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• Challenge: Learn One New Thing Today

  - by BuckWoody

  Most of us know that there's a lot to learn. I'm teaching a class this morning, and even on the subject where I'm the "expert" (that word always makes me nervous!) I still have a lot to learn. To learn, sometimes I take a class, read a book, or carve out a large chunk of time so that I can fully grasp the subject. But since I've been working, I really don't have a lot of opportunities to do that. Like you, I'm really busy. So what I've been able to learn is to take just a few moments each day and learn something new about SQL Server. I thought I would share that process here. First, I started with an outline of the product. You can use Books Online, a college class syllabus, a training class outline, or a comprehensive book table of contents. Then I checked off the things I felt I knew a little about. Sure, I'll come back around to those, but I want to be as efficient as I can. I then trolled various checklists to see what I needed to know about the subjects I didn't have checked off. From there (I'm doing all this in a notepad, and then later in OneNote when that came out) I developed a block of text for that subject. Every time I ran across a book, article, web site or recording on that topic I wrote that reference down. Later I went back and quickly looked over those resources and tried to figure out how I could parcel it out - 10 minutes for this one, a free seminar (like the one I'm teaching today - ironic) takes 4 hours, a web site takes an hour to grok, that sort of thing.  Then all I did was figure out how much time each day I'll give to training. Sure, it literally may be ten minutes, but it adds up. One final thing - as I used something I learned, I came back and made notes in that topic. You learn to play the piano not just from a book, but by playing the piano, after all. If you don't use what you learn, you'll lose it. So if you're interested in getting better at SQL Server, and you're willing to do a little work, try out this method. Leave a note here for others to encourage them.  Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Using ext4 in VMware machine

  First of all, using a journaling filesystems like NTFS, ext4, XFS, or JFS (not to name all of them) is a very good idea and nowadays unthinkable not to do. Linux offers a good variety of different option as journaling filesystem for your system. Since years I am using SGI's XFS and I am pretty confident with stability, performance and liability of the system. In earlier years I had to struggle with incompatibilities between XFS and the boot loader. Using an ext2 formatted /boot solved this issue. But, wow, that is ages ago! Lately, I had to setup a fresh Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) system for a change of our internal groupware / messaging system. Therefore, I fired up a new virtual machine with almost standard configuration in VMware Server and run through our network-based PXE boot and installation procedure. At a certain step in this process, Ubuntu asks you about the partitioning of your hard drive(s). Honestly, I have to say that only out of curiousity I sticked to the "default" suggestion and gave my faith and trust into the Ubuntu installation routine... Resulting to have an ext4 based root mount point ( / ). The rest of the installation went on without further concerns or worries. Note:I really can't remember why I chose to go away from my favourite... Well, it should turn out to be the wrong decision after all. Ok, let's continue the story about ext4 in a VMware based virtual machine. After some hours installing additional packages and configuring the new system using LDAP for general authentication and login, I had an "out-of-the-box" usable enterprise messaging system based on Zarafa 6.40 Community Edition inclusive proper SSL-based Webaccess interface and Z-Push extension for ActiveSync with my Nokia mobile. Straightforward and pretty nice for the time spent on the setup. Having priority on other tasks I let the system just running and didn't pay any further attention at all. Until I run into an upgrade of "Mail for Exchange" on Symbian OS. My mobile did not bother me at all with the upgrade and everything went smooth, but trying to re-establish the ActiveSync connection to the Zarafa messaging system resulted in a frustating situation. So, I shifted my focus back to the Linux system and I was amazed to figure out that the root had been remounted readonly due to hard drive failures or at least ext4 reported errors. Firing up Google only confirmed my concerns and it seems that using ext4 for VMware based virtual machines does not look like a stable and reliable candidate to me. You might consider reading those external resources: ext4 fs corruption under VMWare Server 2.01Bug #389555 - ext4 filesystem corruption Well, I learned my lesson and ext{2|3|4} based filesystems are not going to be used on any of my Linux systems or customer installations in the future. Addendum: I did not try this setup in other virtualization environments like VirtualBox, qemu, kvm, Xen, etc.

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• Enterprise 2.0 Conference recap

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  We had a great week in Boston attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. We learned a lot from industry thought leaders and had a chance to speak with a lot of different folks about social and collaboration technologies and trends.  Of all the conferences we attend, this one definitely has a different “feel”. It seems like the attendees are younger, they dress hipper, and there is much more livelihood all around. A few of the sessions addressed this, as the "millenials" or Generation Y, have been using Web 2.0 tools, such as Facebook and Twitter for many years now, and as they are entering the workforce they are expecting similar tools to be a part of how they accomplish their job tasks. It's important to note that it's not just Millenials that are expecting these technologies, as workers young and old alike benefit from social and collaboration tools. I’ve highlighted some of the takeaways I had, as well as a reaction from John Brunswick, who helped us in staffing the booth. Giving your employees choices is empowering, but if there is no course of action or plan, it’s useless. There is no such thing as collaboration without a goal. In a few years, social will become a feature in the “platform”, a component of collaboration. Social will become part of the norm – just like email is expected when you start a job at a company, Social will be too. 1 in 3 of your employees are using tools your company doesn't sanction (how scary is this?!) 25,000 pieces of content are created every second. Context is king. Social tools help us navigate and manage the complexities we face with information overload. We need to design products for the way people work. Consumerization of the enterprise - bringing social tools like Facebook to the organization. From John Brunswick: "The conference had solid attendance, standing as a testament to organizations making a concerted effort to understand what social tools exist to support their businesses.  Many vendors were narrowly focused and people we pleasantly surprised at the breadth of capability provided by Oracle WebCenter.  People seemed to feel that it just made sense that social technology provides the most benefit when presented in the context of key business data." Did you attend the conference? What were some of your key takeaways?

