Search Results

Search found 16560 results on 663 pages for 'high tech resources'.

Page 591/663 | < Previous Page | 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 598  | Next Page >

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

  - by MHarrison

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

  Read the article

• How should I plan the inheritance structure for my game?

  - by Eric Thoma

  I am trying to write a platform shooter in C++ with a really good class structure for robustness. The game itself is secondary; it is the learning process of writing it that is primary. I am implementing an inheritance tree for all of the objects in my game, but I find myself unsure on some decisions. One specific issue that it bugging me is this: I have an Actor that is simply defined as anything in the game world. Under Actor is Character. Both of these classes are abstract. Under Character is the Philosopher, who is the main character that the user commands. Also under Character is NPC, which uses an AI module with stock routines for friendly, enemy and (maybe) neutral alignments. So under NPC I want to have three subclasses: FriendlyNPC, EnemyNPC and NeutralNPC. These classes are not abstract, and will often be subclassed in order to make different types of NPC's, like Engineer, Scientist and the most evil Programmer. Still, if I want to implement a generic NPC named Kevin, it would nice to be able to put him in without making a new class for him. I could just instantiate a FriendlyNPC and pass some values for the AI machine and for the dialogue; that would be ideal. But what if Kevin is the one benevolent Programmer in the whole world? Now we must make a class for him (but what should it be called?). Now we have a character that should inherit from Programmer (as Kevin has all the same abilities but just uses the friendly AI functions) but also should inherit from FriendlyNPC. Programmer and FriendlyNPC branched away from each other on the inheritance tree, so inheriting from both of them would have conflicts, because some of the same functions have been implemented in different ways on the two of them. 1) Is there a better way to order these classes to avoid these conflicts? Having three subclasses; Friendly, Enemy and Neutral; from each type of NPC; Engineer, Scientist, and Programmer; would amount to a huge number of classes. I would share specific implementation details, but I am writing the game slowly, piece by piece, and so I haven't implemented past Character yet. 2) Is there a place where I can learn these programming paradigms? I am already trying to take advantage of some good design patterns, like MVC architecture and Mediator objects. The whole point of this project is to write something in good style. It is difficult to tell what should become a subclass and what should become a state (i.e. Friendly boolean v. Friendly class). Having many states slows down code with if statements and makes classes long and unwieldy. On the other hand, having a class for everything isn't practical. 3) Are there good rules of thumb or resources to learn more about this? 4) Finally, where does templating come in to this? How should I coordinate templates into my class structure? I have never actually taken advantage of templating honestly, but I hear that it increases modularity, which means good code.

  Read the article

• Passed: Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3

  First off: Mission accomplished successfully. And it was fun! Using the resources listed in my previous article about Learning Content, I'd like to thank Microsoft Technical Evangelists Jeremy Foster and Michael Palermo for their excellent jump start videos on Channel 9, and the various authors at Pluralsight. Local Prometric testing centre Back in November I chose a local testing centre which was the easiest to access from my office despite the horrible traffic you might experience here on the island. Actually, it was not the closest one. But due to their website, their awards as Microsoft Learning Center, and my general curiosity about the premises, I gave FRCI my priority. Boy, how should I regret this decision this morning... The official Prometric exam guide asks any attendee to show up at least 30 minutes prior to the scheduled time of the test. Well, this should have been the easier part but unfortunately due to heavier traffic than usual I arrived only 20 minutes before time. Not too bad but more to come. The building called 'le Hub' is nicely renovated and provides the right environment for an IT group of companies like FRCI. I think they have currently 5 independent IT departments over there. Even the handling at the reception was straight forward, welcoming and at my ease. But then... first shock: "We don't have any exam registration for today." - Hm, that's nice... Here's my mail confirmation from Prometric. First attack successfully handled and the lady went off again to check their records. Next shock: A couple of minutes later, another guy tries to explain me that "the staff of the testing centre is already on vacation and the centre is officially closed." - Are you kidding me? Here's the official confirmation by Prometric, and I don't find it funny that I take a day off today only to hear this kind of blubbering nonsense. I thought that I'll be on the safe side choosing a company with a good reputation here on the island. Another 40 (!) minutes later, they finally come back to the waiting area with a pre-filled form about the test appointment. And finally, after an hour of waiting, discussing, restarting the testing PC, and lots of talk, I am allowed to sit down and take the exam. Exam details Well, you know the rules. Signing an NDA doesn't allow me to provide you any details about the questions or topics that have been covered. Please check out the official exam description, and you're on the right way. Sorry, guys... ;-) The result "Congratulations! You have passed this Microsoft Certification exam." - In general, I have to admit that the parts on HTML5 and CSS3 were the easiest after all, and that I have to get myself a little bit more familiar with certain Javascript features like class definitions, inheritance and data security. Anyway, exam passed - who cares about the details? Next goal Of course, the journey to Microsoft Certifications continues and my next goal is to pass exams 70-481 - Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps using HTML5 and JavaScript and 70-482 - Advanced Windows Store App Development using HTML5 and JavaScript. This would allow me to achieve the certification of MCSD: Windows Store Apps using HTML5. I guess, during 2013 I'll be busy with various learning and teaching lessons.

  Read the article

• Caching factory design

  - by max

  I have a factory class XFactory that creates objects of class X. Instances of X are very large, so the main purpose of the factory is to cache them, as transparently to the client code as possible. Objects of class X are immutable, so the following code seems reasonable: # module xfactory.py import x class XFactory: _registry = {} def get_x(self, arg1, arg2, use_cache = True): if use_cache: hash_id = hash((arg1, arg2)) if hash_id in _registry: return _registry[hash_id] obj = x.X(arg1, arg2) _registry[hash_id] = obj return obj # module x.py class X: # ... Is it a good pattern? (I know it's not the actual Factory Pattern.) Is there anything I should change? Now, I find that sometimes I want to cache X objects to disk. I'll use pickle for that purpose, and store as values in the _registry the filenames of the pickled objects instead of references to the objects. Of course, _registry itself would have to be stored persistently (perhaps in a pickle file of its own, in a text file, in a database, or simply by giving pickle files the filenames that contain hash_id). Except now the validity of the cached object depends not only on the parameters passed to get_x(), but also on the version of the code that created these objects. Strictly speaking, even a memory-cached object could become invalid if someone modifies x.py or any of its dependencies, and reloads it while the program is running. So far I ignored this danger since it seems unlikely for my application. But I certainly cannot ignore it when my objects are cached to persistent storage. What can I do? I suppose I could make the hash_id more robust by calculating hash of a tuple that contains arguments arg1 and arg2, as well as the filename and last modified date for x.py and every module and data file that it (recursively) depends on. To help delete cache files that won't ever be useful again, I'd add to the _registry the unhashed representation of the modified dates for each record. But even this solution isn't 100% safe since theoretically someone might load a module dynamically, and I wouldn't know about it from statically analyzing the source code. If I go all out and assume every file in the project is a dependency, the mechanism will still break if some module grabs data from an external website, etc.). In addition, the frequency of changes in x.py and its dependencies is quite high, leading to heavy cache invalidation. Thus, I figured I might as well give up some safety, and only invalidate the cache only when there is an obvious mismatch. This means that class X would have a class-level cache validation identifier that should be changed whenever the developer believes a change happened that should invalidate the cache. (With multiple developers, a separate invalidation identifier is required for each.) This identifier is hashed along with arg1 and arg2 and becomes part of the hash keys stored in _registry. Since developers may forget to update the validation identifier or not realize that they invalidated existing cache, it would seem better to add another validation mechanism: class X can have a method that returns all the known "traits" of X. For instance, if X is a table, I might add the names of all the columns. The hash calculation will include the traits as well. I can write this code, but I am afraid that I'm missing something important; and I'm also wondering if perhaps there's a framework or package that can do all of this stuff already. Ideally, I'd like to combine in-memory and disk-based caching.

