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• New Communications Industry Data Model with "Factory Installed" Predictive Analytics using Oracle Da

  - by charlie.berger

  Oracle Introduces Oracle Communications Data Model to Provide Actionable Insight for Communications Service Providers   We've integrated pre-installed analytical methodologies with the new Oracle Communications Data Model to deliver automated, simple, yet powerful predictive analytics solutions for customers.  Churn, sentiment analysis, identifying customer segments - all things that can be anticipated and hence, preconcieved and implemented inside an applications.  Read on for more information! TM Forum Management World, Nice, France - 18 May 2010 News Facts To help communications service providers (CSPs) manage and analyze rapidly growing data volumes cost effectively, Oracle today introduced the Oracle Communications Data Model. With the Oracle Communications Data Model, CSPs can achieve rapid time to value by quickly implementing a standards-based enterprise data warehouse that features communications industry-specific reporting, analytics and data mining. The combination of the Oracle Communications Data Model, Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Foundation represents the most comprehensive data warehouse and BI solution for the communications industry. Also announced today, Hong Kong Broadband Network enhanced their data warehouse system, going live on Oracle Communications Data Model in three months. The leading provider increased its subscriber base by 37 percent in six months and reduced customer churn to less than one percent. Product Details Oracle Communications Data Model provides industry-specific schema and embedded analytics that address key areas such as customer management, marketing segmentation, product development and network health. CSPs can efficiently capture and monitor critical data and transform it into actionable information to support development and delivery of next-generation services using: More than 1,300 industry-specific measurements and key performance indicators (KPIs) such as network reliability statistics, provisioning metrics and customer churn propensity. Embedded OLAP cubes for extremely fast dimensional analysis of business information. Embedded data mining models for sophisticated trending and predictive analysis. Support for multiple lines of business, such as cable, mobile, wireline and Internet, which can be easily extended to support future requirements. With Oracle Communications Data Model, CSPs can jump start the implementation of a communications data warehouse in line with communications-industry standards including the TM Forum Information Framework (SID), formerly known as the Shared Information Model. Oracle Communications Data Model is optimized for any Oracle Database 11g platform, including Oracle Exadata, which can improve call data record query performance by 10x or more. Supporting Quotes "Oracle Communications Data Model covers a wide range of business areas that are relevant to modern communications service providers and is a comprehensive solution - with its data model and pre-packaged templates including BI dashboards, KPIs, OLAP cubes and mining models. It helps us save a great deal of time in building and implementing a customized data warehouse and enables us to leverage the advanced analytics quickly and more effectively," said Yasuki Hayashi, executive manager, NTT Comware Corporation. "Data volumes will only continue to grow as communications service providers expand next-generation networks, deploy new services and adopt new business models. They will increasingly need efficient, reliable data warehouses to capture key insights on data such as customer value, network value and churn probability. With the Oracle Communications Data Model, Oracle has demonstrated its commitment to meeting these needs by delivering data warehouse tools designed to fill communications industry-specific needs," said Elisabeth Rainge, program director, Network Software, IDC. "The TM Forum Conformance Mark provides reassurance to customers seeking standards-based, and therefore, cost-effective and flexible solutions. TM Forum is extremely pleased to work with Oracle to certify its Oracle Communications Data Model solution. Upon successful completion, this certification will represent the broadest and most complete implementation of the TM Forum Information Framework to date, with more than 130 aggregate business entities," said Keith Willetts, chairman and chief executive officer, TM Forum. Supporting Resources Oracle Communications Oracle Communications Data Model Data Sheet Oracle Communications Data Model Podcast Oracle Data Warehousing Oracle Communications on YouTube Oracle Communications on Delicious Oracle Communications on Facebook Oracle Communications on Twitter Oracle Communications on LinkedIn Oracle Database on Twitter The Data Warehouse Insider Blog

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• What’s New from the Oracle Marketing Cloud at Oracle OpenWorld 2014

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A Guest Post by Laura Vogel, Director, Oracle Marketing Cloud Events (pictured left) Marketing—CX Central is your hub for all things Marketing related at OpenWorld in San Francisco, September 28-October 2, 2014. Learn how to personalize the modern marketing journey to improve customer loyalty. We’re hosting more than 60 breakout sessions, half of which will highlight customer success stories from marquee brands including Bizo, Comcast, Dell, Epson, John Deere, Lane Bryant, ReadyTalk and Shutterfly. Moscone West, Levels 2 and 3To learn more about how modern marketing works, visit Moscone West, levels 2 and 3, for exciting demos of each of the Oracle Marketing Cloud solutions (BlueKai, Compendium, Eloqua, Push I/O, and Responsys). You also can check out our stations for Vertical Marketing Best Practices, the Markie Awards, and more! CX Spotlight Sessions “Accelerating Big Profits in Big Data,” Jeff Tanner, Baylor University “Using Content Marketing to Impact Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey,” Jennifer Agustin, Bizo “Expanding Your Marketing with Proven Testing and Optimization,” Brian Border, Shutterfly and Matthew Balthazor, Epson “Modern Marketing: The New Digital Dialogue,” Cory Treffiletti, Oracle A Special Marquee SessionDell’s Hayden Mugford will speak on "The Digital Ecosystem: Driving Experience Through Contact Engagement.” She will highlight how the organization built a digital ecosystem that supports a behaviorally driven, multivehicle nurturing campaign. The Dell 1:1 Global Marketing team worked with multiple partners to innovate integrations with Oracle Eloqua, Oracle Real-Time Decisions for real-time decision logic, and a content management system (CMS) that enables 100 percent customized e-mails. The program doubled average order values for nurtured contacts versus non-nurtured and tripled open and click-through rates versus push e-mail. It Wouldn’t Be an Oracle Marketing Cloud Event Without a Party!We’re hosting CX Central Fest: a unique customer experience specifically designed for attendees of CX Central. It will include a chance to rock out at a private concert featuring Los Angeles indie electronic pop group, Capital Cities! Join us Tuesday, September 30 from 7-9 p.m. Other Oracle Marketing Cloud Session Highlights Thought leadership by role Exploring the benefits of moving to the Cloud Product line roadmaps and innovations in Marketing Technical deep dives for product lines within Marketing Best practices and impactful business measurements Solutions that are integrated across CX Target AudienceSession content is geared toward professionals in Marketing, Marketing Operations, Marketing Demand Generation, Social: Chief Marketing Officers, Vice Presidents, Directors and Managers. OutcomesCustomers attending Marketing—CX Central @ OpenWorld will be able to: Gain insight into delivering consistent cross-channel marketing Discover how to provide the right information to the right customer at the right time and with the right channel Get answers to burning questions and advice on business challenges Hear from other Oracle customers about recommended best practices to help their organization move forward Network and share ideas to help create a strategy for connecting with customers in better ways Resources At a Glance Register Now Track Site—View Marketing Sessions 72 1024x768 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Focus on Session Doc Downloadable Justification Email OpenWorld is a fabulous way for you to see all that Oracle Marketing Cloud has to offer. Register today.