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• Web.NET: A Brief Retrospective

  - by Chris Massey

  It’s been several weeks since I had the pleasure of visiting Milan, and joining 150 enthusiastic web developers for a day of server-side frameworks and JavaScript. Lucky for me, I keep good notes. Overall the day went smoothly, with some solid logistics and very attentiveorganizerss, and an impressively diverse audience drawn by the fact that the event was ambitiously run in English. This was great in that it drew a truly pan-European audience (11 countries were represented on the day, and at least 1 visa had to be procured to get someone there!) It was trouble because, in some cases, it pushed speakers outside their comfort zone. Thankfully, despite a slightly rocky start, every session I attended was very well presented, and the consensus on the day was that the speakers were excellent. While I felt that a lot of the speakers had more that they wanted to cover, the topics were well-chosen, every room constantly had a stack of people in it, and all the sessions were pleasingly focused on code & demos. For all that the language barriers occasionally made networking a little challenging,organizerss Simone & Ugo nailed the logistics. Registration was slick, lunch was plentiful, and session management was great. The very generous Rui was kind enough to showcase a short video about Glimpse in his session, which seemed to go down well (Although the audio in the rooms was a little under-powered). Because I think you might need a mid-week chuckle, here are some out-takes.: And lets not forget the Hackathon. The idea was what having just learned about a stack of interesting technologies, attendees could spend an evening (fuelled by pizza and some good Github beer) hacking something together using them. Unfortunately, after a (great)10-hour day, and in many cases facing international travel in the morning, many of the attendees headed straight for their hotel rooms. This idea could work so beautifully, and I’m excited to see how it pans out in 2013. On top of the slick sessions, getting to finally meet Ugo and Simone in the flesh as a pleasure, as was the serendipitous introduction to the most excellent Rui. They’re all fantastic guys who are passionate about the web, and I’m looking forward to finding opportunities to work with them. Simone & Ugo put on a great event, and I’m excited to see what they do next year.

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• Big Data – Buzz Words: What is NewSQL – Day 10 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the relational database. In this article we will take a quick look at the what is NewSQL. What is NewSQL? NewSQL stands for new scalable and high performance SQL Database vendors. The products sold by NewSQL vendors are horizontally scalable. NewSQL is not kind of databases but it is about vendors who supports emerging data products with relational database properties (like ACID, Transaction etc.) along with high performance. Products from NewSQL vendors usually follow in memory data for speedy access as well are available immediate scalability. NewSQL term was coined by 451 groups analyst Matthew Aslett in this particular blog post. On the definition of NewSQL, Aslett writes: “NewSQL” is our shorthand for the various new scalable/high performance SQL database vendors. We have previously referred to these products as ‘ScalableSQL‘ to differentiate them from the incumbent relational database products. Since this implies horizontal scalability, which is not necessarily a feature of all the products, we adopted the term ‘NewSQL’ in the new report. And to clarify, like NoSQL, NewSQL is not to be taken too literally: the new thing about the NewSQL vendors is the vendor, not the SQL. In other words - NewSQL incorporates the concepts and principles of Structured Query Language (SQL) and NoSQL languages. It combines reliability of SQL with the speed and performance of NoSQL. Categories of NewSQL There are three major categories of the NewSQL New Architecture – In this framework each node owns a subset of the data and queries are split into smaller query to sent to nodes to process the data. E.g. NuoDB, Clustrix, VoltDB MySQL Engines – Highly Optimized storage engine for SQL with the interface of MySQ Lare the example of such category. E.g. InnoDB, Akiban Transparent Sharding – This system automatically split database across multiple nodes. E.g. Scalearc  Summary In simple words – NewSQL is kind of database following relational database principals and provides scalability like NoSQL. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about the Role of Cloud Computing in Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-09-21