  Read the article

• Head in the Clouds

  - by Tony Davis

  We're just past the second anniversary of the launch of Windows Azure. A couple of years' experience with Azure in the industry has provided some obvious success stories, but has deflated some of the initial marketing hyperbole. As a general principle, Azure seems to work well in providing a Service-Oriented Architecture for services in enterprises that suffer wide fluctuations in demand. Instead of being obliged to provide hardware sufficient for the occasional peaks in demand, one can hire capacity only when it is needed, and the cost of hosting an application is no longer a capital cost. It enables companies to avoid having to scale out hardware for peak periods only to see it underused for the rest of the time. A customer-facing application such as a concert ticketing system, which suffers high demand in short, predictable bursts of activity, is a great example of an application that would work well in Azure. However, moving existing applications to Azure isn't something to be done on impulse. Unless your application is .NET-based, and consists of 'stateless' components that communicate via queues, you are probably in for a lot of redevelopment work. It makes most sense for IT departments who are already deep in this .NET mindset, and who also want 'grown-up' methods of staging, testing, and deployment. Azure fits well with this culture and offers, as a bonus, good Visual Studio integration. The most-commonly stated barrier to porting these applications to Azure is the problem of reconciling the use of the cloud with legislation for data privacy and security. Putting databases in the cloud is a sticky issue for many and impossible for some due to compliance and security issues, the need for direct control over data, and so on. In the face of feedback from the early adopters of Azure, Microsoft has broadened the architectural choices to cater for a wide range of requirements. As well as SQL Azure Database (SAD) and Azure storage, the unstructured 'BLOB and Entity-Attribute-Value' NoSQL storage alternative (which equates more closely with folders and files than a database), Windows Azure offers a wide range of storage options including use of services such as oData: developers who are programming for Windows Azure can simply choose the one most appropriate for their needs. Secondly, and crucially, the Windows Azure architecture allows you the freedom to produce hybrid applications, where only those parts that need cloud-based hosting are deployed to Azure, whereas those parts that must unavoidably be hosted in a corporate datacenter can stay there. By using a hybrid architecture, it will seldom, if ever, be necessary to move an entire application to the cloud, along with personal and financial data. For example that we could port to Azure only put those parts of our ticketing application that capture and process tickets orders. Once an order is captured, the financial side can be processed in our own data center. In short, Windows Azure seems to be a very effective way of providing services that are subject to wide but predictable fluctuations in demand. Have you come to the same conclusions, or do you think I've got it wrong? If you've had experience with Azure, would you recommend it? It would be great to hear from you. Cheers, Tony.

  Read the article

• Design Pattern for building a Budget

  - by Scott

  So I've looked at the Builder Pattern, Abstract Interfaces, other design patterns, etc. - and I think I'm over thinking the simplicity behind what I'm trying to do, so I'm asking you guys for some help with either recommending a design pattern I should use, or an architecture style I'm not familiar with that fits my task. So I have one model that represents a Budget in my code. At a high level, it looks like this: public class Budget { public int Id { get; set; } public List<MonthlySummary> Months { get; set; } public float SavingsPriority { get; set; } public float DebtPriority { get; set; } public List<Savings> SavingsCollection { get; set; } public UserProjectionParameters UserProjectionParameters { get; set; } public List<Debt> DebtCollection { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public List<Expense> Expenses { get; set; } public List<Income> IncomeCollection { get; set; } public bool AutoSave { get; set; } public decimal AutoSaveAmount { get; set; } public FundType AutoSaveType { get; set; } public decimal TotalExcess { get; set; } public decimal AccountMinimum { get; set; } } To go into more detail about some of the properties here shouldn't be necessary, but if you have any questions about those I will fill more out for you guys. Now, I'm trying to create code that builds one of these things based on a set of BudgetBuildParameters that the user will create and supply. There are going to be multiple types of these parameters. For example, on the sites homepage, there will be an example section where you can quickly see what your numbers look like, so they would be a much simpler set of SampleBudgetBuildParameters then say after a user registers and wants to create a fully filled out Budget using much more information in the DebtBudgetBuildParameters. Now a lot of these builds are going to be using similar code for certain tasks, but might want to also check the status of a users DebtCollection when formulating a monthly spending report, where as a Budget that only focuses on savings might not want to. I'd like to reduce code duplication (obviously) as much as possible, but in my head, every way I can think to do this would require using a base BudgetBuilderFactory to return the correct builder to the caller, and then creating say a SimpleBudgetBuilder that inherits from a BudgetBuilder, and put all duplicate code in the BudgetBuilder, and let the SimpleBudgetBuilder handle it's own cases. Problem is, a lot of the unique cases are unique to 2/4 builders, so there will be duplicate code somewhere in there obviously if I did that. Can anyone think of a better way to either explain a solution to this that may or may not be similar to mine, or a completely different pattern or way of thinking here? I really appreciate it.

  Read the article

• Paper-free Customer Engagement

  - by Michael Snow

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Appropriate repost from our friends at the AIIM blog: Digital Landfill -- John Mancini, supporting our mission of enabling customer engagement through better technology choices.  ---------- My wife didn't even give me a card for #wpfd - and they say husbands are bad at remembering anniversaries Well, today is the third World Paper Free Day.  I just got off the Tweet Jam, and there was a host of ideas for getting rid of -- or at least reducing -- paper. When we first started talking about "paper-free" most of the reasons raised to pursue this direction were "green" reasons.  I'm glad to see that the thinking has moved on to questions about how getting rid of paper and digitizing processes helps improve customer engagement.  And the bottom line.  And process responsiveness.  Not that the "green" reasons have gone away, but it's nice to see a maturation in the BUSINESS reasons to get rid of paper. Our World Paper Free Handbook (do not, do not, do not print it!) looks at how less paper in the workplace delivers significant benefits. Key findings show eliminating paper from processes can improve the responsiveness of customer service by 300 percent. Removing paper from business processes and moving content to PCs and tablets has the added advantage of helping companies adopt mobile-enable processes and eliminate elapsed time, lost forms, poor data and re-keying. To effectively mobile-enable processes and reduce reliance on paper, data should be captured as close to the point of origination as possible, which makes information easily available to whomever needs it, wherever they are, in the shortest time possible. This handbook summarizes the value of automating manual, paper-based processes. It then goes a step beyond to provide actionable steps that will set you on the path to productivity, profitability, and, yes, less paper.  Get your copy today and send the link around to your peers and colleagues.  Here's the link; please share it! http://www.aiim.org/Research-and-Publications/Research/AIIM-White-Papers/WPFD-Revolution-Handbook And don't miss out on the real world discussions about increasing engagement with WebCenter in new webinars being offered over the next couple of weeks:  October 30, 2012:  ResCare Solves Content Lifecycle Challenges with Oracle WebCenter November 1, 2012: WebCenter Content for Applications: Streamline Processes with Oracle WebCenter Content Management for Human Resources Applications Available On-Demand:  Using Oracle WebCenter to Content-Enable Your Business Applications

