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• Updated SOA Documents now available in ITSO Reference Library

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Nine documents within the IT Strategies from Oracle (ITSO) reference library have recently been updated. (Access to the ITSO collection is free to registered Oracle.com members -- and that membership is free.) All nine documents fall within the Service Oriented Architecture section of the ITSO collection, and cover the following topics: SOA Practitioner Guides Creating an SOA Roadmap (PDF, 54 pages, published: February 2012) The secret to successful SOA is to build a roadmap that can be successfully executed. SOA offers an opportunity to adopt an iterative technique to deliver solutions incrementally. This document offers a structured, iterative methodology to help you stay focused on business results, mitigate technology and organizational risk, and deliver successful SOA projects. A Framework for SOA Governance (PDF, 58 pages, published: February 2012) Successful SOA requires a strong governance strategy that designs-in measurement, management, and enforcement procedures. Enterprise SOA adoption introduces new assets, processes, technologies, standards, roles, etc. which require application of appropriate governance policies and procedures. This document offers a framework for defining and building a proper SOA governance model. Determining ROI of SOA through Reuse (PDF, 28 pages, published: February 2012) SOA offers the opportunity to save millions of dollars annually through reuse. Sharing common services intuitively reduces workload, increases developer productivity, and decreases maintenance costs. This document provides an approach for estimating the reuse value of the various software assets contained in a typical portfolio. Identifying and Discovering Services (PDF, 64 pages, published: March 2012) What services should we build? How can we promote the reuse of existing services? A sound approach to answer these questions is a primary measure for the success of a SOA initiative. This document describes a pragmatic approach for collecting the necessary information for identifying proper services and facilitating service reuse. Software Engineering in an SOA Environment (PDF, 66 pages, published: March 2012) Traditional software delivery methods are too narrowly focused and need to be adjusted to enable SOA. This document describes an engineering approach for delivering projects within an SOA environment. It identifies the unique software engineering challenges faced by enterprises adopting SOA and provides a framework to remove the hurdles and improve the efficiency of the SOA initiative. SOA Reference Architectures SOA Foundation (PDF, 70 pages, published: February 2012) This document describes they key tenets for SOA design, development, and execution environments. Topics include: service definition, service layering, service types, the service model, composite applications, invocation patterns, and standards. SOA Infrastructure (PDF, 86 pages, published: February 2012) Properly architected, SOA provides a robust and manageable infrastructure that enables faster solution delivery. This document describes the role of infrastructure and its capabilities. Topics include: logical architecture, deployment views, and Oracle product mapping. SOA White Papers and Data Sheets Oracle's Approach to SOA (white paper) (PDF, 14 pages, published: February 2012) Oracle has developed a pragmatic, holistic approach, based on years of experience with numerous companies to help customers successfully adopt SOA and realize measureable business benefits. This executive datasheet and whitepaper describe Oracle's proven approach to SOA. Oracle's Approach to SOA (data sheet) (PDF, 3 pages, published: March 2012) SOA adoption is complex and success is far from assured. This is why Oracle has developed a pragmatic, holistic approach, based on years of experience with numerous companies, to help customers successfully adopt SOA and realize measurable business benefits. This data sheet provides an executive overview of Oracle's proven approach to SOA.

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• Insurers Pushed to Transform Their Business

  - by Calvin Glenn

  Everyone in the P&C industry has heard it “We can’t do it.” “Nobody wants to do it.” “We can’t afford to do it.”  Unfortunately, what they’re referencing are the reasons many insurers are still trying to maintain their business processing on legacy policy administration systems, attempting to bide time until there is no other recourse but to give in, bite the bullet, and take on the monumental task of replacing an entire policy administration system (PAS). Just the thought of that project sends IT, Business Users and Management reeling. However, is that fear real?  It is a bit daunting when one realizes that a complete policy administration system replacement will touch most every function an insurer manages, from quoting and rating, to underwriting, distribution, and even customer service. With that, everyone has heard at least one horror story around a transformation initiative that has far exceeded budget and the promised implementation / go-live timeline.    But, does it have to be that hard?  Surely, in the age where a person can voice-activate their DVR to record a TV program from a cell phone, there has to be someone somewhere who’s figured out how to simplify this process. To be able to help insurers, of all sizes, transform and grow their business while also delivering on their overall objectives of providing speed to market, straight-through-processing for applications, quoting, underwriting, and simplified product development. Maybe we’re looking too hard and the answer is simple and straight-forward. Why replace the entire machine when all it really needs is a new part…a single enterprise rating system? This core, modular piece of the policy administration system is the foundation of product development and rate management that enables insurers to provide the right product at the right price to the right customer through the best channels at any given moment in time. The real benefit of a single enterprise rating system is the ability to deliver enhanced business capabilities, such as improved product management, streamlined underwriting, and speed to market. With these benefits, carriers have accomplished a portion of their overall transformation goal. Furthermore, lessons learned from the rating project can be applied to the bigger, down-the-road PAS project to support the successful completion of the overall transformation endeavor. At the recent Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, information was shared with attendees about a recent “go-live” project from an Oracle Insurance Tier 1 insurer who did what is proposed above…replaced just the rating portion of their legacy policy administration system with Oracle Insurance Insbridge Rating and Underwriting.  This change provided the insurer greater flexibility to set rates that better reflect risk while enabling the company to support its market segment strategy. Using the Oracle Insurance Insbridge enterprise rating solution, the insurer was able to reduce processing time for agents and underwriters, gained the ability to support proprietary rating models and improved pricing accuracy.      There is mounting pressure on P&C insurers to produce growth and show net profitability in the midst of modest overall industry growth, large weather-related losses and intensifying competition for market share.  Insurers are also being asked to improve customer service, offer a differentiated value proposition and simplify insurance processes.  While the demands are many there is an easy answer…invest in and update the most mission critical application in your arsenal, the single enterprise rating system. Download the Podcast to listen to “Stand-Alone Rating Engine - Leading Force Behind Core Transformation Projects in the P&C Market,” a podcast originally recorded in October 2013. Related Resources: White Paper: Stand-Alone Rating Engine: Leading Force Behind Core Transformation Projects in the P&C Market Webcast On Demand: Stand-Alone Rating Engine and Core Transformation for P&C Insurers Don’t forget to keep up with us year-round: Facebook: www.facebook.com/oracleinsurance Twitter: www.twitter.com/oracleinsurance YouTube: www.youtube.com/oracleinsurance