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Real Architects of Los Angeles: OTN Architect Day in LA - Oct 25 No gossip. No drama. No hair pulling. Just a full day of technical sessions and peer interaction focused on using Oracle technologies in today's cloud and SOA architectures. The event is free, but seating is limited, so register now. Thursday October 25, 2012. 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Why IT is a profession in 'flux' | ZDNet I usuallly don't post two items from the same person in one day, but this post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick deals with some critical issues affecting those in IT. As McKendrick puts it: "IT professionals are under considerable pressure to deliver more value to the business, versus being good at coding and testing and deploying and integrating." Cloud, automation drive new growth in SOA governance market | ZDNet "SOA governance tools and processes learned over the past decade are now underpinning cloud projects as they scale across enterprises," reports Joe McKendrick. But there remains a lack of understanding about SOA Governance. For a broader discussion of the importance of IT governance check out the lastest OTN Archbeat Podcast: By Any Other Name: Governance and Architecture How I Simplified the Installation of Oracle Database on Oracle Linux 6 Michele Casey's update of Ginny Henningsen's original article. This version shows how to simplify the installation of Oracle Database 11g on Oracle Linux 6 by installing the oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall RPM package. Fault Handling Slides and Q&A | Ronald van Luttikhuizen Oracle ACE Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen shares the slides and a Q&A transcript from a presentation he and fellow ACE Director Guido Schmutz gave at the recent Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne preview event organized by AMIS Technology. BPM ADF Task forms. Checking whether the current user is in a BPM Swimlane | Christopher Karl Chan "The tricky part here is that the ADF Task Details Form is in fact part of a separate J2EE application to the main workspace," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Christopher Karl Chan. "So if you try to use Java or Expression Language to get the logged in user you will only find anonymous and none of the BPM Roles you will be expecting. So what to do?" Don't guess—read the post and find out. Thought for the Day "The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture. " — Tadao Ando Source: BrainyQuote

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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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• Is the Joel Test really a good gauging tool?

  - by henry

  I just learned about the Joel Test. I have been computer programmer for 22 years, but somehow I never heard about it before. I consider my best job so far to be this small investment managing company with 30 employees and only three people in the IT department. I am no longer with them, but I had being working there for five years – my longest streak with any given company. To my surprise they scored extremely poor on the Joel Test. The only two questions I would answer “yes” are #4: Do you have a bug database? And #9: Do you use the best tools money can buy? Everything else is either “sometimes” or straight “no”. Here is what I liked about the company however: Good pay. They bragged about it to my face, and I bragged about it to their face, so it was almost like a family environment. I always knew the big picture. When writing code to solve a particular problem there were no ambiguity about the business nature of that problem. Even though we did not always had written specifications we could ask business users a question anytime, often yelling it across the floor. I could even talk to executives any time I felt like doing it: no appointment necessary. Immediate feedback. Once we implement a solution and make business users happy they immediately let us know that, we (programmers) become heroes of the moment. No red tape. I could always buy any tools I deemed necessary, and design solutions the way my professional judgment dictates. Flexibility. If I had mid-day dental appointment that is near my house rather than near the office, I would send email to the company: "FYI: I work from home today". As long as one of three IT guys was on the floor (to help traders in case their monitors go dark) they did not care where two others were. So the question thus becomes: How valuable is the Joel Test? Why bother with it?

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• The Social Business Thought Leaders

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Enterprise Gamification, Big Data, Social Support, Total Customer Experience, Pull Organizations, Social Business. Are these purely the latest buzzwords to enter the market or significant trends that companies should keep an eye on? Oracle recently sponsored and presented at the 5th Social Business Forum, one of the largest European events on the use of social media as a business tool and accelerator. Through the participation of dozens of practitioners, experts and customer success stories, the conference demonstrated how a perfect storm of technology, management and cultural change is pushing peer-to-peer conversations deep into business processes. It is clear that Social Business is serving as a new propellant of agility, efficiency and reactivity. According to Deloitte and MIT what we have learned to call Social Business is considered important in the next 3 years by 86% of managers (see Social Business: What Are Companies Really Doing?, MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte). McKinsey further estimates the value that can be unlocked in terms of knowledge-worker productivity, consumer insights, product co-creation, improved sales, marketing and customer service up to $1300B (See The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, McKinsey Global Institute). This impacts any industry, with the strongest effects seen in Media & Entertainment, Technology, Telcos and Education. For those not able to attend the Social Business Forum and also for the many friends that joined us in Milan, we decided to keep the conversation going by extracting some golden nuggets from the perspective of five of the most well-known thought-leaders in this space. Starting this week you will have the chance to view: John Hagel (Author of the Power of Pull and Co-Chairman Center for the Edge at Deloitte & Touche) Christian Finn (Senior Director, WebCenter Evangelist at Oracle) Steve Denning (Author of The Radical Management and Independent Management Consulting Professional) Esteban Kolsky (Principal & Founder at ThinkJar) Ray Wang (Principal Analyst & CEO at Constellation Research) Stay tuned to hear: How pull organizations are addressing some of the deepest challenges impacting the market. How to integrate social into existing infrastructure and processes. How to apply radical management to become more agile and profitable. About the importance of gamification as an engagement lever. The first interview with John Hagel will be published tomorrow. Don't miss it and the entire series!

