45000/1) -> 25.00 (25/1) 45000/25 = 1800. Must be a relation somewhere. Somehow, the obscenely high frame rate is causing issues with the timing. How is that frame rate so high? The best part about this is that the resulting clip.mp4 has the exact same feature (due to the copied video codec), and taking further clips from this needs the same scaling for the -t duration option. Therefore, I've made it available for anyone willing to check this out. Appendix The preamble for ffmpeg on my system (built using MacPorts ffmpeg port): FFmpeg version 0.5, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al. configuration: --prefix=/opt/local --disable-vhook --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libdirac --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libxvid --enable-libx264 --mandir=/opt/local/share/man --enable-shared --enable-pthreads --cc=/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 --arch=x86_64 libavutil 49.15. 0 / 49.15. 0 libavcodec 52.20. 0 / 52.20. 0 libavformat 52.31. 0 / 52.31. 0 libavdevice 52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0 libavfilter 1. 4. 0 / 1. 4. 0 libswscale 1. 7. 1 / 1. 7. 1 libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0 built on Jan 4 2010 21:51:51, gcc: 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646) (dot 1)

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• Upgrading Windows 8 boot to VHD to Windows 8.1&ndash;Step by step guide

  - by Liam Westley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2013/10/19/upgrading-windows-8-boot-to-vhd-to-windows-8.1ndashstep-by.aspxBoot to VHD – dual booting Windows 7 and Windows 8 became easy When Windows 8 arrived, quite a few people decided that they would still dual boot their machines, and instead of mucking about with resizing disk partitions to free up space for Windows 8 they decided to use the boot from VHD feature to create a huge hard disc image into which Windows 8 could be installed.  Scott Hanselman wrote this installation guide, while I myself used the installation guide from Ed Bott of ZD net fame. Boot to VHD is a great solution, it achieves a dual boot, can be backed up easily and had virtually no effect on the original Windows 7 partition. As a developer who has dual booted Windows operating systems for years, hacking boot.ini files, the boot to VHD was a much easier solution. Upgrade to Windows 8.1 – ah, you can’t do that on a virtual disk installation (boot to VHD) Last week the final version of Windows 8.1 arrived, and I went into the Windows Store to upgrade.  Luckily I’m on a fast download service, and use an SSD, because once the upgrade was downloaded and prepared Windows informed that This PC can’t run Windows 8.1, and provided the reason, You can’t install Windows on a virtual drive.  You can see an image of the message and discussion that sparked my search for a solution in this Microsoft Technet forum post. I was determined not to have to resize partitions yet again and fiddle with VHD to disk utilities and back again, and in the end I did succeed in upgrading to a Windows 8.1 boot to VHD partition.  It takes quite a bit of effort though … tldr; Simple steps of how you upgrade Boot into Windows 7 – make a copy of your Windows 8 VHD, to become Windows 8.1 Enable Hyper-V in your Windows 8 (the original boot to VHD partition) Create a new virtual machine, attaching the copy of your Windows 8 VHD Start the virtual machine, upgrade it via the Windows Store to Windows 8.1 Shutdown the virtual machine Boot into Windows 7 – use the bcedit tool to create a new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD option (pointing at the copy) Boot into the new Windows 8.1 option Reactivate Windows 8.1 (it will have become deactivated by running under Hyper-V) Remove the original Windows 8 VHD, and in Windows 7 use bcedit to remove it from the boot menu Things you’ll need A system that can run Hyper-V under Windows 8 (Intel i5, i7 class CPU) Enough space to have your original Windows 8 boot to VHD and a copy at the same time An ISO or DVD for Windows 8 to create a bootable Windows 8 partition Step by step guide Boot to your base o/s, the real one, Windows 7. Make a copy of the Windows 8 VHD file that you use to boot Windows 8 (via boot from VHD) – I copied it from a folder on C: called VHD-Win8 to VHD-Win8.1 on my N: drive. Reboot your system into Windows 8, and enable Hyper-V if not already present (this may require reboot) Use the Hyper-V manager , create a new Hyper-V machine, using half your system memory, and use the option to attach an existing VHD on the main IDE controller – this will be the new copy you made in Step 2. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and you’ll probably discover it cannot boot as there is no boot record If this is the case, go to Hyper-V manager, edit the Settings for the virtual machine to attach an ISO of a Windows 8 DVD to the second IDE controller. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and it should now attempt a fresh installation of Windows 8.  You should select Advanced Options and choose Repair - this will make VHD bootable When the setup reboots your virtual machine, turn off the virtual machine, and remove the ISO of the Windows 8 DVD from the virtual machine settings. Start virtual machine, use Connect to view it.  You will see the devices to be re-discovered (including your quad CPU becoming single CPU).  Eventually you should see the Windows Login screen. You may notice that your desktop background (Win+D) will have turned black as your Windows installation has become deactivate due to the hardware changes between your real PC and Hyper-V. Fortunately becoming deactivated, does not stop you using the Windows Store, where you can select the update to Windows 8.1. You can now watch the progress joy of the Windows 8 update; downloading, preparing to update, checking compatibility, gathering info, preparing to restart, and finally, confirm restart - remember that you are restarting your virtual machine sitting on the copy of the VHD, not the Windows 8 boot to VHD you are currently using to run Hyper-V (confused yet?) After the reboot you get the real upgrade messages; setting up x%, xx%, (quite slow) After a while, Getting ready Applying PC Settings x%, xx% (really slow) Updating your system (fast) Setting up a few more things x%, (quite slow) Getting ready, again Accept license terms Express settings Confirmed previous password Next, I had to set up a Microsoft account – which is possibly now required, and not optional Using the Microsoft account required a 2 factor authorization, via text message, a 7 digit code for me Finalising settings Blank screen, HI .. We're setting up things for you (similar to original Windows 8 install) 'You can get new apps from the Store', below which is ’Installing your apps’ - I had Windows Media Center which is counts as an app from the Store ‘Taking care of a few things’, below which is ‘Installing your apps’ ‘Taking care of a few things’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Getting your apps ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Almost ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ … finally, we get the Windows 8.1 start menu, and a quick Win+D to check the desktop confirmed all the application icons I expected, pinned items on the taskbar, and one app moaning about a missing drive At this point the upgrade is complete – you can shutdown the virtual machine Reboot from the original Windows 8 and return to Windows 7 to configure booting to the Windows 8.1 copy of the VHD In an administrator command prompt do following use the bcdedit tool (from an MSDN blog about configuring VHD to boot in Windows 7) Type bcedit to list the current boot options, so you can copy the GUID (complete with brackets/braces) for the original Windows 8 boot to VHD Create a new menu option, copy of the Windows 8 option; bcdedit /copy {originalguid} /d "Windows 8.1" Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} device vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} osdevice vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Set autodetection of the HAL (may already be set); bcdedit /set {newguid} detecthal on Reboot from Windows 7 and select the new option 'Windows 8.1' on the boot menu, and you’ll have some messages to look at, as your hardware is redetected (as you are back from 1 CPU to 4 CPUs) ‘Getting devices ready, blank then %xx, with occasional blank screen, for the graphics driver, (fast-ish) Getting Ready message (fast) You will have to suffer one final reboots, choose 'Windows 8.1' and you can now login to a lovely Windows 8.1 start screen running on non virtualized hardware via boot to VHD After checking everything is running fine, you can now choose to Activate Windows, which for me was a toll free phone call to the automated system where you type in lots of numbers to be given a whole bunch of new activation codes. Once you’re happy with your new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD, and no longer need the Windows 8 boot to VHD, feel free to delete the old one.  I do believe once you upgrade, you are no longer licensed to use it anyway. There, that was simple wasn’t it? Looking at the huge list of steps it took to perform this upgrade, you may wonder whether I think this is worth it.  Well, I think it is worth booting to VHD.  It makes backups a snap (go to Windows 7, copy the VHD, you backed up the o/s) and helps with disk management – want to move the o/s, you can move the VHD and repoint the boot menu to the new location. The downside is that Microsoft has complete neglected to support boot to VHD as an upgradable option.  Quite a poor decision in my opinion, and if you read twitter and the forums quite a few people agree with that view.  It’s a shame this got missed in the work on creating the upgrade packages for Windows 8.1.