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• Barcodes and Bugs

  - by Tim Dexter

  A great mail from Mike at Browning last week. He has been through the ringer getting his BIP barcoding sorted out but he's now out of the woods. Here's the final result. By way of explanation, an excerpt from Mike's email:   This is an example of the GS1_128 carton shipping labels we are now producing with BIP in our web application for our vendors who drop ship products to our dealers. It produces 4 labels per printed page, in PDF format, on peel & stick label paper. Each label has a unique carton number, and a unique carton serial number in the SSCC-18 barcode. This example is for Cabelas (each customer has slightly different GS1-128 label format requirements – custom template for each - a pain!). I am using custom java encoders I wrote for the UPC and SSCC-18 barcodes, and a standard encoder (code128b) for the ShipTo zip barcode. Is there any way yet to get around that SUPER ANNOYING bug when opening the rtf template in MS Word, and it replaces my xsl code text in the barcode fields with gibberish??? Every time I open it I have to re-enter all the xsl code. Not only to be able to read & edit it, but also to get it to work in BIP (BIP doesn’t like the gibberish if I upload the template that has it). Mike's last point, regarding the annoying bug in the template builder, is one that I have experienced occasionally. The development team have looked at it and found it to be an issue with MSWord and not a plugin problem. That's all well and good but how can you get around it? Well, you can take advantage of the font mapping that BIP offers to get the barcodes into the PDF output. As many of you know, getting a barcode font to appear in the PDF output, you need employ the use of the xdo.cfg file in the template builder config directory.You would normally have an entry such as this:         <font family="Code 128" style="normal" weight="normal">        <truetype path="C:\windows\fonts\128R00.TTF" />       </font>to map a barcode font to get it to render in the PDF output when testing from the template builder plugin.   Mike's issue is only present when the formfield is highlighted with a barcode font. The other fields in the template are OK. What you can do to get around the issue is to bend the config entry to get around having to use the barcode font in the template at all. Changing the entry to something like:         <font family="Calibri" style="normal" weight="normal">        <truetype path="C:\windows\fonts\128R00.TTF" />       </font>   Note that we are mapping the Calibri; a humanly readable and non 'erroring' font in the template, to the code 128 barcode font. Where you used to highlight the field with the barcode in MSWord, you now use the Calibri font instead. At run time, BIP will go look for the Calibri font mapping and will drop in the Code128 font. Of course, Calibri is an example; you need to pick a font that you are not going to use any where else in the layout.

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• PECL OCI8 2.0 Production Release Announcement

  - by cj

  The PHP OCI8 2.0.6 extension for Oracle Database is now "production" status. The source code is available on PECL. This can be used immediately to update your OCI8 extension in PHP 5.2 and later versions. The extension compiles with Oracle 10.2 or later client libraries. Oracle's standard cross-version database connectivity applies. OCI8 2.0 and PHP 5.5.5 RPMs for Oracle and Red Hat Linux are available from oss.oracle.com. Windows DLLs are available on PECL for PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5. OCI8 2.0 source code will also be automatically included in the next major version of PHP. New Functionality Oracle Database 12c Implicit Result Set support. IRS's make it easy to pass query results back from stored PL/SQL procedures or anonymous PL/SQL blocks. Individual IRS statement resources, each corresponding to a single query, can be obtained with the new function oci_get_implicit_resultset(). These 'child' statement resources can be passed to any oci_fetch_* function. See Using PHP and Oracle Database 12c Implicit Result Sets and the PHP Manual: oci_get_implicit_resultset(). DTrace Dynamic Trace static probes. This well respected DTrace tracing framework is available on a number of platforms, including Oracle Linux. PHP OCI8 static user-space probes can be enabled with PHP's --enable-dtrace configuration option. See Using PHP DTrace on Oracle Linux. Documentation is also available in the PHP Manual OCI8 and DTrace Dynamic Tracing Improved Functionality Using oci_execute($s, OCI_NO_AUTO_COMMIT) for a SELECT no longer unnecessarily initiates an internal ROLLBACK during connection close. This can improve overall scalability by reducing "round trips" between PHP and the database. Changed Functionality PHP OCI8 2.0's minimum pre-requisites are now PHP 5.2 and Oracle client library 10.2. Later versions of both are usable and, in fact, recommended. Use the older PHP OCI8 1.4.10 extension when using PHP 4.3.9 through to PHP 5.1.x, or when only Oracle Database 9.2 client libraries are available. oci_set_*($connection, ...) meta data setting call error handling is fixed so that oci_error($connection) works for these calls. Note: The old, deprecated function aliases like ocilogon still exist but are not recommended for new applications. Phpinfo() Changes Some cosmetic changes were made to the output of php --ri oci8 and the phpinfo() function. The oci8.event and oci8.connection_class values are now shown only when the Oracle client libraries support the respective functionality. Connection statistics are now in a separate phpinfo() table. Temporary LOB and Collection support status lines in phpinfo() output were removed. These two features have always been enabled since 2007. Oci_internal_debug() Changes The oci_internal_debug() function is now a no-op. Use PHP's --enable-dtrace functionality with DTrace or SystemTap instead. References OCI8 Extension source code and Windows DLLs http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8 Oracle Linux RPMs oss.oracle.com PHP Manual for OCI8 OCI8 and DTrace Dynamic Tracing Oracle OpenWorld Conference paper What's New in Oracle Database 12c for PHP

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• Seamless STP with Oracle SOA Suite

  - by user12339860

  STP stands for “Straight Through Processing”. Wikipedia describes STP as a solution that enables “the entire trade process for capital markets and payment transactions to be conducted electronically without the need for re-keying or manual intervention, subject to legal and regulatory restrictions” .I will deal with the later part of the definition i.e “payment transactions without manual intervention” in this article. The STP that I am writing about involves the interaction between a Bank and its’ corporate customers,to that extent this business case is also called “Corporate Payments”.Simply put a  Corporate Payment-STP solution needs to connect the payment transaction right from the Corporate ERP into the Bank’s Payment Hub. A SOA based STP solution can do a lot more than just process transaction. But before I get to the solution let me describe the perspectives of the two primary parties in this interaction. The Corporate customer and the Bank. Corporate's Interaction with Bank:  Typically it is the treasury department of an enterprise which interacts with the Bank on a daily basis. Here is how a day of interaction would look like from the treasury department of a corp. Corporate Cash Retrieve Beginning of day totals Monitor Cash Accounts Send or receive cash between accounts Supply chain payments Payment Settlements Calculate settlement positions Retrieve End of Day totals Assess Transaction Financial Impact Short Term Investment Desk Retrieve Current Account information Conduct Investment activities Bank’s Interaction with the Corporate :  From the Bank’s perspective, the interaction starts from the point of on boarding a corporate customer to billing the corporate for the value added services it provides. Once the corporate is on-boarded the daily interaction involves Handle the various formats of data arriving from customers Process Beginning of Day & End of Day reporting request from customers Meet compliance requirements Process Payments Transmit Payment Status Challenges with this Interaction :  Both the Bank & the Corporate face many challenges from these interactions. Some of the challenges include Keeping a consistent view of transaction data for various LOBs of the corporate & the Bank Corporate customers use different ERPs, hence the data formats are bound to be different Can the Bank’s IT systems convert the data formats that can be easily mapped to the corporate ERP How does the Bank manage the communication profiles of these customers?  Corporate customers are demanding near real time visibility on their corporate accounts Corporate customers can make better cash management decisions if they can analyse the impact. Can the Bank create opportunities to sell its products to the investment desks at corporate houses & manage their orders? How will the Bank bill the corporate customer for the value added services it provides. What does a SOA based Seamless STP solution bring to the table? Highlights of Oracle SOA based STP solution For the Corporate Customer: No Manual or Paper based banking transactions Secure Delivery of Payment data to the Bank from multiple ERPs without customization Single Portal for monitoring & administering payment transactions Rule based validation of payments Customer has data necessary for more effective handling of payment and cash management decisions  Business measurements track progress toward payment cost goals  For the Bank: Reduces time & complexity of transactions Simplifies the process of introducing new products to corporate customers Single Payment hub for all corporate ERP payments across multiple instruments New Revenue sources by delivering value added services to customers Leverages existing payment infrastructure Remove Inconsistent data formats and interchange between bank and corporate systems  Compliance and many other benefits

