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• How to Apply a Business Card Template to a Contact and Customize it in Outlook 2013

  - by Lori Kaufman

  If you want to add a business card template to an existing contact in Outlook, you can do so without having to enter all of the information again. We will also show you how to customize the layout and format of the text on the card. Microsoft provides a couple of business card templates you can use. We will use their Blue Sky template as an example. To open the archive file for the template you downloaded, double-click on the .cab file. NOTE: You can also use a tool like 7-Zip to open the archive. A new Extract tab becomes available under Compressed Folder Tools and the files in the archive are listed. Select the .vcf file in the list of files. This automatically activates the Extract tab. Click Extract To and select a location or select Choose location if the desired location is not on the drop-down menu. Select a folder in which you want to save the .vcf file on the Copy Items dialog box and click Copy. NOTE: Use the Make New Folder button to create a new folder for the location, if desired. Double-click on the .vcf file that you copied out of the .cab archive file. By default, .vcf files are associated with Outlook so, when you double-click on a .vcf file, it automatically opens in a Contact window in Outlook. Change the Full Name to match the existing contact to which you want to apply this template. Delete the other contact info from the template. If you want to add any additional information not in the existing contact, enter it. Click Save & Close to save the contact with the new template. The Duplicate Contact Detected dialog box displays. To update the existing contact, select the Update information of selected Contact option. Click Update. NOTE: If you want to create a new contact from this template, select the Add new contact option. With the Contacts folder open (the People link on the Navigation Bar), click Business Card in the Current View section of the Home tab. You may notice that not all the fields from your contact display on the business card you just updated. Double-click on the contact to update the contact and the business card. On the Contact window, right-click on the image of the business card and select Edit Business Card from the popup menu. The Edit Business Card dialog box displays. You can change the design of the card, including changing he background color or image. The Fields box allows you to specify which fields display on the business card and in what order. Notice, in our example, that Company is listed below the Full Name, but no text displays on the business card below the name. That’s because we did not enter any information for Company in the Contact. We have information in Job Title. So, we select Company and click Remove to remove that field. Now, we want to add Job Title. First, select the field below which you want to add the new field. We select Full Name to add the Job Title below that. Then, we click Add and select Organization | Job Title from the popup menu to insert the Job Title. To make the Job Title white like the name, we select Job Title in the list of Fields and click the Font Color button in the Edit section. On the Color dialog box, select the color you want to use for the text in the selected field. Click OK. You can also make text bold, italic, or underlined. We chose to make the Job Title bold and the Full Name bold and italic. We also need to remove the Business Phone because this contact only has a mobile phone number. So, we add a Mobile Phone from the Phone submenu. Then, we need to remove enough blank lines so the Mobile Phone is visible on the card. We also added a website and email address and removed more blank lines so they are visible. You can also move text to the right side of the card or make it centered on the card. We also changed the color of the bottom three lines to blue. Click OK to accept your changes and close the dialog box. Your new business card design displays on the Contact window. Click Save & Close to save the changes you made to the business card for this contact and close the Contact window. The final design of the business card displays in the Business Card view on the People screen. If you have a signature that contains the business card for the contact you just updated, you will also need to update the signature by removing the business card and adding it again using the Business Card button in the Signature editor. You can also add the updated Business Card to a signature without the image or without the vCard (.vcf) file.     

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• Windows in StreamInsight: Hopping vs. Snapshot

  - by Roman Schindlauer

  Three weeks ago, we explained the basic concept of windows in StreamInsight: defining sets of events that serve as arguments for set-based operations, like aggregations. Today, we want to discuss the so-called Hopping Windows and compare them with Snapshot Windows. We will compare these two, because they can serve similar purposes with different behaviors; we will discuss the remaining window type, Count Windows, another time. Hopping (and its syntactic-sugar-sister Tumbling) windows are probably the most straightforward windowing concept in StreamInsight. A hopping window is defined by its length, and the offset from one window to the next. They are aligned with some absolute point on the timeline (which can also be given as a parameter to the window) and create sets of events. The diagram below shows an example of a hopping window with length of 1h and hop size (the offset) of 15 minutes, hence creating overlapping windows:   Two aspects in this diagram are important: Since this window is overlapping, an event can fall into more than one windows. If an (interval) event spans a window boundary, its lifetime will be clipped to the window, before it is passed to the set-based operation. That’s the default and currently only available window input policy. (This should only concern you if you are using a time-sensitive user-defined aggregate or operator.) The set-based operation will be applied to each of these sets, yielding a result. This result is: A single scalar value in case of built-in or user-defined aggregates. A subset of the input payloads, in case of the TopK operator. Arbitrary events, when using a user-defined operator. The timestamps of the result are almost always the ones of the windows. Only the user-defined  operator can create new events with timestamps. (However, even these event lifetimes are subject to the window’s output policy, which is currently always to clip to the window end.) Let’s assume we were calculating the sum over some payload field: var result = from window in source.HoppingWindow( TimeSpan.FromHours(1), TimeSpan.FromMinutes(15), HoppingWindowOutputPolicy.ClipToWindowEnd) select new { avg = window.Avg(e => e.Value) }; Now each window is reflected by one result event:   As you can see, the window definition defines the output frequency. No matter how many or few events we got from the input, this hopping window will produce one result every 15 minutes – except for those windows that do not contain any events at all, because StreamInsight window operations are empty-preserving (more about that another time). The “forced” output for every window can become a performance issue if you have a real-time query with many events in a wide group & apply – let me explain: imagine you have a lot of events that you group by and then aggregate within each group – classical streaming pattern. The hopping window produces a result in each group at exactly the same point in time for all groups, since the window boundaries are aligned with the timeline, not with the event timestamps. This means that the query output will become very bursty, delivering the results of all the groups at the same point in time. This becomes especially obvious if the events are long-lasting, spanning multiple windows each, so that the produced result events do not change their value very often. In such a case, a snapshot window can remedy. Snapshot windows are more difficult to explain than hopping windows: they represent those periods in time, when no event changes occur. In other words, if you mark all event start and and times on your timeline, then you are looking at all snapshot window boundaries:   If your events are never overlapping, the snapshot window will not make much sense. It is commonly used together with timestamp modification, which make it a very powerful tool. Or as Allan Mitchell expressed in in a recent tweet: “I used to look at SnapshotWindow() with disdain. Now she is my mistress, the one I turn to in times of trouble and need”. Let’s look at a simple example: I want to compute the average of some value in my events over the last minute. I don’t want this output be produced at fixed intervals, but at soon as it changes (that’s the true event-driven spirit!). The snapshot window will include all currently active event at each point in time, hence we need to extend our original events’ lifetimes into the future: Applying the Snapshot window on these events, it will appear to be “looking back into the past”: If you look at the result produced in this diagram, you can easily prove that, at each point in time, the current event value represents the average of all original input event within the last minute. Here is the LINQ representation of that query, applying the lifetime extension before the snapshot window: var result = from window in source .AlterEventDuration(e => TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1)) .SnapshotWindow(SnapshotWindowOutputPolicy.Clip) select new { avg = window.Avg(e => e.Value) }; With more complex modifications of the event lifetimes you can achieve many more query patterns. For instance “running totals” by keeping the event start times, but snapping their end times to some fixed time, like the end of the day. Each snapshot then “sees” all events that have happened in the respective time period so far. Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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• Augmenting your Social Efforts via Data as a Service (DaaS)

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is the 3rd in a series of posts on the value of leveraging social data across your enterprise by Oracle VP Product Development Don Springer and Oracle Cloud Data and Insight Service Sr. Director Product Management Niraj Deo. In this post, we will discuss the approach and value of integrating additional “public” data via a cloud-based Data-as-as-Service platform (or DaaS) to augment your Socially Enabled Big Data Analytics and CX Management. Let’s assume you have a functional Social-CRM platform in place. You are now successfully and continuously listening and learning from your customers and key constituents in Social Media, you are identifying relevant posts and following up with direct engagement where warranted (both 1:1, 1:community, 1:all), and you are starting to integrate signals for communication into your appropriate Customer Experience (CX) Management systems as well as insights for analysis in your business intelligence application. What is the next step? Augmenting Social Data with other Public Data for More Advanced Analytics When we say advanced analytics, we are talking about understanding causality and correlation from a wide variety, volume and velocity of data to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to achieve and optimize business value. And in some cases, to predict future performance to make appropriate course corrections and change the outcome to your advantage while you can. The data to acquire, process and analyze this is very nuanced: It can vary across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data It can span across content, profile, and communities of profiles data It is increasingly public, curated and user generated The key is not just getting the data, but making it value-added data and using it to help discover the insights to connect to and improve your KPIs. As we spend time working with our larger customers on advanced analytics, we have seen a need arise for more business applications to have the ability to ingest and use “quality” curated, social, transactional reference data and corresponding insights. The challenge for the enterprise has been getting this data inline into an easily accessible system and providing the contextual integration of the underlying data enriched with insights to be exported into the enterprise’s business applications. The following diagram shows the requirements for this next generation data and insights service or (DaaS): Some quick points on these requirements: Public Data, which in this context is about Common Business Entities, such as - Customers, Suppliers, Partners, Competitors (all are organizations) Contacts, Consumers, Employees (all are people) Products, Brands This data can be broadly categorized incrementally as - Base Utility data (address, industry classification) Public Master Reference data (trade style, hierarchy) Social/Web data (News, Feeds, Graph) Transactional Data generated by enterprise process, workflows etc. This Data has traits of high-volume, variety, velocity etc., and the technology needed to efficiently integrate this data for your needs includes - Change management of Public Reference Data across all categories Applied Big Data to extract statics as well as real-time insights Knowledge Diagnostics and Data Mining As you consider how to deploy this solution, many of our customers will be using an online “cloud” service that provides quality data and insights uniformly to all their necessary applications. In addition, they are requesting a service that is: Agile and Easy to Use: Applications integrated with the service can obtain data on-demand, quickly and simply Cost-effective: Pre-integrated into applications so customers don’t have to Has High Data Quality: Single point access to reference data for data quality and linkages to transactional, curated and social data Supports Data Governance: Becomes more manageable and cost-effective since control of data privacy and compliance can be enforced in a centralized place Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Just as the cloud has transformed and now offers a better path for how an enterprise manages its IT from their infrastructure, platform, and software (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), the next step is data (DaaS). Over the last 3 years, we have seen the market begin to offer a cloud-based data service and gain initial traction. On one side of the DaaS continuum, we see an “appliance” type of service that provides a single, reliable source of accurate business data plus social information about accounts, leads, contacts, etc. On the other side of the continuum we see more of an online market “exchange” approach where ISVs and Data Publishers can publish and sell premium datasets within the exchange, with the exchange providing a rich set of web interfaces to improve the ease of data integration. Why the difference? It depends on the provider’s philosophy on how fast the rate of commoditization of certain data types will occur. How do you decide the best approach? Our perspective, as shown in the diagram below, is that the enterprise should develop an elastic schema to support multi-domain applicability. This allows the enterprise to take the most flexible approach to harness the speed and breadth of public data to achieve value. The key tenet of the proposed approach is that an enterprise carefully federates common utility, master reference data end points, mobility considerations and content processing, so that they are pervasively available. One way you may already be familiar with this approach is in how you do Address Verification treatments for accounts, contacts etc. If you design and revise this service in such a way that it is also easily available to social analytic needs, you could extend this to launch geo-location based social use cases (marketing, sales etc.). Our fundamental belief is that value-added data achieved through enrichment with specialized algorithms, as well as applying business “know-how” to weight-factor KPIs based on innovative combinations across an ever-increasing variety, volume and velocity of data, will be where real value is achieved. Essentially, Data-as-a-Service becomes a single entry point for the ever-increasing richness and volume of public data, with enrichment and combined capabilities to extract and integrate the right data from the right sources with the right factoring at the right time for faster decision-making and action within your core business applications. As more data becomes available (and in many cases commoditized), this value-added data processing approach will provide you with ongoing competitive advantage. Let’s look at a quick example of creating a master reference relationship that could be used as an input for a variety of your already existing business applications. In phase 1, a simple master relationship is achieved between a company (e.g. General Motors) and a variety of car brands’ social insights. The reference data allows for easy sort, export and integration into a set of CRM use cases for analytics, sales and marketing CRM. In phase 2, as you create more data relationships (e.g. competitors, contacts, other brands) to have broader and deeper references (social profiles, social meta-data) for more use cases across CRM, HCM, SRM, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the amount of master reference relationships is constrained only by your imagination and the availability of quality curated data you have to work with. DaaS is just now emerging onto the marketplace as the next step in cloud transformation. For some of you, this may be the first you have heard about it. Let us know if you have questions, or perspectives. In the meantime, we will continue to share insights as we can.Photo: Erik Araujo, stock.xchng