  Read the article

• Welcome To The Nashorn Blog

  - by jlaskey

  Welcome to all.  Time to break the ice and instantiate The Nashorn Blog.  I hope to contribute routinely, but we are very busy, at this point, preparing for the next development milestone and, of course, getting ready for open source. So, if there are long gaps between postings please forgive. We're just coming back from JavaOne and are stoked by the positive response to all the Nashorn sessions. It was great for the team to have the front and centre slide from Georges Saab early in the keynote. It seems we have support coming from all directions. Most of the session videos are posted. Check out the links. Nashorn: Optimizing JavaScript and Dynamic Language Execution on the JVM. Unfortunately, Marcus - the code generation juggernaut,  got saddled with the first session of the first day. Still, he had a decent turnout. The talk focused on issues relating to optimizations we did to get good performance from the JVM. Much yet to be done but looking good. Nashorn: JavaScript on the JVM. This was the main talk about Nashorn. I delivered the little bit of this and a little bit of that session with an overview, a follow up on the open source announcement, a run through a few of the Nashorn features and some demos. The room was SRO, about 250±. High points: Sam Pullara, from Twitter, came forward to describe how painless it was to get Mustache.js up and running (20x over Rhino), and,  John Ceccarelli, from NetBeans came forward to describe how Nashorn has become an integral part of Netbeans. A healthy Q & A at the end was very encouraging. Meet the Nashorn JavaScript Team. Michel, Attila, Marcus and myself hosted a Q & A. There was only a handful of people in the room (we assume it was because of a conflicting session ;-) .) Most of the questions centred around Node.jar, which leads me to believe, Nashorn + Node.jar is what has the most interest. Akhil, Mr. Node.jar, sitting in the audience, fielded the Node.jar questions. Nashorn, Node, and Java Persistence. Doug Clarke, Akhil and myself, discussed the title topics, followed by a lengthy Q & A (security had to hustle us out.) 80 or so in the room. Lots of questions about Node.jar. It was great to see Doug's use of Nashorn + JPA. Nashorn in action, with such elegance and grace. Putting the Metaobject Protocol to Work: Nashorn’s Java Bindings. Attila discussed how he applied Dynalink to Nashorn. Good turn out for this session as well. I have a feeling that once people discover and embrace this hidden gem, great things will happen for all languages running on the JVM. Finally, there were quite a few JavaOne sessions that focused on non-Java languages and their impact on the JVM. I've always believed that one's tool belt should carry a variety of programming languages, not just for domain/task applicability, but also to enhance your thinking and approaches to problem solving. For the most part, future blog entries will focus on 'how to' in Nashorn, but if you have any suggestions for topics you want discussed, please drop a line.  Cheers. 

  Read the article

• Cloud Computing Pricing - It's like a Hotel

  - by BuckWoody

  I normally don't go into the economics or pricing side of Distributed Computing, but I've had a few friends that have been surprised by a bill lately and I wanted to quickly address at least one aspect of it. Most folks are used to buying software and owning it outright - like buying a car. We pay a lot for the car, and then we use it whenever we want. We think of the "cloud" services as a taxi - we'll just pay for the ride we take an no more. But it's not quite like that. It's actually more like a hotel. When you subscribe to Azure using a free offering like the MSDN subscription, you don't have to pay anything for the service. But when you create an instance of a Web or Compute Role, Storage, that sort of thing, you can think of the idea of checking into a hotel room. You get the key, you pay for the room. For Azure, using bandwidth, CPU and so on is billed just like it states in the Azure Portal. so in effect there is a cost for the service and then a cost to use it, like water or power or any other utility. Where this bit some folks is that they created an instance, played around with it, and then left it running. No one was using it, no one was on - so they thought they wouldn't be charged. But they were. It wasn't much, but it was a surprise.They had the hotel room key, but they weren't in the room, so to speak. To add to their frustration, they had to talk to someone on the phone to cancel the account. I understand the frustration. Although we have all this spelled out in the sign up area, not everyone has the time to read through all that. I get that. So why not make this easier? As an explanation, we bill for that time because the instance is still running, and we have to tie up resources to be available the second you want them, and that costs money. As far as being able to cancel from the portal, that's also something that needs to be clearer. You may not be aware that you can spin up instances using code - and so cancelling from the Portal would allow you to do the same thing. Since a mistake in code could erase all of your instances and the account, we make you call to make sure you're you and you really want to take it down. Not a perfect system by any means, but we'll evolve this as time goes on. For now, I wanted to make sure you're aware of what you should do. By the way, you don't have to cancel your whole account not to be billed. Just delete the instance from the portal and you won't be charged. You don't have to call anyone for that. And just FYI - you can download the SDK for Azure and never even hit the online version at all for learning and playing around. No sign-up, no credit card, PO, nothing like that. In fact, that's how I demo Azure all the time. Everything runs right on your laptop in an emulated environment.  

  Read the article

• Find Knowledge Quickly

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document Get to relevant knowledge on the Oracle products you use in a few quick steps! Customers tell us that the volume of search results returned can make it difficult to find the information they need, especially when similar Oracle products exist. These simple tips show you how to filter, browse, search, and refine your results to get relevant answers faster. Filter first: PowerView is your best friend Powerview is an often ignored feature of My Oracle Support that enables you to control the information displayed on the Dashboard, the Knowledge tab and regions, and the Service Request tab based on one or more parameters. You can define a PowerView to limit information based on product, product line, support ID, platform, hostname, system name and others. Using PowerView allows you to restrict: Your search results to the filters you have set The product list when selecting your products in Search & Browse and when creating service requests   The PowerView menu is at the top of My Oracle Support, near the title You turn PowerView on by clicking PowerView is Off, which is a button. When PowerView is On, and filters are active, clicking the button again will toggle Powerview off. Click the arrow to the right to create new filters, edit filters, remove a filter, or choose from the list of previously created filters. You can create a PowerView in 3 simple steps! Turn PowerView on and select New from the PowerView menu. Select your filter from the Select Filter Type dropdown list and make selections from the other two menus. Hint: While there are many filter options, selecting your product line or your list of products will provide you with an effective filter. Click the plus sign (+) to add more filters. Click the minus sign (-) to remove a filter. Click Create to save and activated the filter(s) You’ll notice that PowerView is On displays along with the active filters. For more information about the PowerView capabilities, click the Learn more about PowerView… menu item or view a short video. Browse & Refine: Access the Best Match Fast For Your Product and Task In the Knowledge Browse region of the Knowledge or Dashboard tabs, pick your product, pick your task, select a version, if applicable. A best match document – a collection of knowledge articles and resources specific to your selections - may display, offering you a one-stop shop. The best match document, called an “information center,” is an aggregate of dynamically updated links to information pertinent to the product, task, and version (if applicable) you chose. These documents are refreshed every 24 hours to ensure that you have the most current information at your fingertips. Note: Not all products have “information centers.” If no information center appears as a best match, click Search to see a list of search results. From the information center, you can access topics from a product overview to security information, as shown in the left menu. Just want to search? That’s easy too! Again, pick your product, pick your task, select a version, if applicable, enter a keyword term, and click Search. Hint: In this example, you’ll notice that PowerView is on and set to PeopleSoft Enterprise. When PowerView is on and you select a product from the Knowledge Base product list, the listed products are limited to the active PowerView filter. (Products you’ve previously picked are also listed at the top of the dropdown list.) Your search results are displayed based on the parameters you entered. It’s that simple! Related Information: My Oracle Support - User Resource Center [ID 873313.1] My Oracle Support Community For more tips on using My Oracle Support, check out these short video training modules. My Oracle Support Speed Video Training [ID 603505.1]

  Read the article

• Comparing Apples and Pairs

  - by Tony Davis

  A recent study, High Costs and Negative Value of Pair Programming, by Capers Jones, pulls no punches in its assessment of the costs-to- benefits ratio of pair programming, two programmers working together, at a single computer, rather than separately. He implies that pair programming is a method rushed into production on a wave of enthusiasm for Agile or Extreme Programming, without any real regard for its effectiveness. Despite admitting that his data represented a far from complete study of the economics of pair programming, his conclusions were stark: it was 2.5 times more expensive, resulted in a 15% drop in productivity, and offered no significant quality benefits. The author provides a more scientific analysis than Jon Evans’ Pair Programming Considered Harmful, but the theme is the same. In terms of upfront-coding costs, pair programming is surely more expensive. The claim of productivity loss is dubious and contested by other studies. The third claim, though, did surprise me. The author’s data suggests that if both the pair and the individual programmers employ static code analysis and testing, then there is no measurable difference in the resulting code quality, in terms of defects per function point. In other words, pair programming incurs a massive extra cost for no tangible return in investment. There were, inevitably, many criticisms of his data and his conclusions, a few of which are persuasive. Firstly, that the driver/observer model of pair programming, on which the study bases its findings, is far from the most effective. For example, many find Ping-Pong pairing, based on use of test-driven development, far more productive. Secondly, that it doesn’t distinguish between “expert” and “novice” pair programmers– that is, independently of other programming skills, how skilled was an individual at pair programming. Thirdly, that his measure of quality is too narrow. This point rings true, certainly at Red Gate, where developers don’t pair program all the time, but use the method in short bursts, while tackling a tricky problem and needing a fresh perspective on the best approach, or more in-depth knowledge in a particular domain. All of them argue that pair programming, and collective code ownership, offers significant rewards, if not in terms of immediate “bug reduction”, then in removing the likelihood of single points of failure, and improving the overall quality and longer-term adaptability/maintainability of the design. There is also a massive learning benefit for both participants. One developer told me how he once worked in the same team over consecutive summers, the first time with no pair programming and the second time pair-programming two-thirds of the time, and described the increased rate of learning the second time as “phenomenal”. There are a great many theories on how we should develop software (Scrum, XP, Lean, etc.), but woefully little scientific research in their effectiveness. For a group that spends so much time crunching other people’s data, I wonder if developers spend enough time crunching data about themselves. Capers Jones’ data may be incomplete, but should cause a pause for thought, especially for any large IT departments, supporting commerce and industry, who are considering pair programming. It certainly shouldn’t discourage teams from exploring new ways of developing software, as long as they also think about how to gather hard data to gauge their effectiveness.

