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• Own a KINECT for MS-XBOX before anyone does

  Following is the announced by Richik Nandi from Microsoft team. Dear Customer, We believe that our privileged customers shouldn't have to wait for good things. So, here's a special offer exclusively for you. Be one of the first in India to own and experience Kinect for XBOX 360, few days before it is even launched in stores. Introducing the new Kinect for XBOX 360®. Kinect needs no controllers. You are the controller. Kinect brings games and entertainment to life in extraordinary new ways without using a controller. The sensor recognizes your face, eyes and body movements to deliver a superb gaming experience. Easy to use and great fun, Kinect gets everyone off the couch. See a ball? Kick it. Want to join a friend in the fun? Simply jump in. Imagine controlling movies and music with the wave of a hand or the sound of your voice! Kinect is all about fun for you and your family. And the best part is Kinect works with every Xbox 360®. There are two options you can choose from: •  Kinect sensor + 4GB Xbox 360 bundle + Kinect Adventures game at Rs 22,990/-and get Dance Central game worth Rs 1999 from Redington, 20% discount voucher from Starwood on food and beverages, T-shirt from PUMA and a Kinect adventure live card absolutely free using your unique promo code : XbTXXZl2Sb •  Kinect Sensor at Rs 9,500/-and get 20% discount voucher from Starwood on food and beverages, T-shirt from PUMA and a Kinect adventure live card absolutely free using your unique promo code : lDg6o8SuYh We want you to own your Kinect before the official launch. The promotion closes by 10th November. To know more about Kinect click here. To book your Kinect PRE-ORDER now! Enter your details along with the above mentioned promo code to avail of the free gifts offer. We will have your Kinect delivered by 19th November 2010. Enjoy being the controller. Enjoy the Kinect. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Keybindings for individual letter keys (not modifier-combinations) on a GtkTextView widget (Gtk3 and PyGI)

  - by monotasker

  I've been able to set several keybord shortcuts for a GtkTextView and a GtkTextEntry using the new css provider system. I'm finding, though, that I only seem to be able to establish keybindings for combinations including a modifier key. The widget doesn't respond to any bindings I set up that use: the delete key the escape key individual letter or punctuation keys alone Here's the code where I set up the css provider for the keybindings: #set up style context keys = Gtk.CssProvider() keys.load_from_path(os.path.join(data_path, 'keybindings.css')) #set up style contexts and css providers widgets = {'window': self.window, 'vbox': self.vbox, 'toolbar': self.toolbar, 'search_entry': self.search_entry, 'paned': self.paned, 'notelist_treeview': self.notelist_treeview, 'notelist_window': self.notelist_window, 'notetext_window': self.notetext_window, 'editor': self.editor, 'statusbar': self.statusbar } for l, w in widgets.iteritems(): w.get_style_context().add_provider(keys, Gtk.STYLE_PROVIDER_PRIORITY_USER) Then in keybindings.css this is an example of what works: @binding-set gtk-vi-text-view { bind "<ctrl>b" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, -5, 0) }; /* 5 lines up */ bind "<ctrl>k" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, -1, 0) }; /* down */ bind "<ctrl>j" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, 1, 0) }; /* up */ } Part of what I'm trying to do is just add proper delete-key function to the text widgets (right now the delete key does nothing at all). So if I add a binding like one of these, nothing happens: bind "Delete" { "delete-selection" () }; bind "Delete" { "delete-from-cursor" (chars, 1) }; The other part of what I want to do is more elaborate. I want to set up something like Vim's command and visual modes. So at the moment I'm just playing around with (a) setting the widget to editable=false by hitting the esc key; and (b) using homerow letters to move the cursor (as a proof-of-concept exercise). So far there's no response from the escape key or from the letter keys, even though the bindings work when I apply them to modifier-key combinations. For example, I do this in the css for the text-widget: bind "j" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, 1, 0) }; /* down */ bind "k" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, -1, 0) }; /* up */ bind "l" { "move-cursor" (logical-positions, 1, 0) }; /* right */ bind "h" { "move-cursor" (logical-positions, -1, 0) }; /* left */ but none of these bindings does anything, even if other bindings in the same set are respected. What's especially odd is that the vim-like movement bindings above are respected when I attach them to a GtkTreeView widget for navigating the tree-view options: @binding-set gtk-vi-tree-view { bind "j" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, 1) }; /* selection down */ bind "k" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, -1) }; /* selection up */ } So it seems like there are limitations or overrides of some kind on keybindings for the TextView widget (and for the del key?), but I can't find documentation of anything like that. Are these just things that can't be done with the css providers? If so, what are my alternatives for non-modified keybindings? Thanks.

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• State / Screen management in Entity Component Systems

  - by David Lively

  My entity/component system is happily humming along and, despite some performance concerns I initially had, everything is working fine. However, I've realized that I missed a crucial point when starting this thing: how do you handle different screens? At the moment, I have a GameManager class which owns a component manager and entity manager. When I create an entity, the entity manager assigns it an ID and makes sure it's tracked. When I modify the components that are assigned to an entity. an UpdateEntity method is called, which alerts each of the systems that they may need to add or remove the entity from their respective entity lists. A problem with this is that the collection of entities operated on by each system is determined solely by the individual Systems, typically based on a "required component" filter. (An entity has to have a Renderable component to be rendered, for instance.) In this situation, I can't just keep collections of entities per screen and only Update/Draw those collections. They'd have to either be added and removed depending on their applicability to the current screen, which would cause their associated components to be removed, or enable/disable entities in a group per screen to hide what's not supposed to be visible. These approaches seem like really, really crappy kludges. What's a good way to handle this? A pretty straightforward way that comes to mind is to create a separate GameManager (which in my implementation owns all of the systems, entities, etc.) per screen, which means that everything outside of the device context would be duplicated. That's bothersome because some things are always visible, or I might want to continue to display the game under a translucent menu window. Another option would be to add a "layer" key to the GameManager class, which could be checked against a displayable layer stack held by the game manager. *System.Draw() would be called for each active layer, in the required order as determined by the stack. When the systems request an iterator for their respective entity collections, it would be pre-filtered to a (cached) set of those entities that participate in the active layer. Those collections could be updated from the same UpdateEntity event that's already used to maintain each system's entity collections. Still, kinda feels like a hack. If I've coded myself into a corner, feel free to throw tomatoes as long as they're labeled with a helpful suggestion. Hooray for learning curves.