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• Loading XML file containing leading zeros with SSIS preserving the zeros

  - by Compudicted

  Visiting the MSDN SQL Server Integration Services Forum oftentimes I could see that people would pop up asking this question: “why I am not able to load an element from an XML file that contains zeros so the leading/trailing zeros would remain intact?”. I started to suspect that such a trivial and often-required operation perhaps is being misunderstood by the developer community. I would also like to add that the whole state of affairs surrounding the XML today is probably also going to be increasingly affected by a motion of people who dislike XML in general and many aspects of it as XSD and XSLT invoke a negative reaction at best. Nevertheless, XML is in wide use today and its importance as a bridge between diverse systems is ever increasing. Therefore, I deiced to write up an example of loading an arbitrary XML file that contains leading zeros in one of its elements using SSIS so the leading zeros would be preserved keeping in mind the goal on simplicity into a table in SQL Server database. To start off bring up your BIDS (running as admin) and add a new Data Flow Task (DFT). This DFT will serve as container to adding our XML processing elements (besides, the XML Source is not available anywhere else other than from within the DFT). Double-click your DFT and drag and drop the XMS Source component from the Tool Box’s Data Flow Sources. Now, let the fun begin! Being inspired by the upcoming Christmas I created a simple XML file with one set of data that contains an imaginary SSN number of Rudolph containing several leading zeros like 0000003. This file can be viewed here. To configure the XML Source of course it is quite intuitive to point it to our XML file, next what the XML source needs is either an embedded schema (XSD) or it can generate one for us. In lack of the one I opted to auto-generate it for me and I ended up with an XSD that looked like: <?xml version="1.0"?> <xs:schema attributeFormDefault="unqualified" elementFormDefault="qualified" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <xs:element name="XMasEvent"> <xs:complexType> <xs:sequence> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="CaseInfo"> <xs:complexType> <xs:sequence> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="ID" type="xs:unsignedByte" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="CreatedDate" type="xs:unsignedInt" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="LastName" type="xs:string" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="FirstName" type="xs:string" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="SSN" type="xs:unsignedByte" /> <!-- Becomes string -- > <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="DOB" type="xs:unsignedInt" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="Event" type="xs:string" /> <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="ClosedDate" /> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> </xs:element> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> </xs:element> </xs:schema> As an aside on the XML file: if your XML file does not contain the outer node (<XMasEvent>) then you may end up in a situation where you see just one field in the output. Now please note that the SSN element’s data type was chosen to be of unsignedByte (and this is for a reason). The reason is stemming from the fact all our figures in the element are digits, this is good, but this is not exactly what we need, because if we will attempt to load the data with this XSD then we are going to either get errors on the destination or most typically lose the leading zeros. So the next intuitive choice is to change the data type to string. Besides, if a SSIS package was already created based on this XSD and the data type change was done thereafter, one should re-set the metadata by right-clicking the XML Source and choosing “Advanced Editor” in which there is a refresh button at the bottom left which will do the trick. So far so good, we are ready to load our XML file, well actually yes, and no, in my experience typically some data conversion may be required. So depending on your data destination you may need to tweak the data types targeted. Let’s add a Data Conversion Task to our DFT. Your package should look like: To make the story short I only will cover the SSN field, so in my data source the target SQL Table has it as nchar(10) and we chose string in our XSD (yes, this is a big difference), under such circumstances the SSIS will complain. So will go and manipulate on the data type of SSN by making it Unicode String (DT_WSTR), World String per se. The conversion should look like: The peek at the Metadata: We are almost there, now all we need is to configure the destination. For simplicity I chose SQL Server Destination. The mapping is a breeze, F5 and I am able to insert my data into SQL Server now! Checking the zeros – they are all intact!

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Ops Center Jump-Start for Partners

  - by Get_Specialized!

  Following the Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE 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-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;} announcement at Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo, Partners can check out these resources to further learn about Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Op Center and then use it to optimize your solution/services or offer new ones: 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-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;} 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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Product Documentation Oracle Technical Network Resources Online Learning Series for Partners in the OPN Enterprise Manager KnowledgeZone Whitepaper 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-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;} Making Infrastructure-as-a-Service in the Enterprise a Reality IDC report: Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Embraces the Cloud with Integrated Lifecycle Management Follow-up webcast April 12th  Total Cloud Control for Systems 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-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;} Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c is no extra charge and included in the support contract of Oracle Systems customers.To learn more see the Ops Center Everywhere Program And if you're not already a member, be sure and join the 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-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;} Oracle Enterprise Manager KnowledgeZone on the Oracle PartnerNetwork  Portal

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• Ransomware: Why This New Malware is So Dangerous and How to Protect Yourself

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ransomware is a type of malware that tries to extort money from you. One of the nastiest examples, CryptoLocker, takes your files hostage and holds them for ransom, forcing you to pay hundreds of dollars to regain access. Most malware is no longer created by bored teenagers looking to cause some chaos. Much of the current malware is now produced by organized crime for profit and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. How Ransomware Works Not all ransomware is identical. The key thing that makes a piece of malware “ransomware” is that it attempts to extort a direct payment from you. Some ransomware may be disguised. It may function as “scareware,” displaying a pop-up that says something like “Your computer is infected, purchase this product to fix the infection” or “Your computer has been used to download illegal files, pay a fine to continue using your computer.” In other situations, ransomware may be more up-front. It may hook deep into your system, displaying a message saying that it will only go away when you pay money to the ransomware’s creators. This type of malware could be bypassed via malware removal tools or just by reinstalling Windows. Unfortunately, Ransomware is becoming more and more sophisticated. One of the latest examples, CryptoLocker, starts encrypting your personal files as soon as it gains access to your system, preventing access to the files without knowing the encryption key. CryptoLocker then displays a message informing you that your files have been locked with encryption and that you have just a few days to pay up. If you pay them $300, they’ll hand you the encryption key and you can recover your files. CryptoLocker helpfully walks you through choosing a payment method and, after paying, the criminals seem to actually give you a key that you can use to restore your files. You can never be sure that the criminals will keep their end of the deal, of course. It’s not a good idea to pay up when you’re extorted by criminals. On the other hand, businesses that lose their only copy of business-critical data may be tempted to take the risk — and it’s hard to blame them. Protecting Your Files From Ransomware This type of malware is another good example of why backups are essential. You should regularly back up files to an external hard drive or a remote file storage server. If all your copies of your files are on your computer, malware that infects your computer could encrypt them all and restrict access — or even delete them entirely. When backing up files, be sure to back up your personal files to a location where they can’t be written to or erased. For example, place them on a removable hard drive or upload them to a remote backup service like CrashPlan that would allow you to revert to previous versions of files. Don’t just store your backups on an internal hard drive or network share you have write access to. The ransomware could encrypt the files on your connected backup drive or on your network share if you have full write access. Frequent backups are also important. You wouldn’t want to lose a week’s worth of work because you only back up your files every week. This is part of the reason why automated back-up solutions are so convenient. If your files do become locked by ransomware and you don’t have the appropriate backups, you can try recovering them with ShadowExplorer. This tool accesses “Shadow Copies,” which Windows uses for System Restore — they will often contain some personal files. How to Avoid Ransomware Aside from using a proper backup strategy, you can avoid ransomware in the same way you avoid other forms of malware. CryptoLocker has been verified to arrive through email attachments, via the Java plug-in, and installed on computers that are part of the Zeus botnet. Use a good antivirus product that will attempt to stop ransomware in its tracks. Antivirus programs are never perfect and you could be infected even if you run one, but it’s an important layer of defense. Avoid running suspicious files. Ransomware can arrive in .exe files attached to emails, from illicit websites containing pirated software, or anywhere else that malware comes from. Be alert and exercise caution over the files you download and run. Keep your software updated. Using an old version of your web browser, operating system, or a browser plugin can allow malware in through open security holes. If you have Java installed, you should probably uninstall it. For more tips, read our list of important security practices you should be following. Ransomware — CryptoLocker in particular — is brutally efficient and smart. It just wants to get down to business and take your money. Holding your files hostage is an effective way to prevent removal by antivirus programs after it’s taken root, but CryptoLocker is much less scary if you have good backups. This sort of malware demonstrates the importance of backups as well as proper security practices. Unfortunately, CryptoLocker is probably a sign of things to come — it’s the kind of malware we’ll likely be seeing more of in the future.     

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• Agilist, Heal Thyself!