  Read the article

• E-Business Suite : Role of CHUNK_SIZE in Oracle Payroll

  - by Giri Mandalika

  Different batch processes in Oracle Payroll flow have the ability to spawn multiple child processes (or threads) to complete the work in hand. The number of child processes to fork is controlled by the THREADS parameter in APPS.PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS view. THREADS parameter The default value for THREADS parameter is 1, which is fine for a single-processor system but not optimal for the modern multi-core multi-processor systems. Setting the THREADS parameter to a value equal to or less than the total number of [virtual] processors available on the system may improve the performance of payroll processing. However on the down side, since multiple child processes operate against the same set of payroll tables in HR schema, database may experience undesired consequences such as buffer busy waits and index contention, which results in giving up some of the gains achieved by using multiple child processes/threads to process the work. Couple of other action parameters, CHUNK_SIZE and CHUNK_SHUFFLE, help alleviate the database contention. eg., Set a value for THREADS parameter as shown below. CONNECT APPS/APPS_PASSWORD UPDATE PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS SET PARAMETER_VALUE = DESIRED_VALUE WHERE PARAMETER_NAME = 'THREADS'; COMMIT; (I am not aware of any maximum value for THREADS parameter) CHUNK_SIZE parameter The size of each commit unit for the batch process is controlled by the CHUNK_SIZE action parameter. In other words, chunking is the act of splitting the assignment actions into commit groups of desired size represented by the CHUNK_SIZE parameter. The default value is 20, and each thread processes one chunk at a time -- which means each child process inserts or processes 20 assignment actions at any time. When multiple threads are configured, each thread picks up a chunk to process, completes the assignment actions and then picks up another chunk. This is repeated until all the chunks are exhausted. It is possible to use different chunk sizes in different batch processes. During the initial phase of processing, CHUNK_SIZE number of assignment actions are inserted into relevant table(s). When multiple child processes are inserting data at the same time into the same set of tables, as explained earlier, database may experience contention. The default value of 20 is mostly optimal in such a case. Experiment with different values for the initial phase by +/-10 for CHUNK_SIZE parameter and observe the performance impact. A larger value may make sense during the main processing phase. Again experimentation is the key in finding the suitable value for your environment. Start with a large value such as 2000 for the chunk size, then increment or decrement the size by 500 at a time until an optimal value is found. eg., Set a value for CHUNK_SIZE parameter as shown below. CONNECT APPS/APPS_PASSWORD UPDATE PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS SET PARAMETER_VALUE = DESIRED_VALUE WHERE PARAMETER_NAME = 'CHUNK_SIZE'; COMMIT; CHUNK_SIZE action parameter accepts a value that is as low as 1 or as high as 16000. CHUNK SHUFFLE parameter By default, chunks of assignment actions are processed sequentially by all threads - which may not be a good thing especially given that all child processes/threads performing similar actions against the same set of tables almost at the same time. By saying not a good thing, I mean to say that the default behavior leads to contention in the database (in data blocks, for example). It is possible to relieve some of that database contention by randomizing the processing order of chunks of assignment actions. This behavior is controlled by the CHUNK SHUFFLE action parameter. Chunk processing is not randomized unless explicitly configured. eg., Set chunk shuffling as shown below. CONNECT APPS/APPS_PASSWORD UPDATE PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS SET PARAMETER_VALUE = 'Y' WHERE PARAMETER_NAME = 'CHUNK SHUFFLE'; COMMIT; Finally I recommend checking the following document out for additional details and additional pay action tunable parameters that may speed up the processing of Oracle Payroll.     My Oracle Support Doc ID: 226987.1 Oracle 11i & R12 Human Resources (HRMS) & Benefits (BEN) Tuning & System Health Checks Also experiment with different combinations of parameters and values until the right set of action parameters and values are found for your deployment.

  Read the article

• Randomely loosing wireless connexion with Cubuntu 12.04

  - by statquant

  I am presently experiencing random disconnections from my wireless network. It looks like it is more and more frequent (however I have not seen any clear pattern). This is killing me... Here is some information that should help (from ubuntu forums). Thanks for reading Machine : Acer Aspire S3 statquant@euclide:~$ lsb_release -d Description: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS statquant@euclide:~$ uname -mr 3.2.0-33-generic x86_64 statquant@euclide:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart * Running /etc/init.d/networking restart is deprecated because it may not enable again some interfaces * Reconfiguring network interfaces... statquant@euclide:~$ lspci 02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01) statquant@euclide:~$ lsusb Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 001 Device 004: ID 064e:c321 Suyin Corp. Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0bda:0129 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. statquant@euclide:~$ ifconfig wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 74:de:2b:dd:c4:78 inet addr:192.168.1.3 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::76de:2bff:fedd:c478/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:913 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:802 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:873218 (873.2 KB) TX bytes:125826 (125.8 KB) statquant@euclide:~$ iwconfig wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"Bbox-D646D1" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:19:70:80:01:6C Bit Rate=65 Mb/s Tx-Power=16 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:on Link Quality=56/70 Signal level=-54 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:71 Missed beacon:0 statquant@euclide:~$ dmesg | grep "wlan" [ 17.495866] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready [ 17.498950] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready [ 20.072015] wlan0: authenticate with 00:19:70:80:01:6c (try 1) [ 20.269853] wlan0: authenticate with 00:19:70:80:01:6c (try 2) [ 20.272386] wlan0: authenticated [ 20.298682] wlan0: associate with 00:19:70:80:01:6c (try 1) [ 20.302321] wlan0: RX AssocResp from 00:19:70:80:01:6c (capab=0x431 status=0 aid=1) [ 20.302325] wlan0: associated [ 20.307307] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready [ 30.402292] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present statquant@euclide:~$ sudo lshw -C network [sudo] password for statquant: *-network description: Wireless interface product: AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter vendor: Atheros Communications Inc. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 01 serial: 74:de:2b:dd:c4:78 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.2.0-33-generic firmware=N/A ip=192.168.1.3 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn resources: irq:17 memory:c0400000-c047ffff memory:afb00000-afb0ffff statquant@euclide:~$ iwlist scan wlan0 Scan completed : Cell 01 - Address: 00:19:70:80:01:6C Channel:6 Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6) Quality=56/70 Signal level=-54 dBm Encryption key:on ESSID:"Bbox-D646D1" Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s Bit Rates:24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s Mode:Master Extra:tsf=000000125fb152bb Extra: Last beacon: 40020ms ago IE: Unknown: 000B42626F782D443634364431 IE: Unknown: 010882848B960C121824 IE: Unknown: 030106 IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1 Group Cipher : TKIP Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: WPA Version 1 Group Cipher : TKIP Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: Unknown: 2A0100 IE: Unknown: 32043048606C IE: Unknown: DD180050F2020101820003A4000027A4000042435E0062322F00 IE: Unknown: 2D1A4C101BFF00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: 3D1606080800000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: DD0900037F01010000FF7F IE: Unknown: DD0A00037F04010000000000 And... finally, please note that I did the following (after looking for fixes of similar problems), but unfortunately it did not work sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1