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• Another Marketing Conference, part two – the afternoon

  - by Roger Hart

  In my previous post, I’ve covered the morning sessions at AMC2012. Here’s the rest of the write-up. I’ve skipped Charles Nixon’s session which was a blend of funky futurism and professional development advice, but you can see his slides here. I’ve also skipped the Google presentation, as it was a little thin on insight. 6 – Brand ambassadors: Getting universal buy in across the organisation, Vanessa Northam Slides are here This was the strongest enforcement of the idea that brand and campaign values need to be delivered throughout the organization if they’re going to work. Vanessa runs internal communications at e-on, and shared her experience of using internal comms to align an organization and thereby get the most out of a campaign. She views the purpose of internal comms as: “…to help leaders, to communicate the purpose and future of an organization, and support change.” This (and culture) primes front line staff, which creates customer experience and spreads brand. You ensure a whole organization knows what’s going on with both internal and external comms. If everybody is aligned and informed, if everybody can clearly articulate your brand and campaign goals, then you can turn everybody into an advocate. Alignment is a powerful tool for delivering a consistent experience and message. The pathological counter example is the one in which a marketing message goes out, which creates inbound customer contacts that front line contact staff haven’t been briefed to handle. The NatWest campaign was again mentioned in this context. The good example was e-on’s cheaper tariff campaign. Building a groundswell of internal excitement, and even running an internal launch meant everyone could contribute to a good customer experience. They found that meter readers were excited – not a group they’d considered as obvious in providing customer experience. But they were a group that has a lot of face-to-face contact with customers, and often were asked questions they may not have been briefed to answer. Being able to communicate a simple new message made it easier for them, and also let them become a sales and marketing asset to the organization. 7 – Goodbye Internet, Hello Outernet: the rise and rise of augmented reality, Matt Mills I wasn’t going to write this up, because it was essentially a sales demo for Aurasma. But the technology does merit some discussion. Basically, it replaces QR codes with visual recognition, and provides a simple-looking back end for attaching content. It’s quite sexy. But here’s my beef with it: QR codes had a clear visual language – when you saw one you knew what it was and what to do with it. They were clunky, but they had the “getting started” problem solved out of the box once you knew what you were looking at. However, they fail because QR code reading isn’t native to the platform. You needed an app, which meant you needed to know to download one. Consequentially, you can’t use QR codes with and ubiquity, or depend on them. This means marketers, content providers, etc, never pushed them, and they remained and awkward oddity, a minority sport. Aurasma half solves problem two, and re-introduces problem one, making it potentially half as useful as a QR code. It’s free, and you can apparently build it into your own apps. Add to that the likelihood of it becoming native to the platform if it takes off, and it may have legs. I guess we’ll see. 8 – We all need to code, Helen Mayor Great title – good point. If there was anybody in the room who didn’t at least know basic HTML, and if Helen’s presentation inspired them to learn, that’s fantastic. However, this was a half hour sales pitch for a basic coding training course. Beyond advocating coding skills it contained no useful content. Marketers may also like to consider some of these resources if they’re looking to learn code: Code Academy – free interactive tutorials Treehouse – learn web design, web dev, or app dev WebPlatform.org – tutorials and documentation for web tech  11 – Understanding our inner creativity, Margaret Boden This session was the most theoretical and probably least actionable of the day. It also held my attention utterly. Margaret spoke fluently, fascinatingly, without slides, on the subject of types of creativity and how they work. It was splendid. Yes, it raised a wry smile whenever she spoke of “the content of advertisements” and gave an example from 1970s TV ads, but even without the attempt to meet the conference’s theme this would have been thoroughly engaging. There are, Margaret suggested, three types of creativity: Combinatorial creativity The most common form, and consisting of synthesising ideas from existing and familiar concepts and tropes. Exploratory creativity Less common, this involves exploring the limits and quirks of a particular constraint or style. Transformational creativity This is uncommon, and arises from finding a way to do something that the existing rules would hold to be impossible. In essence, this involves breaking one of the constraints that exploratory creativity is composed from. Combinatorial creativity, she suggested, is particularly important for attaching favourable ideas to existing things. As such is it probably worth developing for marketing. Exploratory creativity may then come into play in something like developing and optimising an idea or campaign that now has momentum. Transformational creativity exists at the edges of this exploration. She suggested that products may often be transformational, but that marketing seemed unlikely to in her experience. This made me wonder about Listerine. Crucially, transformational creativity is characterised by there being some element of continuity with the strictures of previous thinking. Once it has happened, there may be  move from a revolutionary instance into an explored style. Again, from a marketing perspective, this seems to chime well with the thinking in Youngme Moon’s book: Different Talking about the birth of Modernism is visual art, Margaret pointed out that transformational creativity has historically risked a backlash, demanding what is essentially an education of the market. This is best accomplished by referring back to the continuities with the past in order to make the new familiar. Thoughts The afternoon is harder to sum up than the morning. It felt less concrete, and was troubled by a short run of poor presentations in the middle. Mainly, I found myself wrestling with the internal comms issue. It’s one of those things that seems astonishingly obvious in hindsight, but any campaign – particularly any large one – is doomed if the people involved can’t believe in it. We’ve run things here that haven’t gone so well, of course we have; who hasn’t? I’m not going to air any laundry, but people not being informed (much less aligned) feels like a common factor. It’s tough though. Managing and anticipating information needs across an organization of any size can’t be easy. Even the simple things like ensuring sales and support departments know what’s in a product release, and what messages go with it are easy to botch. The thing I like about framing this as a brand and campaign advocacy problem is that it makes it likely to get addressed. Better is always sexier than less-worse. Any technical communicator who’s ever felt crowded out by a content strategist or marketing copywriter  knows this – increasing revenue gets a seat at the table far more readily than reducing support costs, even if the financial impact is identical. So that’s it from AMC. The big thought-provokers were social buying behaviour and eliciting behaviour change, and the value of internal communications in ensuring successful campaigns and continuity of customer experience. I’ll be chewing over that for a while, and I’d definitely return next year.      

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• Refreshing Your PC Won’t Help: Why Bloatware is Still a Problem on Windows 8