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• Silverlight Cream for February 13, 2011 -- #1046

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Loek van den Ouweland, Colin Eberhardt, Rudi Grobler, Joost van Schaik, Mike Taulty(-2-, -3-), Deborah Kurata, David Kelley, Peter Foot, Samuel Jack(-2-), and WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding" Deborah Kurata WP7: "WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button" WindowsPhoneGeek Expression Blend: "Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images" Loek van den Ouweland Shoutouts: Dave Campbell posted a write-up about the project he's on and the use of Sterling: Sterling Object-Oriented Database for ISO 1.0 Released!... Also see Jeremy Likness' post on the 1.0 release: Sterling Object-Oriented Database 1.0 RTM Not necessarily Silverlight, but darn cool, a great control by Sasha Barber: WPF : A Weird 3d based control snoutholder announced new content: Windows Phone 7 QuickStarts Live! From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images Loek van den Ouweland has a video tutorial up for creating an ImageButton with a hover state... Expression Blend coolness, and check out the external links he has to their training site. Windows Phone 7 Performance Measurements – Emulator vs. Hardware Colin Eberhardt's latest is a popular post comparing performance metrics between the WP7 emulator and a real device. Mileage may vary, but I'm pretty sure the overall results are conculsive, and should help the way you view your app as you're building in the emulator. WP7: WebClient vs HttpWebRequest Rudi Grobler's latest is a discussion of WebClient and HttpWebRequest, gives coding examples of each plus discussion of why you may choose one over the other... and pay attention to his comment about mobile providers. A Blendable Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight clipping behavior Joost van Schaik posted this WP7/Silverlight clipping behavior he developed because all the other solutions were not blendable. Another really useful piece of code from Joost! Blend Bits 22–Being Stylish Mike Taulty has 3 more episodes in his Blend Bits series... first up is on one Styles... explicit, implicit, inheriting... you name it, he's covering it! Blend Bits 23–Templating Part 1 MIke Taulty then has the beginning of a series within his Blend Bits series on Templating. This is something you just have to either bite the bullet and go with Blend to do, or consume someone else's work. Mike shows us how to do it ourself by tweaking the visual aspects of a checkbox Blend Bits 24–Templating Part 2 In part 2 of the Templating series, Mike Taulty digs deeper into Blend and cracks open the Listbox control to take a bunch of the inner elements out for a spin... fun stuff and great tutorial, Mike! Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding Deborah Kurata has another great MVVM post up... if you don't have your head wrapped around commanding yet, this is a good place to start that process... VB and C# as always. App Development for Windows Phone 7 101 David Kelley goes through the basics of producing a WP7 app both from the Silverlight and XNA side... good info and good external links to get you going. Copyable TextBlock for Windows Phone Peter Foot takes a look at the Copy/Paste functionality in WP7 and how to apply it to a TextBlock... which is NOT an out-of-the-box solution. How to deploy to, and debug, multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator Samuel Jack has a couple posts up this week... first is this clever one on running multiple copies of the emulator at once... too cool for debugging a multi-player game! Multi-player enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 3 – The Server Side Samuel Jack's latest is a detailed look at his day 3 adventure of taking his multi-player game to WP7... lots of information and external links... what do you say, give him another day? :) WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button WindowsPhoneGeek has a couple more posts up... first is this "CustomInputPrompt" control based off the InputPrompt from Coding4Fun. Implementing Windows Phone 7 DataTemplateSelector and CustomDataTemplateSelector In his latest post, WindowsPhoneGeek writes a DataTemplateSelector to allow different data templates for different list elements based on the type of the element. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Seamless STP with Oracle SOA Suite