  Read the article

• BI&EPM in Focus Sep 2012

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Customers ·       Iluka Resources Improves Business Insight into Mining Operations Through Significantly Faster, Customized Analyses ·       Waikato Regional Council Consolidates Financial Reports up to 10 Times Faster  ·       Lojas Renner Shortens Budget Consolidation from Three Days to 15 Minutes; Improves Data Quality, and Supports Aggressive Expansion Plans  ·       Link to Complete Archive ·       Profit Magazine article featuring General Dynamics: RECONnomics: Integrate. Innovate. Grow (link) ·       Video: Goodhope Asia Unifies Financial Data with Oracle Hyperion (link)   Enterprise Performance Management ·       Oracle University Training on Demand: 1.     Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting 11.1.2 for Financial Management (link) 2.     Oracle Essbase Bootcamp: On Demand (link) 3.     Oracle Hyperion Planning 11.1.2: Create & Manage Applications On Demand (link)   Business Intelligence ·       Oracle University Training on Demand: 1.     Learn How to Create Analyses, Dashboards with OBI 11g (link) 2.     Build Repositories with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g (link) 3.     Oracle BI Publisher 11g Fundamentals (link) 4.     Oracle BI Applications Courses now available for 7.9.6  (link) 5.     Oracle BI 11g: New Features and Exalytics ·       Oracle Business Intelligence Release 11.1.1.6.2BP, updated information: 1.     Oracle BI Mobile at the Speed of Thought 2.     What's New in Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile 3.     What's New in Oracle Business Intelligence Visualizations 4.     Oracle Business Intelligence on Oracle.com 5.     Download the New Release ·       Discover How to Turn Data into Insight: Big Data Guide : Whitepaper and set of short Videos. ·       New OPN Specialisation Exam for OBI 11g Certification . ·       Lastest BIC2g and Exalytics Demonstration VMs for Partners . ·       New Version 2.3 Oracle Endeca Information Discovery and Server now available . ·       New Oracle BI Publisher 11.1.1.6 Trial Edition Now Available .

  Read the article

• Seeking advice on tools and technology for my new game [closed]

  - by k.k. slider

  I'm a C# developer who has been programming a game in my spare time using XNA and Visual Studio. The game's logic is mostly done and I've completed a prototype that has most of the functionality of (what I envision to be) the final game. However, having heard about the uncertain future and (possibly) limited audience for XNA games, I'm looking to switch platforms... but I don't know what technology would best suit my needs. Below are some specifics about my game and what exactly I'm looking for, if you're interested: The game is a 2D turn-based tactical RPG (strategy game) for two players. It is a basic sprite and tile based game with animations and sound. 3D capabilities are not necessary. I'd like to allow players to compete with others online, and have a basic ranking/matchmaking system. I will probably need something that can interact with a server and a database (the game is turn-based and has no RNG, so cheating would be easy to detect even if most computation is done client-side and minimal data is sent to the server). Ideally, I would be able to release an early version of the game and have people give feedback as I develop additional features (similar to Minecraft). I'd prefer to have a way to release periodic updates to the game instead of releasing an absolute final product. To reach the widest possible audience, I'd prefer technology that allows me to release on PC, Android, iOS, and (maybe) Mac. This is a game with simple mouse inputs which can fit on a mobile touch screen. The game should be monetizable. If I find success with this game, then I may consider becoming a full-time indie game developer. I have several other game ideas and have learned quite a bit from my first attempt at game development. My first thought was an F2P/microtransaction model, but I'm open to other suggestions. Language isn't a primary concern of mine, since I have a decent amount of experience using several languages to program large projects. I'm willing to spend money (e.g. on a developer's license), but the more expensive it gets, the more hesitant I am to use it. I've looked into the following solutions... there are a LOT of tools out there... if anyone has experience with any of these and would like to recommend/reject any of them, it would be helpful. C#/.NET (XNA/MonoGame/SDL/SlimDX/Xamarin/ExEn/ANX?) HTML5/JS (AppMobi/PhoneGap/Marmalade/FlashCanvas/Cordova/libRocket?) Python (Pyglet/Pygame/Kivy?) Java (JavaFX/libGDX?) Unity/Construct 2/Cocos2D/NME/Corona/other game creation software? I'd like something that can do 2D and isn't limited by being too high-level. Other languages (Lua/LOVE? Moai?) Thanks for answering this rather long and tedious question...

  Read the article

• ORE graphics using Remote Desktop Protocol

  - by Sherry LaMonica

  Oracle R Enterprise graphics are returned as raster, or bitmap graphics. Raster images consist of tiny squares of color information referred to as pixels that form points of color to create a complete image. Plots that contain raster images render quickly in R and create small, high-quality exported image files in a wide variety of formats. However, it is a known issue that the rendering of raster images can be problematic when creating graphics using a Remote Desktop connection. Raster images do not display in the windows device using Remote Desktop under the default settings. This happens because Remote Desktop restricts the number of colors when connecting to a Windows machine to 16 bits per pixel, and interpolating raster graphics requires many colors, at least 32 bits per pixel.. For example, this simple embedded R image plot will be returned in a raster-based format using a standalone Windows machine:  R> library(ORE) R> ore.connect(user="rquser", sid="orcl", host="localhost", password="rquser", all=TRUE)  R> ore.doEval(function() image(volcano, col=terrain.colors(30))) Here, we first load the ORE packages and connect to the database instance using database login credentials. The ore.doEval function executes the R code within the database embedded R engine and returns the image back to the client R session. Over a Remote Desktop connection under the default settings, this graph will appear blank due to the restricted number of colors. Users who encounter this issue have two options to display ORE graphics over Remote Desktop: either raise Remote Desktop's Color Depth or direct the plot output to an alternate device. Option #1: Raise Remote Desktop Color Depth setting In a Remote Desktop session, all environment variables, including display variables determining Color Depth, are determined by the RCP-Tcp connection settings. For example, users can reduce the Color Depth when connecting over a slow connection. The different settings are 15 bits, 16 bits, 24 bits, or 32 bits per pixel. To raise the Remote Desktop color depth: On the Windows server, launch Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration from the Accessories menu.Under Connections, right click on RDP-Tcp and select Properties.On the Client Settings tab either uncheck LimitMaximum Color Depth or set it to 32 bits per pixel. Click Apply, then OK, log out of the remote session and reconnect.After reconnecting, the Color Depth on the Display tab will be set to 32 bits per pixel.  Raster graphics will now display as expected. For ORE users, the increased color depth results in slightly reduced performance during plot creation, but the graph will be created instead of displaying an empty plot. Option #2: Direct plot output to alternate device Plotting to a non-windows device is a good option if it's not possible to increase Remote Desktop Color Depth, or if performance is degraded when creating the graph. Several device drivers are available for off-screen graphics in R, such as postscript, pdf, and png. On-screen devices include windows, X11 and Cairo. Here we output to the Cairo device to render an on-screen raster graphic.  The grid.raster function in the grid package is analogous to other grid graphical primitives - it draws a raster image within the current plot's grid.  R> options(device = "CairoWin") # use Cairo device for plotting during the session R> library(Cairo) # load Cairo, grid and png libraries  R> library(grid) R> library(png)  R> res <- ore.doEval(function()image(volcano,col=terrain.colors(30))) # create embedded R plot  R> img <- ore.pull(res, graphics = TRUE)$img[[1]] # extract image  R> grid.raster(as.raster(readPNG(img)), interpolate = FALSE) # generate raster graph R> dev.off() # turn off first device   By default, the interpolate argument to grid.raster is TRUE, which means that what is actually drawn by R is a linear interpolation of the pixels in the original image. Setting interpolate to FALSE uses a sample from the pixels in the original image.A list of graphics devices available in R can be found in the Devices help file from the grDevices package: R> help(Devices)