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Bloatware is still a big problem on new Windows 8 and 8.1 PCs. Some websites will tell you that you can easily get rid of manufacturer-installed bloatware with Windows 8′s Reset feature, but they’re generally wrong. This junk software often turns the process of powering on your new PC from what could be a delightful experience into a tedious slog, forcing you to spend hours cleaning up your new PC before you can enjoy it. Why Refreshing Your PC (Probably) Won’t Help Manufacturers install software along with Windows on their new PCs. In addition to hardware drivers that allow the PC’s hardware to work properly, they install more questionable things like trial antivirus software and other nagware. Much of this software runs at boot, cluttering the system tray and slowing down boot times, often dramatically. Software companies pay computer manufacturers to include this stuff. It’s installed to make the PC manufacturer money at the cost of making the Windows computer worse for actual users. Windows 8 includes “Refresh Your PC” and “Reset Your PC” features that allow Windows users to quickly get their computers back to a fresh state. It’s essentially a quick, streamlined way of reinstalling Windows.  If you install Windows 8 or 8.1 yourself, the Refresh operation will give your PC a clean Windows system without any additional third-party software. However, Microsoft allows computer manufacturers to customize their Refresh images. In other words, most computer manufacturers will build their drivers, bloatware, and other system customizations into the Refresh image. When you Refresh your computer, you’ll just get back to the factory-provided system complete with bloatware. It’s possible that some computer manufacturers aren’t building bloatware into their refresh images in this way. It’s also possible that, when Windows 8 came out, some computer manufacturer didn’t realize they could do this and that refreshing a new PC would strip the bloatware. However, on most Windows 8 and 8.1 PCs, you’ll probably see bloatware come back when you refresh your PC. It’s easy to understand how PC manufacturers do this. You can create your own Refresh images on Windows 8 and 8.1 with just a simple command, replacing Microsoft’s image with a customized one. Manufacturers can install their own refresh images in the same way. Microsoft doesn’t lock down the Refresh feature. Desktop Bloatware is Still Around, Even on Tablets! Not only is typical Windows desktop bloatware not gone, it has tagged along with Windows as it moves to new form factors. Every Windows tablet currently on the market — aside from Microsoft’s own Surface and Surface 2 tablets — runs on a standard Intel x86 chip. This means that every Windows 8 and 8.1 tablet you see in stores has a full desktop with the capability to run desktop software. Even if that tablet doesn’t come with a keyboard, it’s likely that the manufacturer has preinstalled bloatware on the tablet’s desktop. Yes, that means that your Windows tablet will be slower to boot and have less memory because junk and nagging software will be on its desktop and in its system tray. Microsoft considers tablets to be PCs, and PC manufacturers love installing their bloatware. If you pick up a Windows tablet, don’t be surprised if you have to deal with desktop bloatware on it. Microsoft Surfaces and Signature PCs Microsoft is now selling their own Surface PCs that they built themselves — they’re now a “devices and services” company after all, not a software company. One of the nice things about Microsoft’s Surface PCs is that they’re free of the typical bloatware. Microsoft won’t take money from Norton to include nagging software that worsens the experience. If you pick up a Surface device that provides Windows 8.1 and 8 as Microsoft intended it — or install a fresh Windows 8.1 or 8 system — you won’t see any bloatware. Microsoft is also continuing their Signature program. New PCs purchased from Microsoft’s official stores are considered “Signature PCs” and don’t have the typical bloatware. For example, the same laptop could be full of bloatware in a traditional computer store and clean, without the nasty bloatware when purchased from a Microsoft Store. Microsoft will also continue to charge you $99 if you want them to remove your computer’s bloatware for you — that’s the more questionable part of the Signature program. Windows 8 App Bloatware is an Improvement There’s a new type of bloatware on new Windows 8 systems, which is thankfully less harmful. This is bloatware in the form of included “Windows 8-style”, “Store-style”, or “Modern” apps in the new, tiled interface. For example, Amazon may pay a computer manufacturer to include the Amazon Kindle app from the Windows Store. (The manufacturer may also just receive a cut of book sales for including it. We’re not sure how the revenue sharing works — but it’s clear PC manufacturers are getting money from Amazon.) The manufacturer will then install the Amazon Kindle app from the Windows Store by default. This included software is technically some amount of clutter, but it doesn’t cause the problems older types of bloatware does. It won’t automatically load and delay your computer’s startup process, clutter your system tray, or take up memory while you’re using your computer. For this reason, a shift to including new-style apps as bloatware is a definite improvement over older styles of bloatware. Unfortunately, this type of bloatware has not replaced traditional desktop bloatware, and new Windows PCs will generally have both. Windows RT is Immune to Typical Bloatware, But… Microsoft’s Windows RT can’t run Microsoft desktop software, so it’s immune to traditional bloatware. Just as you can’t install your own desktop programs on it, the Windows RT device’s manufacturer can’t install their own desktop bloatware. While Windows RT could be an antidote to bloatware, this advantage comes at the cost of being able to install any type of desktop software at all. Windows RT has also seemingly failed — while a variety of manufacturers came out with their own Windows RT devices when Windows 8 was first released, they’ve all since been withdrawn from the market. Manufacturers who created Windows RT devices have criticized it in the media and stated they have no plans to produce any future Windows RT devices. The only Windows RT devices still on the market are Microsoft’s Surface (originally named Surface RT) and Surface 2. Nokia is also coming out with their own Windows RT tablet, but they’re in the process of being purchased by Microsoft. In other words, Windows RT just isn’t a factor when it comes to bloatware — you wouldn’t get a Windows RT device unless you purchased a Surface, but those wouldn’t come with bloatware anyway. Removing Bloatware or Reinstalling Windows 8.1 While bloatware is still a problem on new Windows systems and the Refresh option probably won’t help you, you can still eliminate bloatware in the traditional way. Bloatware can be uninstalled from the Windows Control Panel or with a dedicated removal tool like PC Decrapifier, which tries to automatically uninstall the junk for you. You can also do what Windows geeks have always tended to do with new computers — reinstall Windows 8 or 8.1 from scratch with installation media from Microsoft. You’ll get a clean Windows system and you can install only the hardware drivers and other software you need. Unfortunately, bloatware is still a big problem for Windows PCs. Windows 8 tries to do some things to address bloatware, but it ultimately comes up short. Most Windows PCs sold in most stores to most people will still have the typical bloatware slowing down the boot process, wasting memory, and adding clutter. Image Credit: LG on Flickr, Intel Free Press on Flickr, Wilson Hui on Flickr, Intel Free Press on Flickr, Vernon Chan on Flickr     

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• FFmpeg extract clip - stream frame rate differs from container frame rate (x264, aac)