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been meaning to blog about a great experience I had earlier in the year at Prairie Dev Con Calgary.  Myself and Steve Rogalsky did a session that we called “Agilist, Heal Thyself!”.  We used a format that was new to me, but that Steve had seen used at another conference.  What we did was start by asking the audience to give us a list of challenges they had had when adopting agile.  We wrote them all down, then had everybody vote on the most interesting ones.  Then we split into two groups, and each group was assigned one of the agile challenges.  We had 20 minutes to discuss the challenge, and suggest solutions or approaches to improve things.  At the end of the 20 minutes, each of the groups gave a brief summary of their discussion and learning's, then we mixed up the groups and repeated with another 2 challenges. The 2 groups I was part of had some really interesting discussions, and suggestions: Unfinished Stories at the end of Sprints The first agile challenge we tackled, was something that every single Scrum team I have worked with has struggled with.  What happens when you get to the end of a Sprint, and there are some stories that are only partially completed.  The team in question was getting very de-moralized as they felt that every Sprint was a failure as they never had a set of fully completed stories. How do you avoid this? and/or what do you do when it happens? There were 2 pieces of advice that were well received: 1. Try to bring stories to completion before starting new ones.  This is advice I give all my Scrum teams.  If you have a 3-week sprint, what happens all too often is you get to the end of week 2, and a lot of stories are almost done; but almost none are completely done.  This is a Bad Thing.  I encourage the teams I work with to only start a new story as a very last resort.  If you finish your task look at the stories in progress and see if there’s anything you can do to help before moving onto a new story.  In the daily standup, put a focus on seeing what stories got completed yesterday, if a few days go by with none getting completed, be sure this fact is visible to the team and do something about it.  Something I’ve been doing recently is introducing WIP (Work In Progress) limits while using Scrum.  My current team has 2-week sprints, and we usually have about a dozen or stories in a sprint.  We instituted a WIP limit of 4 stories.  If 4 stories have been started but not finished then nobody is allowed to start new stories.  This made it obvious very quickly that our QA tasks were our bottleneck (we have 4 devs, but only 1.5 testers).  The WIP limit forced the developers to start to pickup QA tasks before moving onto the next dev tasks, and we ended our sprints with many more stories completely finished than we did before introducing WIP limits. 2. Rather than using time-boxed sprints, why not just do away with them altogether and go to a continuous flow type approach like KanBan.  Limit WIP to keep things under control, but don’t have a fixed time box at the end of which all tasks are supposed to be done.  This eliminates the problem almost entirely.  At some points in the project (releases) you need to be able to burn down all the half finished stories to get a stable release build, but this probably occurs less often than every sprint, and there are alternative approaches to achieve it using branching strategies rather than forcing your team to try to get to Zero WIP every 2-weeks (e.g. when you are ready for a release, create a new branch for any new stories, but finish all existing stories in the current branch and release it). Trying to Introduce Agile into a team with previous Bad Agile Experiences One of the agile adoption challenges somebody described, was he was in a leadership role on a team he had recently joined – lets call him Dave.  This team was currently very waterfall in their ALM process, but they were about to start on a new green-field project.  Dave wanted to use this new project as an opportunity to do things the “right way”, using an Agile methodology like Scrum, adopting TDD, automated builds, proper branching strategies, etc.  The problem he was facing is everybody else on the team had previously gone through an “Agile Adoption” that was a horrible failure.  Dave blamed this failure on the consultant brought in previously to lead this agile transition, but regardless of the reason, the team had very negative feelings towards agile, and was very resistant to trying it out again.  Dave possibly had the authority to try to force the team to adopt Agile practices, but we all know that doesn’t work very well.  What was Dave to do? Ultimately, the best advice was to question *why* did Dave want to adopt all these various practices. Rather than trying to convince his team that these were the “right way” to run a dev project, and trying to do a Big Bang approach to introducing change.  He would be better served by identifying problems the team currently faces, have a discussion with the team to get everybody to agree that specific problems existed, then have an open discussion about ways to address those problems.  This way Dave could incrementally introduce agile practices, and he doesn’t even need to identify them as “agile” practices if he doesn’t want to.  For example, when we discussed with Dave, he said probably the teams biggest problem was long periods without feedback from users, then finding out too late that the software is not going to meet their needs.  Rather than Dave jumping right to introducing Scrum and all it entails, it would be easier to get buy-in from team if he framed it as a discussion of existing problems, and brainstorming possible solutions.  And possibly most importantly, don’t try to do massive changes all at once with a team that has not bought-into those changes.  Taking an incremental approach has a greater chance of success. I see something similar in my day job all the time too.  Clients who for one reason or another claim to not be fans of agile (or not ready for agile yet).  But then they go on to ask me to help them get shorter feedback cycles, quicker delivery cycles, iterative development processes, etc.  It’s kind of funny at times, sometimes you just need to phrase the suggestions in terms they are using and avoid the word “agile”. PS – I haven’t blogged all that much over the past couple of years, but in an attempt to motivate myself, a few of us have accepted a blogger challenge.  There’s 6 of us who have all put some money into a pool, and the agreement is that we each need to blog at least once every 2-weeks.  The first 2-week period that we miss we’re eliminated.  Last person standing gets the money.  So expect at least one blog post every couple of weeks for the near future (I hope!).  And check out the blogs of the other 5 people in this blogger challenge: Steve Rogalsky: http://winnipegagilist.blogspot.ca Aaron Kowall: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/caffeinatedgeek Tyler Doerkson: http://blog.tylerdoerksen.com David Alpert: http://www.spinthemoose.com Dave White: http://www.agileramblings.com (note: site not available yet.  should be shortly or he owes me some money!)

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• Mark Hurd on the Customer Revolution: Oracle's Top 10 Insights

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Reprint of an article from Forbes Businesses that fail to focus on customer experience will hear a giant sucking sound from their vanishing profitability. Because in today’s dynamic global marketplace, consumers now hold the power in the buyer-seller equation, and sellers need to revamp their strategy for this new world order. The ability to relentlessly deliver connected, personalized and rewarding customer experiences is rapidly becoming one of the primary sources of competitive advantage in today’s dynamic global marketplace. And the inability or unwillingness to realize that the customer is a company’s most important asset will lead, inevitably, to decline and failure. Welcome to the lifecycle of customer experience, in which consumers explore, engage, shop, buy, ask, compare, complain, socialize, exchange, and more across multiple channels with the unconditional expectation that each of those interactions will be completed in an efficient and personalized manner however, wherever, and whenever the customer wants. While many niche companies are offering point solutions within that sprawling and complex spectrum of needs and requirements, businesses looking to deliver superb customer experiences are still left having to do multiple product evaluations, multiple contract negotiations, multiple test projects, multiple deployments, and–perhaps most annoying of all–multiple and never-ending integration projects to string together all those niche products from all those niche vendors. With its new suite of customer-experience solutions, Oracle believes it can help companies unravel these challenges and move at the speed of their customers, anticipating their needs and desires and creating enduring and profitable relationships. Those solutions span the full range of marketing, selling, commerce, service, listening/insights, and social and collaboration tools for employees. When Oracle launched its suite of Customer Experience solutions at a recent event in New York City, president Mark Hurd analyzed the customer experience revolution taking place and presented Oracle’s strategy for empowering companies to capitalize on this important market shift. From Hurd’s presentation and related materials, I’ve extracted a list of Hurd’s Top 10 Insights into the Customer Revolution. 1. Please Don’t Feed the Competitor’s Pipeline!After enduring a poor experience, 89% of consumers say they would immediately take their business to your competitor. (Except where noted, the source for these findings is the 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report including a survey commissioned by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in March 2012) and conducted by Harris Interactive.) 2. The Addressable Market Is Massive. Only 1% of consumers say their expectations were always met by their actual experiences. 3. They’re Willing to Pay More! In return for a great experience, 86% of consumers say they’ll pay up to 25% more. 4. The Social Media Microphone Is Always Live. After suffering through a poor experience, more than 25% of consumers said they posted a negative comment on Twitter or Facebook or other social media sites. Conversely, of those consumers who got a response after complaining, 22% posted positive comments about the company. 5.  The New Deal Is Never Done: Embrace the Entire Customer Lifecycle. An appropriately active and engaged relationship, says Hurd, extends across every step of the entire processs: need, research, select, purchase, receive, use, maintain, and recommend. 6. The 360-Degree Commitment. Customers want to do business with companies that actively and openly demonstrate the desire to establish strong and seamless connections across employees, the company, and the customer, says research firm Temkin Group in its report called “The CX Competencies.” 7. Understand the Emotional Drivers Behind Brand Love. What makes consumers fall in love with a brand? Among the top factors are friendly employees and customer reps (73%), easy access to information and support (55%), and personalized experiences, such as when companies know precisely what products or services customers have purchased in the past and what issues those customers have raised (36%). 8.  The Importance of Immediate Action. You’ve got one week to respond–and then the opportunity’s lost. If your company needs more than a week to answer a prospect’s question or request, most of those prospects will terminate the relationship. 9.  Want More Revenue, Less Churn, and More Referrals? Then improve the overall customer experience: Forrester’s research says that approach put an extra $900 million in the pockets of wireless service providers, $800 million for hotels, and $400 million for airlines. 10. The Formula for CX Success.  Hurd says it includes three elegantly interlaced factors: Connected Engagement, to personalize the experience; Actionable Insight, to maximize the engagement; and Optimized Execution, to deliver on the promise of value. RECOMMENDED READING: The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013 Wal-Mart, Amazon, eBay: Who’s the Speed King of Retail? Career Suicide and the CIO: 4 Deadly New Threats Memo to Marc Benioff: Social Is a Tool, Not an App

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• Moving DataSets through BizTalk

  - by EltonStoneman

  [Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] Yuck. But sometimes you have to, so here are a couple of things to bear in mind: Schemas Point a codegen tool at a WCF endpoint which exposes a DataSet and it will generate an XSD which describes the DataSet like this: <xs:elementminOccurs="0"name="GetDataSetResult"nillable="true">  <xs:complexType>     <xs:annotation>       <xs:appinfo>         <ActualTypeName="DataSet"                     Namespace="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System.Data"                     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/" />       </xs:appinfo>     </xs:annotation>     <xs:sequence>       <xs:elementref="xs:schema" />       <xs:any />     </xs:sequence>  </xs:complexType> </xs:element>  In a serialized instance, the element of type xs:schema contains a full schema which describes the structure of the DataSet – tables, columns etc. The second element, of type xs:any, contains the actual content of the DataSet, expressed as DiffGrams: <GetDataSetResult>  <xs:schemaid="NewDataSet"xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"xmlns=""xmlns:msdata="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xml-msdata">     <xs:elementname="NewDataSet"msdata:IsDataSet="true"msdata:UseCurrentLocale="true">       <xs:complexType>         <xs:choiceminOccurs="0"maxOccurs="unbounded">           <xs:elementname="Table1">             <xs:complexType>               <xs:sequence>                 <xs:elementname="Id"type="xs:string"minOccurs="0" />                 <xs:elementname="Name"type="xs:string"minOccurs="0" />                 <xs:elementname="Date"type="xs:string"minOccurs="0" />               </xs:sequence>             </xs:complexType>           </xs:element>         </xs:choice>       </xs:complexType>     </xs:element>  </xs:schema>  <diffgr:diffgramxmlns:diffgr="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xml-diffgram-v1"xmlns:msdata="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xml-msdata">     <NewDataSetxmlns="">       <Table1diffgr:id="Table11"msdata:rowOrder="0"diffgr:hasChanges="inserted">         <Id>377fdf8d-cfd1-4975-a167-2ddb41265def</Id>         <Name>157bc287-f09b-435f-a81f-2a3b23aff8c4</Name>         <Date>a5d78d83-6c9a-46ca-8277-f2be8d4658bf</Date>       </Table1>     </NewDataSet>  </diffgr:diffgram> </GetDataSetResult> Put the XSD into a BizTalk schema and it will fail to compile, giving you error: The 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema:schema' element is not declared. You should be able to work around that, but I've had no luck in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 – instead you can safely change that xs:schema element to be another xs:any type: <xs:elementminOccurs="0"name="GetDataSetResult"nillable="true">  <xs:complexType>     <xs:sequence>       <xs:any />       <xs:any />     </xs:sequence>  </xs:complexType> </xs:element>  (This snippet omits the annotation, but you can leave it in the schema). For an XML instance to pass validation through the schema, you'll also need to flag the any attributes so they can contain any namespace and skip validation:  <xs:elementminOccurs="0"name="GetDataSetResult"nillable="true">  <xs:complexType>     <xs:sequence>       <xs:anynamespace="##any"processContents="skip" />       <xs:anynamespace="##any"processContents="skip" />     </xs:sequence>  </xs:complexType> </xs:element>  You should now have a compiling schema which can be successfully tested against a serialised DataSet. Transforms If you're mapping a DataSet element between schemas, you'll need to use the Mass Copy Functoid to populate the target node from the contents of both the xs:any type elements on the source node: This should give you a compiled map which you can test against a serialized instance. And if you have a .NET consumer on the other side of the mapped BizTalk output, it will correctly deserialize the response into a DataSet.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 5): Query Snapshots

