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• The Raspberry Pi JavaFX In-Car System (Part 3)

  - by speakjava

  Ras Pi car pt3 Having established communication between a laptop and the ELM327 it's now time to bring in the Raspberry Pi. One of the nice things about the Raspberry Pi is the simplicity of it's power supply.  All we need is 5V at about 700mA, which in a car is as simple as using a USB cigarette lighter adapter (which is handily rated at 1A).  My car has two cigarette lighter sockets (despite being specified with the non-smoking package and therefore no actual cigarette lighter): one in the centre console and one in the rear load area.  This was convenient as my idea is to mount the Raspberry Pi in the back to minimise the disruption to the very clean design of the Audi interior. The first task was to get the Raspberry Pi to communicate using Wi-Fi with the ELM 327.  Initially I tried a cheap Wi-Fi dongle from Amazon, but I could not get this working with my home Wi-Fi network since it just would not handle the WPA security no matter what I did.  I upgraded to a Wi Pi from Farnell and this works very well. The ELM327 uses Ad-Hoc networking, which is point to point communication.  Rather than using a wireless router each connecting device has its own assigned IP address (which needs to be on the same subnet) and uses the same ESSID.  The settings of the ELM327 are fixed to an IP address of 192.168.0.10 and useing the ESSID, "Wifi327".  To configure Raspbian Linux to use these settings we need to modify the /etc/network/interfaces file.  After some searching of the web and a few false starts here's the settings I came up with: auto lo eth0 wlan0 iface lo inet loopback iface eth0 inet static     address 10.0.0.13     gateway 10.0.0.254     netmask 255.255.255.0 iface wlan0 inet static     address 192.168.0.1     netmask 255.255.255.0     wireless-essid Wifi327     wireless-mode ad-ho0 After rebooting, iwconfig wlan0 reported that the Wi-Fi settings were correct.  However, ifconfig showed no assigned IP address.  If I configured the IP address manually using ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 then everything was fine and I was able to happily ping the IP address of the ELM327.  I tried numerous variations on the interfaces file, but nothing I did would get me an IP address on wlan0 when the machine booted.  Eventually I decided that this was a pointless thing to spend more time on and so I put a script in /etc/init.d and registered it with update-rc.d.  All the script does (currently) is execute the ifconfig line and now, having installed the telnet package I am able to telnet to the ELM327 via the Raspberry Pi.  Not nice, but it works. Here's a picture of the Raspberry Pi in the car for testing In the next part we'll look at running the Java code on the Raspberry Pi to collect data from the car systems.

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• Projet Doneness and Einstein's Razor

  - by Malcolm Anderson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} I’ve started working on a series of articles about the value of having testers involved in requirements gathering.  Today I was reminded of a useful tool that has provided value to me for at least 20 years.  To those of you who already use this tool, I’m interested in your stories where it has made a difference for you, and to those of you who have never heard of it, I hope sharing it will make a difference in your careers.   I was reminded of it because I just finished a 3 month set of personal projects and was reviewing the success of those projects while putting together my next set of 3 month projects.  During this review, I noticed that a good number of my projects did not have the level of success that I wanted.  The results were good, but they could have been better.  Then it hit me, I didn’t have clear enough doneness criteria.  As a Scrum Practitioner, I wouldn’t think of running a sprint without reviewing the backlog with Einstein's Razor, so why wouldn’t I do the same for my own projects?    I can hear a few of you asking "What's Einstein's Razor?"   I'm glad you asked.  I was once told that Einstein told an audience, "If you can't explain what you do to a relatively bright six year old, you probably don't understand it yourself."    This quote had an impact on me, especially early in my career as a solo developer.  At the time, I was mostly doing end to end software development.  I found that I saved myself a lot of pain and trouble by turning that quote around to “If you can't explain your project's doneness criteria in such a way that a relatively bright six year old can't competently determine your projects success or failure, then you have not broken it down to a fine enough level.”  There are more negatives in that quote than I’m happy with, but it still gives me tons of value to this day.     In your opinion, in your current projects, could a 6 year old competently pass or fail your next sprint?  What risks are you running if your answer is “No” ?

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• Why We Do What We Do. (Part 3 of 5 Part Series on JDE 5G Postponed)

  - by Kem Butller-Oracle

  By Lyle Ekdahl - Oracle JD Edwards Sr. VP General Manager  In the closing of part two of this 5 part blog series, I stated that in the next installment I would explore the expected results of the digital overdrive era and the impact it will have on our economy. While I have full intentions of writing on that topic, I am inspired today to write about something that is top of mind. It’s top of mind because it has come up several times recently conversations with my Oracle’s JD Edwards team members, with customers and our partners, plus I feel passionately about why I do what I do…. It is not what we do but why we do that thing that we do Do you know what you do? For the most part, I bet you could tell me what you do even if your work has changed over the years.  My real question is, “Do you get excited about what you do, and are you fulfilled? Does your work deliver a sense of purpose, a cause to work for, and something to believe in?”  Alright, I guess that was not a single question. So let me just ask, “Why?” Why are you here, right now? Why do you get up in the morning? Why do you go to work? Of course, I can’t answer those questions for you but I can share with you my POV.   For starters, there are several things that drive me. As many of you know by now, I have a somewhat competitive nature but it is not solely the thrill of winning that actually fuels me. Now don’t get me wrong, I do like winning occasionally. However winning is only a potential result of competing and is clearly not guaranteed. So why compete? Why compete in business, and particularly why in this Enterprise Software business?  Here’s why! I am fascinated by creative and building processes. It is about making or producing things, causing something to come into existence. With the right skill, imagination and determination, whether it’s art or invention; the result can deliver value and inspire. In both avocation and vocation I always gravitate towards the create/build processes.  I believe one of the skills necessary for the create/build process is not just the aptitude but also, and especially, the desire and attitude that drives one to gain a deeper understanding. The more I learn about our customers, the more I seek to understand what makes the successful and what difficult issues cause them to struggle. I like to look for the complex, non-commodity process problems where streamlined design and modern technology can provide an easy and simple solution. It is especially gratifying to see our customers use our software to increase their own ability to deliver value to the market. What an incredible network effect! I know many of you share this customer obsession as well as the create/build addiction focused on simple and elegant design. This is what I believe is at the root of our common culture.  Are JD Edwards customers on a whole different than other ERP solutions’ customers? I would argue that for the most part, yes, they are. They selected our software, and our software is different. Why? Because I believe that the create/build process will generally result in solutions that reflect who built it and their culture. And a culture of people focused on why they create/build will attract different customers than one that is based on what is built or how the solution is delivered. In the past I have referred to this idea as character of the customer, and it transcends industry, size and run rate. Now some would argue that JD Edwards has some customers who are characters. But that is for a different post. As I have told you before, the JD Edwards culture is unique, and its resulting economy is valuable and deserving of our best efforts. 