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• How to Speed Up Any Android Phone By Disabling Animations

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Android phones — and tablets, too — display animations when moving between apps and screens. These animations look very slick, but they waste time — especially on fast phones, which could switch between apps instantly if not for the animations. Disabling these animations will speed up navigating between different apps and interface screens on your phone, saving you time. You can also speed up the animations if you’d rather see them. Access the Developer Options Menu First, we’ll need to access the Developer Options menu. It’s hidden by default so Android users won’t stumble across it unless they’re actually looking for it. To access the Developer Options menu, open the Settings screen, scroll down to the bottom of the list, and tap the About phone or About tablet option. Scroll down to the Build number field and tap it repeatedly. Eventually, you’ll see a message appear saying “You are now a developer!”. The Developer options submenu now appears on the Settings screen. You’ll find it near the bottom of the list, just above the About phone or About tablet option. Disable Interface Animations Open the Developer Options screen and slide the switch at the top of the screen to On. This allows you to change the hidden options on this screen. If you ever want to re-enable the animations and revert your changes, all you have to do is slide the Developer Options switch back to Off. Scroll down to the Drawing section. You’ll find the three options we want here — Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale. Tap each option and set it to Animation off to disable the associated animations. If you’d like to speed up the animations without disabling them entirely, select the Animation .5x option instead. If you’re feeling really crazy, you can even select longer animation durations. You can make the animations take as much as ten times longer with the Animation 10x setting. The Animator duration scale option applies to the transition animation that appears when you tap the app drawer button on your home screen.  Your change here won’t take effect immediately — you’ll have to restart Android’s launcher after changing the Animator duration scale setting. To restart Android’s launcher, open the Settings screen, tap Apps, swipe over to the All category, scroll down, and tap the Launcher app. Tap the Force stop button to forcibly close the launcher, then tap your device’s home button to re-launch the launcher. Your app drawer will now open immediately, too. Now whenever you open an app or transition to a new screen, it will pop up as quickly as possible — no waiting for animations and wasting processing power rendering them. How much of a speed improvement you’ll see here depends on your Android device and how fast it is. On our Nexus 4, this change makes many apps appear and become usable instantly if they’re running in the background. If you have a slower device, you may have to wait a moment for apps to be usable. That’s one of the big reasons why Android and other operating systems use animations. Animations help paper over delays that can occur while the operating system loads the app.     

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• Customers Discuss: Real-World Operational Reporting with Oracle GoldenGate

  - by Irem Radzik

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} As businesses leverage business intelligence and analytics for day-to-day decision making, operational reporting solutions become more and more common. While some companies can use their production OLTP system for running operational reports, for many it is too much overhead and performance impact for transaction processing systems.  Oracle GoldenGate’s real-time data integration capabilities enable companies to create a real-time replica of their OLTP systems, dedicated for operational reporting. This instance can be optimized for the reports needed as well such as containing only the tables needed from the source. Oracle GoldenGate has certified solutions for many Oracle applications such as EBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, to offload operational reporting to another reporting server that has real-time data feeding from the production system. At Oracle OpenWorld we will be hearing from a panel of Oracle GoldenGate customers how they deployed GoldenGate for operational reporting. Comcast, Turk Telekom, and Raymond James will be sharing their experiences and the benefits achieved when implementing GoldenGate’s solution. If you have performance degradation in your production systems due to reporting or ad-hoc queries, and you will be at OpenWorld, don’t miss this informative session: Real-World Operational Reporting with Oracle GoldenGate: Customer Panel-- Tuesday Oct 2nd 11:45am Mascone West 3005. For other data integration sessions at OpenWorld, please check our Focus-On document.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} If you cannot attend OpenWorld, please check out related white paper “Using Oracle GoldenGate to Achieve Operational Reporting for Oracle Applications” to learn more.

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• Attending a Career Fair: &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be shy &ndash; Be prepared&rdquo;

  - by jessica.ebbelaar

  There are a large number of ways to interact with companies nowadays. The career fair is a very effective and personal way to interact with a number of different companies in a very short period of time. Here are some simple tips to help you perform during a career fair. Do research The key to being successful at a career fair is to do research before you go. Make a first selection of the companies you feel could be interesting for you. Include many types of employers. Once you have decided on the list of companies you want to visit, go to their career portal. Inform yourself about what the company does, i.e what roles there are available, how the company culture is described, what impression the testimonials give you. The question that you still have after reviewing this information, are the ones you can discuss with the company on the fair. Sell yourself Visit the companies you have on your top 5 list first, so you will be at your highest energy level to make that first impression. Think in advance about what you are going to tell the recruiter. Prepare a 30-second introduction (including degree, strengths, skills & experience) Be confident when you talk about your experience. Remember to start the conversation with a smile, make good eye contact and give a firm handshake. You could be speaking to your next manager, so be professional! If you already know what jobs you are interested in, relate your skills and experience to the roles that the company has available. If you are not yet sure gather as much information as you can about employment and/or hiring procedures, specific skills necessary for different jobs, training and career paths. Stand out As career fairs are very crowded and the attending companies meet with a lot of potential candidates on one day, you have to make sure you are noticed in a positive way. A good preparation and asking questions that show you have a good understanding of the industry, organization and roles will help you. Be aware of time demands on employers. Do not monopolize an employer's time. Dress appropriately to make a good first impression. Bring your resume Do not forget to bring your resume in print or on a USB-stick to the fair. If you are searching for different types of jobs, bring different versions of your resume. Your resume should be short and professional on white paper that is free of graphics or fancy print styles and containing larger margins for interviewer notes. Follow up After each conversation ask who you can contact for follow-up discussions about the specific roles. Use the back of a business card to record notes that help you remember important details and follow-up instructions. If no card is available, record the contact information and your comments in your notepad or phone. Last but not least, thank everyone you talk to for their time. Follow up as soon as possible with thank you notes that address the companies’ hiring needs, your qualifications, and express your desire for a second interview. What not to do… Do not visit a company with a group of friends. Interact with the companies on your own, to make your own positive impression. Do not walk up to a recruiter and interrupt a current conversation; wait your turn and be polite. What you should absolutely avoid is a grab and run on freebies! Take the time to speak to the company and ask for a freebie at the end of the conversation in case they are not offered to you. Good luck with the preparations for the career fair you will attend. Oracle recruiters look forward to meet you! They will be present on a large number of fairs in the region. For an overview of the fairs go to the Events & Calendar page on http://campus.oracle.com If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact [email protected].

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• How to solve conflicts with another programmer..