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• Finding work as a college student

  - by lightburst

  I'm a 3rd year CS student. I'm currently really, really, bored and tired of cheap school programming(I go to a fairly respectable(albeit not top) university in my country, but, really, it's not MIT) so I've been thinking about getting a part-time dev job for a long while now. I'm not some hotshot programmer or anything, but "Add/Delete XYZ class objects to list" or "Do this web feature/pattern in PHP" does get old after a few semesters. I also only learned(heard?) of programming when I entered college, so the duration of me being in contact with any code is short. I can't really apply as an intern as I have not accumulated the necessary credits yet to do that so I was thinking of selling myself as a part-time dev. I still need to go to school, and don't want to subject myself to living two lives. Plus, I think I'd have better chances considering my lack of things to write on the resume. The only language I know at heart is C (I've written several pointer-oriented stuff on my freshman year, which is apparently pretty leet(for some reason), or so Joel says. That sort of boosted my morale a bit) but I've worked with several other languages only for the sake of course work such as C#/Java/PHP/ASM. My only user-worthy project was a recursive quicksort simulator I wrote for class using GTK+ that used a textbox to output the progress. I also have not taken the compiler theory class yet, or my thesis. All that being said, I wonder if any legitimate software company(big or small) would hire somebody like me considering all that. If there are companies that do accept anybody like me, would I be doing programming or maybe just be a tester or something? Would anybody hire me as a dev at all? I know I don't have much(not even a degree) but what I lack in experience, I compensate with interest? I am less interested in websites and 'management' software(no offense or anything. also, most of the places here ONLY have those), and more into 'process driven'(I'm not sure how to call it) and system software. I have my eyes on a startup that sells basically an extension of Google Drive, but I feel like I'm too 'risky' for them. Oh, I'm also 19 if that means anything. We're not K-12 so kids go to college earlier than in the US.

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• Forms&Reports upgrade characterset issues

  - by Lukasz Romaszewski

  Hello,This quick post is based on my findings during recent IMC workshops, especially those related to upgrading the Forms 6i/9i/10g applications to Forms 11g platform. The upgrade process itself is pretty straightforward and it basically requires recompiling your Forms application with a latest version of frmcmp tool. For some cases though, especially when you migrate from Forms 6i which is a client-server architecture to a 3-tier web solution (Forms 11g), you need to rewrite some parts of your code to make it run on new platform. The things you need to change range from reimplementing (using webutil library) typical client-site functionality like local IO operation, access to WinAPI, invoking DLLs etc. to changing deprecated or obsolete APIs like RUN_PRODUCT to RUN_REPORT_OBJECT. To automate those changes Oracle provides complete Java API  which allows you to manipulate the code and structure of you modules (JDAPI). To make it even easier we can use Forms Migration Assistant tool (written in Java using JDAPI) which is able to replace all occurrences of old API entries with their 11g equivalents or warn you when the replacement is not possible. You can also add your own replacement definitions in the search_replace.properties file. But you need to be aware of some issues that can be encountered using this tool. First of all if you are using some hard-coded text inside your triggers you may notice that after processing them by the Migration Assistant tool the national characters may be lost. This is due to the fact that you need to explicitly tell Java application (which MA really is) what kind of characterset it should use to read those text properly. In order to do that just add to a script calling MA the following line:  export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-Dfile.encoding=<JAVA_ISO_ENCODING>  when the particular encoding must match the NLS_LANG in your Forms Builder environment (for example for Polish characterset you need to use ISO-8859-2).Second issue you can encounter related to national charactersets is lack of national symbols in you reports after migration. This can be solved by adding appropriate NLS_LANG entry in your reports environment. Sometimes instead of particular characterset you see "Greek characters" in your reports. This is just default font used by reports engine instead of the one defined in your report. To solve it you must copy fonts definitions from your old environment (e.g. Forms 10g installation) to appropriate directory in new installation (usually AFM folder). For more information about this and other issues please refer to https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&doctype=BULLETIN&id=1297012.1at My Oracle Support site. That's all for today, stay tuned for more posts on this topic! Lukasz

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• PowerShell - grabbing values out of the registry and running them

  - by Rob Farley

  So I closed an application that runs when Windows starts up, but it doesn’t have a Start Menu entry, and I was trying to find it. Ok, I could’ve run regedit.exe, navigated through the tree and found the list of things that run when Windows starts up, but I thought I’d use PowerShell instead. PowerShell presents the registry as if it’s a volume on a disk, and you can navigate around it using commands like cd and dir. It wasn’t hard to find the folder I knew I was after – tab completion (starting the word and then hitting the Tab key) was a friend here. But unfortunately dir doesn’t list values, only subkeys (which look like folders). PS C:\Windows\system32> dir HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run PS C:\Windows\system32> Instead, I needed to use Get-Item to fetch the ‘Run’ key, and use its Property property. This listed the values in there for me, as an array of strings (I could work this out using Get-Member). PS C:\Windows\system32> (Get-Item HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run).Property QuickSet SynTPEnh Zune Launcher PS C:\Windows\system32> Ok, so the thing I wanted wasn’t in there (an app called PureText, whicih lets me Paste As Text using Windows+V). That’s ok – a simple change to use HKCU instead of HKLM (Current User instead of Local Machine), and I found it. Now to fetch the details of the application itself, using the RegistryKey method GetValue PS C:\Windows\system32> (Get-Item HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run).GetValue('PureText') "C:\Users\Rob\Utilities\PureText.exe" PS C:\Windows\system32> And finally, surrounding it in a bit of code to execute that command. That needs an ampersand and the Invoke-Expression cmdlet. PS C:\Windows\system32> '& ' + (Get-Item HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run).GetValue('PureText') | Invoke-Expression A simple bit of exploring PowerShell which will makes for a much easier way of finding and running those apps which start with Windows.

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• What can a Service do on Windows?