  Read the article

• Getting Help with 'SEPA' Questions

  - by MargaretW

  What is 'SEPA'? The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is a self-regulatory initiative for the European banking industry championed by the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB). The aim of the SEPA initiative is to improve the efficiency of cross border payments and the economies of scale by developing common standards, procedures, and infrastructure. The SEPA territory currently consists of 33 European countries -- the 28 EU states, together with Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway and Switzerland. Part of that infrastructure includes two new SEPA instruments that were introduced in 2008: SEPA Credit Transfer (a Payables transaction in Oracle EBS) SEPA Core Direct Debit (a Receivables transaction in Oracle EBS) A SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) is an outgoing payment instrument for the execution of credit transfers in Euro between customer payment accounts located in SEPA. SEPA Credit Transfers are executed on behalf of an Originator holding a payment account with an Originator Bank in favor of a Beneficiary holding a payment account at a Beneficiary Bank. In R12 of Oracle applications, the current SEPA credit transfer implementation is based on Version 5 of the "SEPA Credit Transfer Scheme Customer-To-Bank Implementation Guidelines" and the "SEPA Credit Transfer Scheme Rulebook" issued by European Payments Council (EPC). These guidelines define the rules to be applied to the UNIFI (ISO20022) XML message standards for the implementation of the SEPA Credit Transfers in the customer-to-bank space. This format is compliant with SEPA Credit Transfer version 6. A SEPA Core Direct Debit (SDD) is an incoming payment instrument used for making domestic and cross-border payments within the 33 countries of SEPA, wherein the debtor (payer) authorizes the creditor (payee) to collect the payment from his bank account. The payment can be a fixed amount like a mortgage payment, or variable amounts such as those of invoices. The "SEPA Core Direct Debit" scheme replaces various country-specific direct debit schemes currently prevailing within the SEPA zone. SDD is based on the ISO20022 XML messaging standards, version 5.0 of the "SEPA Core Direct Debit Scheme Rulebook", and "SEPA Direct Debit Core Scheme Customer-to-Bank Implementation Guidelines". This format is also compliant with SEPA Core Direct Debit version 6. EU Regulation #260/2012 established the technical and business requirements for both instruments in euro. The regulation is referred to as the "SEPA end-date regulation", and also defines the deadlines for the migration to the new SEPA instruments: Euro Member States: February 1, 2014 Non-Euro Member States: October 31, 2016. Oracle and SEPA Within the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications, Oracle Payables (AP), Oracle Receivables (AR), and Oracle Payments (IBY) provide SEPA transaction capabilities for the following releases, as noted: Release 11.5.10.x -  AP & AR Release 12.0.x - AP & AR & IBY Release 12.1.x - AP & AR & IBY Release 12.2.x - AP & AR & IBY Resources To assist our customers in migrating, using, and troubleshooting SEPA functionality, a number of resource documents related to SEPA are available on My Oracle Support (MOS), including: R11i: AP: White Paper - SEPA Credit Transfer V5 support in Oracle Payables, Doc ID 1404743.1R11i: AR: White Paper - SEPA Core Direct Debit v5.0 support in Oracle Receivables, Doc ID 1410159.1R12: IBY: White Paper - SEPA Credit Transfer v5 support in Oracle Payments, Doc ID 1404007.1R12: IBY: White Paper - SEPA Core Direct Debit v5 support in Oracle Payments, Doc ID 1420049.1R11i/R12: AP/AR/IBY: Get Help Setting Up, Using, and Troubleshooting SEPA Payments in Oracle, Doc ID 1594441.2R11i/R12: Single European Payments Area (SEPA) - UPDATES, Doc ID 1541718.1R11i/R12: FAQs for Single European Payments Area (SEPA), Doc ID 791226.1

  Read the article

• Looking for a real-world example illustrating that composition can be superior to inheritance

  - by Job

  I watched a bunch of lectures on Clojure and functional programming by Rich Hickey as well as some of the SICP lectures, and I am sold on many concepts of functional programming. I incorporated some of them into my C# code at a previous job, and luckily it was easy to write C# code in a more functional style. At my new job we use Python and multiple inheritance is all the rage. My co-workers are very smart but they have to produce code fast given the nature of the company. I am learning both the tools and the codebase, but the architecture itself slows me down as well. I have not written the existing class hierarchy (neither would I be able to remember everything about it), and so, when I started adding a fairly small feature, I realized that I had to read a lot of code in the process. At the surface the code is neatly organized and split into small functions/methods and not copy-paste-repetitive, but the flip side of being not repetitive is that there is some magic functionality hidden somewhere in the hierarchy chain that magically glues things together and does work on my behalf, but it is very hard to find and follow. I had to fire up a profiler and run it through several examples and plot the execution graph as well as step through a debugger a few times, search the code for some substring and just read pages at the time. I am pretty sure that once I am done, my resulting code will be short and neatly organized, and yet not very readable. What I write feels declarative, as if I was writing an XML file that drives some other magic engine, except that there is no clear documentation on what the XML should look like and what the engine does except for the existing examples that I can read as well as the source code for the 'engine'. There has got to be a better way. IMO using composition over inheritance can help quite a bit. That way the computation will be linear rather than jumping all over the hierarchy tree. Whenever the functionality does not quite fit into an inheritance model, it will need to be mangled to fit in, or the entire inheritance hierarchy will need to be refactored/rebalanced, sort of like an unbalanced binary tree needs reshuffling from time to time in order to improve the average seek time. As I mentioned before, my co-workers are very smart; they just have been doing things a certain way and probably have an ability to hold a lot of unrelated crap in their head at once. I want to convince them to give composition and functional as opposed to OOP approach a try. To do that, I need to find some very good material. I do not think that a SCIP lecture or one by Rich Hickey will do - I am afraid it will be flagged down as too academic. Then, simple examples of Dog and Frog and AddressBook classes do not really connivence one way or the other - they show how inheritance can be converted to composition but not why it is truly and objectively better. What I am looking for is some real-world example of code that has been written with a lot of inheritance, then hit a wall and re-written in a different style that uses composition. Perhaps there is a blog or a chapter. I am looking for something that can summarize and illustrate the sort of pain that I am going through. I already have been throwing the phrase "composition over inheritance" around, but it was not received as enthusiastically as I had hoped. I do not want to be perceived as a new guy who likes to complain and bash existing code while looking for a perfect approach while not contributing fast enough. At the same time, my gut is convinced that inheritance is often the instrument of evil and I want to show a better way in a near future. Have you stumbled upon any great resources that can help me?

  Read the article

• How can a developer realize the full value of his work [closed]

  - by Jubbat

  I, honestly, don't want to work as a developer in a company anymore after all I have seen. I want to continue developing software, yes, but not in the way I see it all around me. And I'm in London, a city that congregates lots of great developers from the whole world, so it shouldn't be a problem of location. So, what are my concerns? First of all, best case scenario: you are paying managers salary out of yours. You are consistently underpaid by making up for the average manager negative net return plus his whole salary. Typical scenario. I am a reasonably good developer with common sense who cares for readable code with attention to basic principles. I have found way too often, overconfident and arrogant developers with a severe lack of common sense. Personally, I don't want to follow TDD or Agile practices like all the cool kids nowadays. I would read about them, form my own opinion and take what I feel is useful, but don't follow it sheepishly. I want to work with people who understand that you have to design good interfaces, you absolutely have to document your code, that readability is at the top of your priorities. Also people who don't have a cargo cult mentality too. For instance, the same person who asked me about design patterns in a job interview, later told me that something like a List of Map of Vector of Map of Set (in Java) is very readable. Why would someone ask me about design patterns if they can't even grasp encapsulation? These kind of things are the norm. I've seen many examples. I've seen worse than that too, from very well paid senior devs, by the way. Every second that you spend working with people with such lack of common sense and clear thinking, you are effectively losing money by being terribly inefficient with your time. Yet, with all these inefficiencies, the average developer earns a high salary. So I tried working on my own then, although I don't like the idea. I prefer healthy exchange of opinions and ideas and task division. I then did a bit of online freelancing for a while but I think working in a sweatshop might be more enjoyable. Also, I studied computer engineering and you are in an environment in which your client will presume you don't have any formal education because there is no way to prove it. Again, you are undervalued. You could try building a product, yes. But, of course, luck is a big factor. I wonder if there is a way to work in something you can do well, software development, and be valued for the quality of your work and be paid accordingly, and where you and only you get fairly paid for the value you generate. I know that what I have written seems somehow unlikely but I strongly feel this way. Hopefully someone will understand me and has already figured this out. I don't think I'm alone in this kind of feeling.