  - by Tio

  Hi all.. I've read this question, but I think it doesn't really applies in my case.. I started to work at new company about 2 months ago with the position of senior web developer, there was already one programmer there, my position is above his, but I'm not his boss.. I don't tell him what to do.. Since the day I started to work at the company, I managed to implement a kind of a test server which he refuses to use, implemented a project management tool which he refuses to use also, and I'm in the process of implementing version control using mercurial ( damn Mercurial that's giving me so much headaches ), which he is going to use.. He is a nice guy, but just the other day we had a big discussion about "best practices", and "coding standards".. for me it's absolutely necessary to have this two things, at the place I'm currently working... otherwise it's not going to work.. This discussion, basically revolved about using short tags and the echo shortcut, and how we shouldn't use it anymore ( because I sometimes use short tags ).. this went for about 15 minutes, until I finally dropped the subject because I had work to do.. and of course he didn't budge even a millimeter, he's continuing to use short tags, and the echo shortcut and he not even cares about what I think.. When I mentioned that we are a team, he told me: "We are not a team, you work on your projects and I work on mine".. Let's just say, that the switch in my brain flipped, I raised my voice, and I told him that he was going nuts.. this was the most improper way to deal it with, I know, but there are certain things that can't be said to me.. The question here, is how do I deal with this? I want, to implement more changes on our work workflow, and I know that it's going to be a pain, with him always complaining and saying things like this.. Our boss is going to intervene in a few days, I talked to him today, the other programmer send him an email the day we had the discussion complaining.. Just to clarify, when I talk about implementing changes, I just don't appear at work, the next day with a sheet of paper, and say: "This is our we are doing things from now on! And there is no discussion.." For example, when I was trying to implement the project management tool, I took the time to talk to everybody that was going to be involved in it, to see what they think about it.. everyone was positive except him, he responded that it was just a mean to control us even more.. Does anyone has any idea on how to deal with this? PS: Truth to be told, I didn't start the best way with him, in the 4º day of work at the company, I found a really bad piece of code on our custom CMS, one of those things that I only expect to find in code produced by a programmer that has only 1 month of training in programming, and I talked to my boss about it... he showed up at the time I saw that piece of code, he saw my face and asked about it, so I told him.. I know the worst thing that can be said to a programmer is saying that their code is awful, but I've already learned that my code isn't the best of the world, so I take criticism in a completely different way now.. maybe he doesn't..

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

  - by JoeMeeks

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

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• Where Have All the Ugly Forms Gone? Users and ADF Took Care Of It

  - by ultan o'broin

  Sometimes I hear that our application demos are a bit too "cutsey" and that we never talk about with any user roles that have lots of data entry as a requirement. Some (no names) consider those old clunker forms, with the myriad rows of fields, to be super-productive for data clerks. We do have such roles covered in Oracle Fusion Applications for sure. But consider what is really the issue here: productivity. Check out how the Oracle Fusion Financials Applications User Experience team went about designing for productivity when receiving and entering invoice data, for example. See how Fusion Financials caters so well for input and control of data? Central to all this is knowing the users and how they work: what tasks do they need to perform, and when. Read more about Fusion Financials productivity in the white paper, Get It Done Fast, Get It Done Right: The Oracle Fusion Financials User Experience. Now and then, I see forms that weren't designed for end user activity at all. Instead, they were designed by developers or by the IT department around the database schema. Forms with literally dozens of fields on the same page, sometimes. Forms that give the impression there was only task involved, when there may have been several. At times, completing one of these huge forms accurately became so tedious that, under pressure, it made more sense for the user to complete it quickly as possible and then let somebody else check it for accuracy and fill in the gaps from data emailed along in spreadsheet form. Data accuracy is critical in our business. Not good. Not efficient. Not productive. So here are a few basics on forms design for data entry-type user roles. A great place for developers to start exploring what is possible with forms layout is the Rich Client User Experience (RCUX) guidance on Form Layout, using ADF components. User-Centered Forms Design Considerations The starting point--something you must always keep in mind with your own design--is design for the end user. Find a representative end user, and keep that user engaged throughout the design, deployment, and test process. Consider these points in user testing those forms: Are there automated or technical solutions to entering the data that avoid manual input in the first place? For example, imports, uploads, OCR, whatever. Some day we will be able to tell Siri to do it, but leave that for now. Design your form to reflect the task involved (i.e., the business process) and not the database schema. On the form, group like fields together, logically. Eliminate duplicate data entry or prepopulate from previous data entry. Allow users to complete fields in the order they wish (i.e., no interdependency). Allow for tabbing between fields (keyboard is faster than mouse), so know how the browser supports this (see that RCUX guideline). Allow for final validation at the page level not at field-level entry. Way better for heads-down users. For example, ADF messages allow you to see a list of all validation errors on a page on a final submit or navigation action and to easily navigate to the point of error. Better still, be error tolerant. Allow users to enter data in formats they comfortable with. Bind any relevant user preference setting to the input format allowed (for example, the locale date format). Explore what data entry conversion can do for you automatically too (see the ADF converter demos, convenience patterns can also be written). Only ask for data input when it's needed. Get rid of, or hide optional fields. Cut down on the number of mandatory fields, and mark them clearly (use a *). Clearly label the fields in plain language. I am sure you may have a few more tips on forms design for data entry users. Remember the user before finding the comments.

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• LUKOIL Overseas Holding Optimizes Oil Field Development Projects with Integrated Project Management

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} LUKOIL Overseas Group is a growing oil and gas company that is an integral part of the vertically integrated oil company OAO LUKOIL. It is engaged in the exploration, acquisition, integration, and efficient development of oil and gas fields outside the Russian Federation to promote transforming LUKOIL into a transnational energy company. In 2010, the company signed a 20-year development project for the giant, West Qurna 2 oil field in Iraq. Executing 10,000 to 15,000 project activities simultaneously on 14 major construction and drilling projects in Iraq for the West Qurna-2 project meant the company needed a clear picture, in real time, of dependencies between its capital construction, geologic exploration and sinking projects—required for its building infrastructure oil field development projects in Iraq. LUKOIL Overseas Holding deployed Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management to generate structured project management information and optimize planning, monitoring, and analysis of all engineering and commercial activities—such as tenders, and bulk procurement of materials and equipment—related to oil field development projects. A word from LUKOIL Overseas Holding Ltd. “Previously, we created project schedules on desktop computers and uploaded them to the project server to be merged into one big file for each project participant to access. This was not scalable, as we’ve grown and now run up to 15,000 activities in numerous projects and subprojects at any time. With Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management, we can now work concurrently on projects with many team members, enjoy absolute security, and issue new baselines for all projects and project participants once a week, with ease.” – Sergey Kotov, Head of IT and the Communication Office, LUKOIL Mid-East Ltd. Oracle Primavera Solutions: · Facilitated managing dependencies between projects by enabling the general scheduler to reschedule all projects and subprojects once a week, realigning 10,000 to 15,000 project activities that the company runs at any time · Replaced Microsoft Project and a paper-based system with a complete solution that provides structured project data · Enhanced data security by establishing project management security policies that enable only authorized project members to edit their project tasks, while enabling each project participant to view all project data that are relevant to that individual’s task · Enabled the company to monitor project progress in comparison to the projected plan, based on physical project assets to determine if each project is on track to conclude within its time and budget limitations To view the full list of solutions view here. “Oracle Gold Partner Parma Telecom was key to our successful Primavera deployment, implementing the software’s basic functionalities, such as project content, timeframes management, and cost management, in addition to performing its integration with our enterprise resource planning system and intranet portal within ten months and in accordance with budgets,” said Rafik Baynazarov, head of the master planning and control office, LUKOIL Mid-East Ltd. “ To read the full version of the customer success story, please view here.