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• Get to Know a Candidate (2 of 25): Merlin Miller&ndash;American Third Position Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Meet Merlin Miller of American Third Position Party In addition to being American Third Position Party nominee, Miller is an independent film maker.  He is a graduate of West Point and has commanded two units in the United States Army.  After military service he worked as an industrial engineering manager for Michelin Tire.  He learned about film making by earning an MFA from the University of Southern California. Mr. Miller is on the ballot in: CO, NJ, and TN. In the 2000’s, Miller began taking an increasingly paleoconservative political stance.  He claimed that Hollywood “ surreptitiously seeks to destroy our European-American heritage and our Christian-based traditional values, and replace them with values that debase these traditional values and elevate minorities as paragons of virtue and wisdom....Today’s motion pictures, in concert with other forms of mass media entertainment, are the greatest enemies to the well-being of our progeny and the future of our country.” Miller states that he "doesn't like" interracial marriage; however, he does not support outlawing interracial marriage, either.  Miller has denied being anti-Semitic, instead claiming that he merely opposes "favoritism" granted to Jews in the film industry.  He also opposes illegal immigration and what he refers to as "wide open borders" in the United States. The American Third Position Party (A3P) is a third positionist American political party which promotes white supremacy.  It was officially launched in January 2010 (although in November 2009 it filed papers to get on a ballot in California) partially to channel the right-wing populist resentment engendered by the financial crisis of 2007–2010 and the policies of the Obama administration and defines its principal mission as representing the political interests of white Americans. The party takes a strong stand against immigration and globalization, and strongly supports an anti-interventionist foreign policy. Although the party does not support labor unions, they do strongly support the labor rights of the American working class on a platform of placing American workers first over illegal immigrant workers and banning of overseas corporate relocation of American industry and technology Third Position or Third Alternative refers to a revolutionary nationalist political position that emphasizes its opposition to both communism and capitalism. Advocates of Third Position politics typically present themselves as "beyond left and right", instead claiming to syncretize radical ideas from both ends of the political spectrum Learn more about Merlin Miller and American Third Position Party on Wikipedia.

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• Using machine learning to aim mirrors in a solar array?

  - by Buttons840

  I've been thinking about solar collectors where several independent mirrors to focus the light on a solar collector, similar to the following design from Energy Innovations. Because there will be flaws in the assembly of this solar array, I am proceeding with the following assumptions (or lack thereof): The software knows the "position" of each mirror, but doesn't know how this position relates to the real world or to other mirrors. This will account for poor mirror calibration or other environmental factors which may effect one mirror but not the others. If a mirror moves 10 units in one direction, and then 10 units in the opposite direction, it will end up where it originally started. I would like to use machine learning to position the mirrors correctly and focus the light on the collector. I expect I would approach this as an optimization problem, optimizing the mirror positions to maximize the heat inside the collector and the power output. The problem is finding a small target in a noisy high-dimensional space (considering each mirror has 2 axis of rotation). Some of the problems I anticipate are: cloudy days, even if you stumble upon the perfect mirror alignment, it might be cloudy at the time noisy sensor data the sun is a moving target, it moves along a path, and follows a different path every day - although you could calculate the exact position of the sun at any time, you wouldn't know how that position relates to your mirrors My question isn't about the solar array, but possible machine learning techniques that would help in this "small target in a noisy high dimensional-space" problem. I mentioned the solar array because it was the catalyst for this question and a good example. What machine learning techniques can find such a small target in a noisy high-dimensional space? EDIT: A few additional thoughts: Yes, you can calculate the suns position in the real world, but you don't know how the mirrors position is related to the real world (unless you've learned it somehow). You might know the suns azimuth is 220 degrees, and the suns elevation is 60 degrees, and you might know a mirror is at position (-20, 42); now tell me, is that mirror correctly aligned with the sun? You don't know. Lets assume you have some very sophisticated heat measurements, and you know "with this heat level, there must be 2 mirrors correctly aligned". Now the question is, which two mirrors (out of 25 or more) are correctly aligned? One solution I considered was to approximate the correct "alignment function" using a neural network which would take the suns azimuth and elevation as input and output a large array with 2 values for each mirror which correspond to the 2 axis of each mirror. I'm not sure what the best training method is though.

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• In a multidisciplinary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

  - by spade78

  I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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• Introducing Agile development after traditional project inception

  - by Riggy

  About a year and a half ago, I entered a workplace that claimed to do Agile development. What I learned was that this place has adopted several agile practices (such as daily standups, sprint plannings and sprint reviews) but none of the principles (just in time / just good enough mentality, exposing failure early, rich communication). I've now been tasked with making the team more agile and I've been assured that I have complete buy-in from the devs and the business team. As a pilot program, they've given me a project that just completed 15 months of requirements gathering, has a 110 page Analysis & Design document (to be considered as "written in stone"), and where I have no access to the end users (only to the committee made up of the users' managers who won't actually be using the product). I started small, giving them a list of expected deliverables for the first 5 sprints (leaving the future sprints undefined), a list of goals for the first sprint, and I dissected the A&D doc to get enough user stories to meet the first sprint's goals. Since then, they've asked why we don't have all the requirements for all the sprints, why I haven't started working on stuff for the third sprint (which they consider more important but is based off of the deliverables of the first 2 sprints) and are pressing for even more documentation that my entire IT team considers busy-work or un-related to us (such as writing the user manual up-front, documenting all the data fields from all the sprints up front, and more "up-front" work). This has been pretty rough for me as a new project manager, but there are improvements I have effectively implemented such as scrumban for story management, pair programming, and having the business give us customer acceptance tests up front (as part of the requirements documentation). So my questions are: What can I do to more effectively introduce change to a resistant business? Are there other practices that I can introduce on the IT side to help show the business the benefits of agile? The burden of documentation is strangling us - the business still sees it as a risk management strategy instead of as a risk. What can we do to alleviate their documentation concerns and demands (specifically the quantity of documentation and their need for all of it up front)? We are in a separate building from our business, about 3 blocks away and they refuse to have their people on the project co-habitate b/c that person "won't be able to work on their other projects while they're at our building." They expect us to always go over there and to bundle our questions so that we can ask them all at once and not waste that person's time with "constant interruptions." What can we do to get richer communication from them? Any additional advice would also be appreciated. Thanks!