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

  - by ultan o'broin

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

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• Session Sharing with another User on *NIX and Windows

  - by Giri Mandalika

  Oracle Solaris Since Solaris is not widely known for its graphical interface, let's just focus on sharing a terminal session in read-only mode with another user on the same system. Here is an example. eg., % finger Login Name TTY Idle When Where root Super-User pts/1 Sat 16:57 dhcp-amer-vpn-rmdc-a sunperf ??? pts/2 4 Sat 16:41 pitcher.sfbay.sun.com In this example, two users root and sunperf are connected to the same system from two different terminals pts/1 and pts/2 respectively. If the root user wants to show something to sunperf user -- what s/he is doing in her/his terminal, for example, it can be accomplished with the following command. script -a /dev/null | tee -a <target_terminal eg., # script -a /dev/null | tee -a /dev/pts/2 Script started, file is /dev/null # # uptime 5:04pm up 1 day(s), 2:56, 2 users, load average: 0.81, 0.81, 0.81 # # isainfo -v 64-bit sparcv9 applications crc32c cbcond pause mont mpmul sha512 sha256 sha1 md5 camellia kasumi des aes ima hpc vis3 fmaf asi_blk_init vis2 vis popc 32-bit sparc applications crc32c cbcond pause mont mpmul sha512 sha256 sha1 md5 camellia kasumi des aes ima hpc vis3 fmaf asi_blk_init vis2 vis popc v8plus div32 mul32 # # exit Script done, file is /dev/null After the script .. | tee .. command, sunperf user should be able to see the root user's stdin and stdout contents in her/his own terminal until the script session exits in root user's terminal. Since this kind of sharing is based on capturing and redirecting the contents to the target terminal, the users on the receiving end won't be able to see whatever is being edited on initiators' terminal [using editors such as vi]. Also it is not possible to share the session with any connected user on the system unless the initiator has the necessary permissions and privileges. The script utility records everything printed in a terminal session, while the tee utility replicates the contents of the screen capture on to the standard output of the target terimal. The tee utility does not buffer the output - so, the screen capture from the initiators' terminal appears almost right away in the target terminal. Though I never tested, this technique may work on all *NIX and Linux flavors with little or no changes. Also there might be other ways to accomplish this. [Thanks to Sujeet for sharing this tip] Microsoft Windows Most of the Windows users may rely on VNC services to share a desktop session. Another way to share the desktop session is to use the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client. Here are the steps. Connect to the target Windows system using Remote Desktop Connection client Launch Windows Task Manager Navigate to the "Users" tab Find the user session that you want to connect to and have full control over as the other user who is currently holding that session Select the user name in Windows Task Manager, right click and choose the option "Remote Control" A window pops up on the other user's session with the message "<USER is requesting to control your session remotely. Do you accept the request?" Once the other user says "Yes", you will be granted access to that session. Since then both users should be able to see the same screen and even control the session from their respective workstations.

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• A developer&rsquo;s WBS &ndash; 3 factors of 5

  - by johndoucette

  As a development manager, I have requested work breakdown structures (WBS) many times from the dev leads. Everyone has their own approach and why it takes sometimes days to get this simple list is often frustrating. Here is a simple way to get that elusive WBS done in 30 minutes and have 125 items in your list – well, 126. The WBS is made up of parent-child entities representing the overall outcome of the project. At the bottom of the hierarchical list should be the task item that a developer would perform in support of the branch in the list or WBS. Because I work with different dev leads on every project, I always ask the “what time value would you like to see at the lowest task in order to assign it to a developer and ensure it gets done within the timeframe”. I am particular to a task being 8 hours. Some like 8 to 24 hours. Stay away from tasks defaulting to 1 week. The task becomes way to vague and hard to manage completeness, especially on short budgets. As a developer, your focus is identifying the tasks you to accomplish in order to deliver the product. As a project manager, you will take the developer's WBS and add all the “other stuff” like quality testing, meetings, documentation, transition to maintenance, etc… Start your exercise with the name of the product you are delivering as a result of the project. You should be able to represent what you are building and deploying with one to three words. Example; XYZ Public Website Middleware BizTalk Application The reason you start with that single identifier is to always see the list as the product. It helps during each of the next three passes. Now, choose 5 tasks which in their entirety represent the product you will be delivering and add them to list under the product name you created earlier; Public Website     Security     Sites     Infrastructure     Publishing     Creative Continue this concept of seeing the list as the complete picture and decompose it one more level. You should have 25 items. Public Website     Security         Authentication         Login Control         Administration         DRM         Workflow     Sites         Masterpages         Page Layouts         Web Parts (RIA, Multimedia)         Content Types         Structures     Infrastructure         ...     Publishing         ...     Creative         ... And one more time for a total of 125 items. The top item makes the list 126. Public Website     Security         Authentication             Install (AD/ADAM/LDAP/SQL)             Configuration             Management             Web App Configuration             Implement Provider         Login Control             Login Form             Login/Logoff             pw change             pw recover/forgot             email verification         Administration             ...         DRM             ...         Workflow             ...     Sites         Masterpages         Page Layouts         Web Parts (RIA, Multimedia)         Content Types         Structures     Infrastructure         ...     Publishing         ...     Creative         ... The next step is to make sure the task at the bottom of every branch represents the “time value” you planned for the project. You can add more to the WBS and of course if you can’t find 5 items, 4 is fine. If a task can be done in a fraction of the time value you determined for the project, try to roll it up into a larger task. In the task actions (later when the iteration is being planned), decompose the details back to the simple tasks. Now, go estimate!

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• Why do I need two Instances in Windows Azure?

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) means that there are various components you can use in it to solve a problem: Compute “Roles” - Computers running an OS and optionally IIS - you can have more than one "Instance" of a given Role Storage - Blobs, Tables and Queues for Storage Other Services - Things like the Service Bus, Azure Connection Services, SQL Azure and Caching It’s important to understand that some of these services are Stateless and others maintain State. Stateless means (at least in this case) that a system might disappear from one physical location and appear elsewhere. You can think of this as a cashier at the front of a store. If you’re in line, a cashier might take his break, and another person might replace him. As long as the order proceeds, you as the customer aren’t really affected except for the few seconds it takes to change them out. The cashier function in this example is stateless. The Compute Role Instances in Windows Azure are Stateless. To upgrade hardware, because of a fault or many other reasons, a Compute Role's Instance might stop on one physical server, and another will pick it up. This is done through the controlling fabric that Windows Azure uses to manage the systems. It’s important to note that storage in Azure does maintain State. Your data will not simply disappear - it is maintained - in fact, it’s maintained three times in a single datacenter and all those copies are replicated to another for safety. Going back to our example, storage is similar to the cash register itself. Even though a cashier leaves, the record of your payment is maintained. So if a Compute Role Instance can disappear and re-appear, the things running on that first Instance would stop working. If you wrote your code in a Stateless way, then another Role Instance simply re-starts that transaction and keeps working, just like the other cashier in the example. But if you only have one Instance of a Role, then when the Role Instance is re-started, or when you need to upgrade your own code, you can face downtime, since there’s only one. That means you should deploy at least two of each Role Instance not only for scale to handle load, but so that the first “cashier” has someone to replace them when they disappear. It’s not just a good idea - to gain the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for our uptime in Azure it’s a requirement. We point this out right in the Management Portal when you deploy the application: (Click to enlarge) When you deploy a Role Instance you can also set the “Upgrade Domain”. Placing Roles on separate Upgrade Domains means that you have a continuous service whenever you upgrade (more on upgrades in another post) - the process looks like this for two Roles. This example covers the scenario for upgrade, so you have four roles total - One Web and one Worker running the "older" code, and one of each running the new code. In all those Roles you want at least two instances, and this example shows that you're covered for High Availability and upgrade paths: The take-away is this - always plan for forward-facing Roles to have at least two copies. For Worker Roles that do background processing, there are ways to architect around this number, but it does affect the SLA if you have only one.