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  If you open up Task Manager or Process Explorer on your system, you will see many services running. But how much of an impact can a service have on your system, especially if it is ‘corrupted’ by malware? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answers to a curious reader’s questions. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Forivin wants to know how much impact a service can have on a Windows system, especially if it is ‘corrupted’ by malware: What kind malware/spyware could someone put into a service that does not have its own process on Windows? I mean services that use svchost.exe for example, like this: Could a service spy on my keyboard input? Take screenshots? Send and/or receive data over the internet? Infect other processes or files? Delete files? Kill processes? How much impact could a service have on a Windows installation? Are there any limits to what a malware ‘corrupted’ service could do? The Answer SuperUser contributor Keltari has the answer for us: What is a service? A service is an application, no more, no less. The advantage is that a service can run without a user session. This allows things like databases, backups, the ability to login, etc. to run when needed and without a user logged in. What is svchost? According to Microsoft: “svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries”. Could we have that in English please? Some time ago, Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files. From a programming perspective, this makes more sense for reusability…but the problem is that you can not launch a .dll file directly from Windows, it has to be loaded up from a running executable (exe). Thus the svchost.exe process was born. So, essentially a service which uses svchost is just calling a .dll and can do pretty much anything with the right credentials and/or permissions. If I remember correctly, there are viruses and other malware that do hide behind the svchost process, or name the executable svchost.exe to avoid detection. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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• Goodbye FY14, Welcome FY15!

  - by Alliances & Channels Redaktion

  FY14, ein spannendes Geschäftsjahr liegt gerade hinter uns. Das ist immer auch ein Anlass, um Bilanz zu ziehen. Lassen wir also gemeinsam 12 ereignisreiche Monate Revue passieren! Beim Blick auf die Ereignisse des FY14 stehen natürlich Sie, unsere Partner, an allererster Stelle, denn Sie leisten einen ungeheuer wichtigen Beitrag zum Erfolg von Oracle. Dafür möchte ich Ihnen heute im Namen von Oracle A&C ganz herzlich danken! Von all den Events und Highlights im Partnerbereich war die Oracle Open World auch in FY14 schon allein quantitativ das Beeindruckendste: 60.000 Besucherinnen und Besucher aus 145 Ländern, 2.555 Sessions und 3.599 Speaker. Die angereisten Partner kamen in San Francisco zum Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange zusammen. Dort tauschten sie sich über aktuelle Fragen zu Applications, Cloud, Engineered Systems, Big Data sowie Industry Solutions aus – Themen die uns auch in FY15 sicher bewegen werden! FY14 war bei Oracle auch das Jahr der Datenbank-Offensive: Auf der Open World wurde die neue In-Memory-Option für Datenbanken präsentiert, das Schlagwort Datenbank-Tuning machte die Runde. Als Meilenstein gilt vor allem die enorme Beschleunigung, die mit Version 12.1.0.1 der Oracle Database 12c möglich wird. Diese und weitere Innovationen sorgten für viel positives Presseecho. Im Januar 2014 kamen die Partner aus ganz Deutschland nach München zum Oracle Partner Day und zur Verleihung der Oracle Excellence Awards. Wie immer war unsere Blogredaktion natürlich live vor Ort. Zu den Höhepunkten des Partner Day zählte die Key Note zur Oracle Strategie von Helene Lengler, Vice President Sales Fusion Middleware & Engineered Systems. Spannend für die Partner war auch der Blick in die Zukunft mit Andreas Zilch (Experton): Industrie 4.0 lautete eines seiner zentralen Themen - also die Frage der Informatisierung der klassischen Industrien und damit natürlich auch das Internet of Things. Ich freue mich auf neue Herausforderungen im FY2015 und vor allem auf die anregende Zusammenarbeit mit Ihnen! Wir werden gemeinsam daran arbeiten, spannende Projekte u.a. mit Big Data, Customer Experience oder Cloud zu entwickeln. Uns allen wünsche ich ein gutes, erfolgreiches Geschäftsjahr 2015. Herzlichst, Ihr Christian Werner Senior Director Alliances & Channels Deutschland

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• Goodbye FY14, Welcome FY15!

  - by Alliances & Channels Redaktion

  FY14, ein spannendes Geschäftsjahr liegt gerade hinter uns. Das ist immer auch ein Anlass, um Bilanz zu ziehen. Lassen wir also gemeinsam 12 ereignisreiche Monate Revue passieren! Beim Blick auf die Ereignisse des FY14 stehen natürlich Sie, unsere Partner, an allererster Stelle, denn Sie leisten einen ungeheuer wichtigen Beitrag zum Erfolg von Oracle. Dafür möchte ich Ihnen heute im Namen von Oracle A&C ganz herzlich danken! Von all den Events und Highlights im Partnerbereich war die Oracle Open World auch in FY14 schon allein quantitativ das Beeindruckendste: 60.000 Besucherinnen und Besucher aus 145 Ländern, 2.555 Sessions und 3.599 Speaker. Die angereisten Partner kamen in San Francisco zum Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange zusammen. Dort tauschten sie sich über aktuelle Fragen zu Applications, Cloud, Engineered Systems, Big Data sowie Industry Solutions aus – Themen die uns auch in FY15 sicher bewegen werden! FY14 war bei Oracle auch das Jahr der Datenbank-Offensive: Auf der Open World wurde die neue In-Memory-Option für Datenbanken präsentiert, das Schlagwort Datenbank-Tuning machte die Runde. Als Meilenstein gilt vor allem die enorme Beschleunigung, die mit Version 12.1.0.1 der Oracle Database 12c möglich wird. Diese und weitere Innovationen sorgten für viel positives Presseecho. Im Januar 2014 kamen die Partner aus ganz Deutschland nach München zum Oracle Partner Day und zur Verleihung der Oracle Excellence Awards. Wie immer war unsere Blogredaktion natürlich live vor Ort. Zu den Höhepunkten des Partner Day zählte die Key Note zur Oracle Strategie von Helene Lengler, Vice President Sales Fusion Middleware & Engineered Systems. Spannend für die Partner war auch der Blick in die Zukunft mit Andreas Zilch (Experton): Industrie 4.0 lautete eines seiner zentralen Themen - also die Frage der Informatisierung der klassischen Industrien und damit natürlich auch das Internet of Things. Ich freue mich auf neue Herausforderungen im FY2015 und vor allem auf die anregende Zusammenarbeit mit Ihnen! Wir werden gemeinsam daran arbeiten, spannende Projekte u.a. mit Big Data, Customer Experience oder Cloud zu entwickeln. Uns allen wünsche ich ein gutes, erfolgreiches Geschäftsjahr 2015. Herzlichst, Ihr Christian Werner Senior Director Alliances & Channels Deutschland