  - by fideli

  Summary H.264 video seems to have a really high frame rate that requires a scaling factor to the applied to the duration of video that I'm trying to extract (900x lower). Body I'm trying to extract a clip from a movie that I have in MP4 format (created using Handbrake). After trying mencoder and VLC, I decided to give FFmpeg a shot since it was the least troublesome when it came to copying the codecs. That is, compared to mencoder and VLC, the resulting file was still playable in QuickTime (I know about Perian, etc, I'm just trying to learn how all this works). Anyway, my command was as follows: ffmpeg -ss 01:15:51 -t 00:05:59 -i outofsight.mp4 \ -acodec copy -vcodec copy clip.mp4 During the copy, The following comes up: Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 45000.00 (45000/1) -> 25.00 (25/1) Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from outofsight.mp4': Duration: 01:57:42.10, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 830 kb/s Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 720x384, 25 tbr, 22500 tbn, 45k tbc Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16 Output #0, mp4, to 'out.mp4': Stream #0.0(und): Video: libx264, yuv420p, 720x384, q=2-31, 90k tbn, 22500 tbc Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: libfaac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16 Stream mapping: Stream #0.0 -> #0.0 Stream #0.1 -> #0.1 Press [q] to stop encoding frame= 2591 fps=2349 q=-1.0 size= 8144kB time=101.60 bitrate= 656.7kbits/s … Instead of a 5:59 duration clip, I get the entire rest of the movie. So, to test this, I ran the ffmpeg command with -t 00:00:01. What I got was exactly a 15:00 minute clip. So I did some black box engineering and decided to scale my -t option by calculating what value to enter given that 1 second was interpreted as 900 s. For my desired 359 s clip, I calculated 0.399 s and so my ffmpeg command became: ffmpeg -ss 01:15.51 -t 00:00:00.399 -i outofsight.mp4 \ -acodec copy -vcodec copy clip.mp4 This works, but I have no idea why the duration is scaled by 900. Investigating further, each ffmpeg run has the line: Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 45000.00 (45000/1) -> 25.00 (25/1) 45000/25 = 1800. Must be a relation somewhere. Somehow, the obscenely high frame rate is causing issues with the timing. How is that frame rate so high? The best part about this is that the resulting clip.mp4 has the exact same feature (due to the copied video codec), and taking further clips from this needs the same scaling for the -t duration option. Therefore, I've made it available for anyone willing to check this out. Appendix The preamble for ffmpeg on my system (built using MacPorts ffmpeg port): FFmpeg version 0.5, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al. configuration: --prefix=/opt/local --disable-vhook --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libdirac --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libxvid --enable-libx264 --mandir=/opt/local/share/man --enable-shared --enable-pthreads --cc=/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 --arch=x86_64 libavutil 49.15. 0 / 49.15. 0 libavcodec 52.20. 0 / 52.20. 0 libavformat 52.31. 0 / 52.31. 0 libavdevice 52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0 libavfilter 1. 4. 0 / 1. 4. 0 libswscale 1. 7. 1 / 1. 7. 1 libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0 built on Jan 4 2010 21:51:51, gcc: 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646) (dot 1) EDIT Not sure whether it was a bug or not, but it seems to be fixed now in my current version of ffmpeg, at least for this video (version 0.6.1 from MacPorts).

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• Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

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• Visiting the Emtel Data Centre