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• Where Twitter Stands Heading Into 2013

  - by Mike Stiles

  As Twitter continued throughout 2012 to be a stage on which global politics and culture played itself out, the company itself underwent some adjustments that give us a good indication of what users and brands can expect from the platform in 2013. The power of the network did anything but fade. Celebrities continued to use it to connect one-on-one. Even the Pope signed on this year. It continued to fuel revolutions. It played an exponentially large factor in this US Presidential election. And around the world, the freedom to speak was challenged as users were fired, sued, sometimes even jailed for their tweets. Expect more of the same in 2013, as Twitter has entrenched itself, for individuals, causes and brands, as the fastest, easiest, most efficient way to message the masses so some measure of impact can come from it. It’s changed everything, and it’s not finished. These fun facts reveal the position of strength with which Twitter enters 2013: It now generates a billion tweets every 2.5 days It has 500 million+ users The average Twitter user has tweeted 307 times 32% of everyone using the Internet uses Twitter It’s expected to bring in $540 million in ad revenue by 2014 11 new accounts are created every second High-level Executive Summary: people love it, people use it, and they’re going to keep loving and using it. Whether or not outside developers love it is a different matter. 2012 marked a shift from welcoming the third party support that played at least some role in Twitter being so warmly embraced, to discouraging anything that replicates what Twitter can do itself…or plans to do itself. It’s not the open playground it once was. Now Twitter must spend 2013 proving it can innovate in-house and keep us just as entranced. Likewise, Twitter is distancing itself from Facebook. Images from the #1 platform’s Instagram don’t work on Twitter anymore, and Twitter’s rolling out their own photo filter product. Where the two have lived in a “plenty of room for everybody” symbiosis up to now, 2013 could see the giants ramping up a full-on rivalry. Twitter is exhibiting a deliberate strategy. Updates have centered on more visually appealing search results, and making finding and sharing content easier. Deals have been cut with some media entities so their content stands out. CEO Dick Costolo has said tweets aren’t the attraction, they’re what leads you to content. Twitter aims to be a key distributor of media and info. Add the addition of former News Corp. President Peter Chernin to the board, and their hashtag landing page experience for events, and their media behemoth ambitions get pretty clear. There are challenges ahead and Costolo has also laid those out; entry into China, figuring out how to have Twitter deliver both comprehensive and relevant, targeted experiences, and the visualization of big data. What does this mean for corporations? They can expect a more media-rich evolution and growing emphases on imagery. They can expect more opportunities to create great media content and leverage Twitter for its distribution. And they can expect new ways to surface in searches. Are brands diving in? 56% of customer tweets to companies get completely and totally ignored. Ugh. A study Twitter recently conducted with Compete shows people who see tweets from retailers are more likely to buy a product. And, the more retailer tweets they see, the more likely they are to purchase on the retail site. As more of those tweets point to engaging media content from the brand, the results should get even better. Twitter appears ready for 2013. Enterprise brands have some work to do. @mikestilesPhoto Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net

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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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• Feynman's inbox

  - by user12607414

  Here is Richard Feynman writing on the ease of criticizing theories, and the difficulty of forming them: The problem is not just to say something might be wrong, but to replace it by something — and that is not so easy. As soon as any really definite idea is substituted it becomes almost immediately apparent that it does not work. The second difficulty is that there is an infinite number of possibilities of these simple types. It is something like this. You are sitting working very hard, you have worked for a long time trying to open a safe. Then some Joe comes along who knows nothing about what you are doing, except that you are trying to open the safe. He says ‘Why don’t you try the combination 10:20:30?’ Because you are busy, you have tried a lot of things, maybe you have already tried 10:20:30. Maybe you know already that the middle number is 32 not 20. Maybe you know as a matter of fact that it is a five digit combination… So please do not send me any letters trying to tell me how the thing is going to work. I read them — I always read them to make sure that I have not already thought of what is suggested — but it takes too long to answer them, because they are usually in the class ‘try 10:20:30’. (“Seeking New Laws”, page 161 in The Character of Physical Law.) As a sometime designer (and longtime critic) of widely used computer systems, I have seen similar difficulties appear when anyone undertakes to publicly design a piece of software that may be used by many thousands of customers. (I have been on both sides of the fence, of course.) The design possibilities are endless, but the deep design problems are usually hidden beneath a mass of superfluous detail. The sheer numbers can be daunting. Even if only one customer out of a thousand feels a need to express a passionately held idea, it can take a long time to read all the mail. And it is a fact of life that many of those strong suggestions are only weakly supported by reason or evidence. Opinions are plentiful, but substantive research is time-consuming, and hence rare. A related phenomenon commonly seen with software is bike-shedding, where interlocutors focus on surface details like naming and syntax… or (come to think of it) like lock combinations. On the other hand, software is easier than quantum physics, and the population of people able to make substantial suggestions about software systems is several orders of magnitude bigger than Feynman’s circle of colleagues. My own work would be poorer without contributions — sometimes unsolicited, sometimes passionately urged on me — from the open source community. If a Nobel prize winner thought it was worthwhile to read his mail on the faint chance of learning a good idea, I am certainly not going to throw mine away. (In case anyone is still reading this, and is wondering what provoked a meditation on the quality of one’s inbox contents, I’ll simply point out that the volume has been very high, for many months, on the Lambda-Dev mailing list, where the next version of the Java language is being discussed. Bravo to those of my colleagues who are surfing that wave.) I started this note thinking there was an odd parallel between the life of the physicist and that of a software designer. On second thought, I’ll bet that is the story for anybody who works in public on something requiring special training. (And that would be pretty much anything worth doing.) In any case, Feynman saw it clearly and said it well.

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• How do I cap rendering of tiles in a 2D game with SDL?

  - by farmdve

  I have some boilerplate code working, I basically have a tile based map composed of just 3 colors, and some walls and render with SDL. The tiles are in a bmp file, but each tile inside it corresponds to an internal number of the type of tile(color, or wall). I have pretty basic collision detection and it works, I can also detetc continuous presses, which allows me to move pretty much anywhere I want. I also have a moving camera, which follows the object. The problem is that, the tile based map is bigger than the resolution, thus not all of the map can be displayed on the screen, but it's still rendered. I would like to cap it, but since this is new to me, I pretty much have no idea. Although I cannot post all the code, as even though I am a newbie and the code pretty basic, it's already quite a few lines, I can post what I tried to do void set_camera() { //Center the camera over the dot camera.x = ( player.box.x + DOT_WIDTH / 2 ) - SCREEN_WIDTH / 2; camera.y = ( player.box.y + DOT_HEIGHT / 2 ) - SCREEN_HEIGHT / 2; //Keep the camera in bounds. if(camera.x < 0 ) { camera.x = 0; } if(camera.y < 0 ) { camera.y = 0; } if(camera.x > LEVEL_WIDTH - camera.w ) { camera.x = LEVEL_WIDTH - camera.w; } if(camera.y > LEVEL_HEIGHT - camera.h ) { camera.y = LEVEL_HEIGHT - camera.h; } } set_camera() is the function which calculates the camera position based on the player's positions. I won't pretend I know much about it. Rectangle box = {0,0,0,0}; for(int t = 0; t < TOTAL_TILES; t++) { if(box.x < (camera.x - TILE_WIDTH) || box.y > (camera.y - TILE_HEIGHT)) apply_surface(box.x - camera.x, box.y - camera.y, surface, screen, &clips[tiles[t]]); box.x += TILE_WIDTH; //If we've gone too far if(box.x >= LEVEL_WIDTH) { //Move back box.x = 0; //Move to the next row box.y += TILE_HEIGHT; } } This is basically my render code. The for loop loops over 192 tiles stored in an int array, each with their own unique value describing the tile type(wall or one of three possible colored tiles). box is an SDL_Rect containing the current position of the tile, which is calculated on render. TILE_HEIGHT and TILE_WIDTH are of value 80. So the cap is determined by if(box.x < (camera.x - TILE_WIDTH) || box.y > (camera.y - TILE_HEIGHT)) However, this is just me playing with the values and see what doesn't break it. I pretty much have no idea how to calculate it. My screen resolution is 1024/768, and the tile map is of size 1280/960.