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• Data Structures usage and motivational aspects

  - by Aubergine

  For long student life I was always wondering why there are so many of them yet there seems to be lack of usage at all in many of them. The opinion didn't really change when I got a job. We have brilliant books on what they are and their complexities, but I never encounter resources which would actually give a good hint of practical usage. I perfectly understand that I have to look at problem , analyse required operations, look for data structure that does them efficiently. However in practice I never do that, not because of human laziness syndrome, but because when it comes to work I acknowledge time priority over self-development. Over time I thought that when I would be better developer I will automatically use more of them - that didn't happen at all or maybe I just didn't. Then I found that the colleagues usually in the same plate as me - knowing more or less some three of data structures and being totally happy about it and refusing to discuss this matter further with me, coming back to conversations about 'cool new languages' 'libraries that do jobs for you' and the joy to work under scrumban etc. I am stuck with ArrayLists, Arrays and SortedMap , which no matter what I do always suffice or either I tweak them to be capable of fulfilling my task. Yes, it might be inefficient but do we really have to care if Intel increases performance over years no matter if we improve our skills? Does new Xeon or IBM machines really care what we use? What if I like build things, but I am not particularly excited whether it is n log(n) or just n? Over twenty years the processing power increased enormously, which gives us freedom of not being critical about which one to use? On top of that new more optimized languages appear which support multiple cores more efficiently. To be more specific: I would like to find motivational material on complex real areas/cases of possible effective usages of data structures. I would be really grateful if you would provide relevant resources. There is similar question ,but in the end the links again mostly describe or do dumb example(vehicles, students or holy grail quest - yes, very relevant) them and people keep referring to the "scenario decides the data structure to use". I want to know these complex scenarios to be able to identify similarities to my scenario and then use them. The complex scenarios where it really matters and not necessarily of quantitive nature. It seems that data structures only concern is efficiency and nothing else? There seems to be no particular convenience for developer in use one over another. (only when I found scientific resources on why exactly simple carbohydrates are evil I stopped eating sugar and candies completely replacing it with less harmful fruits - I hope you can see the analogy)

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• The JDEdwards EnterpriseOne PreSales University

  - by Julien Haye

  Istanbul NOV 5-9 Wednesday, NOV 7 - It is raining outside and I am sitting in my hotel room (#106) in Istanbul and create my first blog entry. Today this blog was enabled and I am excited to have the ability to share my (first) thoughts with the EMEA JDE Partner Community. I am here in Istanbul because we are currently running the JDEdwards PreSales University Event series. This PreSales University is an established event series which we deliver the fifth time now and the first time in the ECEMEA region. Delegates value the openness and competence from the Product Strategy and Product Development Team from Denver and India. Together with the regional Oracle PreSales team we had very valuable discussions around product features and functions and about the business value of the new delivered applications and tools. Additionally the event provides endless opportunities to exchange ideas with other JD Edwards Partner and the Oracle PreSales Team. With its focus on sharing and learning, best practice, user experience and transforming technologies, delegates will leave this event with an abundance of new ideas and best practices to try for your coming projects and existing customer implementations. A day out of the office gives delegates a chance to gain a new perspective on their business processes. Everybody sees better ways of working just by being immersed in an environment where the focus is on using products more effectively. Apps Track: Highly concentrated participants in Istanbul listening to Jeff Erickson presenting the news about OneView Reporting. Jeff: We believe “The things you said”. The event is organized into two tracks, one for Apps and one for Tech. Everybody was able to learn new features and functions and how to position this products. The focus was on the new Apps release 9.1 and Tools Release 9.1.2 and their Value Propositions. For all topics hands-on exercises has been given to the participants. Even very experienced senior consultants did learn a lot from this event. In total we have 55 people registered and we still have some more content to deliver. By the way: Istanbul is a nice place to be. I already booked my next trip to this beautiful city. In two weeks we deliver the JD Edwards EECIS Executive Forum again in Istanbul. Once again a tough Agenda. I will let you know if I had the ability to have a walk outside and see a bit more of this beautiful city. At least I expect to have a different room number. Many greetings Hartmut WieseOracle Alliances & Channels EMEA

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• Exit Infragistics, Enter Telerik

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  Today I made the purchase of the Premium Collection of components from Telerik.  This follows an evaluation I’ve been doing to replace the Infragistics components we currently use for Windows Forms, ASP.NET MVC, and WPF. It was not a formal evaluation.  I had already decided to move the company away from Infragistics.  That decision was mostly born out of frustration with support over using the Infragistics components in my first production MVC application. One such issue was a simple scenario where you have a model that has a scalar property that can be one value out of a list.  The built-in combobox does this, but I was told by Infragistics support that they didn’t support it – and it took them several emails and days of waiting between responses to determine that.  I implemented this in Telerik in a minute not including the several minutes it took me to get a rudimentary understanding for the component and its API. Here’s the code using the built-in combobox:@Html.DropDownListFor(x => x.VendorId, new SelectList(ViewBag.Vendors, "VendorId", "VendorName", Model.VendorId), "Select Id") Here’s the code using the Telerik combobox:@(Html.Telerik().ComboBoxFor(model => model.VendorId) .AutoFill(true) .BindTo(new SelectList(ViewBag.Vendors, "VendorId", "VendorName", Model.VendorId)) )   I chose Telerik over other competitors based on the professional appearance of their website, and how easy it was to find information.  I’d like to say I had time to evaluate other Infragistics competitors.  Due to time constraints I had to make an initial decision based on superficial, but still important things. I picked Telerik with the plan to only look further at other companies if my evaluation didn’t meet my expectations.  Luckily they did, because I didn’t relish the thought of carving out more time to evaluate another set of components. Overall my experience with Telerik has been superior to Infragistics in every way.  The installation was easy using their control panel installer application.  Getting up to speed has been easy.  And the communication from Telerik has met my expectations.  And we’ll continue to be good as long as I don’t start getting email messages from a sales rep saying that they want to talk to me about training and consulting – I’m looking at you Infragistics.