  Back in February at the first event of the Emtel Knowledge Series (EKS) I spoke to various people at Emtel about their data centre here on the island. I was trying to see whether it would be possible to arrange a meeting over there for a selected group of our community members. Well, let's say it like this... My first approach wasn't that promising and far from successful but during the following months there were more and more occasions to get in touch with the "right" contact persons at Emtel to make it happen... Setting up an appointment and pre-requisites The major improvement came during a Boot Camp for Windows Phone 8.1 App development organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands in cooperation with Emtel at the Emtel World, Ebene. Apart from learning bits and pieces regarding Universal Apps I took the opportunity to get in touch with Arvin Lockee, Sales Executive - Data, during our lunch break. And this really kicked off the whole procedure. Prior to get access to the Emtel data centre it is requested that you provide full name and National ID of anyone going to visit. Also, it should be noted that there was only a limited amount of seats available. Anyways, packed with this information I posted through the usual social media channels. Responses came in very quickly and based on First-come, first-serve (FCFS) principle I noted down the details and forwarded them to Emtel in order to fix a date and time for the visit. In preparation on our side, all attendees exchanged contact details and we organised transport options to go to the data centre in Arsenal. The day before and on the day of our meeting, Arvin send me a reminder to check whether everything is still confirmed and ready to go... Of course, it was! Arriving at the Emtel Data Centre As I'm coming from Flic En Flac towards the North, we agreed that I'm going to pick up a couple of young fellows near the old post office in Port Louis. All went well, except that Sean eventually might be living in another time zone compared to the rest of us. Anyway, after some extended stop we were complete and arrived just in time in Arsenal to meet and greet with Ish and Veer. Again, Emtel is taking access procedures to their data centre very serious and the gate stayed close until all our IDs had been noted and compared to the list of registered attendees. Despite having a good laugh at the mixture of old and new ID cards it was a straight-forward processing. The ward was very helpful and guided us to the waiting area at the entrance section of the building. Shortly after we were welcomed by Kamlesh Bokhoree, the Data Centre Officer. He gave us brief introduction into the rules and regulations during our visit, like no photography allowed, not touching the buttons, and following his instructions through the whole visit. Of course! Inside the data centre Next, he explained us the multi-factor authentication system using a combination of bio-metric data, like finger print reader, and "classic" pin panel. The Emtel data centre provides multiple services and next to co-location for your own hardware they also offer storage options for your backup and archive data in their massive, fire-resistant vault. Very impressive to get to know about the considerations that have been done in choosing the right location and how to set up the whole premises. It should also be noted that there is 24/7 CCTV surveillance inside and outside the buildings. Strengths of the Emtel TIER 3 Data Centre, Mauritius Finally, we were guided into the first server room. And wow, the whole setup is cleverly planned and outlined in the architecture. From the false floor and ceilings in order to provide optimum air flow, over to the separation of cold and hot aisles between the full-size server racks, and of course the monitored air conditions in order to analyse and watch changes in temperature, smoke detection and other parameters. And not surprisingly everything has been implemented in two independent circuits. There is a standardised classification for the construction and operation of data centres world-wide, and the Emtel's one has been designed to be a TIER 4 building but due to the lack of an alternative power supplier on the island it is officially registered as a TIER 3 compliant data centre. Maybe in the long run there might be a second supplier of energy next to CEB... time will tell. Luckily, the data centre is integrated into the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and Emtel already connects internationally through diverse undersea cable routes like SAFE & LION/LION2 out of Mauritius and through several other providers for onwards connectivity. The data centre is part of the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and has redundant internet connectivity onwards. Meanwhile, Arvin managed to join our little group of geeks and he supported Kamlesh in answering our technical questions regarding the capacities and general operation of the data centre. Visiting the NOC and its dedicated team of IT professionals was surely one of the visual highlights. Seeing their wall of screens to monitor any kind of activities on the data lines, the managed servers and the activity in and around the building was great. Even though I'm using a multi-head setup since years I cannot keep it up with that setup... ;-) But I got a couple of ideas on how to improve my work spaces here at the office. Clear advantages of hosting your e-commerce and mobile backends locally After the completely isolated NOC area we continued our Q&A session with Kamlesh and Arvin in the second server room which is dedictated to shared environments. On first thought it should be well-noted that there is lots of space for full-sized racks and therefore co-location of your own hardware. Actually, given the feedback that there will be upcoming changes in prices the facilities at the Emtel data centre are getting more and more competitive and interesting for local companies, especially small and medium enterprises. After seeing this world-class infrastructure available on the island, I'm already considering of moving one of my root servers abroad to be co-located here on the island. This would provide an improved user experience in terms of site performance and latency. This would be a good improvement, especially for upcoming e-commerce solutions for two of my local clients. Later on, we actually started the conversation of additional services that could be a catalyst for the local market in order to attract more small and medium companies to take the data centre into their evaluations regarding online activities. Until today Emtel does not provide virtualised server environments but there might be ongoing plans in the future to cover this field as well. Emtel is a mobile operator and internet connectivity provider in the first place, entering a market of managed and virtualised server infrastructures including capacities in terms of cloud storage and computing are rather new and there is a continuous learning curve at Emtel, too. You cannot just jump into a new market and see how it works out... And I appreciate Emtel's approach towards a solid fundament and then building new services on top of that. Emtel as a future one-stop-shop service provider for all your internet and telecommunications needs. Emtel's promotional video about their TIER 3 data centre in Arsenal, Mauritius More details are thoroughly described in Emtel's brochure of their data centre. Check out their PDF document here. Thanks for this opportunity Visiting and walking through the Emtel data centre for more than 2 hours was a great experience. As representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) I would like to thank anyone at Emtel involved in the process of making it happen, and especially to Arvin Lockee and Kamlesh Bokhoree for their time and patience in explaining the infrastructure and answering all the endless questions from our members. Thank You!

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• Beyond Chatting: What ‘Social’ Means for CRM

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin: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;} A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle In a recent post on this blog, my colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of Human Capital Management. So, in turning to a conversation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA), let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies, consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal, third-party partners, etc.? Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales, introverts arguably have a distinct disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards – none of them to individuals and all of them to TEAMS of individuals. That’s how it works in Sales. Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a solution. They work with you as a collective team. And so how is all this collaboration STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search. It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at some point in history. This is where social networking for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors – just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version control. But lest we get carried away, let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most sales organizations, this is how the game is won. To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin: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;}

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• Product Development Investment: A Measure of Vendor Performance