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• TechCast Live: "Java and Oracle, One Year Later" Replay Now Available

  - by Justin Kestelyn

  Earlier this week I had the opportunity to chat with Ajay Patel, Oracle's VP leading the Java Evangelist team, about "the state of the union" wrt Oracle and Java. Take a look: And here are some choice quotes, some paraphrased, as helpfully transcribed by Java evangelist Terrence Barr: "One key thing we have learned ... Java is not just a platform, it is also an ecosystem, and you can't have an ecosystem without a community." "The objectives, strategically [for Java at Oracle] have been pretty clear: How do we drive adoption, how do we build a larger, stronger developer community, how do we really make the platform much more competitive." "It's about transparency, involvement. IBM, RedHat, Apple have all agreed to working with us to make OpenJDK the best platform for open source development ... it is a sign that the community has been waiting to move the Java platform forward." "It's not just about Oracle anymore, it's about Java, the technology, the community, the developer base, and how we work with them to move the innovation forward." "Java is strategic to Oracle, and the community is strategic for Java to be successful ... it is critical to our business." On JavaFX 2.0: "... is coming to beta soon, with a release planned in second half [of 2011] ... will give you a new, high-performance graphics engine, the new API for JavaFX ... you will see a very strong, relevant platform for levering rich media platforms." On the JDK and SE: "... aggressively moving forward, JDK 7 is now code complete ... looking good for getting JDK 7 out by summer as we promised. Started work on JDK 8, Jigsaw and Lambda are moving along nicely, on track for JDK 8 release next year ... good progress." On Java EE and Glassfish: "... Very excited to have Glassfish 3.1 released, with clustering and management capabilities ... working with the JCP to shortly submit a number of JSRs for Java EE 7 ... You'll see Java EE 7 becoming the platform for cloud-based development." "You will see Oracle continue to step up to this role of Java steward, making sure that the language, the technology, the platform ... is competitive, relevant, and widely adopted." Making progress!

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• Tell me a Story

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  I recently had a friend ask me to review his resume.  He is a very experienced DBA with excellent skills.  If I had an opening I would have hired him myself.  But not because of the resume.  I know his skill set and skill levels, but there is no way his standard resume can convey that.  A bare bones list of job titles and skills does not set you apart from your competition, nor does it convey whether you have junior or senior level skills and experience.  The solution is to not use the standard format. Tell me a story.  I want to know what you were responsible for.  Describe a tough project and how you saved time/money/personnel on that project.  Link your work activity to business value.  Drop some technical bits in there since we do work in a technical field, but show me what you can do to add value to my business well above what I would pay you.  That will get my attention. The resume exists for one primary and one secondary reason.  The primary reason is to get the interview.  A Resume won’t get you a job, so don’t expect it to.  The secondary reason is to give you and the interviewer a starting point for conversations.  If I can say “Tell me more about when….” and reference an item from your resume, then that is great for both of us.  Of course, you better be able to tell me more, both from the technical and the business side, at least if I am hiring a senior or higher level position.  As for the junior DBAs, go ahead and tell your story too.  Don’t worry about how simple or basic your projects or solutions seem.  It is how you solved the problem and what you learned that I am looking for.  If you learn rapidly and think like a DBA, I can work with that, regardless of you current skill level.

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• Tech Cast Live - Java and Oracle, One Year Later - February 15th 10AM PST

  - by Cassandra Clark

  Join us for a special live conversation with Ajay Patel, Vice President of Product Development for Application Grid Products and Justin Kestelyn, Director of the Oracle Technology Network. Justin and Ajay will discuss the changes that have come to Java and Oracle since the Sun acquisition, just over a year ago. This live broadcast conversation will include discussion on: - Highlights, challenges and what we learned over the past year - The Future of Java and its importance to Oracle and the community - Oracle's Application Grid product portfolio today Watch Live Event February 15th Watch Archived TechCast Lives You will also have the chance to submit questions to the speakers live on the show, for real-time feedback by using #techcastlive. If your question is read on air we will send you a Free I am the Future of Java t-shirt* *Promotion Details After you have submitted your question and it is read on the live TechCast held February 15th your shirt should arrive in two to four weeks while supplies last. No purchase, payments, or fees are required to receive the gift. Limit one thank you gift per person, and the offer is available only while supplies last. Oracle reserves the right to modify or terminate this offer at any time, for any reason. This offer is not available to Oracle employees or residents of countries subject to U.S. embargo (including Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria). Due to Federal Government regulations, this offer is not available to Federal Government customers. Those residing in India or Brazil will be given a substitute gift as we can not ship t-shirts to your country. You are responsible for complying with your employer's policies regarding acceptance of promotional items, and for government laws, regulations and agency policies, if you are a government employee you will not be able to participate. Must be 18 years of age or older. Void where prohibited. Neither Oracle nor any third party assisting Oracle with this offer is responsible for any problems, errors, delays, or technical malfunction related to or impacting this offer. Oracle respects your right to privacy and your information will not be distributed or used for any other purpose. For more information on Oracle's privacy policy, please review our http://www.oracle.com/html/privacy-policy.html. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