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• Heterogeneous Datacenter Management with Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Joe Diemer

  The following is a Guest Blog, contributed by Bryce Kaiser, Product Manager at Blue MedoraWhen I envision a perfect datacenter, it would consist of technologies acquired from a single vendor across the entire server, middleware, application, network, and storage stack - Apps to Disk - that meets your organization’s every IT requirement with absolute best-of-breed solutions in every category.   To quote a familiar motto, your datacenter would consist of "Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together".  In almost all cases, practical realities dictate something far less than the IT Utopia mentioned above.   You may wish to leverage multiple vendors to keep licensing costs down, a single vendor may not have an offering in the IT category you need, or your preferred vendor may quite simply not have the solution that meets your needs.    In other words, your IT needs dictate a heterogeneous IT environment.  Heterogeneity, however, comes with additional complexity. The following are two pretty typical challenges:1) No End-to-End Visibility into the Enterprise Wide Application Deployment. Each vendor solution which is added to an infrastructure may bring its own tooling creating different consoles for different vendor applications and platforms.2) No Visibility into Performance Bottlenecks. When multiple management tools operate independently, you lose diagnostic capabilities including identifying cross-tier issues with database, hung-requests, slowness, memory leaks and hardware errors/failures causing DB/MW issues. As adoption of Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) has increased, especially since the release of Enterprise Manager 12c, Oracle has seen an increase in the number of customers who want to leverage their investments in EM to manage non-Oracle workloads.  Enterprise Manager provides a single pane of glass view into their entire datacenter.  By creating a highly extensible framework via the Oracle EM Extensibility Development Kit (EDK), Oracle has provided the tooling for business partners such as my company Blue Medora as well as customers to easily fill gaps in the ecosystem and enhance existing solutions.  As mentioned in the previous post on the Enterprise Manager Extensibility Exchange, customers have access to an assortment of Oracle and Partner provided solutions through this Exchange, which is accessed at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emextensibility.  Currently, there are over 80 Oracle and partner provided plug-ins across the EM 11g and EM 12c versions.  Blue Medora is one of those contributing partners, for which you will find 3 of our solutions including our flagship plugin for VMware.  Let's look at Blue Medora’s VMware plug-in as an example to what I'm trying to convey.  Here is a common situation solved by true visibility into your entire stack:Symptoms•    My database is bogging down, however the database appears okay internally.  Maybe it’s starved for resources?•    My OS tooling is showing everything is “OK”.  Something doesn’t add up. Root cause•    Through the VMware plugin we can see the problem is actually on the virtualization layer Solution•    From within Enterprise Manager  -- the same tool you use for all of your database tuning -- we can overlay the data of the database target, host target, and virtual machine target for a true picture of the true root cause. Here is the console view: Perhaps your monitoring conditions are more specific to your environment.  No worries, Enterprise Manager still has you covered.  With Metric Extensions you have the “Next Generation” of User-Defined Metrics, which easily bring the power of your existing management scripts into a single console while leveraging the proven Enterprise Manager framework. Simply put, Oracle Enterprise manager boasts a growing ecosystem that provides the single pane of glass for your entire datacenter from the database and beyond.  Bryce can be contacted at [email protected]

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• OPN Specialized Latest News (15th November)

  - by swalker

  HELPING YOU TO SPECIALIZE WebCenter Implementation Specialist Exam Preparation Webcasts: WebCenter Content And WebCenter Portal Oracle Partner Network would like to invite you to Refresh Courses for WebCenter Content and WebCenter Portal, to help partners to prepare for the WebCenter Implementation Specialist EXAMS. This is a 3 hours intensive refresher partner-only training session, providing attendees with an overview of WebCenter Content and WebCenter Portal functions and related topics. After the refresher part you will be able to take the relevant Implementation Specialist EXAM depending on your personal focus. NOTE: This is only suitable for experienced WebCenter Content or WebCenter Portal practitioners Who should attend? Partner Consultants who want to become an Oracle WebCenter Content or a WebCenter Portal Certified Implementation Specialist or both, that will help them to differentiate themselves in front of customers and support their Companies to become Specialized. Webcast Details: Click here to read more... Specialized Partners Only! New Service to Promote Your Events The Partner Event Publisher has just been made available to all specialized partners in EMEA.  Partners now have the opportunity to publish their events to the Oracle.com/events site and spread the word on their upcoming live in-person and/or live webcast events. Click here to read more information and watch a short video demo. VADs Get Specialized Effective November 1, 2011 , VADs, with a valid Value Added Distributor Agreement will no longer be required to meet customer reference requirements outlined in the business criteria section in order to become specialized. VADs must continue meet all other business and competency criteria set forth in the applicable Knowledge Zone prior to specialization approval. New Certification Pillar Axiom 600 Storage System Your opportunity to take the Pillar Axiom 600 Storage System Essentials (1Z0-581) Exam is vailable now in beta. Pass the exam so you can become a Pillar Axiom 600 Storage Systems Implementation Specialist! Free vouchers are available for Oracle Partners! If you would like to receive a free Beta exam voucher, please send your request to [email protected] and include your name, business email address, company, and the Exam name Pillar Axiom 600 Storage System Essentials Beta exam. New Certification Available: Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2 Essentials (1Z0-562) is a solution designed to help you meet market windows and regulatory deadlines while enjoying a low total cost of ownership and a high return on investment. Take the exam now to become an  Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2 Essentials Implementation Specialists. MEASURING YOUR SUCCESS We had 1674 Specialized Partners covering 5364 Specializations. Please note that due to OPN contract renewals at any given point in time there are valid Specialized Partners and Specializations which are temporarily not captured in the total statistics. An incremental 1961 individuals were accredited as Implementation Specialists giving an EMEA cumulative total of 9598 Implementation Specialists 26 ISVs obtained one or more Ready's, for a total of 53 Ready's Don't forget! You can submit your own press releases to Oracle! Every time you achieve specialization we'd like to support you getting the message out! Press guidelines and a submission link can be found on the OPN Portal here.

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• Hijax == sneaky Javascript redirects? Will I get banned from Google?

  - by Chris Jacob

  Question Will I get penalised as "sneaky Javascript redirects" by Google if I have the following Hijax setup (which requires a JavaScript redirect on the page indexed by google). Goal I want to implement Hijax to enable AJAX content to be accessibile to non-JavaScript users and search engine crawlers. Background I'm working on a static file server (GitHub Pages). No server side tricks allowed (so Google's #! "hash bang" solution is not an option). I'm trying to keep my files DRY. I don't want to repeat the common OUTER template in all my files i.e. header, navigation menu, footer, etc They will live in the main index.html Setup the Hijax index.html page contains all OUTER html/css/js... the site's template. index.html has a <div id="content"> which defaults to containing the "homepage" html. index.html has a navigation menu, with a Hijax link to an "about" page. With JavaScript disabled (e.g. crawler) it follows link to /about.html. With JavaScript enabled (e.g. most people) the link updates the url hash fragment to /#about and jQuery replaces the <div id="content"> innerHTML with $("#content").load("about.html #inner-container");. AJAX content about.html does not contain anything extra to try an cloak content for crawlers. about.html file contains enough HTML / CSS / JavaScript to display /about.html as a standalone page with it's own META data... e.g. <html><head><title>About</title>...</head><body></body></html>. about.html has NO OUTER HTML template (i.e. header, navigation menu, footer, etc). about.html <body> contains a <div id="inner-container"> which holds the content that is injected into index.html. about.html has a <noscript> tag as the first child of <body> which explains to non-JavaScript users that they are viewing the about page "inner content" - with a link to navigate to the index.html page to get the full page layout with menu. The (Sneaky?) Redirect Google indexes the /about.html page. However when a person with JavaScript enabled visits that page there is no OUTER html template (e.g. header, navigation menu, footer, etc). So I need to do a JavaScript redirect to get the person over the /#about page (deeplinking to the "about" page "state" in index.html). I'm thinking of doing a "redirect on click or after 10 seconds". The end results is that user ends up on an "enhanced" page back on index.html with all it's OUTER template - but the core "page" content is practically identical. Known issue with inbound links e.g. Share / Bookmarking It seems that if a user shares the URL /#about on their blog, when allocating inbound links to my site Google ignores everything after the # ... it allocates value to the / page - See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5028405/hashbang-vs-hijax/5166665#5166665. I can only try an minimise this issue offering "share" buttons on the page with the appropriate urls i.e. /about.html. Duplicate Sorry. I posted this same question over on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5561686/hijax-sneaky-javascript-redirects-will-i-get-banned-from-google ... then realised it probably belongs more on this Stack Exchange site... Not sure if I should delete the Stack Overflow question? Or just leave it on both sites? Please leave comment.