  - by user12339860

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

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• Good DBAs Do Baselines

  - by Louis Davidson

  One morning, you wake up and feel funny. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something isn’t quite right. What now? Unless you happen to be a hypochondriac, you likely drag yourself out of bed, get on with the day and gather more “evidence”. You check your symptoms over the next few days; do you feel the same, better, worse? If better, then great, it was some temporal issue, perhaps caused by an allergic reaction to some suspiciously spicy chicken. If the same or worse then you go to the doctor for some health advice, but armed with some data to share, and having ruled out certain possible causes that are fixed with a bit of rest and perhaps an antacid. Whether you realize it or not, in comparing how you feel one day to the next, you have taken baseline measurements. In much the same way, a DBA uses baselines to gauge the gauge health of their database servers. Of course, while SQL Server is very willing to share data regarding its health and activities, it has almost no idea of the difference between good and bad. Over time, experienced DBAs develop “mental” baselines with which they can gauge the health of their servers almost as easily as their own body. They accumulate knowledge of the daily, natural state of each part of their database system, and so know instinctively when one of their databases “feels funny”. Equally, they know when an “issue” is just a passing tremor. They see their SQL Server with all of its four CPU cores running close 100% and don’t panic anymore. Why? It’s 5PM and every day the same thing occurs when the end-of-day reports, which are very CPU intensive, are running. Equally, they know when they need to respond in earnest when it is the first time they have heard about an issue, even if it has been happening every day. Nevertheless, no DBA can retain mental baselines for every characteristic of their systems, so we need to collect physical baselines too. In my experience, surprisingly few DBAs do this very well. Part of the problem is that SQL Server provides a lot of instrumentation. If you look, you will find an almost overwhelming amount of data regarding user activity on your SQL Server instances, and use and abuse of the available CPU, I/O and memory. It seems like a huge task even to work out which data you need to collect, let alone start collecting it on a regular basis, managing its storage over time, and performing detailed comparative analysis. However, without baselines, though, it is very difficult to pinpoint what ails a server, just by looking at a single snapshot of the data, or to spot retrospectively what caused the problem by examining aggregated data for the server, collected over many months. It isn’t as hard as you think to get started. You’ve probably already established some troubleshooting queries of the type SELECT Value FROM SomeSystemTableOrView. Capturing a set of baseline values for such a query can be as easy as changing it as follows: INSERT into BaseLine.SomeSystemTable (value, captureTime) SELECT Value, SYSDATETIME() FROM SomeSystemTableOrView; Of course, there are monitoring tools that will collect and manage this baseline data for you, automatically, and allow you to perform comparison of metrics over different periods. However, to get yourself started and to prove to yourself (or perhaps the person who writes the checks for tools) the value of baselines, stick something similar to the above query into an agent job, running every hour or so, and you are on your way with no excuses! Then, the next time you investigate a slow server, and see x open transactions, y users logged in, and z rows added per hour in the Orders table, compare to your baselines and see immediately what, if anything, has changed!

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• In the Firing Line: The impact of project and portfolio performance on the CEO

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} What are the primary measurements for rating CEO performance? For corporate boards, business analysts, investors, and the trade press the metrics they deploy are relatively binary in nature; what is being done to generate earnings, and what is being done to build and sustain high performance? As for the market, interest is primarily aroused when operational and financial performance falls outside planned commitments for the year. When organizations announce better than predicted results, they usually experience an immediate increase in share price. Likewise, poor results have an obviously negative impact on the share price and impact the role and tenure of the incumbent CEO. The danger for the CEO is that the risk of failure is ever present, ranging from manufacturing delays and supply chain issues to labor shortages and scope creep. This risk is enhanced by the involvement of secondary suppliers providing services critical to overall work schedules, and magnified further across a portfolio of programs and projects underway at any one time – and all set within a global context. All can impact planned return on investment and have an inevitable impact on the share price – the primary empirical measure of day-to-day performance. Read this complete complementary report, In the Firing Line and explore what is the direct link between the health of the portfolio and CEO performance. This report will provide an overview of the responsibility the CEO has for implementing and maintaining a culture of accountability, offer examples of some of the higher profile project failings in recent years, and detail the capabilities available to the CEO to mitigate the risks residing in their own portfolios. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• kanban scrumish tool(s) to get started

  - by Davide

  After investigating a little bit scrum and kanban, I finally read this answer and decided to start using kanban, picking something from scrum (note that I'm working mostly by myself, and I do have read this question and its answers). Now, my question is: which tool would be best to get started? whiteboard and postit agilezen.com JIRA with greenhopper a spreadsheet (possibly on Google Docs) brightgreenprojects.com Agilo Target Process something else (please specify) Notes about each: I would lean towards the whiteboard, but there are several drawbacks (e.g. cannot make automatic charts, time measurements, metrics, and sometimes I work from home - where I need it most - and it's not convenient to carry :-) I don't want to remember another username/password (I promised to myself to signup only to OpenID-enabled services) My employer has JIRA but my group doesn't use it - I might ask for an account (it shouldn't require another password) and maybe later involve the rest of the group. But I don't know if they are using greenhopper and if it's a big deal installing it. I generally hate spreadsheets maybe overkill? I'd be happy to have a localhost instance, but it could be problematic to give access to the whole group (per network/firewalls) - not a deal-breaker but surely a concern What I'd like to get from this? being more productive tracking how much time I spend in any given task, possibly discussing the issue with my supervisor tracking what "blocks" me most often immediately see where I am compared to my schedule manage in a better way my long todo list (e.g. answering faster to the "what I should do next?" question) Do you have any suggestion? Note on the scrumish tag: read the Henrik Kniberg's PDF. He first introduced the definition of scrumish on page 9.

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• Setting WPF RichTextBox width and height according to the size of a monospace font

  - by oxeb

  I am trying to fit a WPF RichTextBox to exactly accommodate a grid of characters in a particular monospace font. I am currently using FormattedText to determine the width and height of my RichTextBox, but the measurements it is providing me with are too small--specifically two characters in width too small. Is there a better way to perform this task? This does not seem to be an appropriate way to determine the size of my control. RichTextBox rtb; rtb = new RichTextBox(); FontFamily fontFamily = new FontFamily("Consolas"); double fontSize = 16; char standardizationCharacter = 'X'; String standardizationLine = ""; for(long loop = 0; loop < columns; loop ++) { standardizationLine += standardizationCharacter; } standardizationLine += Environment.NewLine; String standardizationString = ""; for(long loop = 0; loop < rows; loop ++) { standardizationString += standardizationLine; } Typeface typeface = new Typeface(fontFamily, FontStyles.Normal, FontWeights.Normal, FontStretches.Normal); FormattedText formattedText = new FormattedText(standardizationString, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, FlowDirection.LeftToRight, typeface, fontSize, Brushes.Black); rtb.Width = formattedText.Width; rtb.Height = formattedText.Height;

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• Software development metrics and reporting