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• iscsitarget suddenly broken after upgrade of the 12.04 Hardware Stack

  - by RapidWebs

  After an upgrade to the latest Hardware Stack using Ubuntu 12.04, my iscsi service is not longer operational. The error from the service is such: FATAL: Module iscsi_trgt not found. I have learned that I might need to reinstall the package iscsitarget-dkms. this package builds a driver or something during installation, from source. During this build process, it reports and error, and now has also broke my package manager. Here is the relevant output: Building module: cleaning build area.... make KERNELRELEASE=3.13.0-34-generic -C /lib/modules/3.13.0-34-generic/build M=/var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build........(bad exit status: 2) Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 3.13.0-34-generic (i686) Consult /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/make.log for more information. Errors were encountered while processing: iscsitarget E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) and this is the information provided by make.log: or iscsitarget-1.4.20.2 for kernel 3.13.0-34-generic (i686) Fri Aug 15 22:07:15 EDT 2014 make: Entering directory /usr/src/linux-headers-3.13.0-34-generic LD /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/built-in.o LD /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel/built-in.o CC [M] /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel/tio.o CC [M] /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel/iscsi.o CC [M] /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel/nthread.o CC [M] /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel/wthread.o /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel/wthread.c: In function ‘worker_thread’: /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel/wthread.c:73:28: error: void value not ignored as it ought to be /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel/wthread.c:74:3: error: implicit declaration of function ‘get_io_context’ [-Werror=implicit-function-declaration] /var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel/wthread.c:74:21: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast [enabled by default] cc1: some warnings being treated as errors make[2]: * [/var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel/wthread.o] Error 1 make[1]: * [/var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build/kernel] Error 2 make: * [module/var/lib/dkms/iscsitarget/1.4.20.2/build] Error 2 make: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.13.0-34-generic' I am at a loss on how to resolve this issue. any help would be appreciated!

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• How can a solo programmer become a good team player?

  - by Nick

  I've been programming (obsessively) since I was 12. I am fairly knowledgeable across the spectrum of languages out there, from assembly, to C++, to Javascript, to Haskell, Lisp, and Qi. But all of my projects have been by myself. I got my degree in chemical engineering, not CS or computer engineering, but for the first time this fall I'll be working on a large programming project with other people, and I have no clue how to prepare. I've been using Windows all of my life, but this project is going to be very unix-y, so I purchased a Mac recently in the hopes of familiarizing myself with the environment. I was fortunate to participate in a hackathon with some friends this past year -- both CS majors -- and excitingly enough, we won. But I realized as I worked with them that their workflow was very different from mine. They used Git for version control. I had never used it at the time, but I've since learned all that I can about it. They also used a lot of frameworks and libraries. I had to learn what Rails was pretty much overnight for the hackathon (on the other hand, they didn't know what lexical scoping or closures were). All of our code worked well, but they didn't understand mine, and I didn't understand theirs. I hear references to things that real programmers do on a daily basis -- unit testing, code reviews, but I only have the vaguest sense of what these are. I normally don't have many bugs in my little projects, so I have never needed a bug tracking system or tests for them. And the last thing is that it takes me a long time to understand other people's code. Variable naming conventions (that vary with each new language) are difficult (__mzkwpSomRidicAbbrev), and I find the loose coupling difficult. That's not to say I don't loosely couple things -- I think I'm quite good at it for my own work, but when I download something like the Linux kernel or the Chromium source code to look at it, I spend hours trying to figure out how all of these oddly named directories and files connect. It's a programming sin to reinvent the wheel, but I often find it's just quicker to write up the functionality myself than to spend hours dissecting some library. Obviously, people who do this for a living don't have these problems, and I'll need to get to that point myself. Question: What are some steps that I can take to begin "integrating" with everyone else? Thanks!

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• Configuring Full-Text Search for pdf and docx files

  - by Lukasz Kurylo

  I think in may I was creating a little filters module based on Full Text-Search. I have configured my dev machine, the same for two testing servers – in our company for internal testing before we deployed it to client, and then on the testing client server. Until last week this build  was still on the testing server and finally we got feedback that we can deploy it on the production one. I only say that, I lost half a day because I had not correctly remembered what I was doing to configure the FTS on the previous servers and I had no notes for that. I foolishly believed in my memory. Lesson learned.   For future reference a bunch of steps to configure the FTS for searching in *.pdf and *.docx files (and by the way in other Office files like *.xlsx).   1. From the page (link) download and install the *.pdf IFilter for FTS. 2. To the PATH global system variable add path to the catalog, where you installed the plugin. Default for this version is: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms\bin 3. From the page (link) download a FilterPackx64.exe and install it. 4. Now from SSMS execute the following procedures: -sp_fulltext_service 'load_os_resources',1 -sp_fulltext_service 'verify_signature', 0 5. Restart the server 6. Now we must check if the plugins are visible: -select document_type, path from sys.fulltext_document_types where document_type = '.pdf' -select document_type, path from sys.fulltext_document_types where document_type = '.docx' 7. If we see a result, then we can assume that everything is ok*. 8. Right now we can create a catalog for FTS and indexes on appropriate columns.     *I lost a lot of hours to find out, why the plugin for the *.pdf files wasn’t indexed any file in the database, but in the sys.fulltext_document_types table there was available a line for this plugin. After the deeper investigation I found that the *.pdf files actually were indexed. At least the EOF sign was added to the indexes and nothing more for each file. In the end the problem was that, I forgot to add the /bin in the path to the plugin in PATH variable..