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• Outlying DBAs

  - by steveh99999

  Read an interesting book recently, ‘Outliers – the story of success’ by Malcolm Gladwell. There’s a good synopsis of the book here on wikipedia. I don’t want to write in detailed review of the book, but it’s well worth a read. There were a couple of sections which I thought were possibly relevant to IT professionals and DBAs in particular. Firstly, ‘the 10,000 hour rule’, in this section Gladwell asserts that to be a real ‘elite performer’ takes 10,000 hours of practice. ‘Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good, it’s the thing you do that makes you good’.  He gives many interesting examples – the Beatles, Bill Gates etc – but I was wondering could this be applied to DBAs ? If it takes 10,000 hours to be a really elite DBA – how long does that really take ? 8 hours a day makes 1250 days. If we assume that most DBAs work around 230 days a year – then it takes around 5 and a half years to become an elite DBA.   But how much time per day does a DBA spend actually doing DBA work ? Certainly it’s my experience that the more experienced I get as a DBA, the less time I seem to spend actually doing DBA work – ie meetings, change-control meetings, project planning, liasing with other teams, appraisals etc.  Is it more accurate to assume that a DBA spends half their time actually doing ‘real’ DBA work – or is that just my bad luck ?   So, in reality, I’d argue it can take at least 5 1/2 and more likely closer to 10 years to become an elite DBA. Why do I keep receiving CVs for senior DBAs with 2-4 years actual DBA experience ? In the second section I found particularly interesting, Gladwell writes about analysis of plane crashes and the importance of in-cockpit communications. He describes a couple of crashes involving Korean Airlines – where co-pilots were often deferrential to pilots, and unwilling to openly criticise their more senior colleagues or point out errors when things were going badly wrong… There’s a better summary of Gladwell’s concepts on mitigation  here – but to apply this to a DBA role… If you are a DBA and you do not agree with  a decision of one of your superiors, then it’s your duty as a DBA to say what you think is wrong, before it’s too late…  Obviously there’s a fine line between constructive criticism and moaning, but a good senior DBA or manager should be able to take well-researched criticism\debate from a more junior DBA.   Is this really possible ?

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• Why is my class worse than the hierarchy of classes in the book (beginner OOP)?

  - by aditya menon

  I am reading this book. The author is trying to model a lesson in a college. The goal is to output the Lesson Type (Lecture or Seminar), and the Charges for the lesson depending on whether it is a hourly or fixed price lesson. So the output should be: lesson charge 20. Charge type: hourly rate. lesson type seminar. lesson charge 30. Charge type: fixed rate. lesson type lecture. When the input is as follows: $lessons[] = new Lesson('hourly rate', 4, 'seminar'); $lessons[] = new Lesson('fixed rate', null, 'lecture'); I wrote this: class Lesson { private $chargeType; private $duration; private $lessonType; public function __construct($chargeType, $duration, $lessonType) { $this->chargeType = $chargeType; $this->duration = $duration; $this->lessonType = $lessonType; } public function getChargeType() { return $this->getChargeType; } public function getLessonType() { return $this->getLessonType; } public function cost() { if($this->chargeType == 'fixed rate') { return "30"; } else { return $this->duration * 5; } } } $lessons[] = new Lesson('hourly rate', 4, 'seminar'); $lessons[] = new Lesson('fixed rate', null, 'lecture'); foreach($lessons as $lesson) { print "lesson charge {$lesson->cost()}."; print " Charge type: {$lesson->getChargeType()}."; print " lesson type {$lesson->getLessonType()}."; print "<br />"; } But according to the book, I am wrong (I am pretty sure I am, too). The author gave a large hierarchy of classes as the solution instead. In a previous chapter, the author stated the following 'four signposts' as the time when I should consider changing my class structure: Code Duplication The Class Who Knew Too Much About His Context The Jack of All Trades - Classes that try to do many things Conditional Statements The only problem I can see is Conditional Statements, and that too in a vague manner - so why refactor this? What problems do you think might arise in the future that I have not foreseen?

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• Height Map Mapping to "Chunked" Quadrilateralized Spherical Cube

  - by user3684950

  I have been working on a procedural spherical terrain generator for a few months which has a quadtree LOD system. The system splits the six faces of a quadrilateralized spherical cube into smaller "quads" or "patches" as the player approaches those faces. What I can't figure out is how to generate height maps for these patches. To generate the heights I am using a 3D ridged multi fractals algorithm. For now I can only displace the vertices of the patches directly using the output from the ridged multi fractals. I don't understand how I generate height maps that allow the vertices of a terrain patch to be mapped to pixels in the height map. The only thing I can think of is taking each vertex in a patch, plug that into the RMF and take that position and translate into u,v coordinates then determine the pixel position directly from the u,v coordinates and determine the grayscale color based on the height. I feel as if this is the right approach but there are a few other things that may further complicate my problem. First of all I intend to use "height maps" with a pixel resolution of 192x192 while the vertex "resolution" of each terrain patch is only 16x16 - meaning that I don't have any vertices to sample for the RMF for most of the pixels. The main reason the height map resolution is higher so that I can use it to generate a normal map (otherwise the height maps serve little purpose as I can just directly displace vertices as I currently am). I am pretty much following this paper very closely. This is, essentially, the part I am having trouble with. Using the cube-to-sphere mapping and the ridged multifractal algorithm previously described, a normalized height value ([0, 1]) is calculated. Using this height value, the terrain position is calculated and stored in the first three channels of the positionmap (RGB) – this will be used to calculate the normalmap. The fourth channel (A) is used to store the height value itself, to be used in the heightmap. The steps in the first sentence are my primary problem. I don't understand how the pixel positions correspond to positions on the sphere and what positions are sampled for the RMF to generate the pixels if only vertices cannot be used.