  - by Jim Mcglothlin

  The relationship between a large, complex organization and its key suppliers of information technology is normally more than just "strategic". Expectations about the duration of the relationship typically exceed 20 years. Enterprise applications and technology infrastructure are not expected to be changed out like petunias. So how would you rate the due diligence processes as performed in Higher Education when selecting critical, transformational information technology? My observation: I see a lot of effort put into elaborate demonstration of basic software functionality. I see a lot of attention paid to the cost element of technology acquisition, including the contracted cost of implementation consulting services. But the factor that receives only cursory analysis and due diligence is long-term performance--the ability of a vendor to grow, expand, and develop, and bring its customers along with it. So what should you look for in a long-term IT supplier? Oracle has a public track record for product development. The annual investment has been on a run rate of almost $3 Billion organic product development. Oracle's well-publicized acquisitions and mergers have been supplemental to its R&D. This is important for Higher Education. Another meaningful way to evaluate a company is to look at the tangible track record of enhancement. Consider the Oracle-PeopleSoft enterprise business platform since acquired by Oracle 6 years ago: Product or Technology Enhancement Customer or User Impact Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) 300+ new web services delivered in versions 9.0 & 9.1 provide flexibility, so that customers can integrate PeopleSoft with other applications. Campus Solutions has added Admissions and Constituent Web Services. Constituent Relationship Management PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 for Higher Education introduced new process flows for student recruiting and retention to support "Student Success" initiatives. A 360 view of the constituent is now delivered, and the concept of a single-stop Student Services Center is now in CRM 9.1 with tight integration to PeopleSoft Campus Solutions. Human Capital Management Contract Pay for Education, with flexibility for configuration and calculation, has been extended in HCM 9.1. New chartfield integration among Project Costing - Time & Labor - Payroll to serve the labor distribution requirements for Grants / Sponsored Research. Talent Management PeopleSoft 9.0 and 9.1 feature an integrated talent management approach centered on definitions in "Profile Manager", with all new usability improvements. Internal and external candidate pools, and the entire recruitment process, are driven by delivered configurable selection and on-boarding processes. Interview scheduling, and online job offers are newly delivered processes. Performance Management PeopleSoft HCM ePerformance 9.1 will include significant new functionality designed to help organizations more effectively align business objectives with employee goals. Using an Organization Chart view, your business goals can flow down to become tangible objectives per employee. Succession Planning / Workforce Development New in HCM 9.0, enhanced in 9.1, is a planning capability for regular or unusual (major organizational change) succession of internal or external candidates. PeopleSoft supports employee-based career planning, which ultimately increases the integrity of the succession planning process (identify their career needs, plans, preferences, and interests). Dashboards / Oracle Business Intelligence Application Suite Oracle Human Resources Analytics provides the workforce information foundation that integrates data from HR functional areas and Finance. Oracle Human Resources Analytics delivers 9 dashboards and over 200 reports. Provide your HR professionals and front-line managers the tools to analyze workforce staffing, retention, productivity, to better source high-quality applicants, and to reduce absence costs. Multi-year Planning and Commitment Control External funding sources, especially Grants, require a multi-year encumbrance business process. PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 adds multi-year funding and commitment control, including budget checking. The newly designed Real Time Budget Checking will provide the customer with an updated snapshot of their budget and encumbrances at any given time. Position Budgeting with Hyperion Hyperion Planning world-class products now include delivered integration to PeopleSoft HCM. Position Budgeting is available in the new Public Sector Planning module of Hyperion. Web 2.0 features for the latest in usability PeopleSoft 9.1 features a contemporary internet user experience: Partial-page refreshing Drag and drop pagelets New menu structure Navigation pagelets Modal popup message windows Favorites & recently used links Type-ahead Drag and drop grid columns, pop-out grids Portal Workspaces Enterprise 2.0 for your collaborative web communities, using new content management, along with Wikis, blogs, and discussion forums in PeopleSoft Portal 9.1. PeopleTools enhanced by Oracle Fusion Middleware Standards-based tools have been added to the PeopleTools application infrastructure: BI (XML) Publisher, Java tools. Certified for use with PeopleSoft: Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE), Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Weblogic Server, Oracle SOA Suite. Hosting for PeopleSoft applications A solid new deployment option: Oracle On Demand remote hosting center for high scalability, security, and continuity of operations. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) for HCM / Payroll functions Partnership with AT&T provides hosting of HR/Payroll application along with payroll business process operations, and subscription-based service fees (SaaS). AT&T BPO full service includes pay sheet processing, bank and 3rd party file transfer, payroll tax handling, etc. Continuous Delivery Model Feature Packs provide faster time-to-benefit; new features become available in PeopleSoft 9.1 (or Campus Solutions 9.0) without need to perform upgrade. Golden person data model across all campus applications Oracle Higher Education Constituent Hub provides synchronization and data governance of person data across any application, e.g. HR/ Payroll, Student Information System, Housing, Emergency Contact, LMS, CRM. Oracle's aggressive enhancement plans within the "Applications Unlimited" program continue, as new functionality is under development for a new version of a PeopleSoft release planned for 2012. Meanwhile, new capabilities are planned on an annual basis in Feature Packs. PeopleSoft just delivered the HCM 2010 Feature Pack and another is planned for 2011. In February we plan to have over 100 customers from our Customer Advisory Boards at our PeopleSoft Development Center in California to review designs for all of these releases. For those of you near New York City The investment and progressive development story described above is the subject of an Oracle road show event on February 9, 2011. Charting Your Course with Oracle Applications is a global event series designed to help business and IT executives assess the impact of new inflection points on their business and applications roadmap: changing workforces, shifting customer and constituent bases, and increased volatility. Learn how innovations ranging from new deployment models like cloud computing to the introduction of social applications and smart devices are delivering results across all areas of business and industry. THIS DOCUMENT IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND MAY NOT BE INCORPORATED INTO A CONTRACT OR AGREEMENT.

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• Azure, don't give me multiple VMs, give me one elastic VM