  - by David M

  I've had some interesting conversations recently about software development metrics, in particular how they can be used in a reasonably large organisation to help development teams work better. I know there have been Stack Overflow questions about which metrics are good to use - like this one, but my question is more about which metrics are useful to which stakeholders, and at what level of aggregation. As an example, my view is that code coverage is a useful metric in the following ways (and maybe others): For a team's own internal use when combined with other measurements. For facilitating/enabling/mentoring teams, where it might be instructive when considered on a team-by-team basis as a trend (e.g. if team A and B have coverage this month of 75 and 50, I'd be more concerned with team A than B if the previous month they'd had 80 and 40). For senior management when presented as an aggregated statistic across a number of teams or a whole department. But I don't think it's useful for senior management to see this on a team-by-team basis, as this encourages artifical attempts to bolster coverage with tests that merely exercise, rather than test, code. I'm in an organisation with a couple of levels in its management hierarchy, but where the vast majority of managers are technically minded and able (with many still getting their hands dirty). Some of the development teams are leading the way in driving towards agile development practices, but others lag, and there is now a serious mandate from the top for this to be the way the organisation works. A couple of us are starting a programme to encourage this. In this sort of an organisation, what sort of metrics do you think are useful, to whom, why, and at what level of aggregation? I don't want people to feel their performance is being assessed based on a metric that they can artificially influence; at the same time, the senior management are going to want some sort of evidence that progress is being made. What advice or caveats can you provide based on experience in your own organisations? EDIT We are definitely wanting to use metrics as a tool for organisational improvement not as a tool for individual performance measurement.

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• How to get a volume measurement of iPhone recording in dB, with a limit of at least 120dB

  - by Cyber

  Hello, I am trying to make a simple volume meter for the iPhone. I want the volume displayed in dB. When using this turorial, I am only getting measurements up to 78 dB. I've read that that is because the dBFS spectrum for 16 bit audio recordings is only 96 dB. I tried modifying this piece of code in the init funcyion: dataFormat.mSampleRate = 44100.0f; dataFormat.mFormatID = kAudioFormatLinearPCM; dataFormat.mFramesPerPacket = 1; dataFormat.mChannelsPerFrame = 1; dataFormat.mBytesPerFrame = 2; dataFormat.mBytesPerPacket = 2; dataFormat.mBitsPerChannel = 16; dataFormat.mReserved = 0; I changed the value of mBitsPerChannel, hoping to increase the bit value of the recording. dataFormat.mBitsPerChannel = 32; With that variable set to 32, the "mAveragePower" function returns only 0. So, how can i measure more decibels? All my code is practically the same as in the tutorial i posted above. Thanks in advance, Thomas

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• C# COM Cross Thread problem

  - by user364676

  Hi, we're developing a software to control a scientific measuring device. it provides a COM-Interface defines serveral functions to set measurement parameters and fires an event when it measured data. in order to test our software, i'm implementing a simulation of that device. the com-object runs a loop which periodically fires the event. another loop in the client app should now setup up the com-simulator using the given functions. i created a class for measuring parameters which will be instanciated when setting up a new measurement. // COM-Object public class MeasurementParams { public double Param1; public double Param2; } public class COM_Sim : ICOMDevice { public MeasurementParams newMeasurement; IClient client; public int NewMeasurement() { newMeasurment = new MeasurementParam(); } public int SetParam1(double val) { // why is newMeasurement null when method is called from client loop newMeasurement.Param1 = val; } void loop() { while(true) { // fire event client.HandleEvent; } } } public class Client : IClient { ICOMDevice server; public int HandleEvent() { // handle this event server.NewMeasurement(); server.SetParam1(0.0); } void loop() { while(true) { // do some stuff... server.NewMeasurement(); server.SetParam1(0.0); } } } both of the loops run in independent threads. when server.NewMeasurement() is called, the object on the server is set to a new instance. but in the next function, the object is null again. do the same when handling the server-event, it works perfectly, because the method runs in the servers thread. how to make it work from client-thread as well. as the client is meant to be working with the real device, i cannot modify the interfaces given by the manufactor. also i need to setup measurements independent from the event-handler, which will be fired not regulary. i assume this problem related to multithreaded-COM behavior but i found nothing on this topic.

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• What are some good ways to store performance statistics in a database for querying later?

  - by Nathan

  Goal: Store arbitrary performance statistics of stuff that you care about (how many customers are currently logged on, how many widgets are being processed, etc.) in a database so that you can understand what how your servers are doing over time. Assumptions: A database is already available, and you already know how to gather the information you want and are capable of putting it in the database however you like. Some Ideal Attributes of a Solution Causes no noticeable performance hit on the server being monitored Has a very high precision of measurement Does not store useless or redundant information Is easy to query (lends itself to gathering/displaying useful information) Lends itself to being graphed easily Is accurate Is elegant Primary Questions 1) What is a good design/method/scheme for triggering the storing of statistics? 2) What is a good database design for how to actually store the data? Example answers...that are sort of vague and lame... 1) I could, once per [fixed time interval], store a row of data with all the performance measurements I care about in each column of one big flat table indexed by timestamp and/or server. 2) I could have a daemon monitoring performance stuff I care about, and add a row whenever something changes (instead of at fixed time intervals) to a flat table as in #1. 3) I could trigger either as in #2, but I could store information about each aspect of performance that I'm measuring in separate tables, opening up the possibility of adding tons of rows for often-changing items, and few rows for seldom-changing items. Etc. In the end, I will implement something, even if it's some super-braindead approach I make up myself, but I'm betting there are some really smart people out there willing to share their experiences and bright ideas!

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• Interpolating data points in Excel

  - by Niels Basjes

  Hi, I'm sure this is the kind of problem other have solved many times before. A group of people are going to do measurements (Home energy usage to be exact). All of them will do that at different times and in different intervals. So what I'll get from each person is a set of {date, value} pairs where there are dates missing in the set. What I need is a complete set of {date, value} pairs where for each date withing the range a value is known (either measured or calculated). I expect that a simple linear interpolation would suffice for this project. If I assume that it must be done in Excel. What is the best way to interpolate in such a dataset (so I have a value for every day) ? Thanks. NOTE: When these datasets are complete I'll determine the slope (i.e. usage per day) and from that we can start doing home-to-home comparisons. ADDITIONAL INFO After first few suggestions: I do not want to manually figure out where the holes are in my measurement set (too many incomplete measurement sets!!). I'm looking for something (existing) automatic to do that for me. So if my input is {2009-06-01, 10} {2009-06-03, 20} {2009-06-06, 110} Then I expect to automatically get {2009-06-01, 10} {2009-06-02, 15} {2009-06-03, 20} {2009-06-04, 50} {2009-06-05, 80} {2009-06-06, 110} Yes, I can write software that does this. I am just hoping that someone already has a "ready to run" software (Excel) feature for this (rather generic) problem.