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've emailed us about a bug you've encountered with the EAP or beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, we probably asked you to send us a query snapshot of your databases. Here, I explain what a query snapshot is, and how it helps us fix your bug. Problem 1: Debugging users' bug reports When we started the Schema Compare project, we knew we were going to get problems with users' databases - configurations we hadn't considered, features that weren't installed, unicode issues, wierd dependencies... With SQL Compare, users are generally happy to send us a database backup that we can restore using a single RESTORE DATABASE command on our test servers and immediately reproduce the problem. Oracle, on the other hand, would be a lot more tricky. As Oracle generally has a 1-to-1 mapping between instances and databases, any databases users sent would have to be restored to their own instance. Furthermore, the number of steps required to get a properly working database, and the size of most oracle databases, made it infeasible to ask every customer who came across a bug during our beta program to send us their databases. We also knew that there would be lots of issues with data security that would make it hard to get backups. So we needed an easier way to be able to debug customers issues and sort out what strange schema data Oracle was returning. Problem 2: Test execution time Another issue we knew we would have to solve was the execution time of the tests we would produce for the Schema Compare engine. Our initial prototype showed that querying the data dictionary for schema information was going to be slow (at least 15 seconds per database), and this is generally proportional to the size of the database. If you're running thousands of tests on the same databases, each one registering separate schemas, not only would the tests would take hours and hours to run, but the test servers would be hammered senseless. The solution To solve these, we needed to be able to populate the schema of a database without actually connecting to it. Well, the IDataReader interface is the primary way we read data from an Oracle server. The data dictionary queries we use return their data in terms of simple strings and numbers, which we then process and reconstruct into an object model, and the results of these queries are identical for identical schemas. So, we can record the raw results of the queries once, and then replay these results to construct the same object model as many times as required without needing to actually connect to the original database. This is what query snapshots do. They are binary files containing the raw unprocessed data we get back from the oracle server for all the queries we run on the data dictionary to get schema information. The core of the query snapshot generation takes the results of the IDataReader we get from running queries on Oracle, and passes the row data to a BinaryWriter that writes it straight to a file. The query snapshot can then be replayed to create the same object model; when the results of a specific query is needed by the population code, we can simply read the binary data stored in the file on disk and present it through an IDataReader wrapper. This is far faster than querying the server over the network, and allows us to run tests in a reasonable time. They also allow us to easily debug a customers problem; using a simple snapshot generation program, users can generate a query snapshot that could be sent along with a bug report that we can immediately replay on our machines to let us debug the issue, rather than having to obtain database backups and restore databases to test systems. There are also far fewer problems with data security; query snapshots only contain schema information, which is generally less sensitive than table data. Query snapshots implementation However, actually implementing such a feature did have a couple of 'gotchas' to it. My second blog post detailed the development of the dependencies algorithm we use to ensure we get all the dependencies in the database, and that algorithm uses data from both databases to find all the needed objects - what database you're comparing to affects what objects get populated from both databases. We get information on these additional objects using an appropriate WHERE clause on all the population queries. So, in order to accurately replay the results of querying the live database, the query snapshot needs to be a snapshot of a comparison of two databases, not just populating a single database. Furthermore, although the code population queries (eg querying all_tab_cols to get column information) can simply be passed straight from the IDataReader to the BinaryWriter, we need to hook into and run the live dependencies algorithm while we're creating the snapshot to ensure we get the same WHERE clauses, and the same query results, as if we were populating straight from a live system. We also need to store the results of the dependencies queries themselves, as the resulting dependency graph is stored within the OracleDatabase object that is produced, and is later used to help order actions in synchronization scripts. This is significantly helped by the dependencies algorithm being a deterministic algorithm - given the same input, it will always return the same output. Therefore, when we're replaying a query snapshot, and processing dependency information, we simply have to return the results of the queries in the order we got them from the live database, rather than trying to calculate the contents of all_dependencies on the fly. Query snapshots are a significant feature in Schema Compare that really helps us to debug problems with the tool, as well as making our testers happier. Although not really user-visible, they are very useful to the development team to help us fix bugs in the product much faster than we otherwise would be able to.

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• Updates broke my themes/shell [Ubuntu 12.04 running Gnome 3 ]

  - by APNW

  I am running gnome-session 3.4.2.1. After the latest updates (listed below) my theme regressed to what looks like tango - not sure. Am unable to change it using Gnome-tweak tool or the display settings. I am also unable to change the wallpaper. Here's what it looks like: Synaptic: Chromium and this is the wallpaper page even though I have selected the wallpaper, it actually does not change. This same problem occurred on my personal computer, and one other computer I have, all running the same software/config. The interesting thing is that while Gnome 3 and Unity are affected, Cinnamon is not. What I've done so far: purged and re-installed both gnome 3 and Unity- no change noted. So, how do I fix this? Thanks Here's the installation log: Start-Date: 2013-11-07 12:01:28 Upgrade: chromium-browser-l10n:i386 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.12.04.1, 30.0.1599.114-0ubuntu0.12.04.3), libswscale2:i386 (0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, 0.8.8-0ubuntu0.12.04.1), chromium-codecs-ffmpeg:i386 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.12.04.1, 30.0.1599.114-0ubuntu0.12.04.3), chromium-browser:i386 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.12.04.1, 30.0.1599.114-0ubuntu0.12.04.3), libpostproc52:i386 (0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, 0.8.8-0ubuntu0.12.04.1), libavcodec-extra-53:i386 (0.8.6ubuntu0.12.04.1, 0.8.8ubuntu0.12.04.1), libavformat53:i386 (0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, 0.8.8-0ubuntu0.12.04.1), libavutil-extra-51:i386 (0.8.6ubuntu0.12.04.1, 0.8.8ubuntu0.12.04.1) End-Date: 2013-11-07 12:02:00 Start-Date: 2013-11-07 17:32:55 Commandline: aptdaemon role='role-commit-packages' sender=':1.136' Install: libmusicbrainz5-0:i386 (5.0.1-2~precise2), udisks2:i386 (1.98.0-1~precise1), libclutter-gst-1.0-0:i386 (1.5.4-0ubuntu2), libudisks2-0:i386 (1.98.0-1~precise1), cinnamon-session-common:i386 (2.0.4-20131105043005-precise), librhythmbox-core6:i386 (2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), gcr:i386 (3.4.1-3~precise1), libcluttergesture-0.0.2-0:i386 (0.0.2.1-2ubuntu3), libmx-1.0-2:i386 (1.4.3-0ubuntu1), guile-2.0-libs:i386 (2.0.5+1-1), libclutter-imcontext-0.1-0:i386 (0.1.4-2build1), libnatpmp1:i386 (20110808-3ubuntu1) Upgrade: gnome-keyring:i386 (3.2.2-2ubuntu4.1, 3.4.1-4ubuntu1~precise1), cinnamon:i386 (2.0.6-20131026040307-precise, 2.0.10-20131105040309-precise), gir1.2-muffin-3.0:i386 (2.0.3-20131023003029-precise, 2.0.3-20131105003012-precise), gir1.2-totem-1.0:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), nemo:i386 (2.0.2-20131023010018-precise, 2.0.5-20131105010007-precise), aisleriot:i386 (3.2.3.2-0ubuntu1, 3.4.1-1~precise1), procps:i386 (3.2.8-11ubuntu6.2, 3.2.8-11ubuntu6.3), libcinnamon-desktop0:i386 (2.0.2-20131025011504-precise, 2.0.3-20131105011505-precise), libgck-1-0:i386 (3.2.2-2ubuntu4.1, 3.4.1-3~precise1), totem-plugins:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), cinnamon-desktop-data:i386 (2.0.2-20131025011504-precise, 2.0.3-20131105011505-precise), rhythmbox:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), libgcr-3-1:i386 (3.2.2-2ubuntu4.1, 3.4.1-3~precise1), seahorse:i386 (3.2.2-0ubuntu2.1, 3.4.1-2~precise1), muffin-common:i386 (2.0.3-20131023003029-precise, 2.0.3-20131105003012-precise), totem-common:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), libtotem0:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), rhythmbox-data:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), gir1.2-cinnamondesktop-3.0:i386 (2.0.2-20131025011504-precise, 2.0.3-20131105011505-precise), cinnamon-session:i386 (2.0.1-20131021043004-precise, 2.0.4-20131105043005-precise), rhythmbox-mozilla:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), rhythmbox-plugin-zeitgeist:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), libmuffin0:i386 (2.0.3-20131023003029-precise, 2.0.3-20131105003012-precise), cjs:i386 (2.0.0-20131021020602-precise, 2.0.0-20131105020703-precise), rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), cinnamon-common:i386 (2.0.6-20131026040307-precise, 2.0.10-20131105040309-precise), gnome-disk-utility:i386 (3.0.2-2ubuntu7, 3.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1), nemo-fileroller:i386 (2.0.0-20131021020004-precise, 2.0.0-20131105020003-precise), libnemo-extension1:i386 (2.0.2-20131023010018-precise, 2.0.5-20131105010007-precise), rhythmbox-plugins:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), gimp:i386 (2.8.6-0precise1~ppa, 2.8.8-0precise0~ppa), cinnamon-settings-daemon:i386 (2.0.5-20131026004504-precise, 2.0.6-20131105004505-precise), libgimp2.0:i386 (2.8.6-0precise1~ppa, 2.8.8-0precise0~ppa), gir1.2-rb-3.0:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), wpasupplicant:i386 (0.7.3-6ubuntu2.1, 0.7.3-6ubuntu2.2), libcjs0c:i386 (2.0.0-20131021020602-precise, 2.0.0-20131105020703-precise), nemo-data:i386 (2.0.2-20131023010018-precise, 2.0.5-20131105010007-precise), totem:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), gimp-data:i386 (2.8.6-0precise1~ppa, 2.8.8-0precise0~ppa), transmission-common:i386 (2.51-0ubuntu1.3, 2.73-0ubuntu1~precise1), cinnamon-translations:i386 (2.0.1-20131021040407-precise, 2.0.1-20131105040807-precise), totem-mozilla:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), rhythmbox-plugin-magnatune:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), transmission-gtk:i386 (2.51-0ubuntu1.3, 2.73-0ubuntu1~precise1) End-Date: 2013-11-07 17:34:40

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• Windows Azure – Write, Run or Use Software