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• In a multidisciplicary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

  - by spade78

  I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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• Phone number in meta description bad or good for local rankings NAP

  - by bybe

  Once again I'm at it with increasing people's local rankings and I've learnt so much about local rankings in the past 2 weeks it feels like my brain is gonna pop anyway, question is fairly simple for someone who engages in local rankings and I appreciate the question may be a little guess work but isn't SEO mostly guessing anyway? From what I've read and learned that Google works of a system called nap for local rankings (With many other factors but this question is purely based on NAP). For people who care about local rankings NAP stands for Name of Business / Address of Business / Phone Number for Business. Now what what I've read you don't need the whole NAP to be on one website, a P or just a N can help towards your local rankings. It's believed that NAP rewards more than just P and N for example but knowing Google they might have a diversity checker which is my concern what your get to in a moment. Now of course sites weight differently where your business is posted, it's certainly going to be more credible if your NAP details are on your national phone book than say a blog site, so taking in this consideration too. Pure Guess (Not apart of the question but none the less makes a good read on my belief). Now my guess work would make me believe that the formula would look something like (N)+(A)+(P)x(T) So (N)name would be 1 or 0 to indicate present or not So (A)dress would be 1 or 0 to indicate present or not So (P)hone would be 1 or 0 to indicate present or not So (T)rust would be 1-100 to indicate level of trust So a phone number appearing on youtube might look something like 0+0+1x95= 95 and a NAP appearing on your national phone book might look something like 1+1+1x100= 300 Please note that I'm not saying this is the sole factor and I'm sure its way more complex that this with things like other factors on the page, off the page (Reviews, Links, Clicks) and so on but its still a contributor). The Question My question is fairly simple and I'd imagine hard to impossible to have an actual definite answer to this but maybe someone has seen official wording else where on this, is it bad to include address or phone number in the Meta Description? The reason I ask is that one of my competitors has these elements in the meta descriptions and their local rankings are absolutely superb, the problem I have with this is scrap bot sites like 'Similar Too' 'Seo Rankings' and 1,000's of the other scrap box networks that scrap site and then make urls with your site information are mostly limited to your meta description what this means that your phone number, address and sometimes even your company name if the domain is exact will appear as AP, and even NAP on thousands of websites. So, is it a bad strategy to include phone number and address in meta description, everything I read into would suggest its good of course with the downside of maybe lowering quality of description for click thoughts but top rankings would increase this 10 folds anyhow..

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• Learn programming backwards, or "so I failed the FizzBuzz test. Now what?"

  - by moraleida

  A Little Background I'm 28 today, and I've never had any formal training in software development, but I do have two higher education degrees equivalent to a B.A in Public Relations and an Executive MBA focused on Project Management. I've worked on those fields for about 6 years total an then, 2,5 years ago I quit/lost my job and decided to shift directions. After a month thinking things through I decided to start freelancing developing small websites in WordPress. I self-learned my way into it and today I can say I run a humble but successful career developing themes and plugins from scratch for my clients - mostly agencies outsourcing some of their dev work for medium/large websites. But sometimes I just feel that not having studied enough math, or not having a formal understanding of things really holds me behind when I have to compete or work with more experienced developers. I'm constantly looking for ways to learn more but I seem to lack the basics. Unfortunately, spending 4 more years in Computer Science is not an option right now, so I'm trying to learn all I can from books and online resources. This method is never going to have NASA employ me but I really don't care right now. My goal is to first pass the bar and to be able to call myself a real programmer. I'm currently spending my spare time studying Java For Programmers (to get a hold on a language everyone says is difficult/demanding), reading excerpts of Code Complete (to get hold of best practices) and also Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (to grasp the inner workings of computers). TL;DR So, my current situation is this: I'm basically capable of writing any complete system in PHP (with the help of Google and a few books), integrating Ajax, SQL and whatnot, and maybe a little slower than an experienced dev would expect due to all the research involved. But I was stranded yesterday trying to figure out (not Google) a solution for the FizzBuzz test because I didn't have the if($n1 % $n2 == 0) method modulus operator memorized. What would you suggest as a good way to solve this dilemma? What subjects/books should I study that would get me solving problems faster and maybe more "in a programmers way"? EDIT - Seems that there was some confusion about what did I not know to solve FizzBuzz. Maybe I didn't express myself right: I knew the steps needed to solve the problem. What I didn't memorize was the modulus operator. The problem was in transposing basic math to the program, not in knowing basic math. I took the test for fun, after reading about it on Coding Horror. I just decided it was a good base-comparison line between me and formally-trained devs. I just used this as an example of how not having dealt with math in a computer environment before makes me lose time looking up basic things like modulus operators to be able to solve simple problems.