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• Canonicalization issue regarding academic URL vs. blog URL

  - by user5395

  I'm sorry if what I am about to write is long-winded. I only wish to be clear. I am an academic in the scientific community. I maintain a web site for my research, teaching, and other professional activities. Until recently, the content for this site was hosted in a directory on my university department's own server. The address is of the typical form (universityname).edu/~(myusername) I decided that I wanted to use WordPress in order to host and manage my page. So I set up a WordPress.com blog and then replaced the index.html file in (universityname).edu/~(myusername) with a new one consisting of a single frame, containing the WordPress.com blog. Now when a user visits (universityname).edu/~(myusername), he or she sees the blog instead. This has been pretty nice because, even when the user clicks on links between pages or posts in the blog, the only thing showing up in the address bar of the browser is www.(universityname).edu/~(myusername), because the blog is constrained to a frame. However, the effect of this change on the search side of things has not been so kind to me. Before, when someone searched for my name in Google, the first result was always (universityname).edu/~(myusername). This is the most desirable outcome, for professional reasons. (Having my academic URL come up first suggests that I am an accredited professional, and not just some crank with a blog!) But now, Google seems to have canonicalized my web presence under the blog's WordPress.com address. It has completely forgotten about my academic URL and considers the WordPress.com address to be the best address representing me on the web. Unfortunately, WordPress.com doesn't support the canonical tag, so I can't tell the blog to advertise itself as my academic URL in the header. (It doesn't seem to help at all that I have used the WordPress.com dashboard to turn on no-indexing of the blog.) One obvious solution would be to use the departmental server to host my content again, and use a local installation of the WordPress platform. For reasons beyond my control, the platform will not be deployed on the departmental server at this time. Another solution would be to use shared hosting with WordPress.org support, because the WordPress.org platform does support the canonical tag (albeit via a plug-in). But this seems to usually require purchasing a domain name and other fees, and there is no guarantee that Google will listen to the canonical tag (it might use whatever domain name I end up with instead). Is there a way I can more cleverly integrate the WordPress.com blog into a page hosted on my department's server? Is there some PHP code I can write to retrieve the blog's contents in a way that Google won't treat as a link / "perceive" the blog? Please note: I am a PHP novice at best. I just feel there should be a simpler solution to all this, within the constraints of what I have described above. Thanks!

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• Mobile Shopping Alerts

  - by David Dorf

  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;} It’s been popular to offer coupons when people check-in to a store, because you’re catching them at the best possible time – they’re presumably in a shopping state-of-mind, and they’re at your store.  But wouldn’t it be even better to catch the people walking by your store and entice them to visit?  That’s the concept of geo-fences.  When people enter a geographic zone, they are sent a relevant text message alerting them about something nearby. I wrote about Placecast doing this for The North Face, noting that the messages were a unique combination of both offers and useful information about outdoor activities. After creating a program with European carrier O2, Placecast recently entered into an agreement to provide similar services to AT&T customers.  The ShopAlerts program allows AT&T customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco opt-in to receive these messages.  The program will be expanded nationwide as early as this summer. It’s a much better model for customers (and Placecast) to sign-up once with the carrier instead of each individual retailer, but I hope the messages aren’t restricted to advertising.  I really the like the idea of providing other information, such as nearby special events, races, and perhaps even things to avoid like construction.

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• My Graduate Experience at Oracle by Mayuri Khinvasara

  - by david.talamelli

  My experience at Oracle. I still vividly remember the day, when my name was announced in the campus hiring list of Oracle at my college. I was proud of myself but at the same time, I was getting goose bumps!!! A new world had arrived before me and the anxiousness of whether I could survive it or not had gripped me. Nervous about moving into an unknown city, I came to visit Hyderabad with my father. One look at the Oracle Campus and I felt some kind of magnetism pulling me towards it. And then, I joined Oracle in June 2009, with a lot of apprehensions in my mind. The HR Rep made us really comfortable in the first week itself. I met so many new people, managers, HR folks and most importantly 20 other Campus Hires like me. Then we had our team bonding sessions, team parties etc. I didn’t realize when the transition from campus to corporate happened. And I had started loving it. The confidence the HR Reps gave us and the bonding our managers imbibed in us, made us all ready for the new life ahead. Then started the rigorous training sessions, the excitement about our new work, new cubicles, new desktops, our first business cards, our first conference call and so on. I made new friends which were now my extended family, the freedom and courage of living alone. I was enjoying all that. As I was getting totally immersed into my regular work schedule I started getting to know the innumerable Oracle products, their functionalities, implementations and realizing the brand that Oracle is. Work pressure started increasing and so did the challenges to understand and deliver. I Didn’t realize how days and soon months passed by. Then came a golden chance to visit the Oracle Headquarters in US for 45 days training in November 2009. Once again, the excitement was enormous about the counter team-mates in HQ, the trainings ahead, the US work culture and my stay there. I felt so privileged for the company I was working. Boarding an international flight for the first time and visiting famous US cities which I had just seen in movies, was now a reality. It was a totally amazing experience. Work pressure kept me really busy, with learning new things every day, the immense satisfaction of delivering something, the nightmares of debugging a mistake, only to realize how silly it was.  I was enjoying the process. Soon a year passed by. I had transformed into this corporate software professional, I couldn’t believe I could be. Today, I complete 1 year and 8 months at Oracle and continue to look forward to the enriching experience I will have here. Truly one of the Top Companies in the World. Mayuri Khinvasara

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• Shelving &ndash; What is it &ndash; and more importantly, can it help me?