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• Walkthrough: Scheduling jobs using Quartz.net &ndash; Part 1: What is Quartz.Net?

  - by Tarun Arora

  Quartz.NET is a full-featured, open source enterprise job scheduling system written in .NET platform that can be used from smallest apps to large scale enterprise systems. What is the problem that we trying to address? I want to schedule the execution of a task but only when something happens. Let’s call that something a trigger, so... if the trigger is met => execute the task. Sounds simple, why not use windows task scheduler for this? Well, windows task scheduler is great for tasks where the trigger can be easily defined. With windows task scheduler will you be able to schedule a task to run on every working day according to the UK calendar (exclude all weekends & bank holidays) without either writing the logic for day check in the task or a wrapper script calling into the task. The task should just contain the execution logic and should not have anything to do with the schedule for execution; Quartz.net allows you to achieve this and lots more. A quartz.net trigger gives you the flexibility for task invocation based on the following triggers, 1. at a certain time of day (to the millisecond) 2. on certain days of the week 3. on certain days of the month 4. on certain days of the year 5. not on certain days listed within a registered Calendar (such as business holidays) 6. repeated a specific number of times 7. repeated until a specific time/date 8. repeated indefinitely 9. repeated with a delay interval Did 8 – repeat indefinitely just ring a bell? I’ll be covering that in the future post. Using Quartz.net as a windows service You can have Quartz.net run as a standalone instance within its own .NET virtual machine instance via .NET Remoting. Let’s take a look at typical application architecture. In the figure below, I have the application tier set up on Machine 1, database set up on Machine 2 and Quartz.net set up on Machine 3 which is normally the architecture for most (if not all) enterprise applications. Figure 1 -  Typical Application architecture while using Quartz.net as a windows service What other options do I have if I don’t want to use Quartz.net? Quartz.net is just one of the many job scheduling services. Have a look at this comprehensive list of free and paid enterprise job scheduling software along with their feature comparison. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_job_scheduler_software This was first in the series of posts on enterprise scheduling using Quartz.net, in the next post I’ll be covering how to Install Quartz.net as a windows service. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

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• The Best Data Integration for Exadata Comes from Oracle

  - by maria costanzo

  Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate offer unique and optimized data integration solutions for Oracle Exadata. For example, customers that choose to feed their data warehouse or reporting database with near real-time throughout the day, can do so without decreasing  performance or availability of source and target systems. And if you ask why real-time, the short answer is: in today’s fast-paced, always-on world, business decisions need to use more relevant, timely data to be able to act fast and seize opportunities. A longer response to "why real-time" question can be found in a related blog post. If we look at the solution architecture, as shown on the diagram below,  Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate are both uniquely designed to take full advantage of the power of the database and to eliminate unnecessary middle-tier components. Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is the best bulk data loading solution for Exadata. ODI is the only ETL platform that can leverage the full power of Exadata, integrate directly on the Exadata machine without any additional hardware, and by far provides the simplest setup and fastest overall performance on an Exadata system. We regularly see customers achieving a 5-10 times boost when they move their ETL to ODI on Exadata. For  some companies the performance gain is even much higher. For example a large insurance company did a proof of concept comparing ODI vs a traditional ETL tool (one of the market leaders) on Exadata. The same process that was taking 5hrs and 11 minutes to complete using the competing ETL product took 7 minutes and 20 seconds with ODI. Oracle Data Integrator was 42 times faster than the conventional ETL when running on Exadata.This shows that Oracle's own data integration offering helps you to gain the most out of your Exadata investment with a truly optimized solution. GoldenGate is the best solution for streaming data from heterogeneous sources into Exadata in real time. Oracle GoldenGate can also be used together with Data Integrator for hybrid use cases that also demand non-invasive capture, high-speed real time replication. Oracle GoldenGate enables real-time data feeds from heterogeneous sources non-invasively, and delivers to the staging area on the target Exadata system. ODI runs directly on Exadata to use the database engine power to perform in-database transformations. Enterprise Data Quality is integrated with Oracle Data integrator and enables ODI to load trusted data into the data warehouse tables. Only Oracle can offer all these technical benefits wrapped into a single intelligence data warehouse solution that runs on Exadata. Compared to traditional ETL with add-on CDC this solution offers: §  Non-invasive data capture from heterogeneous sources and avoids any performance impact on source §  No mid-tier; set based transformations use database power §  Mini-batches throughout the day –or- bulk processing nightly which means maximum availability for the DW §  Integrated solution with Enterprise Data Quality enables leveraging trusted data in the data warehouse In addition to Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Morrison Supermarkets, United Kingdom’s fourth-largest food retailer, has seen the power of this solution for their new BI platform and shared their story with us. Morrisons needed to analyze data across a large number of manufacturing, warehousing, retail, and financial applications with the goal to achieve single view into operations for improved customer service. The retailer deployed Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator to bring new data into Oracle Exadata in near real-time and replicate the data into reporting structures within the data warehouse—extending visibility into operations. Using Oracle's data integration offering for Exadata, Morrisons produced financial reports in seconds, rather than minutes, and improved staff productivity and agility. You can read more about Morrison’s success story here and hear from Starwood here. From an Irem Radzik article.

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• Sitting Pretty

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk IT Pro newsletter'DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed' I dislike the term 'avatar', when used to describe a portrait photograph. An avatar, in the sense of a picture, is merely the depiction of one's role-play alter-ego, often a ridiculous bronze-age deity. However, professional image is important. The choice and creation of online photos has an effect on the way your message is received and it is important to get that right. It is fine to use that photo of you after ten lagers on holiday in an Ibiza nightclub, but what works on Facebook looks hilarious on LinkedIn. My splendid photograph that I use online was done by a professional photographer at great expense and I've never had the slightest twinge of regret when I remember how much I paid for it. It is me, but a more pensive and dignified edition, oozing trust and wisdom. One gasps at the magical skill that a professional photographer can conjure up, without digital manipulation, to make the best of a derisory noggin (ed: slang for a head). Even if he had offered to depict me as a semi-naked, muscle-bound, sword-wielding hero, I'd have demurred. No, any professional person needs a carefully cultivated image that looks right. I'd never thought of using that profile shot, though I couldn't help noticing the photographer flinch slightly when he first caught sight of my face. There is a problem with using an avatar. The use of a single image doesn't express the appropriate emotion. At the moment, it is weird to see someone with a laughing portrait writing something solemn. A neutral cast to the face, somewhat like a passport photo, is probably the best compromise. Actually, the same is true of a working life in IT. One of the first skills I learned was not to laugh at managers, but, instead, to develop a facial expression that promoted a sense of keenness, energy and respect. Every profession has its own preferred facial cast. A neighbour of mine has the natural gift of a face that displays barely repressed grief. Though he is characteristically cheerful, he earns a remarkable income as a pallbearer. DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed. With an appropriate avatar, you could do away with a lot of the need for 'smilies' to give clues as to the meaning of what you've written on forums and blogs. If you had a set of avatars, showing the full gamut of human emotions expressible in writing: Rage, fear, reproach, joy, ebullience, apprehension, exasperation, dissembly, irony, pathos, euphoria, remorse and so on. It would be quite a drop-down list on forums, but given the vast prairies of space on the average hard drive, who cares? It would cut down on the number of spats in Forums just as long as one picks the right avatar. As an unreconstructed geek, I find it hard to admit to the value of image in the workplace, but it is true. Just as we use professionals to tidy up and order our CVs and job applications, we should employ experts to enhance our professional image. After all you don't perform surgery or dentistry on yourself do you?