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• Replicating between Cloud and On-Premises using Oracle GoldenGate

  - by Ananth R. Tiru

  Do you have applications running on the cloud that you need to connect with the on premises systems. The most likely answer to this question is an astounding YES!  If so, then you understand the importance of keep the data fresh at all times across the cloud and on-premises environments. This is also one of the key focus areas for the new GoldenGate 12c release which we announced couple of week ago via a press release. Most enterprises have spent years avoiding the data “silos” that inhibit productivity. For example, an enterprise which has adopted a CRM strategy could be relying on an on-premises based marketing application used for developing and nurturing leads. At the same time it could be using a SaaS based Sales application to create opportunities and quotes. The sales and the marketing teams which use these systems need to be able to access and share the data in a reliable and cohesive way. This example can be extended to other applications areas such as HR, Supply Chain, and Finance and the demands the users place on getting a consistent view of the data. When it comes to moving data in hybrid environments some of the key requirements include minimal latency, reliability and security: Data must remain fresh. As data ages it becomes less relevant and less valuable—day-old data is often insufficient in today’s competitive landscape. Reliability must be guaranteed despite system or connectivity issues that can occur between the cloud and on-premises instances. Security is a key concern when replicating between cloud and on-premises instances. There are several options to consider when replicating between the cloud and on-premises instances. Option 1 – Secured network established between the cloud and on-premises A secured network is established between the cloud and on-premises which enables the applications (including replication software) running on the cloud and on-premises to have seamless connectivity to other applications irrespective of where they are physically located. Option 2 – Restricted network established between the cloud and on-premises A restricted network is established between the cloud and on-premises instances which enable certain ports (required by replication) be opened on both the cloud and on the on-premises instances and white lists the IP addresses of the cloud and on-premises instances. Option 3 – Restricted network access from on-premises and cloud through HTTP proxy This option can be considered when the ports required by the applications (including replication software) are not open and the cloud instance is not white listed on the on-premises instance. This option of tunneling through HTTP proxy may be only considered when proper security exceptions are obtained. Oracle GoldenGate Oracle GoldenGate is used for major Fortune 500 companies and other industry leaders worldwide to support mission-critical systems for data availability and integration. Oracle GoldenGate addresses the requirements for ensuring data consistency between cloud and on-premises instances, thus facilitating the business process to run effectively and reliably. The architecture diagram below illustrates the scenario where the cloud and the on-premises instance are connected using GoldenGate through a secured network In the above scenario, Oracle GoldenGate is installed and configured on both the cloud and the on-premises instances. On the cloud instance Oracle GoldenGate is installed and configured on the machine where the database instance can be accessed. Oracle GoldenGate can be configured for unidirectional or bi-directional replication between the cloud and on premises instances. The specific configuration details of Oracle GoldenGate processes will depend upon the option selected for establishing connectivity between the cloud and on-premises instances. The knowledge article (ID - 1588484.1) titled ' Replicating between Cloud and On-Premises using Oracle GoldenGate' discusses in detail the options for replicating between the cloud and on-premises instances. The article can be found on My Oracle Support. To learn more about Oracle GoldenGate 12c register for our launch webcast where we will go into these new features in more detail.   You may also want to download our white paper "Oracle GoldenGate 12c Release 1 New Features Overview" I would love to hear your requirements for replicating between on-premises and cloud instances, as well as your comments about the strategy discussed in the knowledge article to address your needs. Please post your comments in this blog or in the Oracle GoldenGate public forum - https://forums.oracle.com/community/developer/english/business_intelligence/system_management_and_integration/goldengate

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• Any tips on getting hired as a software project manager straight out of college?

  - by MHarrison

  I graduated with a BS in compsci last September, and I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to find a job as a project manager ever since. I fell in love with software engineering (the formal practice behind it all, not just coding) in school, and I've dedicated the last 3-4 years of my life to learning everything I can about project management and gaining experience. I've managed several projects (with teams around 12 people) while in school, and I worked with my university's software engineering research lab. My résumé is also decent - I worked as a programmer before I went to school (I'm 27 now), and I did Google Summer of Code for 3 summers. I also have general "people management" experience via working as the photo editor for my university's newspaper for 2 years. My first problem with the job hunt is not getting enough interviews. I use careers.stackoverflow.com, which is awesome because I usually get contacted by non-HR people who know what they're talking about, but there's just not enough companies using it for me to get interviews on a regular basis. I've also tried sites like monster.com, and in a fit of desperation, I sent out no less than 60 applications to project management positions. I've gotten 3 automated rejection letters and that's it. At least careers.stackoverflow gets me a phone interview with 8/10 places I apply to. But the main (and extremely frustrating) problem is the matter of experience. I've successfully managed projects from start to finish (in my software engineering classes we had real customers come in with a real software need and we built it for them), but I've never had to deal with budgets and money (I know this is why HR people immediately turn me away). Most of these positions require 5+ years PM experience, and I've seen absurd things like 12+ years required. Interviews are also maddening. I've had so many places who absolutely loved me and I made it to the final round of interviews, and I left thinking things went extremely well and they'd consider me. However, when I check in with them a week later, they tell me "We really liked you and your qualifications are excellent, but we're hoping to find someone with more experience." The bad interviews I can understand - like the PM position that would have had me managing developers both locally and overseas - I had 3 interviews with them and the ENTIRE interview process was them asking me CS brainteasers and having me waste time on things like writing quicksort on paper or writing binary search trees. Even when I tried steering the discussion towards more relevant PM stuff, they gave me some vague generic replies and went back to the "We want to be Google/MS" crap. But when I have a GOOD interview, they say my "qualifications are excellent" but they want "more experience"...that makes me want to tear my hair out. What else can I DO? While I'm aiming for technically-involved PM positions (not just crunching budget numbers), I really don't want a straight development job because I like creating software from the very high-level vs. spending a lot of time debugging memory leaks. In fact, I can't even GET development positions that I'm qualified for because I make the mistake of telling them that my future career goals are as PM (which usually results in them saying something like "Well we already have PMs and this position isn't really set up to get you there." - which I take to mean "No, that's my job, stay away.") My apologies on the long rant, but I'm seriously hellbent on getting hired as a PM since it's both my career goal and the passion that keeps me awake at night. Any suggestions on what the heck else I can do? I'm currently writing a blog where I talk about my philosophies about software engineering, and I'm writing up specs for an iOS app which I will design, code, and show employers, but this takes an awful lot of time that I don't have.