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure is a platform that has you covered, whether you need to write software, run software that is already written, or Install and use “canned” software whether you or someone else wrote it. Like any platform, it’s a set of tools you can use where it makes sense to solve a problem. The primary location for Windows Azure information is located at http://windowsazure.com. You can find everything there from the development kits for writing software to pricing, licensing and tutorials on all of that. I have a few links here for learning to use Windows Azure – although it’s best if you focus not on the tools, but what you want to solve. I’ve got it broken down here into various sections, so you can quickly locate things you want to know. I’ll include resources here from Microsoft and elsewhere – I use these same resources in the Architectural Design Sessions (ADS) I do with my clients worldwide. Write Software Also called “Platform as a Service” (PaaS), Windows Azure has lots of components you can use together or separately that allow you to write software in .NET or various Open Source languages to work completely online, or in partnership with code you have on-premises or both – even if you’re using other cloud providers. Keep in mind that all of the features you see here can be used together, or independently. For instance, you might only use a Web Site, or use Storage, but you can use both together. You can access all of these components through standard REST API calls, or using our Software Development Kit’s API’s, which are a lot easier. In any case, you simply use Visual Studio, Eclipse, Cloud9 IDE, or even a text editor to write your code from a Mac, PC or Linux.  Components you can use: Azure Web Sites: Windows Azure Web Sites allow you to quickly write an deploy websites, without setting a Virtual Machine, installing a web server or configuring complex settings. They work alone, with other Windows Azure Web Sites, or with other parts of Windows Azure. Web and Worker Roles: Windows Azure Web Roles give you a full stateless computing instance with Internet Information Services (IIS) installed and configured. Windows Azure Worker Roles give you a full stateless computing instance without Information Services (IIS) installed, often used in a "Services" mode. Scale-out is achieved either manually or programmatically under your control. Storage: Windows Azure Storage types include Blobs to store raw binary data, Tables to use key/value pair data (like NoSQL data structures), Queues that allow interaction between stateless roles, and a relational SQL Server database. Other Services: Windows Azure has many other services such as a security mechanism, a Cache (memcacheD compliant), a Service Bus, a Traffic Manager and more. Once again, these features can be used with a Windows Azure project, or alone based on your needs. Various Languages: Windows Azure supports the .NET stack of languages, as well as many Open-Source languages like Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, NodeJS, C++ and more.   Use Software Also called “Software as a Service” (SaaS) this often means consumer or business-level software like Hotmail or Office 365. In other words, you simply log on, use the software, and log off – there’s nothing to install, and little to even configure. For the Information Technology professional, however, It’s not quite the same. We want software that provides services, but in a platform. That means we want things like Hadoop or other software we don’t want to have to install and configure.  Components you can use: Kits: Various software “kits” or packages are supported with just a few clicks, such as Umbraco, Wordpress, and others. Windows Azure Media Services: Windows Azure Media Services is a suite of services that allows you to upload media for encoding, processing and even streaming – or even one or more of those functions. We can add DRM and even commercials to your media if you like. Windows Azure Media Services is used to stream large events all the way down to small training videos. High Performance Computing and “Big Data”: Windows Azure allows you to scale to huge workloads using a few clicks to deploy Hadoop Clusters or the High Performance Computing (HPC) nodes, accepting HPC Jobs, Pig and Hive Jobs, and even interfacing with Microsoft Excel. Windows Azure Marketplace: Windows Azure Marketplace offers data and programs you can quickly implement and use – some free, some for-fee.   Run Software Also known as “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), this offering allows you to build or simply choose a Virtual Machine to run server-based software.  Components you can use: Persistent Virtual Machines: You can choose to install Windows Server, Windows Server with Active Directory, with SQL Server, or even SharePoint from a pre-configured gallery. You can configure your own server images with standard Hyper-V technology and load them yourselves – and even bring them back when you’re done. As a new offering, we also even allow you to select various distributions of Linux – a first for Microsoft. Windows Azure Connect: You can connect your on-premises networks to Windows Azure Instances. Storage: Windows Azure Storage can be used as a remote backup, a hybrid storage location and more using software or even hardware appliances.   Decision Matrix With all of these options, you can use Windows Azure to solve just about any computing problem. It’s often hard to know when to use something on-premises, in the cloud, and what kind of service to use. I’ve used a decision matrix in the last couple of years to take a particular problem and choose the proper technology to solve it. It’s all about options – there is no “silver bullet”, whether that’s Windows Azure or any other set of functions. I take the problem, decide which particular component I want to own and control – and choose the column that has that box darkened. For instance, if I have to control the wiring for a solution (a requirement in some military and government installations), that means the “Networking” component needs to be dark, and so I select the “On Premises” column for that particular solution. If I just need the solution provided and I want no control at all, I can look as “Software as a Service” solutions. Security, Pricing, and Other Info  Security: Security is one of the first questions you should ask in any distributed computing environment. We have certification info, coding guidelines and more, even a general “Request for Information” RFI Response already created for you.   Pricing: Are there licenses? How much does this cost? Is there a way to estimate the costs in this new environment? New Features: Many new features were added to Windows Azure - a good roundup of those changes can be found here. Support: Software Support on Virtual Machines, general support.    

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• Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  As more and more business is being conducted via online channels, engaging users and making them more productive and efficient though these online channels is becoming critical. These users could be customers, partners or employees and while the respective channels through which they interact might be different, these users do increasingly interact with your business through the Web, or mobile devices or now through various social mediums.  Businesses need a user engagement strategy and solution that allows them to deliver targeted and personalized content and applications to users through the various online mediums and touch points.  The customer experience today is made up of an ongoing set of interactions with organizations across many channels, online and offline.  The Direct channel (including sales reps, email and mail) is an important point of contact, as is the Contact Center.  Contact Centers rely on the phone as a means of interacting with customers, and also more now than ever, the Web as well.  However, the online organization is often managed separately from the Contact Center organization within a business. In-store is an important channel for retailers, offering Point-of-Service for human interactions, and Kiosks which enable self-service. Kiosks are a Web-enabled touch point but in-store kiosks are often managed by the head of retail operations, rather than the online organization.  And of course, the online channel, including customer interactions with an organization via digital means -- on the website, mobile websites, and social networking sites, has risen to paramount importance in recent years in the customer experience. Historically all of these channels have been managed separately. The result of all of this fragmentation is that the customer touch points with an organization are siloed.  Their interactions online are not known and respected in their dealings in-store.  Their calls to the contact center are not taken as input into what the website offers them when they arrive. Think of how many times you’ve fallen victim to this. Your experience with the company call center is different than the experience in-store. Your experience with the company website on your desktop computer is different than your experience on your iPad. I think you get the point. But the customer isn’t the only one we need to look at here, as employees and the IT organization have challenges as well when it comes to online engagement. There are many common tools and technologies that organizations have been using to try and engage users, whether it’s customers, employees or partners. Some have adopted different blog and wiki technologies (some hosted, some open source, sometimes embedded in platforms), to things like tagging, file sharing and content management, or composite applications for self-service applications and activity streams. Basically, there are so many different tools & technologies that each address different aspects of user engagement. Now, one of the challenges with this, is that if we look at each individual tool, typically just implementing for example a file sharing and basic collaboration solution, may meet the needs of the business user for one aspect of user engagement, but it may not be the best solution to engage with customers and partners, or it may not fit with IT standards such as integrating with their single sign on tools or their corporate website. Often, the scenario is that businesses are having to acquire multiple pieces and parts as well as build custom applications to meet their needs. Leaving customers and partners with a more fragmented way of interacting with the company. Every organization has some sort of enterprise balancing act between the needs of the business user and the needs and restrictions enforced by enterprise IT groups. As we’ve been discussing, we all know that the expectations for online engagement have changed since the days of the static, one-size fits all website. With these changes have come some very difficult organizational challenges as well. Today, as a business user, you want to engage with your customers, and your customers expect you to know who they are. They expect you to recall the details they’ve provided to you on your website, to your CSRs and to your sales people. They expect you to remember their purchases, their preferences and their problems. And they expect you to know who they are, equally well, across channels, including your web presence. This creates a host of challenges for today’s business users. Delivering targeted, relevant content online is now essential for converting prospects into customers and for engendering long term loyalty. Business users need the ability to leverage customer data from different sources to fuel their segmentation and targeting strategies and to easily set-up, manage and optimize online campaigns. Also critical, they need the ability to accomplish these things on-the-fly, at the speed of the marketplace, while making iterative improvements.  These changing expectations put a host of demands on the IT organization as well. The web presence must be able to scale to support the delivery of personalized and targeted content to thousands of site visitors without sacrificing performance. And integration between systems becomes more important as well, as organizations strive to obtain one view of the customer culled from WCM data, CRM data and more. So then, how do you solve these challenges and meet the growing demands of your users?  You need a solution that: Unifies every customer interaction across all channels Personalizes the products and content that interest the customer and to the device Delivers targeted promotions to the right customer Engages and improve employee productivity Provides self-service access to applications Includes embedded in-context social   So how then do you achieve this level of online engagement, complete customer experience and engage your employees? The answer: Oracle WebCenter. If you want to learn how to get there, we encourage you to attend this webcast on Thursday Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites, where we'll talk about how you are able to transform your portal experience and optimize online engagement -- making your portals more interactive and more engaging across multiple channels. Register today!

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• Taking a Flying Leap

  - by Lance Shaw

  Yesterday, I went skydiving with three of my children.  It was thrilling, scary, invigorating and exciting. While there is obvious risk involved, the reward and feeling of success was well worth it. You might already be wondering what skydiving would have to with WebCenter, so let me explain. Implementing a skydiving program and becoming an instructor does not happen overnight.  It does not happen with the purchase of the needed technology. Not one of us would go out, buy a parachute, the harnesses, helmet and all the gear and be able to convince anyone that we are now ready to be a skydiving instructor. The fact is that obtaining the technology is merely a small piece of the overall process and so is the case with managing content in your company. You don't just buy the right software (Oracle WebCenter Content) and go to your boss and declare information management success. There is planning, research and effort that goes into deploying software of any kind and especially when it is as mission-critical to the success of your business as Enterprise Content Management. To become a certified skydiving instructor takes at least 3 years of commitment and often longer. In the United States, candidates must complete over 500 solo jumps of their own over a minimum of 36 months and then must complete additional rigorous training under observation.  When you consider the amount of time and effort involved, it's not unlike getting a college degree and anyone that has trusted their lives to one of these instructors will no doubt appreciate their dedication to the curriculum.  Implementing an ECM system won't take that long, but it certainly requires commitment, analysis and consideration. But guess what?  Humans are involved and that means that mistakes can happen and that rules change.  This struck me while reading an excellent post on darkreading.com by Glenn S. Phillips entitled "Mission Impossible: 4 Reasons Compliance is Impossible".  His over-arching point was that with information management and security, environments change and people are involved meaning the work is never done.  He stated that you can never claim your compliance efforts are complete because of the following reasons. People are involved.  And lets face it, some are more trustworthy than others. Change is Constant. There is always some new technology coming along that is disruptive. Consumer grade cloud file sharing and sync tools come to mind here. Compliance is interpreted, not defined.  Laws and the judges that read them are always on the move. Technology is a tool, not a complete solution. There is no magic pill. The skydiving analogy holds true here as well.  Ultimately, a single person packs your parachute.  For obvious reasons, you prefer that this person be trustworthy but there are no absolute guarantees of a 100% error-free scenario.  Weather and wind conditions are never a constant and the best-laid plans for a great day of skydiving are easily disrupted by forces outside of your control.  Rules and regulations vary by location and may be updated at any time and as I mentioned early on, even the best technology on its own will only get you started. The good news is that, like skydiving, with the right technology, the right planning, the right team and a proper understanding of the rules and regulations that govern your industry, your ECM deployment can be a great success.  Failure to plan for any of the 4 factors that Glenn outlined in his article will certainly put your deployment and maybe even your company at risk, so consider them carefully. As a final aside, for those of you who consider skydiving an incredibly dangerous and risky pastime, consider this comparative statistic.  In 2012, the U.S. Parachute Association recorded 19 fatal skydiving accidents in the U.S. out of roughly 3.1 million jumps.  That’s 0.006 fatalities per 1,000 jumps. By comparison, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that there were 34,080 deaths due to car accidents in 2012.  Based on the percentages, one could argue that it is safer to jump out of a plane than to drive to the airport where the skydiving will take place. While the way you manage, secure, classify, control, retain and dispose of company files may not carry as much risk as driving or skydiving, it certainly carries risk for the organization when not planned and deployed appropriately.  Consider all the factors involved in your organization as you make your content management plans.  For additional areas of consideration, be sure to download our free whitepaper on the topic entitled "The Top 10 Criteria for Choosing an ECM System" which is available for download here.