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• Editing /.config/dconf/user

  - by user86322

  I am having a problem with Gnome3 (actually, I have it set to fallback mode, or Gnome 2). I have two displays and I need an X screen (I used nvidia-xconfig and nvidia-settings to do this) for each screen. However, every time I either restart X or log in, Gnome seems to be adding the objects values under /gnome/gnome-panel/layouts (ex. first time I set the two separate X screens I had clock, then log out/in, there was clock and clock1 under objects, and then log out/in there were three, clock, clock1, clock2,.......log out/in, ............30 times....clock, clock1, clock2, ......clock 42.....!! The same thing goes for top-panels, menu-bars, etc.) After a while, I found out I could remove all those using the dconf-editor, going to /gnome/gnome-panel/layouts, removing all the repetitions under fields objects-id-list and top-id-list and leaving one value of each object. This is not a solution but at least allow me to keep using Linux without so much problem. However, the problem persists every time I restart X or log in. I now finally learned about "dconf" and where the user profile settings are located (~/.config/dconf/user) and one can use "dconf" to see the keys. In my case, I need to change/remove many keys (all those clocksX, workspace-X, menu-bar-X, etc., where goes from 1 to 42 and still counting) so it's really tedious and boring to be changing one by one using "dconf write". So I found "dconf dump", which actually allow me to dump everything into a .txt file and edit the file really quick (i.e, "dconf dump / >> dump_user.txt"). The problems? Two of them: How do I "load" back "dump_user.txt" I edited into the user profile? (I read somewhere there was a "dconf reload" but reload doesn't exist as a command under "dconf") How do I stop Gnome from keep adding more objects to my desktop environment every time I log in/restart X? NOTE: The problem doesn't occur when I set the displays to use TwinView feature (i.e., the desktop is extended/shared by both displays). However, for my case I need two separate X's. Any help/suggestion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

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• How to become a good team player?

  - by Nick

  I've been programming (obsessively) since I was 12. I am fairly knowledgeable across the spectrum of languages out there, from assembly, to C++, to Javascript, to Haskell, Lisp, and Qi. But all of my projects have been by myself. I got my degree in chemical engineering, not CS or computer engineering, but for the first time this fall I'll be working on a large programming project with other people, and I have no clue how to prepare. I've been using Windows all of my life, but this project is going to be very unix-y, so I purchased a Mac recently in the hopes of familiarizing myself with the environment. I was fortunate to participate in a hackathon with some friends this past year -- both CS majors -- and excitingly enough, we won. But I realized as I worked with them that their workflow was very different from mine. They used Git for version control. I had never used it at the time, but I've since learned all that I can about it. They also used a lot of frameworks and libraries. I had to learn what Rails was pretty much overnight for the hackathon (on the other hand, they didn't know what lexical scoping or closures were). All of our code worked well, but they didn't understand mine, and I didn't understand theirs. I hear references to things that real programmers do on a daily basis -- unit testing, code reviews, but I only have the vaguest sense of what these are. I normally don't have many bugs in my little projects, so I have never needed a bug tracking system or tests for them. And the last thing is that it takes me a long time to understand other people's code. Variable naming conventions (that vary with each new language) are difficult (__mzkwpSomRidicAbbrev), and I find the loose coupling difficult. That's not to say I don't loosely couple things -- I think I'm quite good at it for my own work, but when I download something like the Linux kernel or the Chromium source code to look at it, I spend hours trying to figure out how all of these oddly named directories and files connect. It's a programming sin to reinvent the wheel, but I often find it's just quicker to write up the functionality myself than to spend hours dissecting some library. Obviously, people who do this for a living don't have these problems, and I'll need to get to that point myself. Question: What are some steps that I can take to begin "integrating" with everyone else? Thanks!

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• TechEd 2012: Recap

  - by Tim Murphy

  TechEd this week was a great experience and I wanted to wrap it up with a summary post. First let me say a thank you to John and Jeff from GWB for supplying power, connectivity and a place to work in between sessions.  The blogging hub was a great experience in itself.  Getting to talk with other bloggers and other conference goers turned into a series of interesting conversations.  And where else can you almost end up in the day 1 highlights video? The sessions at TechEd were a mixed bag of value.  The Keynotes rocked, both figuratively and literally and most of the sessions that I want to were a good experience and had gems of information to take away.  There were a few exceptions though.  A couple of the sessions turned out to be sales jobs.  Nothing turns me off more than that (there will be some really honest comments on those surveys). TechEd re-enforced for me that much of the value is not in the sessions, but in the networking opportunities. I got to talk with several Microsoft team members and MVPs as well as some of the vendor representative for companies like Inrule and ComponentOne. Also got to expand both my local and extended community with discussions at meal times and waiting for sessions to start. I think this is one of the benefits that a lot of people don’t take advantage of in these conferences that should be a bigger part of the advertising. Exposure to a wide variety of topics, many of which I had not been able to make time for up to this point was envigorating.  The list of topic includes: Office 365, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8, Metro, Azure.  I can’t wait to get back to work and dig into these subjects in more depth. The one complaint that I had and heard from other attendees was that there weren’t enough sessions that were actually about development.  I realize that TechEd started as an event for IT Pros, but there needs to be more value for the Devs.  It all went by too fast and it will take a couple more days to digest the material, but the batteries are and I’m ready to leverage what I’ve learned.  Hopefully we will do it again next year. del.icio.us Tags: TechEd,TechEd 2012

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