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• Call For Papers Tips and Tricks

  - by speakjava

  This year's JavaOne session review has just been completed and by now everyone who submitted papers should know whether they were successful or not.  I had the pleasure again this year of leading the review of the 'JavaFX and Rich User Experiences' track.  I thought it would be useful to write up a few comments to help people in future when submitting session proposals, not just for JavaOne, but for any of the many developer conferences that run around the world throughout the year.  This also draws on conversations I recently had with various Java User Group leaders at the Oracle User Group summit in Riga.  Many of these leaders run some of the biggest and most successful Java conferences in Europe. Try to think of a title which will sound interesting.  For example, "Experiences of performance tuning embedded Java for an ARM architecture based single board computer" probably isn't going to get as much attention as "Do you like coffee with your dessert? Java on the Raspberry Pi".  When thinking of the subject and title for your talk try to steer clear of sessions that might be too generic (and so get lost in a group of similar sessions).  Introductory talks are great when the audience is new to a subject, but beware of providing sessions that are too basic when the technology has been around for a while and there are lots of tutorials already available on the web. JavaOne, like many other conferences has a number of fields that need to be filled in when submitting a paper.  Many of these are selected from pull-down lists (like which track the session is applicable to).  Check these lists carefully.  A number of sessions we had needed to be shuffled between tracks when it was thought that the one selected was not appropriate.  We didn't count this against any sessions, but it's always a good idea to try and get the right one from the start, just in case. JavaOne, again like many other conferences, has two fields that describe the session being submitted: abstract and summary.  These are the most critical to a successful submission.  The two fields have different names and that is significant; a frequent mistake people make is to write an abstract for a session and then duplicate it for the summary.  The abstract (at least in the case of JavaOne) is what gets printed in the show guide and is typically what will be used by attendees when deciding what sessions to attend.  This is where you need to sell your session, not just to the reviewers, but also the people who you want in your audience.  Submitting a one line abstract (unless it's a really good one line) is not usually enough to decide whether this is worth investing an hour of conference time.  The abstract typically has a limit of a few hundred characters.  Try to use as many of them as possible to get as much information about your session across.  The summary should be different from the abstract (and don't leave it blank as some people do).  This field is where you can give the reviewers more detail about things like the structure of the talk, possible demonstrations and so on.  As a reviewer I look to this section to help me decide whether the hard-sell of the title and abstract will actually be reflected in the final content.  Try to make this comprehensive, but don't make it excessively long.  When you have to review possibly hundreds of sessions a certain level of conciseness can make life easier for reviewers and help the cause of your session. If you've not made many submissions for talks in the past, or if this is your first, try to give reviewers places to find background on you as a presenter.  Having an active blog and Twitter handle can also help reviewers if they're not sure what your level of expertise is.  Many call-for-papers have places for you to include this type of information.  It's always good to have new and original presenters and presentations for conferences.  Hopefully these tips will help you be successful when you answer the next call-for-papers.

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• Best approach to depth streaming via existing codec

  - by Kevin

  I'm working on a development system (and game) intended for games set mostly in static third-person views. We produce our scenery by CG and photographic techniques. Our background art is rendered off-line by a production-grade renderer. To allow the runtime imagery to properly interact with the background art, I wrote a program to convert from depth output by Mental Ray into a texture, and a pixel shader to draw a quad such that the Z data comes from the texture. This technique is working out very well, but now we've decided that some of the camera angle changes between scenes should be animated. The animation itself is straightforward to produce from our CG models. We intend to encode it to some HD video codec such as H.264. The problem is that in order to maintain our runtime imagery on the screen, the depth buffer will need to be loaded for each video frame. Due to the bandwidth, the video's depth data will need to be compressed efficiently. I've looked into methods for performing temporal compression of depth info and found an interesting research paper here: http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.kautz/publications/depth-streaming.pdf The method establishes a mapping between 16-bit depth values and YCbCr values. The mapping is tuned to the properties of existing video codecs in order to maximize precision of the decoded depths after the YCbCr has undergone video compression. It allows an existing, unmodified video codec to be used on the backend. I'm looking at how to pull this off with the least possible work. (This design change was unplanned.) Our game engine itself is native C++, presently for Win32 and DirectX, although we've worked hard to keep platform dependence segregated because we intend other ports. We don't have motion video facilities in the engine yet but will ultimately need that anyway for cinematics. I was planning on using some off-the-shelf motion video solution we can plug into our engine, and haven't chosen one yet. This new added requirement makes selecting one harder since, among other things, we'll now need to bypass colourspace conversion on one of the streams, and also will need to be playing two streams simultaneously in lockstep, on top of in some cases audio on one of them (for the cinematics). I'm also wondering if it's possible (or even useful) to do the conversion from YCbCr to depth in a pixel shader, or if it's better to just do it in CPU and separately load the resulting depth values into a locked tex. The conversion unfortunately does involve branching logic per-pixel. (There are more naive mappings that don't need branching, but they produce inferior results.) It could be reduced to a table lookup but the table would be 32MB. Programming is second-nature to me but I'm not that experienced with pix shaders and have zero knowledge of off-the-shelf video solutions. I'd therefore be interested in advice from others who may have dealt more with depth streaming, pixel shaders, and/or off-the-shelf codecs, regarding how feasible the proposed application is and what off-the-shelf video systems out there would best get along with this usage case.

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• How do you deal with poor management [closed]

  - by Sybiam

  I come from a company where during a project, we saw the client 3 time during the whole project. We were never informed when did the client came in office in order to discuss with him about his requirements. I did setup redmine and told them that if they have any request they can post an issue there. But they never really used redmine to publish anything. They would instead: harass a team member on the phone at any time of the day or night hand us over sheets of paper with new requests or changes hand us over new design (graphical) They requested how much time it would take us to finish the project, I gave them a date and a week to test everything and deployment. I calculated that time taking into account the current features we had to do. And then blamed us that our deadline was wrong and that we lied. But the truth is that one week before that deadline they added a couple of monster feature from nowhere and that week were we were supposed to test and deploy, my friends spent all day in the office changing all little things. After that project, my friend got some kind of depression and got scared everytime his phone rang. They kind of used him as a communication proxy. After that project of hell, (every body got pissed off on that project) as far as I know the designer who was working with us left work after that project and she had some kind of issue too with managers. My team also started looking for work somewhere else. At first I tried to get things straight with management, I tried to make a meeting to discuss about the communication issues and so on.. What really pissed me off and made me leave that job for good is the following. Me: "We have to discuss about what went wrong on the last project. It's quite important" Him: "Lets talk about it in a week or two. Just make a list of all the things you did wrong" Me: "We already have a new project and we want to prevent what happened on the last project to happen again" Him: "Just do it and well have our meeting in a week, make a list of all the thing you did wrong." It kind of ended there then he organized a meeting at a moment I wasn't unable to come. My friend discussed with him and tried to explained him that we really had to discuss about organization issue on how to manage a project. And his answer was pretty much: "During the meeting I don't want to ear how you want to us to manage a project but I want to know what you guys did wrong" After that I felt it wasn't even worth it discussing anything since they weren't even ready listening to us. Found a new job and I'm pretty happy with my choice. I'd like to know how you'd handle such situation. Is there anything to do to solve communication problem? After that project my friend got a depression and some other employee had their down too as far as I know. I wonder what else we can do other than leave these place as soon as possible. Feel sad for the people that are still there and get screamed at just because they need money in order to eat and finding an other job like that isn't that easy. note I died a little when our boss asked us to make a list of things we (programmers) did wrong. This is probably the stupidest request I ever got. If everybody thinks they did everything right, it doesn't mean that there is no problems. Individual problem are rarely the big issue. Colleagues help each others and solve theses issues to prevent problems.

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• Ask the Readers: How Many Monitors Do You Use with Your Computer?