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• regressions with many nested categorical covariates

  - by eric

  I have a few hundred thousand measurements where the dependent variable is a probability, and would like to use logistic regression. However, the covariates I have are all categorical, and worse, are all nested. By this I mean that if a certain measurement has "city - Phoenix" then obviously it is certain to have "state - Arizona" and "country - U.S." I have four such factors - the most granular has some 20k levels, but if need be I could do without that one, I think. I also have a few non-nested categorical covariates (only four or so, with maybe three different levels each). What I am most interested in is prediction - given a new observation in some city, I would like to know the relevant probability/dependent variable. I am not interested as much in the related inferential machinery - standard deviations, etc - at least as of now. I am hoping I can afford to be sloppy. However, I would love to have that information unless it requires methods that are more computationally expensive. Does anyone have any advice on how to attack this? I have looked into mixed effects, but am not sure it is what I am looking for.

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• reshaping a data frame into long format in R

  - by user1773115

  I'm struggling with a reshape in R. I have 2 types of error (err and rel_err) that have been calculated for 3 different models. This gives me a total of 6 error variables (i.e. err_1, err_2, err_3, rel_err_1, rel_err_2, and rel_err_3). For each of these types of error I have 3 different types of predivtive validity tests (ie random holdouts, backcast, forecast). I would like to make my data set long so I keep the 4 types of test long while also making the two error measurements long. So in the end I will have one variable called err and one called rel_err as well as an id variable for what model the error corresponds to (1,2,or 3) Here is my data right now: iter err_1 rel_err_1 err_2 rel_err_2 err_3 rel_err_3 test_type 1 -0.09385732 -0.2235443 -0.1216982 -0.2898543 -0.1058366 -0.2520759 random 1 0.16141630 0.8575728 0.1418732 0.7537442 0.1584816 0.8419816 back 1 0.16376930 0.8700738 0.1431505 0.7605302 0.1596502 0.8481901 front 1 0.14345986 0.6765194 0.1213689 0.5723444 0.1374676 0.6482615 random 1 0.15890059 0.7435382 0.1589823 0.7439204 0.1608709 0.7527580 back 1 0.14412360 0.6743928 0.1442039 0.6747684 0.1463520 0.6848202 front and here is what I would like it to look like: iter model err rel_err test_type 1 1 -0.09385732 (#'s) random 1 2 -0.1216982 (#'s) random 1 3 -0.1216982 (#'s) random and on... I've tried playing around with the syntax but can't quite figure out what to put for the time.varying argument Thanks very much for any help you can offer.

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• Eliminate full table scan due to BETWEEN (and GROUP BY)

  - by Dave Jarvis

  Description According to the explain command, there is a range that is causing a query to perform a full table scan (160k rows). How do I keep the range condition and reduce the scanning? I expect the culprit to be: Y.YEAR BETWEEN 1900 AND 2009 AND Code Here is the code that has the range condition (the STATION_DISTRICT is likely superfluous). SELECT COUNT(1) as MEASUREMENTS, AVG(D.AMOUNT) as AMOUNT, Y.YEAR as YEAR, MAKEDATE(Y.YEAR,1) as AMOUNT_DATE FROM CITY C, STATION S, STATION_DISTRICT SD, YEAR_REF Y FORCE INDEX(YEAR_IDX), MONTH_REF M, DAILY D WHERE -- For a specific city ... -- C.ID = 10663 AND -- Find all the stations within a specific unit radius ... -- 6371.009 * SQRT( POW(RADIANS(C.LATITUDE_DECIMAL - S.LATITUDE_DECIMAL), 2) + (COS(RADIANS(C.LATITUDE_DECIMAL + S.LATITUDE_DECIMAL) / 2) * POW(RADIANS(C.LONGITUDE_DECIMAL - S.LONGITUDE_DECIMAL), 2)) ) <= 50 AND -- Get the station district identification for the matching station. -- S.STATION_DISTRICT_ID = SD.ID AND -- Gather all known years for that station ... -- Y.STATION_DISTRICT_ID = SD.ID AND -- The data before 1900 is shaky; insufficient after 2009. -- Y.YEAR BETWEEN 1900 AND 2009 AND -- Filtered by all known months ... -- M.YEAR_REF_ID = Y.ID AND -- Whittled down by category ... -- M.CATEGORY_ID = '003' AND -- Into the valid daily climate data. -- M.ID = D.MONTH_REF_ID AND D.DAILY_FLAG_ID <> 'M' GROUP BY Y.YEAR Update The SQL is performing a full table scan, which results in MySQL performing a "copy to tmp table", as shown here: +----+-------------+-------+--------+-----------------------------------+--------------+---------+-------------------------------+--------+-------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+-------+--------+-----------------------------------+--------------+---------+-------------------------------+--------+-------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | C | const | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 4 | const | 1 | | | 1 | SIMPLE | Y | range | YEAR_IDX | YEAR_IDX | 4 | NULL | 160422 | Using where | | 1 | SIMPLE | SD | eq_ref | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 4 | climate.Y.STATION_DISTRICT_ID | 1 | Using index | | 1 | SIMPLE | S | eq_ref | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 4 | climate.SD.ID | 1 | Using where | | 1 | SIMPLE | M | ref | PRIMARY,YEAR_REF_IDX,CATEGORY_IDX | YEAR_REF_IDX | 8 | climate.Y.ID | 54 | Using where | | 1 | SIMPLE | D | ref | INDEX | INDEX | 8 | climate.M.ID | 11 | Using where | +----+-------------+-------+--------+-----------------------------------+--------------+---------+-------------------------------+--------+-------------+ Related http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/how-to-avoid-table-scan.html http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/where-optimizations.html http://stackoverflow.com/questions/557425/optimize-sql-that-uses-between-clause Thank you!

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• Displaying performance metrics in a modern web app?