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• DrawIndexedPrimitives overdraws data in previous buffer if called in loop

  - by Daniel Excinsky

  I doubled the question from stackoverflow here, and will delete the opposite of a question that gave me the answer. I have the Draw method in one of my renderers, that loops through the dictionary and gets precollected and preinitialized buffers. When dictionary has only one element, everything is just fine. But with more elements what I get on the screen is only the data from the last buffer (I suppose, not sure) My Draw method: public void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { if (!_areStaticEffectsSet) { // blockEffect.Parameters["TextureAtlas"].SetValue(textureAtlas); blockEffect.Parameters["HorizonColor"].SetValue(World.HORIZONCOLOR); blockEffect.Parameters["NightColor"].SetValue(World.NIGHTCOLOR); blockEffect.Parameters["MorningTint"].SetValue(World.MORNINGTINT); blockEffect.Parameters["EveningTint"].SetValue(World.EVENINGTINT); blockEffect.Parameters["SunColor"].SetValue(World.SUNCOLOR); _areStaticEffectsSet = true; } blockEffect.Parameters["World"].SetValue(Matrix.Identity); blockEffect.Parameters["View"].SetValue(_player.CameraView); blockEffect.Parameters["Projection"].SetValue(_player.CameraProjection); blockEffect.Parameters["CameraPosition"].SetValue(_player.CameraPosition); blockEffect.Parameters["timeOfDay"].SetValue(_world.TimeOfDay); var viewFrustum = new BoundingFrustum(_player.CameraView * _player.CameraProjection); _graphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.Opaque; _graphicsDevice.DepthStencilState = DepthStencilState.Default; foreach (KeyValuePair<int, Texture2D> textureAtlas in textureAtlases) { blockEffect.Parameters["TextureAtlas"].SetValue(textureAtlas.Value); foreach (EffectPass pass in blockEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes) { pass.Apply(); //TODO: ?????????? ??????????????? ?? ?????? ?? ??????? ??????? VertexBuffer ? IndexBuffer foreach (Chunk chunk in _world.Chunks.Values) { if (chunk == null || chunk.IsDisposed) { continue; } if (chunk.BoundingBox.Intersects(viewFrustum) && chunk.GetBlockIndexBuffer(textureAtlas.Key) != null) { lock (chunk) { if (chunk.GetBlockIndexBuffer(textureAtlas.Key).IndexCount > 0) { VertexBuffer vertexBuffer = chunk.GetBlockVertexBuffer(textureAtlas.Key); IndexBuffer indexBuffer = chunk.GetBlockIndexBuffer(textureAtlas.Key); //if (chunk.DrawIndex == new Vector3i(0, 0, 0)) //{ //if (textureAtlas.Key == -1) //{ //var varray = new [] //{ //new VertexPositionTextureLight(new Vector3(0,68,0), new Vector2(0,1),1,new Vector3(0,0,0), new Vector3(1,1,1)), //new VertexPositionTextureLight(new Vector3(0,68,1), new Vector2(0,1),1,new Vector3(0,0,0), new Vector3(1,1,1)), //new VertexPositionTextureLight(new Vector3(1,68,0), new Vector2(0,1),1,new Vector3(0,0,0), new Vector3(1,1,1)) //}; //var iarray = new short[] {0, 1, 2}; //vertexBuffer = new VertexBuffer(_graphicsDevice, typeof(VertexPositionTextureLight), varray.Length, BufferUsage.WriteOnly); //indexBuffer = new IndexBuffer(_graphicsDevice, IndexElementSize.SixteenBits, iarray.Length, BufferUsage.WriteOnly); //vertexBuffer.SetData(varray); //indexBuffer.SetData(iarray); } } _graphicsDevice.SetVertexBuffer(vertexBuffer); _graphicsDevice.Indices = indexBuffer; _graphicsDevice.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, vertexBuffer.VertexCount, 0, indexBuffer.IndexCount / 3); } } } } } } } Noteworthy things about the code: XNA version is 4.0. I've commented the debugging code in the loop, but left it for it may bring some insight. I try not only to change vertices/indices in the loop, but textureAtlas also. Code in the shader about textureAtlas: Texture TextureAtlas; sampler TextureAtlasSampler = sampler_state { texture = <TextureAtlas>; magfilter = POINT; minfilter = POINT; mipfilter = POINT; AddressU = WRAP; AddressV = WRAP; }; struct VSInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float2 TexCoords1 : TEXCOORD0; float SunLight : COLOR0; float3 LocalLight : COLOR1; float3 Normal : NORMAL0; }; VertexPositionTextureLight is my own realization of IVertexType. So, do anybody know about this problem, or see the wrongness in my code (that's far more likely)?

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• Antenna Aligner Part 7: Connecting the dots

  - by Chris George

  The app is basically ready, so I eagerly started to sort out creating the application entry in iTunes Connect. It's mostly intuitive actually, although I did have to create yet another icon for iTunes sized 512x512 pixels, damn lucky I did the original graphics as vector! It took me longer to write the application description than anything else, I'm so not a tech author! I didn't like the way you have to 'make up' an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) number. I have to do some googling to find out that it really doesn't matter what it is! It should be more obvious what to do from the actual website itself. That aside, the rest of it was actually fairly straightforward. As well as the details of the application, iPhone and iPad screenshots were also required. This posed somewhat of a problem. The iPhone ones were easy (as I have one!), but I do not (yet) own an iPad . So I thought I'd leave the iPad screenshots out for now. Once the application details were sorted, I moved onto the rights and pricing. At the start of the project I had made the decision that I wouldn't charge any more than the lowest amount £0.59. I believe there is a market for this, but as my first foray into app development I didn't want to take the mick. I did realise, however, that I had built my app with a developer certificate and provisioning profile. This was fairly quickly corrected, and again Nomad made this very easy to switch over to the distribution certificate and provisioning profile. With a sense of excitement I cracked open iTunes connect and clicked the upload button ... ...slight snag... . when the Nomad project was started, Apple allowed uploads of these binaries via iTunes Connect. But this is no longer possible, the only upload path is via the Application Loader available from the Apple Developer program. This itself has one limitation, it only runs on a mac! D'OH!!!  Actually my language was somewhat more colourful when this fact came to light. After picking my laptop up off the floor and putting it back together... ok only joking, but I did nearly throw it out of frustration!... I started to consider the options; I briefly entertained the idea of buying a cheap mac from ebay... no, that defeats the whole object of what I'm doing, plus my wife wouldn't be impressed there are some guys out there in the interweb who will upload your app for a small fee...but I don't really like the idea of giving some faceless email address my apple developer login details, as well as my app binary! find some willing friend with a mac who would kindly let me use it... obviously this is the only sensible option. In the meantime, I informed the Nomad team about this slight 'issue' and they are currently investigating possible solutions...