  - by Chris Skardon

  Since we shifted to TFS we’ve had the ability to perform what is known as ‘shelving’. Shelving (whilst not a wholly new topic in the world of SCC) is new to us, and didn’t exist in our previous SCC solution – SVN. Soo… what is it? What? Shelving is a way to check-in but not check-in your code. By shelving you submit a copy of your ‘pending changes’ to the SCC server, (which maintains a list of the shelvesets) and once that is done you can either continue working, or undo your changes, safe in the knowledge that a backup copy exists on the server. You can unshelve your code at any time and get back to the state you were when you shelved. Yer, that is great but why not just check it in?? Shelvesets don’t have to build. The shelveset you put in there could be entirely broken, or it might solve every bug in the system – shelves aren’t continuously integrated so you can shelve anything. Hmmmm… What else? Shelving allows us to do some pretty cool stuff that beforehand was quite frankly a pain. For instance – Gated Check-ins are implemented via the shelving mechanism, when code is checked-in, what you’re actually doing is shelving it, the Build Controller will build the shelveset with the original code and if it succeeds, the code will be committed, if it fails – well – it’s only you that has to fix the code :) Other nice features are things like the ability to share code you are working on… For example, if I was having trouble with a particular piece of code, I could shelve it, and then you (yes you) could then get that shelveset and check out the problem for yourself, and if you fix it?? Well – you could check-it in! Nice, but day-to-day shizzle? Let’s say you’ve been working on your project and your project manager comes over to you and says: “Hey, errr, bad times, there is an urgent bug we need you to fix, it needs to go out now!” (also for this to play out – we’ll need to assume you’re currently working in the 'release’ branch for another bug fix (maybe))… You could undo all your current changes (obviously you’ll probably backup your code using zip or something I imagine) fix the bug, then re-copy your backup over the top, or you could shelve and unshelve. Perhaps some other uses will awaken the shelver in you… :) Before each checkin – if you shelve, you no longer need to worry (if indeed you do) about resolving conflicts and mysteriously losing your code… Going home at night? Not checking in straight away? Why not shelve, this way – should the worst come to the worst and your local pc gives up, you can just get the shelveset onto another machine and be up and running in literally seconds minutes…

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• Fan not detected by lm-sensors

  - by OrangeTux

  My fan is blowing hard, while my cpu temperature is 32 degrees I tried a lot of things to control my fan. Changed grub file GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi= pci=noacpi" _ GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=\"Linux\"" Ran sensors-detect : To load everything that is needed, add this to /etc/modules: #----cut here---- # Chip drivers coretemp #----cut here---- If you have some drivers built into your kernel, the list above will contain too many modules. Skip the appropriate ones! Do you want to add these lines automatically to /etc/modules? (yes/NO) Unloading i2c-dev... OK Unloading i2c-i801... OK Unloading cpuid... OK Ran sensors: acpitz-virtual-0 Adapter: Virtual device temp1: +34.0°C (crit = +90.0°C) coretemp-isa-0000 Adapter: ISA adapter Core 0: +34.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +90.0°C) Core 2: +34.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +90.0°C) Ran sudo start module-init-tools and sudo start module-init-tools module-init-tools stop/waiting As you can see my fan isn't detected. Running fancontrol gives me this: Loading configuration from /etc/fancontrol ... Error: Can't read configuration file Can you help me, please? I cannot use my laptop now in class. Thanks in advance. My system 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 02) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 02) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset HECI Controller (rev 06) 00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 05) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a5) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 05) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Manhattan [Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series] 01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Manhattan HDMI Audio [Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series] 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 02) 03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01) 7f:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 05) 7f:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 05) 7f:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 05) 7f:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 05) 7f:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 05) 7f:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 05)

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• Why is it necessary to install EFI/rEFInd/UEFI/... on a SD Card since the Macbook Pro seems to already have it?

  - by user170794

  Dear askubuntu members, I own a Macbook Pro (late 2009) and when I boot the laptop and hold the alt key meanwhile, there is a EFI screen, so EFI is installed on... the firmware? I had a few troubles with my hard disk, so I had to change it, but I haven't installed OS X, I have only installed Ubuntu and still the EFI screen is there which is surely a good thing. As the new hard disk is making troubles again, I am using Puppy Linux, booting from a CD each time, which is unconfortable. So I am trying to have Ubuntu installed on a SD Card. After having spent many months on the internet grabing informations anywhere I can and trying several things, I applied this method: http://www.weihermueller.de/mac/ I succeeded in making one SD Card recognizable by the EFI of my laptop (holding alt key @ boot), but nothing installed on it yet as I fear to lose the recognizable-by-EFI part. I haven't succeded in producing the same result on another SD Card. I have a bootable USB key of Ubuntu (yipee) which works like a live CD, made with the help of Universal Linux UDF Creator, found there: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/ on which I have put Ubuntu 13.04 64bit, retrieved from the official deposits. Eventhough I have to add the "nouveau.noaccel=1" option to the grub command line launching Linux, it works (yipee again) properly as a live cd. When installing Ubuntu I come across the "where do I wanna put Ubuntu" window, I partition another SD Card in: the EFI part (40MB) the Linux part (15GB< <16GB) The installation works fine and finishes with no problem. But at the reboot, the SD Card where Linux is installed is not recognized by the EFI, the icons are : the CD (Puppy Linux), the USB stick (from Linux UDF Creator), the hard drive (the formerly-working Ubuntu 12) but no fourth icon of the SD Card whatsoever. As the title of this thread suggests, I am wondering: why there is a need for EFI to be installed on the SD Card since EFI seems to be on my laptop anyway? why EFI has to be on a different partition than the Linux's one? How do both parts communicate? why the EFI part on the SD Card made with the help of the live-USB key isn't recognized? on the EFI partition, there is a folder named "EFI" which contains another folder named "ubuntu" which contains a file named "grubx64.efi", why is there a thing called grub? Is it the Linux's grub where one can chose either to boot, to boot in safe mode, etc.? Thank you for your patience, looking forward for any kind of answer, Julien

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• The Numbers of Customer Experience

  - by Christie Flanagan

  This week, we’ll be continuing our conversations about Customer Experience (CX) on the Oracle WebCenter blog.  While we all know that customer experience is critically important for acquiring new customers and engendering long term brand loyalty, I thought we could kick this week off by taking a look at the numbers of customer experience.   I’m sure you’ll agree that nothing quite puts things into perspective like numbers and figures. A whopping 86% of consumers say that they are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.  But many companies are failing to step up to the challenge.  And when companies fail deliver on customer experience expectations, they leave money on the table. A huge percentage of customers, 89%, begin doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. Breaking up isn’t hard to do and today’s empowered customers have no qualms about taking their business elsewhere when their expectations for customer experience are not met. Over a quarter of consumers, 26%, posted a negative comment on a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter following a poor customer experience. Today, individual customer service failures have the ability to easily snowball.  An unsatisfied customer has the ability to easily share their rancor with their entire social network and chip away at your brand’s reputation. A large number of consumers, 79%,  who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored.  Companies ignore customer complaints at their own peril.  And unsatisfied customers, when handled effectively, have the potential to become advocates for your brand.  Of the 21% of consumers who did get responses to complaints, more than half had positive reactions to the same company about which they were previously complaining. Half of consumers will give a brand only a week to respond to a question before they stop doing business with them.  The clock is ticking when customers have questions about your brand and a week is an eternity in the realm of customer experience.  The source for these stats is the 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report, which explores the relationship between consumers and brands.  The report is based on a survey commissioned by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in 2012) and conducted by Harris Interactive. If you’re interested in seeing more facts and figures about customer experience, download the full report.