  - by Charles

  We're updating our ancient internal PHP application at work. Right now, we gather extensive performance measurements on every pageview, and log them to the database. Additionally, users requested that some of the metrics be displayed at the bottom of the page. This worked out pretty well for us, because the last thing that the application does on every request is include the file containing the HTML footer. The updated parts of the application use an MVC framework and a Dispatch/Request/Response loop. The page footer is no longer the last thing done. In fact, it could very well be the first thing done, before the rest of the page is created. Because we can grab the Response before it's returned to the user, we could try to include placeholders for the performance metrics in the footer and simply replace them with the actual numbers, but this strikes me as a bad idea somehow. How do you handle this in your modern web app? While we're using PHP, I'm curious how it's done in a Ruby/Rails app, and in your favorite Python framework.

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• Connecting grouped dots/points on a scatter plot based on distance

  - by ToNoY

  I have 2 sets of depth point measurements, for example: > a depth value 1 2 2 2 4 3 3 6 4 4 8 5 5 16 40 6 18 45 7 20 58 > b depth value 1 10 10 2 12 20 3 14 35 I want to show both groups in one figure plotted with depth and with different symbols as you can see here plot(a$value, a$depth, type='b', col='green', pch=15) points(b$value, b$depth, type='b', col='red', pch=14) The plot seems okay, but the annoying part is that the green symbols are all connected (though I want connected lines also). I want connection only when one group has a continued data points at 2 m interval i.e. the symbols should be connected with a line from 2 to 8 m (green) and then group B symbols should be connected from 10-14 m (red) and again group A symbols should be connected (green), which means I do NOT want to see the connection between 8 m sample with the 16 m for group A. An easy solution may be dividing the group A into two parts (say, A-shallow and A-deep) and then plotting A-shallow, B, and A-deep separately. But this is completely impractical because I have thousands of data points with hundreds of groups i.e. I have to produce many depth profiles. Therefore, there has to be a way to program so that dots are NOT connected beyond a prescribed frequency/depth interval (e.g. 2 m in this case) for a particular group of samples. Any idea?

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• Performing measures within the execution of a c++ code every t milliseconds

  - by user506901

  Given a while loop and the function ordering as follows: int k=0; int total=100; while(k<total){ doSomething(); if(approx. t milliseconds elapsed) { measure(); } ++k; } I want to perform 'measure' every t-th milliseconds. However, since 'doSomething' can be close to the t-th millisecond from the last execution, it is acceptable to perform the measure after approximately t milliseconds elapsed from the last measure. My question is: how could this be achieved? One solution would be to set timer to zero, and measure it after every 'doSomething'. When it is withing the acceptable range, I perform measures, and reset. However, I'm not which c++ function I should use for such a task. As I can see, there are certain functions, but the debate on which one is the most appropriate is outside of my understanding. Note that some of the functions actually take into account the time taken by some other processes, but I want my timer to only measure the time of the execution of my c++ code (I hope that is clear). Another thing is the resolution of the measurements, as pointed out below. Suppose the medium option of those suggested.

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• reformatting a matrix in matlab with nan values

  - by Kate

  This post follows a previous question regarding the restructuring of a matrix: re-formatting a matrix in matlab An additional problem I face is demonstrated by the following example: depth = [0:1:20]'; data = rand(1,length(depth))'; d = [depth,data]; d = [d;d(1:20,:);d]; Here I would like to alter this matrix so that each column represents a specific depth and each row represents time, so eventually I will have 3 rows (i.e. days) and 21 columns (i.e. measurement at each depth). However, we cannot reshape this because the number of measurements for a given day are not the same i.e. some are missing. This is known by: dd = sortrows(d,1); for i = 1:length(depth); e(i) = length(dd(dd(:,1)==depth(i),:)); end From 'e' we find that the number of depth is different for different days. How could I insert a nan into the matrix so that each day has the same depth values? I could find the unique depths first by: unique(d(:,1)) From this, if a depth (from unique) is missing for a given day I would like to insert the depth to the correct position and insert a nan into the respective location in the column of data. How can this be achieved?

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• Stream buffering issue

  - by Kolyunya

  The mod_rewrite documentation states that it is a strict requirement to disable in(out)put buffering in a rewrite program. Keeping that in mind I've written a simple program (I do know that it lacks the EOF check but this is not an issue and it saves one condition check per loop): #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main ( void ) { setvbuf(stdin,NULL,_IOLBF,4200); setvbuf(stdout,NULL,_IOLBF,4200); int character; while ( 42 ) { character = getchar(); if ( character == '-' ) { character = '_'; } putchar(character); } return 42 - 42; } After making some measurements I was shocked - it was over 9,000 times slower than the demo Perl script provided by the documentation: #!/usr/bin/perl $| = 1; # Turn off I/O buffering while (<STDIN>) { s/-/_/g; # Replace dashes with underscores print $_; } Now I have two related questions: Question 1. I believe that the streams may be line buffered since Apache sends a new line after each path. Am I correct? Switching my program to setvbuf(stdin,NULL,_IOLBF,4200); setvbuf(stdout,NULL,_IOLBF,4200); makes it twice as fast as Perl one. This should not hit Apache's performance, should it? Question 2. How can one write a program in C which will use unbuffered streams (like Perl one) and will perform as fast as Perl one?