  - by Asian Angel

  Most people have a single monitor for their computers, many have two, and some individuals enjoy “3 monitor plus” goodness. This week we would like to know how many monitors you use with your computer. Photo by DamnedNice. A good majority of people have a single monitor that they use with their computers and that single monitor serves their needs very well. It could be that these individuals do not engage in a heavy amount of work or play on their computers…they just need to do the basics like checking e-mail, using I.M., working with photos, etc. Another possibility is the use of virtual desktop software such as Dexpot, Yodm 3D, or Sysinternals Desktops on Windows systems. Linux systems such as Ubuntu already have that wonderful multi-desktop functionality built in. The wonderful part about virtual desktops is that a single monitor can feel equivalent to a small army of monitors. The ability to separate your open windows into “categories” and spread them out across multiple desktops is definitely nice. With each passing year dual monitor setups are becoming more common. Having twice the screen real-estate visible at the same time can be extremely convenient when you are multi-tasking. Perhaps you like to monitor your system’s stats and an e-mail account on the second monitor while working with software on the first. It certainly beats having windows popping up and down on your screen constantly while keeping on top of everything! Next we have the people who have three or more monitors in use with their computers. This may be a result of the type of work they do, an experiment to see if multiple monitors are right for them, or the cool, geeky factor that comes with having all those monitors. Needless to say these individuals can induce a good amount of envy and/or inspiration in the rest of us when we see their awesome setups. Are you perfectly content with a single monitor? Do you have two or more monitors that you use? If you have two or more monitors are they actually that useful to you? Perhaps you are getting ready even now to add additional monitors to your system. Whatever your situation may be at the moment, let us know your thoughts (and possible multi-monitor plans) in the comments! How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? Hidden Tracks Your Stolen Mac; Free Until End of January Why the Other Checkout Line Always Moves Faster World of Warcraft Theme for Windows 7 Ubuntu Font Family Now Available for Download Oh No! WikiLeaks Published Santa Claus’s Naughty List [Video] Remember the Milk Now Supports HTTPS Encryption for the Entire Session

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• What Counts for a DBA: Skill

  - by drsql

  “Practice makes perfect:” right? Well, not exactly. The reality of it all is that this saying is an untrustworthy aphorism. I discovered this in my “younger” days when I was a passionate tennis player, practicing and playing 20+ hours a week. No matter what my passion level was, without some serious coaching (and perhaps a change in dietary habits), my skill level was never going to rise to a level where I could make any money at the sport that involved something other than selling tennis balls at a sporting goods store. My game may have improved with all that practice but I had too many bad practices to overcome. Practice by itself merely reinforces what we know and what we can figure out naturally. The truth is actually closer to the expression used by Vince Lombardi: “Perfect practice makes perfect.” So how do you get to become skilled as a DBA if practice alone isn’t sufficient? Hit the Internet and start searching for SQL training and you can find 100 different sites. There are also hundreds of blogs, magazines, books, conferences both onsite and virtual. But then how do you know who is good? Unfortunately often the worst guide can be to find out the experience level of the writer. Some of the best DBAs are frighteningly young, and some got their start back when databases were stored on stacks of paper with little holes in it. As a programmer, is it really so hard to understand normalization? Set based theory? Query optimization? Indexing and performance tuning? The biggest barrier often is previous knowledge, particularly programming skills cultivated before you get started with SQL. In the world of technology, it is pretty rare that a fresh programmer will gravitate to database programming. Database programming is very unsexy work, because without a UI all you have are a bunch of text strings that you could never impress anyone with. Newbies spend most of their time building UIs or apps with procedural code in C# or VB scoring obvious interesting wins. Making matters worse is that SQL programming requires mastery of a much different toolset than most any mainstream programming skill. Instead of controlling everything yourself, most of the really difficult work is done by the internals of the engine (written by other non-relational programmers…we just can’t get away from them.) So is there a golden road to achieving a high skill level? Sadly, with tennis, I am pretty sure I’ll never discover it. However, with programming it seems to boil down to practice in applying the appropriate techniques for whatever type of programming you are doing. Can a C# programmer build a great database? As long as they don’t treat SQL like C#, absolutely. Same goes for a DBA writing C# code. None of this stuff is rocket science, as long as you learn to understand that different types of programming require different skill sets and you as a programmer must recognize the difference between one of the procedural languages and SQL and treat them differently. Skill comes from practicing doing things the right way and making “right” a habit.

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• Oracle Excellence Award

  - by Hartmut Wiese

  CALL FOR NOMINATIONS 2014 Oracle Excellence Award: Sustainability Innovation Is your organization using an Oracle product to help with a sustainability initiative while reducing costs? Saving energy? Saving gas? Saving paper? For example, you may use Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management to design more eco-friendly products, Oracle Transportation Management to reduce fleet emissions, Oracle Exadata Database Machine to decrease power and cooling needs while increasing database performance, Oracle Business Intelligence to measure environmental impacts, or one of many other Oracle products. Your organization may be eligible for the 2014 Oracle Excellence Award: Sustainability Innovation. Submit a nomination form located here by Friday June 20 if your company is using any Oracle product to take an environmental lead as well as to reduce costs and improve business efficiencies by using green business practices. These awards will be presented during Oracle OpenWorld 2014 (September 28-October 2) in San Francisco.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 About the Award • Winners will be selected from the customer and/or partner nominations. Either a customer, their partner, or Oracle representative can submit the nomination form on behalf of the customer.• There is a nomination form here to discuss your use of Oracle products and how they have helped your sustainability efforts and reduced costs. • Winners will be selected based on the extent of the environmental impact they have had as well as the business efficiencies they have achieved through their combined use of Oracle products. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Nomination Eligibility • Your company uses at least one component of Oracle products, whether it's the Oracle database, business applications, Fusion Middleware, or Sun servers/storage. • This solution should be in production or in active development. • Nomination deadline: Friday June 20, 2014. Benefits to Award Winners • Award presented to winners during Oracle OpenWorld by Jeff Henley, Oracle Chairman of the Board • Free Oracle OpenWorld registration pass for each winning customer • 2014 Oracle Excellence Award: Sustainability Innovation award logo for inclusion on your own website &/or press release • Possible placement in Oracle Profit Magazine &/or Oracle Magazine • ‘Enable the Eco-Enterprise’ podcast opportunity See last year's winners here Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 ______________________________________________________________________________________ Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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;} Questions? Send an email to: [email protected] Follow Oracle’s Sustainability Solutions on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and the Sustainability Matters blog Web page with award details:  http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/green/call-for-nominations-185050.html  

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• I.T. Chargeback : Core to Cloud Computing