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• Best Practices Generating WebService Proxies for Oracle Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM)

  - by asantaga

  I've recently been building a REST Service wrapper for Oracle Sales Cloud and initially all was going well, however as soon as I added all of my Web Service proxies I started to get weird errors..  My project structure looks like this What I found out was if I only had the InteractionsService & OpportunityService WebService Proxies then all worked ok, but as soon as I added the LocationsService Proxy, I would start to see strange JAXB errors. Example of the error message Exception in thread "main" javax.xml.ws.WebServiceException: Unable to create JAXBContextat com.sun.xml.ws.model.AbstractSEIModelImpl.createJAXBContext(AbstractSEIModelImpl.java:164)at com.sun.xml.ws.model.AbstractSEIModelImpl.postProcess(AbstractSEIModelImpl.java:94)at com.sun.xml.ws.model.RuntimeModeler.buildRuntimeModel(RuntimeModeler.java:281)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.buildRuntimeModel(WSServiceDelegate.java:762)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate.buildRuntimeModel(WLSProvider.java:982)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.createSEIPortInfo(WSServiceDelegate.java:746)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.addSEI(WSServiceDelegate.java:737)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.getPort(WSServiceDelegate.java:361)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate.internalGetPort(WLSProvider.java:934)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate$PortClientInstanceFactory.createClientInstance(WLSProvider.java:1039)...... Looking further down I see the error message is related to JAXB not being able to find an objectFactory for one of its types Caused by: java.security.PrivilegedActionException: com.sun.xml.bind.v2.runtime.IllegalAnnotationsException: 6 counts of IllegalAnnotationExceptionsThere's no ObjectFactory with an @XmlElementDecl for the element {http://xmlns.oracle.com/apps/crmCommon/activities/activitiesService/}AssigneeRsrcOrgIdthis problem is related to the following location:at protected javax.xml.bind.JAXBElement com.oracle.xmlns.apps.crmcommon.activities.activitiesservice.ActivityAssignee.assigneeRsrcOrgId at com.oracle.xmlns.apps.crmcommon.activities.activitiesservice.ActivityAssignee This is very strange... My first thoughts are that when I generated the WebService Proxy I entered the package name as "oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.servicename" and left the generated types as blank. This way all the generated types get put into the same package hierarchy and when deployed they get merged... Sounds resaonable and appears to work but not in this case..  To resolve this I regenerate the proxy but this time setting : Package name : To the name of my package eg. oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.interactionsRoot Package for Generated Types :  Package where the types will be generated to, e.g. oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.SalesParty.types When I ran the application now, it all works , awesome eh???? Alas no, there is a serious side effect. The problem now is that to help coding I've created a collection of helper classes , these helper classes take parameters which use some of the "generic" datatypes, like FindCriteria. e.g. This wont work any more public static FindCriteria createCustomFindCriteria(FindCriteria pFc,String pAttributes) Here lies a gremlin of a problem.. I cant use this method anymore, this is because the FindCriteria datatype is now being defined two, or more times, in the generated code for my project. If you leave the Root Package for types blank it will get generated to com.oracle.xmlns, and if you populate it then it gets generated to your custom package.. The two datatypes look the same, sound the same (and if this were a duck would sound the same), but THEY ARE NOT THE SAME... Speaking to development, they recommend you should not be entering anything in the Root Packages section, so the mystery thickens why does it work.. Well after spending sometime with some colleagues of mine in development we've identified the issue.. Alas different parts of Oracle Fusion Development have multiple schemas with the same namespace, when the WebService generator generates its classes its not seeing the other schemas properly and not generating the Object Factories correctly...  Thankfully I've found a workaround Solution Overview When generating the proxies leave the Root Package for Generated Types BLANK When you have finished generating your proxies, use the JAXB tool XJC and generate Java classes for all datatypes  Create a project within your JDeveloper11g workspace and import the java classes into this project Final bit.. within the project dependencies ensure that the JAXB/XJC generated classes are "FIRST" in the classpath Solution Details Generate the WebServices SOAP proxies When generating the proxies your generation dialog should look like this Ensure the "unwrap" parameters is selected, if it isn't then that's ok, it simply means when issuing a "get" you need to extract out the Element Generate the JAXB Classes using XJC XJC provides a command line switch called -wsdl, this (although is experimental/beta) , accepts a HTTP WSDL and will generate the relevant classes. You can put these into a single batch/shell script xjc -wsdl https://fusionservername:443/appCmmnCompInteractions/InteractionService?wsdlxjc -wsdl https://fusionservername443/opptyMgmtOpportunities/OpportunityService?wsdl Create Project in JDeveloper to store the XJC "generated" JAXB classes Within the project folder create a filesystem folder called "src" and copy the generated files into this folder. JDeveloper11g should then see the classes and display them, if it doesnt try clicking the "refresh" button In your main project ensure that the JDeveloper XJC project is selected as a dependancy and IMPORTANT make sure it is at the top of the list. This ensures that the classes are at the front of the classpath And voilà.. Hopefully you wont see any JAXB generation errors and you can use common datatypes interchangeably in your project, (e.g. FindCriteria etc)

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• SQLIO Writes

  - by Grant Fritchey

  SQLIO is a fantastic utility for testing the abilities of the disks in your system. It has a very unfortunate name though, since it's not really a SQL Server testing utility at all. It really is a disk utility. They ought to call it DiskIO because they'd get more people using I think. Anyway, branding is not the point of this blog post. Writes are the point of this blog post. SQLIO works by slamming your disk. It performs as mean reads as it can or it performs as many writes as it can depending on how you've configured your tests. There are much smarter people than me who will get into all the various types of tests you should run. I'd suggest reading a bit of what Jonathan Kehayias (blog|twitter) has to say or wade into Denny Cherry's (blog|twitter) work. They're going to do a better job than I can describing all the benefits and mechanisms around using this excellent piece of software. My concerns are very focused. I needed to set up a series of tests to see how well our product SQL Storage Compress worked. I wanted to know the effects it would have on a system, the disk for sure, but also memory and CPU. How to stress the system? SQLIO of course. But when I set it up and ran it, following the documentation that comes with it, I was seeing better than 99% compression on the files. Don't get me wrong. Our product is magnificent, wonderful, all things great and beautiful, gets you coffee in the morning and is made mostly from bacon. But 99% compression. No, it's not that good. So what's up? Well, it's the configuration. The default mechanism is to load up a file, something large that will overwhelm your disk cache. You're instructed to load the file with a character 0x0. I never got a computer science degree. I went to film school. Because of this, I didn't memorize ASCII tables so when I saw this, I thought it was zero's or something. Nope. It's NULL. That's right, you're making a very large file, but you're filling it with NULL values. That's actually ok when all you're testing is the disk sub-system. But, when you want to test a compression and decompression, that can be an issue. I got around this fairly quickly. Instead of generating a file filled with NULL values, I just copied a database file for my tests. And to test it with SQL Storage Compress, I used a database file that had already been run through compression (about 40% compression on that file if you're interested). Now the reads were taken care of. I am seeing very realistic performance from decompressing the information for reads through SQLIO. But what about writes? Well, the issue is, what does SQLIO write? I don't have access to the code. But I do have access to the results. I did two different tests, just to be sure of what I was seeing. First test, use the .DAT file as described in the documentation. I opened the .DAT file after I was done with SQLIO, using WordPad. Guess what? It's a giant file full of air. SQLIO writes NULL values. What does that do to compression? I did the test again on a copy of an uncompressed database file. Then I ran the original and the SQLIO modified copy through ZIP to see what happened. I got better than 99% compression out of the SQLIO modified file (original file of 624,896kb went to 275,871kb compressed, after SQLIO it went to 608kb compressed). So, what does SQLIO write? It writes air. If you're trying to test it with compression or maybe some other type of file storage mechanism like dedupe, you need to know this because your tests really won't be valid. Should I find some other mechanism for testing? Yeah, if all I'm interested in is establishing performance to my own satisfaction, yes. But, I want to be able to compare my results with other people's results and we all need to be using the same tool in order for that to happen. SQLIO is the common mechanism that most people I know use to establish disk performance behavior. It'd be better if we could get SQLIO to do writes in some other fashion. Oh, and before I go, I get to brag a bit. Measuring IOPS, SQL Storage Compress outperforms my disk alone by about 30%.

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• Performance triage

  - by Dave

  Folks often ask me how to approach a suspected performance issue. My personal strategy is informed by the fact that I work on concurrency issues. (When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but I'll try to keep this general). A good starting point is to ask yourself if the observed performance matches your expectations. Expectations might be derived from known system performance limits, prototypes, and other software or environments that are comparable to your particular system-under-test. Some simple comparisons and microbenchmarks can be useful at this stage. It's also useful to write some very simple programs to validate some of the reported or expected system limits. Can that disk controller really tolerate and sustain 500 reads per second? To reduce the number of confounding factors it's better to try to answer that question with a very simple targeted program. And finally, nothing beats having familiarity with the technologies that underlying your particular layer. On the topic of confounding factors, as our technology stacks become deeper and less transparent, we often find our own technology working against us in some unexpected way to choke performance rather than simply running into some fundamental system limit. A good example is the warm-up time needed by just-in-time compilers in Java Virtual Machines. I won't delve too far into that particular hole except to say that it's rare to find good benchmarks and methodology for java code. Another example is power management on x86. Power management is great, but it can take a while for the CPUs to throttle up from low(er) frequencies to full throttle. And while I love "turbo" mode, it makes benchmarking applications with multiple threads a chore as you have to remember to turn it off and then back on otherwise short single-threaded runs may look abnormally fast compared to runs with higher thread counts. In general for performance characterization I disable turbo mode and fix the power governor at "performance" state. Another source of complexity is the scheduler, which I've discussed in prior blog entries. Lets say I have a running application and I want to better understand its behavior and performance. We'll presume it's warmed up, is under load, and is an execution mode representative of what we think the norm would be. It should be in steady-state, if a steady-state mode even exists. On Solaris the very first thing I'll do is take a set of "pstack" samples. Pstack briefly stops the process and walks each of the stacks, reporting symbolic information (if available) for each frame. For Java, pstack has been augmented to understand java frames, and even report inlining. A few pstack samples can provide powerful insight into what's actually going on inside the program. You'll be able to see calling patterns, which threads are blocked on what system calls or synchronization constructs, memory allocation, etc. If your code is CPU-bound then you'll get a good sense where the cycles are being spent. (I should caution that normal C/C++ inlining can diffuse an otherwise "hot" method into other methods. This is a rare instance where pstack sampling might not immediately point to the key problem). At this point you'll need to reconcile what you're seeing with pstack and your mental model of what you think the program should be doing. They're often rather different. And generally if there's a key performance issue, you'll spot it with a moderate number of samples. I'll also use OS-level observability tools to lock for the existence of bottlenecks where threads contend for locks; other situations where threads are blocked; and the distribution of threads over the system. On Solaris some good tools are mpstat and too a lesser degree, vmstat. Try running "mpstat -a 5" in one window while the application program runs concurrently. One key measure is the voluntary context switch rate "vctx" or "csw" which reflects threads descheduling themselves. It's also good to look at the user; system; and idle CPU percentages. This can give a broad but useful understanding if your threads are mostly parked or mostly running. For instance if your program makes heavy use of malloc/free, then it might be the case you're contending on the central malloc lock in the default allocator. In that case you'd see malloc calling lock in the stack traces, observe a high csw/vctx rate as threads block for the malloc lock, and your "usr" time would be less than expected. Solaris dtrace is a wonderful and invaluable performance tool as well, but in a sense you have to frame and articulate a meaningful and specific question to get a useful answer, so I tend not to use it for first-order screening of problems. It's also most effective for OS and software-level performance issues as opposed to HW-level issues. For that reason I recommend mpstat & pstack as my the 1st step in performance triage. If some other OS-level issue is evident then it's good to switch to dtrace to drill more deeply into the problem. Only after I've ruled out OS-level issues do I switch to using hardware performance counters to look for architectural impediments.