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• SQL Express 2008 R2 on Amazon EC2 instance: tons of free memory, poor performance

  - by gravyface

  The old SQL Express 2005 was running on a low-end single Xeon CPU Dell server, RAID 5 7200 disks, 2 GB RAM (SBS 2003). I have not done any baseline measurements on the old physical server, but the Web app is used by half a dozen people (maybe 2 concurrently), so I figured "how bad can an Amazon EC2 instance be?". It's pretty horrible: a difference of 8 seconds of load time on one screen. First of all, I'm not a SQL guru, but here's what I've tried: Had a Small Instance, now running a c1.medium (High Cpu Medium) Windows 2008 32-bit R2 EBS-backed instance running IIS 7.5 and SQL Express 2008 R2. No noticeable improvement. Changed Page File from fixed 256 to Automatic. Setup a Striped Mirror from within Disk Management with two attached 1 GB EBS volumes. Moved database and transaction log, left everything else on the boot EBS volume. No noticeable change. Looked at memory, ~1000 MB of physical memory free (1.7 GB total). Changed SQL instance to use a minimum of 1024 RAM; restarted server, no change in memory usage. SQL still only using ~28MB of RAM(!). So I'm thinking: this database is tiny (28MB), why isn't the whole thing cached in RAM? Surely that would speed up performance. The transaction log is 241 MB. Seems kind of large in comparison -- has this not been committed? Is it a cause of performance degradation? I recall something about Recovery Models and log sizes somewhere in my travels, but not positive. Another thing: the old server was running SQL Express 2005. Not sure if that has any impact, but I tried changing the compatibility level from SQL 2000 to 2008, but that had no effect. Anyways, what else can I try here? Seems ridiculous to throw more virtual hardware at this thing. I know I/O is going to be rough on EBS volumes, but surely others are successfully running small .NET/SQL apps on reasonably priced instances?

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• Kaiden and the Arachnoid Cyst

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Some of you may remember when my son Kaiden was born I posted pictures of him and his sister. Kaiden is now 15 months old and is progressing perfectly in every area except that and we had been worried that he was not walking yet. We were only really concerned as his sister was walking at 8 months. Figure: Kai as his usual self   Jadie and I were concerned over that and that he had a rather large head (noggin) so we talked to various GP’s and our health visitor who immediately dismissed our concerns every time. That was until about two months ago when we happened to get a GP whose daughter had Hyper Mobility and she recognised the symptoms immediately. We were referred to the Southbank clinic who were lovely and the paediatrician confirmed that he had Hyper Mobility after testing all of his faculties. This just means that his joints are overly mobile and would need a little physiotherapy to help him out. At the end the paediatrician remarked offhand that he has a rather large head and wanted to measure it. Sure enough he was a good margin above the highest percentile mark for his height and weight. The paediatrician showed the measurements to a paediatric consultant who, as a precautionary measure, referred us for an MRI at Yorkhill Children's hospital. Now, Yorkhill has always been fantastic to us, and this was no exception. You know we have NEVER had a correct diagnosis for the kids (with the exception of the above) from a GP and indeed twice have been proscribed incorrect medication that made the kids sicker! We now always go strait to Yorkhill to save them having to fix GP mistakes as well. Monday 24th May, 7pm The scan went fantastically, with Kaiden sleeping in the MRI machine for all but 5 minutes at the end where he waited patiently for it to finish. We were not expecting anything to be wrong as this was just a precautionary scan to make sure that nothing in his head was affecting his gross motor skills. After the scan we were told to expect a call towards the end of the week… Tuesday 25th May, 12pm The very next day we got a call from Southbank who said that they has found an Arachnoid Cyst and could we come in the next day to see a Consultant and that Kai would need an operation. Wednesday 26th May, 12:30pm We went into the Southbank clinic and spoke to the paediatric consultant who assured us that it was operable but that it was taking up considerable space in Kai’s head. Cerebrospinal fluid is building up as a cyst is blocking the channels it uses to drain. Thankfully they told us that prospects were good and that Kai would expect to make a full recovery before showing us the MRI pictures. Figure: Normal brain MRI cross section. This normal scan shows the spaces in the middle of the brain that contain and produce the Cerebrospinal fluid. Figure: Normal Cerebrospinal Flow This fluid is needed by the brain but is drained in the middle down the spinal column. Figure: Kai’s cyst blocking the four channels. I do not think that I need to explain the difference between the healthy picture and Kai’s picture. However you can see in this first picture the faint outline of the cyst in the middle that is blocking the four channels from draining. After seeing the scans a Neurosurgeon has decided that he is not acute, but needs an operation to unblock the flow. Figure: OMFG! You can see in the second picture the effect of the build up of fluid. If I was not horrified by the first picture I was seriously horrified by this one. What next? Kai is not presenting the symptoms of vomiting or listlessness that would show an immediate problem and as such we will get an appointment to see the Paediatric Neurosurgeon at the Southern General hospital in about 4 weeks. This timescale is based on the Neurosurgeon seeing the scans. After that Kai will need an operation to release the pressure and either remove the cyst completely or put in a permanent shunt (tube from brain to stomach) to bypass the blockage. We have updated his notes for the referral with additional recent information on top of the scan that the consultant things will help improve the timescales, but that is just a guess.   All we can do now is wait and see, and be watchful for tell tail signs of listlessness, eye problems and vomiting that would signify a worsening of his condition.   Technorati Tags: Personal

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• CPU Usage in Very Large Coherence Clusters