  Read the article

• What are they buying &ndash; work or value?

  - by Jamie Kurtz

  When was the last time you ordered a pizza like this: “I want the high school kid in the back to do the following… make a big circle with some dough, curl up the edges, then put some sauce on it using a small ladle, then I want him to take a handful of shredded cheese from the metal container and spread it over the circle and sauce, then finally I want the kid to place 36 pieces of pepperoni over the top of the cheese” ?? Probably never. My typical pizza order usually goes more like this: “I want a large pepperoni pizza”. In the world of software development, we try so hard to be all things agile. We: Write lots of unit tests We refactor our code, then refactor it some more We avoid writing lengthy requirements documents We try to keep processes to a minimum, and give developers freedom And we are proud of our constantly shifting focus (i.e. we’re “responding to change”) Yet, after all this, we fail to really lean and capitalize on one of agile’s main differentiators (from the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto): “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” That is, we foolishly commit to delivering tasks instead of features and bug fixes. Like my pizza example above, we fall into the trap of signing contracts that bind us to doing tasks – rather than delivering working software. And the biggest problem here… by far the most troubling outcome… is that we don’t let working software be a major force in all the work we do. When teams manage to ruthlessly focus on the end product, it puts them on the path of true agile. It doesn’t let them accidentally write too much documentation, or spend lots of time and money on processes and fancy tools. It forces early testing that reveals problems in the feature or bug fix. And it forces lots and lots of customer interaction.  Without that focus on the end product as your deliverable… by committing to a list of tasks instead of a list features and bug fixes… you are doomed to NOT be agile. You will end up just doing stuff, spending time on the keyboard, burning time on timesheets. Doing tasks doesn’t force you to minimize documentation. It makes it much harder to respond to change. And it will eventually force you and the client into contract haggling. Because the customer isn’t really paying you to do stuff. He’s ultimately paying for features and bug fixes. And when the customer doesn’t get what they want, responding with “well, look at the contract - we did all the tasks we committed to” doesn’t typically generate referrals or callbacks. In short, if you’re trying to deliver real value to the customer by going agile, you will most certainly fail if all you commit to is a list of things you’re going to do. Give agile what it needs by committing to features and bug fixes – not a list of ToDo items. So the next time you are writing up a contract, remember that the customer should be buying this: Not this:

  Read the article

• New Version 3.1 Endeca Information Discovery Now Available

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Business User Self-Service Data Mash-up Analysis and Discovery integrated with OBI11g and Hadoop Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 3.1 (OEID) is a major release that incorporates significant new self-service discovery capabilities for business users, including agile data mashup, extended support for unstructured analytics, and an even tighter integration with Oracle BI.  · Self-Service Data Mashup and Discovery Dashboards: business users can combine information from multiple sources, including their own up-loaded spreadsheets, to conduct analysis on the complete set.  Creating discovery dashboards has been made even easier by intuitive drag-and drop layouts and wizard-based configuration.  Business users can now build new discovery applications in minutes, without depending on IT. · Enhanced Integration with Oracle BI: OEID 3.1 enhances its’ native integration with Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation. Business users can now incorporate information from trusted BI warehouses, leveraging dimensions and attributes defined in Oracle’s Common Enterprise Information Model, but evolve them based on the varying day-to-day demands and requirements that they personally manage. · Deep Unstructured Analysis: business users can gain new insights from a wide variety of enterprise and public sources, helping companies to build an actionable Big Data strategy.  With OEID’s long-standing differentiation in correlating unstructured information with structured data, business users can now perform their own text mining to identify hidden concepts, without having to request support from IT. They can augment these insights with best in class keyword search and pattern matching, all in the context of rich, interactive visualizations and analytic summaries. · Enterprise-Class Self-Service Discovery:  OEID 3.1 enables IT to provide a powerful self-service platform to the business as part of a broader Business Analytics strategy, preserving the value of existing investments in data quality, governance, and security.  Business users can take advantage of IT-curated information to drive discovery across high volumes and varieties of data, and share insights with colleagues at a moment’s notice. · Harvest Content from the Web with the Endeca Web Acquisition Toolkit:  Oracle now provides best-of-breed data access to website content through the Oracle Endeca Web Acquisition Toolkit.  This provides an agile, graphical interface for developers to rapidly access and integrate any information exposed through a web front-end.  Organizations can now cost-effectively include content from consumer sites, industry forums, government or supplier portals, cloud applications, and myriad other web sources as part of their overall strategy for data discovery and unstructured analytics. For more information: OEID 3.1 OTN Software and Documentation Download And Endeca available for download on Software Delivery Cloud (eDelivery) New OEID 3.1 Videos on YouTube Oracle.com Endeca Site /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

  Read the article

• Consumer Oriented Search In Oracle Endeca Information Discovery - Part 2

  - by Bob Zurek

  As discussed in my last blog posting on this topic, Information Discovery, a core capability of the Oracle Endeca Information Discovery solution enables businesses to search, discover and navigate through a wide variety of big data including structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. With search as a core advanced capabilities of our product it is important to understand some of the key differences and capabilities in the underlying data store of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery and that is our Endeca Server. In the last post on this subject, we talked about Exploratory Search capabilities along with support for cascading relevance. Additional search capabilities in the Endeca Server, which differentiate from simple keyword based "search boxes" in other Information Discovery products also include: The Endeca Server Supports Set Search.  The Endeca Server is organized around set retrieval, which means that it looks at groups of results (all the documents that match a search), as well as the relationship of each individual result to the set. Other approaches only compute the relevance of a document by comparing the document to the search query – not by comparing the document to all the others. For example, a search for “U.S.” in another approach might match to the title of a document and get a high ranking. But what if it were a collection of government documents in which “U.S.” appeared in many titles, making that clue less meaningful? A set analysis would reveal this and be used to adjust relevance accordingly. The Endeca Server Supports Second-Order Relvance. Unlike simple search interfaces in traditional BI tools, which provide limited relevance ranking, such as a list of results based on key word matching, Endeca enables users to determine the most salient terms to divide up the result. Determining this second-order relevance is the key to providing effective guidance. Support for Queries and Filters. Search is the most common query type, but hardly complete, and users need to express a wide range of queries. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery also includes navigation, interactive visualizations, analytics, range filters, geospatial filters, and other query types that are more commonly associated with BI tools. Unlike other approaches, these queries operate across structured, semi-structured and unstructured content stored in the Endeca Server. Furthermore, this set is easily extensible because the core engine allows for pluggable features to be added. Like a search engine, queries are answered with a results list, ranked to put the most likely matches first. Unlike “black box” relevance solutions, which generalize one strategy for everyone, we believe that optimal relevance strategies vary across domains. Therefore, it provides line-of-business owners with a set of relevance modules that let them tune the best results based on their content. The Endeca Server query result sets are summarized, which gives users guidance on how to refine and explore further. Summaries include Guided Navigation® (a form of faceted search), maps, charts, graphs, tag clouds, concept clusters, and clarification dialogs. Users don’t explicitly ask for these summaries; Oracle Endeca Information Discovery analytic applications provide the right ones, based on configurable controls and rules. For example, the analytic application might guide a procurement agent filtering for in-stock parts by visualizing the results on a map and calculating their average fulfillment time. Furthermore, the user can interact with summaries and filters without resorting to writing complex SQL queries. The user can simply just click to add filters. Within Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, all parts of the summaries are clickable and searchable. We are living in a search driven society where business users really seem to enjoy entering information into a search box. We do this everyday as consumers and therefore, we have gotten used to looking for that box. However, the key to getting the right results is to guide that user in a way that provides additional Discovery, beyond what they may have anticipated. This is why these important and advanced features of search inside the Endeca Server have been so important. They have helped to guide our great customers to success. 

  Read the article

• Should I manage authentication on my own if the alternative is very low in usability and I am already managing roles?