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday, Microsoft revealed new major features for Windows Azure (see ScottGu's post). It all looks shiny and great, but after reading most of the material describing the new features, I still find the overall idea behind all of it flawed: why should I care on how much VMs my web app runs? Isn't that a problem to solve for the Windows Azure engineers / software? And what if I need the file system, why can't I simply get a virtual filesystem ? To illustrate my point, let's use a real example: a product website with a customer system/database and next to it a support site with accompanying database. Both are written in .NET, using ASP.NET and use a SQL Server database each. The product website offers files to download by customers, very simple. You have a couple of options to host these websites: Buy a server, place it in a rack at an ISP and run the sites on that server Use 'shared hosting' with an ISP, which means your sites' appdomains are running on the same machine, as well as the files stored, and the databases are hosted in the same server as the other shared databases. Hire a VM, install your OS of choice at an ISP, and host the sites on that VM, basically the same as the first option, except you don't have a physical server At some cloud-vendor, either host the sites 'shared' or in a VM. See above. With all of those options, scalability is a problem, even the cloud-based ones, though not due to the same reasons: The physical server solution has the obvious problem that if you need more power, you need to buy a bigger server or more servers which requires you to add replication and other overhead Shared hosting solutions are almost always capped on memory usage / traffic and database size: if your sites get too big, you have to move out of the shared hosting environment and start over with one of the other solutions The VM solution, be it a VM at an ISP or 'in the cloud' at e.g. Windows Azure or Amazon, in theory allows scaling out by simply instantiating more VMs, however that too introduces the same overhead problems as with the physical servers: suddenly more than 1 instance runs your sites. If a cloud vendor offers its services in the form of VMs, you won't gain much over having a VM at some ISP: the main problems you have to work around are still there: when you spin up more than one VM, your application must be completely stateless at any moment, including the DB sub system, because what's in memory in instance 1 might not be in memory in instance 2. This might sounds trivial but it's not. A lot of the websites out there started rather small: they were perfectly runnable on a single machine with normal memory and CPU power. After all, you don't need a big machine to run a website with even thousands of users a day. Moving these sites to a multi-VM environment will cause a problem: all the in-memory state they use, all the multi-page transitions they use while keeping state across the transition, they can't do that anymore like they did that on a single machine: state is something of the past, you have to store every byte of state in either a DB or in a viewstate or in a cookie somewhere so with the next request, all state information is available through the request, as nothing is kept in-memory. Our example uses a bunch of files in a file system. Using multiple VMs will require that these files move to a cloud storage system which is mounted in each VM so we don't have to store the files on each VM. This might require different file paths, but this change should be minor. What's perhaps less minor is the maintenance procedure in place on the new type of cloud storage used: instead of ftp-ing into a VM, you might have to update the files using different ways / tools. All in all this makes moving an existing website which was written for an environment that's based around a VM (namely .NET with its CLR) overly cumbersome and problematic: it forces you to refactor your website system to be able to be used 'in the cloud', which is caused by the limited way how e.g. Windows Azure offers its cloud services: in blocks of VMs. Offer a scalable, flexible VM which extends with my needs Instead, cloud vendors should offer simply one VM to me. On that VM I run the websites, store my DB and my files. As it's a virtual machine, how this machine is actually ran on physical hardware (e.g. partitioned), I don't care, as that's the problem for the cloud vendor to solve. If I need more resources, e.g. I have more traffic to my server, way more visitors per day, the VM stretches, like I bought a bigger box. This frees me from the problem which comes with multiple VMs: I don't have any refactoring to do at all: I can simply build my website as if it runs on my local hardware server, upload it to the VM offered by the cloud vendor, install it on the VM and I'm done. "But that might require changes to windows!" Yes, but Microsoft is Windows. Windows Azure is their service, they can make whatever change to what they offer to make it look like it's windows. Yet, they're stuck, like Amazon, in thinking in VMs, which forces developers to 'think ahead' and gamble whether they would need to migrate to a cloud with multiple VMs in the future or not. Which comes down to: gamble whether they should invest time in code / architecture which they might never need. (YAGNI anyone?) So the VM we're talking about, is that a low-level VM which runs a guest OS, or is that VM a different kind of VM? The flexible VM: .NET's CLR ? My example websites are ASP.NET based, which means they run inside a .NET appdomain, on the .NET CLR, which is a VM. The only physical OS resource the sites need is the file system, however this too is accessed through .NET. In short: all the websites see is what .NET allows the websites to see, the world as the websites know it is what .NET shows them and lets them access. How the .NET appdomain is run physically, that's the concern of .NET, not mine. This begs the question why Windows Azure doesn't offer virtual appdomains? Or better: .NET environments which look like one machine but could be physically multiple machines. In such an environment, no change has to be made to the websites to migrate them from a local machine or own server to the cloud to get proper scaling: the .NET VM will simply scale with the need: more memory needed, more CPU power needed, it stretches. What it offers to the application running inside the appdomain is simply increasing, but not fragmented: all resources are available to the application: this means that the problem of how to scale is back to where it should be: with the cloud vendor. "Yeah, great, but what about the databases?" The .NET application communicates with the database server through a .NET ADO.NET provider. Where the database is located is not a problem of the appdomain: the ADO.NET provider has to solve that. I.o.w.: we can host the databases in an environment which offers itself as a single resource and is accessible through one connection string without replication overhead on the outside, and use that environment inside the .NET VM as if it was a single DB. But what about memory replication and other problems? This environment isn't simple, at least not for the cloud vendor. But it is simple for the customer who wants to run his sites in that cloud: no work needed. No refactoring needed of existing code. Upload it, run it. Perhaps I'm dreaming and what I described above isn't possible. Yet, I think if cloud vendors don't move into that direction, what they're offering isn't interesting: it doesn't solve a problem at all, it simply offers a way to instantiate more VMs with the guest OS of choice at the cost of me needing to refactor my website code so it can run in the straight jacket form factor dictated by the cloud vendor. Let's not kid ourselves here: most of us developers will never build a website which needs a truck load of VMs to run it: almost all websites created by developers can run on just a few VMs at most. Yet, the most expensive change is right at the start: moving from one to two VMs. As soon as you have refactored your website code to run across multiple VMs, adding another one is just as easy as clicking a mouse button. But that first step, that's the problem here and as it's right there at the beginning of scaling the website, it's particularly strange that cloud vendors refuse to solve that problem and leave it to the developers to solve that. Which makes migrating 'to the cloud' particularly expensive.

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