  - by Anand Akela

  Contributed by Mark McGill Consolidation and Virtualization have been widely adopted over the years to help deliver benefits such as increased server utilization, greater agility and lower cost to the I.T. organization. These are key enablers of cloud, but in themselves they do not provide a complete cloud solution. Building a true enterprise private cloud involves moving from an admin driven world, where the I.T. department is ultimately responsible for the provisioning of servers, databases, middleware and applications, to a world where the consumers of I.T. resources can provision their infrastructure, platforms and even complete application stacks on demand. Switching from an admin-driven provisioning model to a user-driven model creates some challenges. How do you ensure that users provisioning resources will not provision more than they need? How do you encourage users to return resources when they have finished with them so that others can use them? While chargeback has existed as a concept for many years (especially in mainframe environments), it is the move to this self-service model that has created a need for a new breed of chargeback applications for cloud. Enabling self-service without some form of chargeback is like opening a shop where all of the goods are free. A successful chargeback solution will be able to allocate the costs of shared I.T. infrastructure based on the relative consumption by the users. Doing this creates transparency between the I.T. department and the consumers of I.T. When users are able to understand how their consumption translates to cost they are much more likely to be prudent when it comes to their use of I.T. resources. This also gives them control of their I.T. costs, as moderate usage will translate to a lower charge at the end of the month. Implementing Chargeback successfully create a win-win situation for I.T. and the consumers. Chargeback can help to ensure that I.T. resources are used for activities that deliver business value. It also improves the overall utilization of I.T. infrastructure as I.T. resources that are not needed are not left running idle. Enterprise Manager 12c provides an integrated metering and chargeback solution for Enterprise Manager Targets. This solution is built on top of the rich configuration and utilization information already available in Enterprise Manager. It provides metering not just for virtual machines, but also for physical hosts, databases and middleware. Enterprise Manager 12c provides metering based on the utilization and configuration of the following types of Enterprise Manager Target: Oracle VM Host Oracle Database Oracle WebLogic Server Using Enterprise Manager Chargeback, administrators are able to create a set of Charge Plans that are used to attach prices to the various metered resources. These plans can contain fixed costs (eg. $10/month/database), configuration based costs (eg. $10/month if OS is Windows) and utilization based costs (eg. $0.05/GB of Memory/hour) The self-service user provisioning these resources is then able to view a report that details their usage and helps them understand how this usage translates into cost. Armed with this information, the user is able to determine if the resources are delivering adequate business value based on what is being charged. Figure 1: Chargeback in Self-Service Portal Enterprise Manager 12c provides a variety of additional interfaces into this data. The administrator can access summary and trending reports. Summary reports allow the administrator to drill-down through the cost center hierarchy to identify, for example, the top resource consumers across the organization. Figure 2: Charge Summary Report Trending reports can be used for I.T. planning and budgeting as they show utilization and charge trends over a period of time. Figure 3: CPU Trend Report We also provide chargeback reports through BI Publisher. This provides a way for users who do not have an Enterprise Manager login (such as Line of Business managers) to view charge and usage information. For situations where a bill needs to be produced, chargeback can be integrated with billing applications such as Oracle Billing and Revenue Management (BRM). Further information on Enterprise Manager 12c’s integrated metering and chargeback: White Paper Screenwatch Cloud Management on OTN

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• Is the Leptonica implementation of 'Modified Median Cut' not using the median at all?

  - by TheCodeJunkie

  I'm playing around a bit with image processing and decided to read up on how color quantization worked and after a bit of reading I found the Modified Median Cut Quantization algorithm. I've been reading the code of the C implementation in Leptonica library and came across something I thought was a bit odd. Now I want to stress that I am far from an expert in this area, not am I a math-head, so I am predicting that this all comes down to me not understanding all of it and not that the implementation of the algorithm is wrong at all. The algorithm states that the vbox should be split along the lagest axis and that it should be split using the following logic The largest axis is divided by locating the bin with the median pixel (by population), selecting the longer side, and dividing in the center of that side. We could have simply put the bin with the median pixel in the shorter side, but in the early stages of subdivision, this tends to put low density clusters (that are not considered in the subdivision) in the same vbox as part of a high density cluster that will outvote it in median vbox color, even with future median-based subdivisions. The algorithm used here is particularly important in early subdivisions, and 3is useful for giving visible but low population color clusters their own vbox. This has little effect on the subdivision of high density clusters, which ultimately will have roughly equal population in their vboxes. For the sake of the argument, let's assume that we have a vbox that we are in the process of splitting and that the red axis is the largest. In the Leptonica algorithm, on line 01297, the code appears to do the following Iterate over all the possible green and blue variations of the red color For each iteration it adds to the total number of pixels (population) it's found along the red axis For each red color it sum up the population of the current red and the previous ones, thus storing an accumulated value, for each red note: when I say 'red' I mean each point along the axis that is covered by the iteration, the actual color may not be red but contains a certain amount of red So for the sake of illustration, assume we have 9 "bins" along the red axis and that they have the following populations 4 8 20 16 1 9 12 8 8 After the iteration of all red bins, the partialsum array will contain the following count for the bins mentioned above 4 12 32 48 49 58 70 78 86 And total would have a value of 86 Once that's done it's time to perform the actual median cut and for the red axis this is performed on line 01346 It iterates over bins and check they accumulated sum. And here's the part that throws me of from the description of the algorithm. It looks for the first bin that has a value that is greater than total/2 Wouldn't total/2 mean that it is looking for a bin that has a value that is greater than the average value and not the median ? The median for the above bins would be 49 The use of 43 or 49 could potentially have a huge impact on how the boxes are split, even though the algorithm then proceeds by moving to the center of the larger side of where the matched value was.. Another thing that puzzles me a bit is that the paper specified that the bin with the median value should be located, but does not mention how to proceed if there are an even number of bins.. the median would be the result of (a+b)/2 and it's not guaranteed that any of the bins contains that population count. So this is what makes me thing that there are some approximations going on that are negligible because of how the split actually takes part at the center of the larger side of the selected bin. Sorry if it got a bit long winded, but I wanted to be as thoroughas I could because it's been driving me nuts for a couple of days now ;)

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• Complex SQL Query similar to a z order problem

  - by AaronLS

  I have a complex SQL problem in MS SQL Server, and in drawing on a piece of paper I realized that I could think of it as a single bar filled with rectangles, each rectangle having segments with different Z orders. In reality it has nothing to do with z order or graphics at all, but more to do with some complex business rules that would be difficult to explain. Howoever, if anyone has ideas on how to solve the below that will give me my solution. I have the following data: ObjectID, PercentOfBar, ZOrder (where smaller is closer) A, 100, 6 B, 50, 5 B, 50, 4 C, 30, 3 C, 70, 6 The result of my query that I want is this, in any order: PercentOfBar, ZOrder 50, 5 20, 4 30, 3 Think of it like this, if I drew rectangle A, it would fill 100% of the bar and have a z order of 6. 66666666666 AAAAAAAAAAA If I then layed out rectangle B, consisting of two segments, both segments would cover up rectangle A resulting in the following rendering: 4444455555 BBBBBBBBBB As a rule of thumb, for a given rectangle, it's segments should be layed out such that the highest z order is to the right of the lower Z orders. Finally rectangle C would cover up only portions of Rectangle B with it's 30% segment that is z order 3, which would be on the left. You can hopefully see how the is represented in the output dataset I listed above: 3334455555 CCCBBBBBBB Now to make things more complicated I actually have a 4th column such that this grouping occurs for each key: Input: SomeKey, ObjectID, PercentOfBar, ZOrder (where smaller is closer) X, A, 100, 6 X, B, 50, 5 X, B, 50, 4 X, C, 30, 3 X, C, 70, 6 Y, A, 100, 6 Z, B, 50, 2 Z, B, 50, 6 Z, C, 100, 5 Output: SomeKey, PercentOfBar, ZOrder X, 50, 5 X, 20, 4 X, 30, 3 Y, 100, 6 Z, 50, 2 Z, 50, 5 Notice in the output, the PercentOfBar for each SomeKey would add up to 100%. This is one I know I'm going to be thinking about when I go to bed tonight. Just to be explicit and have a question: What would be a query that would produce the results described above?

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