  - by rumtscho

  As a small in-house dev department, we only have experience with developing applications for our intranet. We use the existing Active Directory for user account management. It contains the accounts of all company employees and many (but not all) of the business partners we have a cooperation with. Now, the top management wants a technology exchange application, and I am the lead dev on the new project. Basically, it is a database containing our know-how, with a web frontend. Our employees, our cooperating business partners, and people who wish to become our cooperating business partners should have access to it and see what technologies we have, so they can trade for them with the department which owns them. The technologies are not patented, but very valuable to competitors, so the department bosses are paranoid about somebody unauthorized gaining access to their technology description. This constraint necessitates a nightmarishly complicated multi-dimensional RBAC-hybrid model. As the Active Directory doesn't even contain all the information needed to infer the roles I use, I will have to manage roles plus per-technology per-user granted access exceptions within my system. The current plan is to use Active Directory for authentication. This will result in a multi-hour registration process for our business partners where the database owner has to manually create logins in our Active Directory and send them credentials. If I manage the logins in my own system, we could improve the usability a lot, for example by letting people have an active (but unprivileged) account as soon as they register. It seems to me that, after I am having a users table in the DB anyway (and managing ugly details like storing historical user IDs so that recycled user IDs within the Active Directory don't unexpectedly get rights to view someone's technologies), the additional complexity from implementing authentication functionality will be minimal. Therefore, I am starting to lean towards doing my own user login management and forgetting the AD altogether. On the other hand, I see some reasons to stay with Active Directory. First, the conventional wisdom I have heard from experienced programmers is to not do your own user management if you can avoid it. Second, we have code I can reuse for connection to the active directory, while I would have to code the authentication if done in-system (and my boss has clearly stated that getting the project delivered on time has much higher priority than delivering a system with high usability). Third, I am not a very experienced developer (this is my first lead position) and have never done user management before, so I am afraid that I am overlooking some important reasons to use the AD, or that I am underestimating the amount of work left to do my own authentication. I would like to know if there are more reasons to go with the AD authentication mechanism. Specifically, if I want to do my own authentication, what would I have to implement besides a secure connection for the login screen (which I would need anyway even if I am only transporting the pw to the AD), lookup of a password hash and a mechanism for password recovery (which will probably include manual identity verification, so no need for complex mTAN-like solutions)? And, if you have experience with such security-critical systems, which one would you use and why?

  Read the article

• Apache config that uses two document roots based on whether the requested resource exists in the first [closed]

  - by mattalexx

  Background I have a client site that consists of a CakePHP installation and a Magento installation: /web/example.com/ /web/example.com/app/ <== CakePHP /web/example.com/app/webroot/ <== DocumentRoot /web/example.com/app/webroot/store/ <== Magento /web/example.com/config/ <== Site-wide config /web/example.com/vendors/ <== Site-wide libraries The server runs Apache 2.2.3. The problem The whole company has FTP access and got used to clogging up the /web/example.com/, /web/example.com/app/webroot/, and /web/example.com/app/webroot/store/ directories with their own files. Sometimes these files need HTTP access and sometimes they don't. In any case, this mess makes my job harder when it comes to maintaining the site. Code merges, tarring the live code, etc, is very complicated and usually requires a bunch of filters. Abandoned solution At first, I thought I would set up a new subdomain on the same server, move all of their files there, and change their FTP chroot. But that wouldn't work for these reasons: Firstly, I have no idea (and neither do they remember) what marketing materials they've sent out that contain URLs to certain resources they've uploaded to the server, using the main domain, and also using abstract subdomains that use the main virtual host because it has ServerAlias *.example.com. So suddenly having them only use static.example.com isn't feasible. Secondly, The PHP scripts in their projects are potentially very non-portable. I want their files to stay in as similar an environment as they were built as I can. Also, I do not want to debug their code to make it portable. Half-baked solution After some thought, I decided to find a way to section off the actual website files into another directory that they would not touch. The company's uploaded files would stay where they were. This would ensure that I didn't break any of their projects that needed HTTP access. It would look something like this: /web/example.com/ <== A bunch of their files are in here /web/example.com/app/webroot/ <== 1st DocumentRoot; A bunch of their files are in here /web/example.com/app/webroot/store/ <== Some more are in here /web/example.com/site/ <== New dir; Contains only site files /web/example.com/site/app/ <== CakePHP /web/example.com/site/app/webroot/ <== 2nd DocumentRoot /web/example.com/site/app/webroot/store/ <== Magento /web/example.com/site/config/ <== Site-wide config /web/example.com/site/vendors/ <== Site-wide libraries After I made this change, I would not need to pay attention to anything except for the stuff within /web/example.com/site/ and my job would be a lot easier. I would be the only one changing stuff in there. So here's where the Apache magic would happen: I need an HTTP request to http://www.example.com/ to first use /web/example.com/app/webroot/ as the document root. If nothing is found (no miscellaneous uploaded company projects are found), try finding something within /web/example.com/site/app/webroot/. Another thing to keep in mind is, the site might have some problems if the $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] variable reads /web/example.com/app/webroot/ but the actual files are within /web/example.com/site/app/webroot/. It would be better if the DOCUMENT_ROOT environment variable could be /web/example.com/site/app/webroot/ for anything within the /web/example.com/site/app/webroot/ directory. Conclusion Is my half-baked solution possible with Apache 2.2.3? Is there a better way to solve this problem?

  Read the article

• Internet of Things Becoming Reality

  - by kristin.jellison

  The Internet of Things is not just on the radar—it’s becoming a reality. A globally connected continuum of devices and objects will unleash untold possibilities for businesses and the people they touch. But the “things” are only a small part of a much larger, integrated architecture. A great example of this comes from the healthcare industry. Imagine an expectant mother who needs to watch her blood pressure. She lives in a mountain village 100 miles away from medical attention. Luckily, she can use a small “wearable” device to monitor her status and wirelessly transmit the information to a healthcare hub in her village. Now, say the healthcare hub identifies that the expectant mother’s blood pressure is dangerously high. It sends a real-time alert to the patient’s wearable device, advising her to contact her doctor. It also pushes an alert with the patient’s historical data to the doctor’s tablet PC. He inserts a smart security card into the tablet to verify his identity. This ensures that only the right people have access to the patient’s data. Then, comparing the new data with the patient’s medical history, the doctor decides she needs urgent medical attention. GPS tracking devices on ambulances in the field identify and dispatch the closest one available. An alert also goes to the closest hospital with the necessary facilities. It sends real-time information on her condition directly from the ambulance. So when she arrives, they already have a treatment plan in place to ensure she gets the right care. The Internet of Things makes a huge difference for the patient. She receives personalized and responsive healthcare. But this technology also helps the businesses involved. The healthcare provider achieves a competitive advantage in its services. The hospital benefits from cost savings through more accurate treatment and better application of services. All of this, in turn, translates into savings on insurance claims. This is an ideal scenario for the Internet of Things—when all the devices integrate easily and when the relevant organizations have all the right systems in place. But in reality, that can be difficult to achieve. Core design principles are required to make the whole system work. Open standards allow these systems to talk to each other. Integrated security protects personal, financial, commercial and regulatory information. A reliable and highly available systems infrastructure is necessary to keep these systems running 24/7. If this system were just made up of separate components, it would be prohibitively complex and expensive for almost any organization. The solution is integration, and Oracle is leading the way. We’re developing converged solutions, not just from device to datacenter, but across devices, utilizing the Java platform, and through data acquisition and management, integration, analytics, security and decision-making. The Internet of Things (IoT) requires the predictable action and interaction of a potentially endless number of components. It’s in that convergence that the true value of the Internet of Things emerges. Partners who take the comprehensive view and choose to engage with the Internet of Things as a fully integrated platform stand to gain the most from the Internet of Things’ many opportunities. To discover what else Oracle is doing to connect the world, read about Oracle’s Internet of Things Platform. Learn how you can get involved as a partner by checking out the Oracle Java Knowledge Zone. Best regards, David Hicks

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 598  | Next Page >