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• Objects won't render when Texture Compression + Mipmapping is Enabled

  - by felipedrl

  I'm optimizing my game and I've just implemented compressed (DXTn) texture loading in OpenGL. I've worked my way removing bugs but I can't figure out this one: objects w/ DXTn + mipmapped textures are not being rendered. It's not like they are appearing with a flat color, they just don't appear at all. DXTn textured objs render and mipmapped non-compressed textures render just fine. The texture in question is 256x256 I generate the mips all the way down 4x4, i.e 1 block. I've checked on gDebugger and it display all the levels (7) just fine. I'm using GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST for min filter and GL_LINEAR for mag one. The texture is being compressed and mipmaps being created offline with Paint.NET tool using super sampling method. (I also tried bilinear just in case) Source follow: [SNIPPET 1: Loading DDS into sys memory + Initializing Object] // Read header DDSHeader header; file.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(&header), sizeof(DDSHeader)); uint pos = static_cast<uint>(file.tellg()); file.seekg(0, std::ios_base::end); uint dataSizeInBytes = static_cast<uint>(file.tellg()) - pos; file.seekg(pos, std::ios_base::beg); // Read file data mData = new unsigned char[dataSizeInBytes]; file.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(mData), dataSizeInBytes); file.close(); mMipmapCount = header.mipmapcount; mHeight = header.height; mWidth = header.width; mCompressionType = header.pf.fourCC; // Only support files divisible by 4 (for compression blocks algorithms) massert(mWidth % 4 == 0 && mHeight % 4 == 0); massert(mCompressionType == NO_COMPRESSION || mCompressionType == COMPRESSION_DXT1 || mCompressionType == COMPRESSION_DXT3 || mCompressionType == COMPRESSION_DXT5); // Allow textures up to 65536x65536 massert(header.mipmapcount <= MAX_MIPMAP_LEVELS); mTextureFilter = TextureFilter::LINEAR; if (mMipmapCount > 0) { mMipmapFilter = MipmapFilter::NEAREST; } else { mMipmapFilter = MipmapFilter::NO_MIPMAP; } mBitsPerPixel = header.pf.bitcount; if (mCompressionType == NO_COMPRESSION) { if (header.pf.flags & DDPF_ALPHAPIXELS) { // The only format supported w/ alpha is A8R8G8B8 massert(header.pf.amask == 0xFF000000 && header.pf.rmask == 0xFF0000 && header.pf.gmask == 0xFF00 && header.pf.bmask == 0xFF); mInternalFormat = GL_RGBA8; mFormat = GL_BGRA; mDataType = GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE; } else { massert(header.pf.rmask == 0xFF0000 && header.pf.gmask == 0xFF00 && header.pf.bmask == 0xFF); mInternalFormat = GL_RGB8; mFormat = GL_BGR; mDataType = GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE; } } else { uint blockSizeInBytes = 16; switch (mCompressionType) { case COMPRESSION_DXT1: blockSizeInBytes = 8; if (header.pf.flags & DDPF_ALPHAPIXELS) { mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT; } else { mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGB_S3TC_DXT1_EXT; } break; case COMPRESSION_DXT3: mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT3_EXT; break; case COMPRESSION_DXT5: mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT5_EXT; break; default: // Not Supported (DXT2, DXT4 or any compression format) massert(false); } } [SNIPPET 2: Uploading into video memory] massert(mData != NULL); glGenTextures(1, &mHandle); massert(mHandle!=0); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, mHandle); commitFiltering(); uint offset = 0; Renderer* renderer = Renderer::getInstance(); switch (mInternalFormat) { case GL_RGB: case GL_RGBA: case GL_RGB8: case GL_RGBA8: for (uint i = 0; i < mMipmapCount + 1; ++i) { uint width = std::max(1U, mWidth >> i); uint height = std::max(1U, mHeight >> i); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, i, mInternalFormat, width, height, mHasBorder, mFormat, mDataType, &mData[offset]); offset += width * height * (mBitsPerPixel / 8); } break; case GL_COMPRESSED_RGB_S3TC_DXT1_EXT: case GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT: case GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT3_EXT: case GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT5_EXT: { uint blockSize = 16; if (mInternalFormat == GL_COMPRESSED_RGB_S3TC_DXT1_EXT || mInternalFormat == GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT) { blockSize = 8; } uint width = mWidth; uint height = mHeight; for (uint i = 0; i < mMipmapCount + 1; ++i) { uint nBlocks = ((width + 3) / 4) * ((height + 3) / 4); // Only POT textures allowed for mipmapping massert(width % 4 == 0 && height % 4 == 0); glCompressedTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, i, mInternalFormat, width, height, mHasBorder, nBlocks * blockSize, &mData[offset]); offset += nBlocks * blockSize; if (width <= 4 && height <= 4) { break; } width = std::max(4U, width / 2); height = std::max(4U, height / 2); } break; } default: // Not Supported massert(false); } Also I don't understand the "+3" in the block size computation but looking for a solution for my problema I've encountered people defining it as that. I guess it won't make a differente for POT textures but I put just in case. Thanks.

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• Private Cloud: Putting some method behind the madness

  - by Sudip Datta

  Finally, I decided to join the blogging community. And what could be a better time to start than the week after OpenWorld 2012. 50K+ attendees, demonstrations, speaker sessions and a whole lot of buzz on Oracle Cloud..It was raining clouds in this year's Openworld. I am not here to write about Oracle's cloud strategy in general, but on Enterprise Manager's cloud management capabilities. This year's Openworld was the first after we announced the 12c Cloud Control and we were happy to share the stage with quite a few early adopters. Stay tuned for videos from our customers and partners, I will post them as they get published. I met a number of platform administrators in Oracle-DBAs, Middleware Admins, SOA Admins...The cloud has affected them all, at least to the point where it beckoned more than just curiosity..Most IT infrastructure are already heavily virtualized (on VMWare and on others including Oracle VM), and some would claim they are already on “cloud” (at least their Sysadmins told them so). But none of them were confident of the benefits because their pain points continued to grow.. Isn't cloud supposed to ease those? Instead, they were chasing hundreds of databases running on hundreds of VMs, often with as much certainty propounded by Heisenberg. What happened to the age-old IT discipline around administration, compliance, configuration management? VMs are great for what they are. I personally think they have opened the doors to new approaches in which an application stack gets provisioned and updated. In fact, Enterprise Manager 12c is possibly the only tool out there that can provision full-fledged application as VM Assemblies. In this year's Openworld, customers talked on how they provisioned RAC and Siebel assemblies, which as the techies out there know, are not trivial (hearing provisioning time for Siebel down from weeks to hours was gratifying indeed). However, I do have an issue with a "one-size fits all" approach to cloud. In a week's span, I met several personas: Project owners requiring an EC2 like VM instance for their projects Admins needing the same for Sparc-Solaris. DBAs requiring dedicated databases for new projects APEX Developers needing just a ready-to-consume schema as a service Java Developers looking for a runtime platform QA engineers needing a fast clone of their production environment If you drill down further, you will end up peeling more layers of the details. For example, the requirements for Load testing and Functional testing are very different. For Load testing the test environment should ideally be the same as the production. You shouldn't run production on Exadata and load test on a VM; they will just not be good representations of one another. For Functional testing it does not possibly matter. DBAs seem to be at the worst affected of the lot. It seems they have been asked to choose between agile provisioning and  faster runtime performance. And in some cases, it is really a Hobson's choice, because their infrastructure provider made no distinction between the OLTP application and the Virtual desktop! Sad indeed. When one looks at the portfolio of services that we already offer (vanilla IaaS, VM Assembly based PaaS, DBaaS) or have announced (Java PaaS, Instant Cloning, Schema-aaS), one can possibly think that we are trying to be the "renaissance man" ! Well I would have possibly digested that had it not been for the various personas that I described above. Getting the use cases right is very important for an application such as cloud management. We iterate and iterate over these over and over again and re-validate them in CABs (Customer Advisory Boards). We consider over the major aspects of tenancy: service placement, resource isolation (can a tenant execute an expensive SQL and run away with all the resources), quota and security. We, in Engineering, keep reminding ourselves that we are dealing with enterprise clouds. We owe it to our customer base ! In the coming posts, I will drill down more into each of the services. In the meanwhile, here are some collateral and  demos for starters with EM 12c. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/cloud-mgmt/index.html Sudip Datta The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter --

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• Right-Time Retail Part 2

  - by David Dorf

  This is part two of the three-part series. 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-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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Integration Of course these real-time enabling technologies are only as good as the systems that utilize them, and it only takes one bottleneck to slow everyone else down. What good is an immediate stock-out notification if the supply chain can’t react until tomorrow? Since being formed in 2006, Oracle Retail has been not only adding more integrations between systems, but also modernizing integrations for appropriate speed. Notice I tossed in the word “appropriate.” Not everything needs to be real-time – again, we’re talking about Right-Time Retail. The speed of data capture, analysis, and execution must be synchronized or you’re wasting effort. Unfortunately, there isn’t an enterprise-wide dial that you can crank-up for your estate. You’ll need to improve things piecemeal, with people and processes as limiting factors while choosing the appropriate types of integrations. There are three integration styles we see in the retail industry. First is batch. I know, the word “batch” just sounds slow, but this pattern is less about velocity and more about volume. When there are large amounts of data to be moved, you’ll want to use batch processes. Our technology of choice here is Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), which provides a fast version of Extract-Transform-Load (ETL). Instead of the three-step process, the load and transform steps are combined to save time. ODI is a key technology for moving data into Retail Analytics where we can apply science. Performing analytics on each sale as it occurs doesn’t make any sense, so we batch up a statistically significant amount and submit all at once. The second style is fire-and-forget. For some types of data, we want the data to arrive ASAP but immediacy is not necessary. Speed is less important than guaranteed delivery, so we use message-oriented middleware available in both Weblogic and the Oracle database. For example, Point-of-Service transactions are queued for delivery to Central Office at corporate. If the network is offline, those transactions remain in the queue and will be delivered when the network returns. Transactions cannot be lost and they must be delivered in order. (Ever tried processing a return before the sale?) To enhance the standard queues, we offer the Retail Integration Bus (RIB) to help the management and monitoring of fire-and-forget messaging in the enterprise. The third style is request-response and is most commonly implemented as Web services. This is a synchronous message where the sender waits for a response. In this situation, the volume of data is small, guaranteed delivery is not necessary, but speed is very important. Examples include the website checking inventory, a price lookup, or processing a credit card authorization. The Oracle Service Bus (OSB) typically handles the routing of such messages, and we’ve enhanced its abilities with the Retail Service Backbone (RSB). To better understand these integration patterns and where they apply within the retail enterprise, we’re providing the Retail Reference Library (RRL) at no charge to Oracle Retail customers. The library is composed of a large number of industry business processes, including those necessary to support Commerce Anywhere, as well as detailed architectural diagrams. These diagrams allow implementers to understand the systems involved in integrations and the specific data payloads. Furthermore, with our upcoming release we’ll be providing a new tool called the Retail Integration Console (RIC) that allows IT to monitor and manage integrations from a single point. Using RIC, retailers can quickly discern where integration activity is occurring, volume statistics, average response times, and errors. The dashboards provide the ability to dive down into the architecture documentation to gather information all the way down to the specific payload. Retailers that want real-time integrations will also need real-time monitoring of those integrations to ensure service-level agreements are maintained. Part 3 looks at marketing.