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• Strategy for clients to retrieve real-time log from HTTP server

  - by Jerry Dodge

  I have an HTTP Server Service application which has its own logging mechanism. It's written in Delphi. I would like to provide a way for multiple clients to connect to this service and get a real-time update of the log. The log in the service moves rather fast, there's a lot of things to log. There may be up to 50 messages within 1 second at times. The existing log which is already implemented is not saved, it's only kept in the memory of the server service - where I will need to distribute it to any client which needs it. Once all clients have a log message, it should be deleted. I intend to use HTTP to "ask" the server for the log, and respond with an XML packet. The connections are not keep-alive. The only problem is, the server should only send the client those log records which it needs, not everything. I have no way of the server pushing the log to the clients in real-time, so each client needs to repeatedly ask the server for the latest log records. This HTTP Server is very lightweight, and there is no session management. There isn't even any type of authentication. The only way I see is for a client to register its self on the server, and whenever a log is issued on the server, it creates a copy of the log for each client, where each client has a log queue (string list). However, suppose there are 100 clients connected and expecting to receive this log. That means the server must create 100 copies of each log, add this log to the end of each client log queue, and wait for the client to request it. At that point, when the server replies with the XML log, it should flush (delete) whatever's in the queue. I'm worried however that this could cause memory issues. Each client log queue might get 100 log messages before the client requests the latest logs. How should I go about doing this in the fastest way possible without hindering the performance of the server? I'm trying to avoid having to create a copy of each log for each client.

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• Purple Cows, Copernicus, and Shampoo – Lessons in Customer Experience

  - by Christina McKeon

  What makes a great customer experience? And, why should you or your organization care? These are the questions that set the stage for the Oracle Customer Experience Summit, which kicked off yesterday in San Francisco. Day 1: The first day was filled with demos and insights from customer experience experts and Oracle customers sharing what it takes to deliver great customer experiences. Author Seth Godin delivered an entertaining presentation that included an in-depth exploration of the always-connected, always-sharing experience revolution that we are witnessing and yes, talked about the purple cow. It turns out that customer experience is your way to be the purple cow. Before everyone headed out to see Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon at the Oracle customer appreciation event, the day wrapped up with a discussion around building a customer-centric culture. Where do you start? Whom does it involve? What are some pitfalls to avoid? Day 2: The second day addressed the details behind all the questions brought up at the end of Day 1. Before you start on a customer experience initiative, Paul Hagen noted that you must understand you will forge a path similar to Copernicus. You will be proposing ideas and approaches that challenge current thinking in your organization. Just as Copernicus' heliocentric theory started a scientific revolution, your customer-centric efforts will start an experience revolution. If you think customer experience is like a traditional marketing approach, think again. It’s not about controlling your customers and leading them where you want them to go. It might sound like heresy to some, but your customers are already in control, whether or not your company realizes and acknowledges it. And, to survive and thrive, you'll have to focus on customers by thinking outside-in and working towards a brand that is better and more authentic. We learned how Vail Resorts takes this customer-centric approach. Employees must experience the mountain themselves and understand the experience from the guest’s standpoint. This has created a culture where employees do things for guests that are not expected. We also learned a valuable lesson in designing and innovating customer-centered experiences from Kerry Bodine. First you make the thing, and then you make the thing right. In this case, the thing is customer experience. Getting customer experience right means iterative prototyping and testing of your ideas. This is where shampoo comes in—think lather, rinse, repeat. Be prepared to keep repeating until the customer experience is right. Many of these sessions will be posted to YouTube in the coming weeks so be sure to subscribe to our CX channel.

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• Media server...serving files...............for a limited time only

  - by Craig

  I’m new to Ubuntu and am seeking help with a media server I have built. I have a couple of HTPCs in my house running XBMC. I wanted to build one for the family room working double duty as a HTPC, and media server to share movies, TV shows, music, etc. on my Windows network. So using some spare old parts I had lying around I decided to go CRAZY and build my first Linux box. I used Ubuntu because it seemed to be the most user friendly variant, especially for people that are new to Linux. I had to do a few things to get the media files shared properly on my network: Made sure my two media drives auto-mount every time I boot the computer by editing the “fstab” file – “sudo nano /etc/fstab” Installed Samba - “sudo apt-get install samba” Set a password for Samba - “sudo smbpasswd –a USERNAME” Edited the Samba configuration file to make sure the computer was in my networks workgroup – “sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf” In the file manager (not sure if that’s the right name for it), I right-clicked my media folders and set the sharing and permissions. The sharing was done without guest access, and permissions were set to; Owner, Group, and Others - Access: Create and Delete Files. Adjusted the Power Management settings to never put the system into sleep mode. I checked to see if I had access to the files from a Windows 7 machine and I did (Woo Hoo!). But when I tried to play any of my video files from the Windows machine (using VLC media player), they would only play for about 2-5 minutes and then they would stop with an error message saying that the file could not be accessed (Booo...). I tried playing some files through XBMC running in Windows and they worked for a bit longer (about 10-15mins), but they also stopped playing. I installed the Linux version of XBMC on the server and played the files locally with no problems. It doesn’t seem to be an issue with the files themselves, it seems to be a sharing problem on my network. So my question to the Ubuntu gurus out there is: Did I miss adding/editing something in the Samba configuration file? Did I use the right method to share my media files (file manager vs. using the terminal)? Is it possible for the computer to still go to sleep without the screen going black (does that even make sense?). Are there any special settings in Ubuntu that I should be using since this computer as a media server (is there a media server mode?...!...?). Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

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