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• Consumer Oriented Search In Oracle Endeca Information Discovery – Part 1

  - by Bob Zurek

  Information Discovery, a core capability of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, enables business users to rapidly search, discover and navigate through a wide variety of big data including structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. One of the key capabilities, among many, that differentiate our solution from others in the Information Discovery market is our deep support for search across this growing amount of varied big data. Our method and approach is very different than classic simple keyword search that is found in may information discovery solutions. In this first part of a series on the topic of search, I will walk you through many of the key capabilities that go beyond the simple search box that you might experience in products where search was clearly an afterthought or attempt to catch up to our core capabilities in this area. Lets explore. The core data management solution of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is the Endeca Server, a hybrid search-analytical database that his highly scalable and column-oriented in nature. We will talk in more technical detail about the capabilities of the Endeca Server in future blog posts as this post is intended to give you a feel for the deep search capabilities that are an integral part of the Endeca Server. The Endeca Server provides best-of-breed search features aw well as a new class of features that are the first to be designed around the requirement to bridge structured, semi-structured and unstructured big data. Some of the key features of search include type a heads, automatic alphanumeric spell corrections, positional search, Booleans, wildcarding, natural language, and category search and query classification dialogs. This is just a subset of the advanced search capabilities found in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. Search is an important feature that makes it possible for business users to explore on the diverse data sets the Endeca Server can hold at any one time. The search capabilities in the Endeca server differ from other Information Discovery products with simple “search boxes” in the following ways: The Endeca Server Supports Exploratory Search.  Enterprise data frequently requires the user to explore content through an ad hoc dialog, with guidance that helps them succeed. This has implications for how to design search features. Traditional search doesn’t assume a dialog, and so it uses relevance ranking to get its best guess to the top of the results list. It calculates many relevance factors for each query, like word frequency, distance, and meaning, and then reduces those many factors to a single score based on a proprietary “black box” formula. But how can a business users, searching, act on the information that the document is say only 38.1% relevant? In contrast, exploratory search gives users the opportunity to clarify what is relevant to them through refinements and summaries. This approach has received consumer endorsement through popular ecommerce sites where guided navigation across a broad range of products has helped consumers better discover choices that meet their, sometimes undetermined requirements. This same model exists in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. In fact, the Endeca Server powers many of the most popular e-commerce sites in the world. The Endeca Server Supports Cascading Relevance. Traditional approaches of search reduce many relevance weights to a single score. This means that if a result with a good title match gets a similar score to one with an exact phrase match, they’ll appear next to each other in a list. But a user can’t deduce from their score why each got it’s ranking, even though that information could be valuable. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery takes a different approach. The Endeca Server stratifies results by a primary relevance strategy, and then breaks ties within a strata by ordering them with a secondary strategy, and so on. Application managers get the explicit means to compose these strategies based on their knowledge of their own domain. This approach gives both business users and managers a deterministic way to set and understand relevance. Now that you have an understanding of two of the core search capabilities in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, our next blog post on this topic will discuss more advanced features including set search, second-order relevance as well as an understanding of faceted search mechanisms that include queries and filters.  

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• Virtualized data centre&ndash;Part three: Architecture

  - by marc dekeyser

  Having the basics (like discussed in the previous articles) is all good and well, but how do we get started on this?! It can be quite daunting after all!   From my own point of view I can absolutely confirm your worries and concerns, but also tell you that it is not as hard as it seems! Deciding on what kind of motherboard to buy, processor and how much memory is an activity you will spend quite some time doing research on. And that is not even mentioning storage! All in all it comes down to setting you expectations and your budget. Probably adjusting your expectations according to your budget :). Processors As a rule of thumb you want VT-D (virtualization) technology built in to the processor allowing you to have 64 bit machines running on your host. Memory The more the better! If you are building a home lab don’t bother with ECC unless you are going to run machines that absolutely should be on all the time and your comfort depends on it! Motherboard Depends on what you are going to do with storage: If you are going the NAS way then the number of SATA port/RAID capabilities do not really matter. If you decide to have a single server with lots of dedicated storage it obviously matters how much SATA ports you will have, alternatively you could use a RAID controller (but these set you back a pretty penny if you want one. DELL 6i’s are usually available for a good bargain if you can find one!). Easiest is to get one with a built-in graphics card (on-board) as you are just adding more heat, power usage and possible points of failure. Networking Just like your choice of motherboard the networking side tends to depend on how you want to go. A single virtualization  host with local storage can usually get away with having a single network card, a cluster or server which uses iSCSI storage tends to have more than one teamed up :). Storage The dreaded beast from the dark! The horror which lives in the forest! The most difficult decision you are going to make in the building of your lab. Why you might ask? Simple my friend, having the right choice of storage can make or break your virtualization solution. The performance of you storage choice will have an important impact on the responsiveness of your virtual machines and the deployment of new machines. It also makes a run with your budget! If you decide to go the NAS route you will be dropping a lot more money than if you would be having just a bunch of disks sitting in a server and manually distributing the virtual machines over the disks. Platform I’m a Microsoftee so Hyper-V is a dead giveaway for me. If you are interested in using VMware I won’t stop you but the rest of my posts will be oriented on Server 2012 Hyper-V (aka 3.0)! What did I use? Before someone asks me this in the comments I’ll give you a quick run down of what I am using. - Intel 2.4 quad core processors (i something something) - 24 GB DDR3 Memory - Single disk in each server (might look at this as I move the servers to 2012) - Synology DS1812+ NAS - 3 network interfaces where possible - HP1800 procurve managed switch I decided to spring for the NAS as I will also be using it for backups and media storage (which is working out quite nicely with my Xbox 360 I must say). At the time of building my 2 boxes (over a year and a half ago) these set me back about 900 euros each so I can image you can build the same or better for a lower price. Next article will be diagramming what I want to achieve and starting a build on the Hyper V 3.0 cluster!

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• The Rise of Project Intelligence and Why It Matters

  - 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;} By Amy DeWolf Are you doing any of these in your organization? How are you leveraging historical data to forecast projects? There’s a lot going on in government today. The economic pressures agencies feel from the uncertainty of budget cuts and sequestration effect every part of an organization, including the Project Management Office (PMO).  The PMO is responsible for monitoring and administering government IT projects. As time goes on, priorities shift, technology advances, and new regulations are imposed, all of which make planning and executing projects more difficult.  For example, think about your own projects.  How many boxes do you need to check and hoops do you need to jump through to ensure you comply with new regulations? While new regulations and technology advancements can be a good thing, they add an additional layer of complexity to already complex projects. To overcome some of these pressures, particularly new regulations, many in the PMO world are adopting a new approach- Project Intelligence (PI). According to a new Oracle Primavera white paper, The Rise of Project Intelligence: When Project Management is Just Not Enough, “PI uses Business Intelligence methods to leverage historical project data to make more informed decisions and greatly enhance project execution.” Currently, project managers plan and forecast the possible phases in an execution cycle.  However, most project managers don’t have the proper tools to do this as effectively as they would like. As the white paper noted, “The underlying deficiencies in most forecasting approaches are that 1) the PM fails in most instances to leverage historical data and 2) the PM doesn’t employ current Business Intelligence tools.” PI seeks to overturn this by combining modeling tools used in Business Intelligence for projects with the understanding of Emotional Intelligence for managing people.   Simply put, Project Intelligence is built off four main pillars: Actively use historical data to forecast project cycles Understand the intricacies of complex projects Enhance social and emotional intelligence in projects Actively use Business intelligence tools Read our complimentary whitepaper and discover the importance of emotional intelligence and best practices for improving projects, specifically in terms of communication.