  - by jpurdy

  When sizing Coherence installations, one of the complicating factors is that these installations (by their very nature) tend to be application-specific, with some being large, memory-intensive caches, with others acting as I/O-intensive transaction-processing platforms, and still others performing CPU-intensive calculations across the data grid. Regardless of the primary resource requirements, Coherence sizing calculations are inherently empirical, in that there are so many permutations that a simple spreadsheet approach to sizing is rarely optimal (though it can provide a good starting estimate). So we typically recommend measuring actual resource usage (primarily CPU cycles, network bandwidth and memory) at a given load, and then extrapolating from those measurements. Of course there may be multiple types of load, and these may have varying degrees of correlation -- for example, an increased request rate may drive up the number of objects "pinned" in memory at any point, but the increase may be less than linear if those objects are naturally shared by concurrent requests. But for most reasonably-designed applications, a linear resource model will be reasonably accurate for most levels of scale. However, at extreme scale, sizing becomes a bit more complicated as certain cluster management operations -- while very infrequent -- become increasingly critical. This is because certain operations do not naturally tend to scale out. In a small cluster, sizing is primarily driven by the request rate, required cache size, or other application-driven metrics. In larger clusters (e.g. those with hundreds of cluster members), certain infrastructure tasks become intensive, in particular those related to members joining and leaving the cluster, such as introducing new cluster members to the rest of the cluster, or publishing the location of partitions during rebalancing. These tasks have a strong tendency to require all updates to be routed via a single member for the sake of cluster stability and data integrity. Fortunately that member is dynamically assigned in Coherence, so it is not a single point of failure, but it may still become a single point of bottleneck (until the cluster finishes its reconfiguration, at which point this member will have a similar load to the rest of the members). The most common cause of scaling issues in large clusters is disabling multicast (by configuring well-known addresses, aka WKA). This obviously impacts network usage, but it also has a large impact on CPU usage, primarily since the senior member must directly communicate certain messages with every other cluster member, and this communication requires significant CPU time. In particular, the need to notify the rest of the cluster about membership changes and corresponding partition reassignments adds stress to the senior member. Given that portions of the network stack may tend to be single-threaded (both in Coherence and the underlying OS), this may be even more problematic on servers with poor single-threaded performance. As a result of this, some extremely large clusters may be configured with a smaller number of partitions than ideal. This results in the size of each partition being increased. When a cache server fails, the other servers will use their fractional backups to recover the state of that server (and take over responsibility for their backed-up portion of that state). The finest granularity of this recovery is a single partition, and the single service thread can not accept new requests during this recovery. Ordinarily, recovery is practically instantaneous (it is roughly equivalent to the time required to iterate over a set of backup backing map entries and move them to the primary backing map in the same JVM). But certain factors can increase this duration drastically (to several seconds): large partitions, sufficiently slow single-threaded CPU performance, many or expensive indexes to rebuild, etc. The solution of course is to mitigate each of those factors but in many cases this may be challenging. Larger clusters also lead to the temptation to place more load on the available hardware resources, spreading CPU resources thin. As an example, while we've long been aware of how garbage collection can cause significant pauses, it usually isn't viewed as a major consumer of CPU (in terms of overall system throughput). Typically, the use of a concurrent collector allows greater responsiveness by minimizing pause times, at the cost of reducing system throughput. However, at a recent engagement, we were forced to turn off the concurrent collector and use a traditional parallel "stop the world" collector to reduce CPU usage to an acceptable level. In summary, there are some less obvious factors that may result in excessive CPU consumption in a larger cluster, so it is even more critical to test at full scale, even though allocating sufficient hardware may often be much more difficult for these large clusters.

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 1 of 3&ndash;Features)

  - by ToStringTheory

  It wasn’t very long ago that I first began to get into CSS precompilers such as SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) and LESS (The Dynamic Stylesheet Language) and I had been hooked on the idea since.  When I finally had a new project come up, I leapt at the opportunity to try out one of these languages. Introduction To be honest, I was hesitant at first to add either framework as I didn’t really know much more than what I had read on their homepages, and I didn’t like the idea of adding too much complexity to a project - I couldn’t guarantee I would be the only person to support it in the future. Thankfully, both of these languages just add things into CSS.  You don’t HAVE to know LESS or SASS to do anything, you can still do your old school CSS, and your output will be the same.  However, when you want to start doing more advanced things such as variables, mixins, and color functions, the functionality is all there for you to utilize. From what I had read, SASS has a few more features than LESS, which is why I initially tried to figure out how to incorporate it into a MVC 4 project. However, through my research, I couldn’t find a way to accomplish this without including some bit of the Ruby on Rails framework on the computer running it, and I hated the fact that I had to do that.  Besides SASS, there is little chance of me getting into the RoR framework, at least in the next couple years.  So in the end, I settled with using LESS. Features So, what can LESS (or SASS) do for you?  There are several reasons I have come to love it in the past few weeks. 1 – Constants Using LESS, you can finally declare a constant and use its value across an entire CSS file. The case that most people would be familiar with is colors.  Wanting to declare one or two color variables that comprise the theme of the site, and not have to retype out their specific hex code each time, but rather a variable name.  What’s great about this is that if you end up having to change it, you only have to change it in one place.  An important thing to note is that you aren’t limited to creating constants just for colors, but for strings and measurements as well. 2 – Inheritance This is a cool feature in my mind for simplicity and organization.  Both LESS and SASS allow you to place selectors within other selectors, and when it is compiled, the languages will break the rules out as necessary and keep the inheritance chain you created in the selectors. Example LESS Code: #header {   h1 {     font-size: 26px;     font-weight: bold;   }   p {     font-size: 12px;     a     {       text-decoration: none;       &:hover {         border-width: 1px       }     }   } } Example Compiled CSS: #header h1 {   font-size: 26px;   font-weight: bold; } #header p {   font-size: 12px; } #header p a {   text-decoration: none; } #header p a:hover {   border-width: 1px; } 3 - Mixins Mixins are where languages like this really shine.  The ability to mixin other definitions setup a parametric mixin.  There is really a lot of content in this area, so I would suggest looking at http://lesscss.org for more information.  One of the things I would suggest if you do begin to use LESS is to also grab the mixins.less file from the Twitter Bootstrap project.  This file already has a bunch of predefined mixins for things like border-radius with all of the browser specific prefixes.  This alone is of great use! 4 – Color Functions This is the last thing I wanted to point out as my final post in this series will be utilizing these functions in a more drawn out manner.  Both LESS and SASS provide functions for getting information from a color (R,G,B,H,S,L).  Using these, it is easy to define a primary color, and then darken or lighten it a little for your needs.  Example: Example LESS Code: @base-color: #111; @red:        #842210; #footer {   color: (@base-color + #003300);   border-left:  2px;   border-right: 2px;   border-color: desaturate(@red, 10%); } Example Compiled CSS: #footer {    color: #114411;    border-left:  2px;    border-right: 2px;    border-color: #7d2717; } I have found that these can be very useful and powerful when constructing a site theme. Conclusion I came across LESS and SASS when looking for the best way to implement some type of CSS variables for colors, because I hated having to do a Find and Replace in all of the files using the colors, and in some instances, you couldn’t just find/replace because of the color choices interfering with other colors (color to replace of #000, yet come colors existed like #0002bc).  So in many cases I would end up having to do a Find and manually check each one. In my next post, I am going to cover how I’ve come to set up these items and the structure for the items in the project, as well as the conventions that I have come to start using.  In the final post in the series, I will cover a neat little side project I built in LESS dealing with colors!

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