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• Ubiquitous BIP

  - by Tim Dexter

  The last number I heard from Mike and the PM team was that BIP is now embedded in more than 40 oracle products. That's a lot of products to keep track of and to help out with new releases, etc. Its interesting to see how internal Oracle product groups have integrated BIP into their products. Just as you might integrate BIP they have had to make a choice about how to integrate. 1. Library level - BIP is a pure java app and at the bottom of the architecture are a group of java libraries that expose APIs that you can use. they fall into three main areas, data extraction, template processing and formatting and delivery. There are post processing capabilities but those APIs are embedded withing the template processing libraries. Taking this integration route you are going to need to manage templates, data extraction and processing. You'll have your own UI to allow users to control all of this for themselves. Ultimate control but some effort to build and maintain. I have been trawling some of the products during a coffee break. I found a great post on the reporting capabilities provided by BIP in the records management product within WebCenter Content 11g. This integration falls into the first category, content manager looks after the report artifacts itself and provides you the UI to manage and run the reports. 2. Web Service level - further up in the stack is the web service layer. This is sitting on the BI Publisher server as a set of services, runReport and scheduleReport are the main protagonists. However, you can also manage the reports and users (locally managed) on the server and the catalog itself via the services layer.Taking this route, you still need to provide the user interface to choose reports and run them but the creation and management of the reports is all handled by the Publisher server. I have worked with a few customer on this approach. The web services provide the ability to retrieve a list of reports the user can access; then the parameters and LOVs for the selected report and finally a service to submit the report on the server. 3. Embedded BIP server UI- the final level is not so well supported yet. You can currently embed a report and its various levels of surrounding  'chrome' inside another html based application using a URL. Check the docs here. The look and feel can be customized but again, not easy, nor documented. I have messed with running the server pages inside an IFRAME, not bad, but not great. Taking this path should present the least amount of effort on your part to get BIP integrated but there are a few gotchas you need to get around. So a reasonable amount of choices with varying amounts of effort involved. There is another option coming soon for all you ADF developers out there, the ability to drop a BIP report into your application pages. But that's for another post.

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• Musings on the launch of SQL Monitor

  - by Phil Factor

  For several years, I was responsible for the smooth running of a large number of enterprise database servers. We ran a network monitoring tool that was primitive by today’s standards but which performed the useful function of polling every system, including all the Servers in my charge. It ran a configurable script for each service that you needed to monitor that was merely required to return one of a number of integer values. These integer values represented the pain level of the service, from 10 (“hurtin’ real bad”) to 1 (“Things is great”). Not only could you program the visual appearance of each server on the network diagram according to the value of the integer, but you could even opt to run a sound file. Very soon, we had a large TFT Screen, high on the wall of the server room, with every server represented by an icon, and a speaker next to it that would give out a series of grunts, groans, snores, shrieks and funeral marches, depending on the problem. One glance at the display, and you could dive in with iSQL/QA/SSMS and check what was going on with your favourite diagnostic tools. If you saw a server icon burst into flames on the screen or droop like a jelly, you dropped your mug of coffee to do it.  It was real fun, but I remember it more for the huge difference it made to have that real-time visibility into how your servers are performing. The management soon stopped making jokes about the real reason we wanted the TFT screen. (It rendered DVDs beautifully they said; particularly flesh-tints). If you are instantly alerted when things start to go wrong, then there was a good chance you could fix it before being alerted to the problem by the users of the system.  There is a world of difference between this sort of tool, one that gives whoever is ‘on watch’ in the server room the first warning of a potential problem on one of any number of servers, and the breed of tool that attempts to provide some sort of prosthetic DBA Brain. I like to get the early warning, to get the right information to help to diagnose a problem: No auto-fix, but just the information. I prefer to leave the task of ascertaining the exact cause of a problem to my own routines, custom code, intuition and forensic instincts. A simulated aircraft cockpit doesn’t do anything for me, especially before I know where I should be flying.  Time has moved on, and that TFT screen is now, with SQL Monitor, an iPad or any other mobile or static device that can support a browser. Rather than trying to reproduce the conceptual topology of the servers, it lists them in their groups so as to give a display that scales with the increasing number of databases you monitor.  It gives the history of the major events and trends for the servers. It gives the icons and colours that you can spot out of the corner of your eye, but goes on to give you just enough information in drill-down to give you a much clearer idea of where to look with your DBA tools and routines. It doesn't swamp you with information.  Whereas a few server and database-level problems are pretty easily fixed, others depend on judgement and experience to sort out.  Although the idea of an application that automates the bulk of a DBA’s skills is attractive to many, I can’t see it happening soon. SQL Server’s complexity increases faster than the panaceas can be created. In the meantime, I believe that the best way of helping  DBAs  is to make the monitoring process as simple and effective as possible,  and provide the right sort of detail and ‘evidence’ to allow them to decide on the fix. In the end, it is still down to the skill of the DBA.

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• Numerically stable(ish) method of getting Y-intercept of mouse position?

  - by Fraser

  I'm trying to unproject the mouse position to get the position on the X-Z plane of a ray cast from the mouse. The camera is fully controllable by the user. Right now, the algorithm I'm using is... Unproject the mouse into the camera to get the ray: Vector3 p1 = Vector3.Unproject(new Vector3(x, y, 0), 0, 0, width, height, nearPlane, farPlane, viewProj; Vector3 p2 = Vector3.Unproject(new Vector3(x, y, 1), 0, 0, width, height, nearPlane, farPlane, viewProj); Vector3 dir = p2 - p1; dir.Normalize(); Ray ray = Ray(p1, dir); Then get the Y-intercept by using algebra: float t = -ray.Position.Y / ray.Direction.Y; Vector3 p = ray.Position + t * ray.Direction; The problem is that the projected position is "jumpy". As I make small adjustments to the mouse position, the projected point moves in strange ways. For example, if I move the mouse one pixel up, it will sometimes move the projected position down, but when I move it a second pixel, the project position will jump back to the mouse's location. The projected location is always close to where it should be, but it does not smoothly follow a moving mouse. The problem intensifies as I zoom the camera out. I believe the problem is caused by numeric instability. I can make minor improvements to this by doing some computations at double precision, and possibly abusing the fact that floating point calculations are done at 80-bit precision on x86, however before I start micro-optimizing this and getting deep into how the CLR handles floating point, I was wondering if there's an algorithmic change I can do to improve this? EDIT: A little snooping around in .NET Reflector on SlimDX.dll: public static Vector3 Unproject(Vector3 vector, float x, float y, float width, float height, float minZ, float maxZ, Matrix worldViewProjection) { Vector3 coordinate = new Vector3(); Matrix result = new Matrix(); Matrix.Invert(ref worldViewProjection, out result); coordinate.X = (float) ((((vector.X - x) / ((double) width)) * 2.0) - 1.0); coordinate.Y = (float) -((((vector.Y - y) / ((double) height)) * 2.0) - 1.0); coordinate.Z = (vector.Z - minZ) / (maxZ - minZ); TransformCoordinate(ref coordinate, ref result, out coordinate); return coordinate; } // ... public static void TransformCoordinate(ref Vector3 coordinate, ref Matrix transformation, out Vector3 result) { Vector3 vector; Vector4 vector2 = new Vector4 { X = (((coordinate.Y * transformation.M21) + (coordinate.X * transformation.M11)) + (coordinate.Z * transformation.M31)) + transformation.M41, Y = (((coordinate.Y * transformation.M22) + (coordinate.X * transformation.M12)) + (coordinate.Z * transformation.M32)) + transformation.M42, Z = (((coordinate.Y * transformation.M23) + (coordinate.X * transformation.M13)) + (coordinate.Z * transformation.M33)) + transformation.M43 }; float num = (float) (1.0 / ((((transformation.M24 * coordinate.Y) + (transformation.M14 * coordinate.X)) + (coordinate.Z * transformation.M34)) + transformation.M44)); vector2.W = num; vector.X = vector2.X * num; vector.Y = vector2.Y * num; vector.Z = vector2.Z * num; result = vector; } ...which seems to be a pretty standard method of unprojecting a point from a projection matrix, however this serves to introduce another point of possible instability. Still, I'd like to stick with the SlimDX Unproject routine rather than writing my own unless it's really necessary.

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