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• Profiling NetBeans 7.0 Beta 2 and Reporting Problems

  - by christopher.jones

  With NetBeans 7.0 recently going into Beta 2 phase, now is the time to test it out properly and report issues. The development team has been squashing bugs, including memory issues with the PHP bundle.There are some great new PHP related features in NetBeans 7.0, so you know you want to try it out.If you identify something wrong with NetBeans, please report it following the guidelines http://wiki.netbeans.org/IssueReportingGuidelinesDepending on the issues, data to attach to the report is mentioned on: http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqLogMessagesFile and http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqProfileMeNowIf you have a memory issue then a memory dump would also be useful. Run the jmap tool for this. There is some background information on http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqMemoryDump. Here's how I used it.First I set my environment to match the JDK used by NetBeans. In my case I am using a nightly build so the JDK is in the configuration file under $HOME/netbeans-dev-201102210501:$ egrep netbeans_jdkhome $HOME/netbeans-dev-201102210501/etc/netbeans.conf netbeans_jdkhome="/home/cjones/src/jdk1.6.0_24" $ export JAVA_HOME=/home/cjones/src/jdk1.6.0_24 $ export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH Next, I found the correct process number to examine:$ ps -ef | egrep 'netbeans|jdk'cjones   23230     1  0 16:07 ?        00:00:00 /bin/bash /home/cjones/netbeans-cjones   23438 23230  2 16:07 ?        00:00:09 /home/cjones/src/jdk1.6.0_24/binFinally I used the parent JDK process as the jmap argument:$ jmap -histo:live 23438 num     #instances         #bytes  class name----------------------------------------------   1:         12075        9028656  [I   2:         49535        6581920  <constMethodKlass>   3:         49535        3964128  <methodKlass>   4:         80256        3840776  <symbolKlass>   5:         36093        3635336  [C   6:          5095        3341312  <constantPoolKlass>   7:          5095        2486016  <instanceKlassKlass>   8:          4325        1961432  <constantPoolCacheKlass>   9:         18729        1763976  [B  10:         59952        1438848  java.util.HashMap$Entry  . . .This histogram memory report will help identify the kind of memory issues you are seeing. It may not be as complete as an often tens of megabyte jmap -dump:live,file=/tmp/nbheap.log 23438 heap dump, but is much more easily attached to a bug report.If you want to keep up to date with NetBeans, nightly builds are at: http://bits.netbeans.org/download/trunk/nightly/latest/zip/

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• Delight and Excite

  - by Applications User Experience

  Mick McGee, CEO & President, EchoUser Editor’s Note: EchoUser is a User Experience design firm in San Francisco and a member of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Mick and his staff regularly consult on Oracle Applications UX projects. Being part of a user experience design firm, we have the luxury of working with a lot of great people across many great companies. We get to help people solve their problems.  At least we used to. The basic design challenge is still the same; however, the goal is not necessarily to solve “problems” anymore; it is, “I want our products to delight and excite!” The question for us as UX professionals is how to design to those goals, and then how to assess them from a usability perspective. I’m not sure where I first heard “delight and excite” (A book? blog post? Facebook  status? Steve Jobs quote?), but now I hear these listed as user experience goals all the time. In particular, somewhat paradoxically, I routinely hear them in enterprise software conversations. And when asking these same enterprise companies what will make the project successful, we very often hear, “Make it like Apple.” In past days, it was “make it like Yahoo (or Amazon or Google“) but now Apple is the common benchmark. Steve Jobs and Apple were not secrets, but with Jobs’ passing and Apple becoming the world’s most valuable company in the last year, the impact of great design and experience is suddenly very widespread. In particular, users’ expectations have gone way up. Being an enterprise company is no shield to the general expectations that users now have, for all products. Designing a “Minimum Viable Product” The user experience challenge has historically been, to echo the words of Eric Ries (author of Lean Startup) , to create a “minimum viable product”: the proverbial, “make it good enough”. But, in our profession, the “minimum viable” part of that phrase has oftentimes, unfortunately, referred to the design and user experience. Technology typically dominated the focus of the biggest, most successful companies. Few have had the laser focus of Apple to also create and sell design and user experience alongside great technology. But now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, copying their success is a common undertaking. Great design is now a premium offering that everyone wants, from the one-person startup to the largest companies, consumer and enterprise. This emerging business paradigm will have significant impact across the user experience design process and profession. One area that particularly interests me is, how are we going to evaluate these new emerging “delight and excite” experiences, which are further customized to each particular domain? How to Measure “Delight and Excite” Traditional usability measures of task completion rate, assists, time, and errors are still extremely useful in many situations; however, they are too blunt to offer much insight into emerging experiences “Satisfaction” is usually assessed in user testing, in roughly equivalent importance to the above objective metrics. Various surveys and scales have provided ways to measure satisfying UX, with whatever questions they include. However, to meet the demands of new business goals and keep users at the center of design and development processes, we have to explore new methods to better capture custom-experience goals and emotion-driven user responses. We have had success assessing custom experiences, including “delight and excite”, by employing a variety of user testing methods that tend to combine formative and summative techniques (formative being focused more on identifying usability issues and ways to improve design, and summative focused more on metrics). Our most successful tool has been one we’ve been using for a long time, Magnitude Estimation Technique (MET). But it’s not necessarily about MET as a measure, rather how it is created. Caption: For one client, EchoUser did two rounds of testing.  Each test was a mix of performing representative tasks and gathering qualitative impressions. Each user participated in an in-person moderated 1-on-1 session for 1 hour, using a testing set-up where they held the phone. The primary goal was to identify usability issues and recommend design improvements. MET is based on a definition of the desired experience, which users will then use to rate items of interest (usually tasks in a usability test). In other words, a custom experience definition needs to be created. This can then be used to measure satisfaction in accomplishing tasks; “delight and excite”; or anything else from strategic goals, user demands, or elsewhere. For reference, our standard MET definition in usability testing is: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well designed and productive an interface is to complete tasks.” Articulating the User Experience We’ve helped construct experience definitions for several clients to better match their business goals. One example is a modification of the above that was needed for a company that makes medical-related products: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well-designed, productive and safe an interface is for conducting tasks. ‘Safe’ is how free an environment (including devices, software, facilities, people, etc.) is from danger, risk, and injury.” Another example is from a company that is pushing hard to incorporate “delight” into their enterprise business line: “User experience is your perception of a product’s ease of use and learning, satisfaction and delight in design, and ability to accomplish objectives.” I find the last one particularly compelling in that there is little that identifies the experience as being for a highly technical enterprise application. That definition could easily be applied to any number of consumer products. We have gone further than the above, including “sexy” and “cool” where decision-makers insisted they were part of the desired experience. We also applied it to completely different experiences where the “interface” was, for example, riding public transit, the “tasks” were train rides, and we followed the participants through the train-riding journey and rated various aspects accordingly: “A good public transportation experience is a cost-effective way of reliably, conveniently, and safely getting me to my intended destination on time.” To construct these definitions, we’ve employed both bottom-up and top-down approaches, depending on circumstances. For bottom-up, user inputs help dictate the terms that best fit the desired experience (usually by way of cluster and factor analysis). Top-down depends on strategic, visionary goals expressed by upper management that we then attempt to integrate into product development (e.g., “delight and excite”). We like a combination of both approaches to push the innovation envelope, but still be mindful of current user concerns. Hopefully the idea of crafting your own custom experience, and a way to measure it, can provide you with some ideas how you can adapt your user experience needs to whatever company you are in. Whether product-development or service-oriented, nearly every company is ultimately providing a user experience. The Bottom Line Creating great experiences may have been popularized by Steve Jobs and Apple, but I’ll be honest, it’s a good feeling to be moving from “good enough” to “delight and excite,” despite the challenge that entails. In fact, it’s because of that challenge that we will expand what we do as UX professionals to help deliver and assess those experiences. I’m excited to see how we, Oracle, and the rest of the industry will live up to that challenge.

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• Application Composer: Exposing Your Customizations in BI Analytics and Reporting

  - by Richard Bingham

  Introduction This article explains in simple terms how to ensure the customizations and extensions you have made to your Fusion Applications are available for use in reporting and analytics. It also includes four embedded demo videos from our YouTube channel (if they don't appear check the browser address bar for a blocking shield icon). If you are new to Business Intelligence consider first reviewing our getting started article, and you can read more about the topic of custom subject areas in the documentation book Extending Sales. There are essentially four sections to this post. First we look at how custom fields added to standard objects are made available for reporting. Secondly we look at creating custom subject areas on the standard objects. Next we consider reporting on custom objects, starting with simple standalone objects, then child custom objects, and finally custom objects with relationships. Finally this article reviews how flexfields are exposed for reporting. Whilst this article applies to both Cloud/SaaS and on-premises deployments, if you are an on-premises developer then you can also use the BI Administration Tool to customize your BI metadata repository (the RPD) and create new subject areas. Whilst this is not covered here you can read more in Chapter 8 of the Extensibility Guide for Developers. Custom Fields on Standard Objects If you add a custom field to your standard object then it's likely you'll want to include it in your reports. This is very simple, since all new fields are instantly available in the "[objectName] Extension" folder in existing subject areas. The following two minute video demonstrates this. Custom Subject Areas for Standard Objects You can create your own subject areas for use in analytics and reporting via Application Composer. An example use-case could be to simplify the seeded subject areas, since they sometimes contain complex data fields and internal values that could confuse business users. One thing to note is that you cannot create subject areas in a sandbox, as it is not supported by BI, so once your custom object is tested and complete you'll need to publish the sandbox before moving forwards. The subject area creation processes is essentially two-fold. Once the request is submitted the ADF artifacts are generated, then secondly the related metadata is sent to the BI presentation server API's to make the updates there. One thing to note is that this second step may take up to ten minutes to complete. Once finished the status of the custom subject area request should show as 'OK' and it is then ready for use. Within the creation processes wizard-like steps there are three concepts worth highlighting: Date Flattening - this feature permits the roll up of reports at various date levels, such as data by week, month, quarter, or year. You simply check the box to enable it for that date field. Measures - these are your own functions that you can build into the custom subject area. They are related to the field data type and include min-max for dates, and sum(), avg(), and count() for  numeric fields. Implicit Facts - used to make the BI metadata join between your object fields and the calculated measure fields. The advice is to choose the most frequently used measure to ensure consistency. This video shows a simple example, where a simplified subject area is created for the customer 'Contact' standard object, picking just a few fields upon which users can then create reports. Custom Objects Custom subject areas support three types of custom objects. First is a simple standalone custom object and for which the same process mentioned above applies. The next is a custom child object created on a standard object parent, and finally a custom object that is related to a parent object - usually through a dynamic choice list. Whilst the steps in each of these last two are mostly the same, there are differences in the way you choose the objects and their fields. This is illustrated in the videos below.The first video shows the process for creating a custom subject area for a simple standalone custom object. This second video demonstrates how to create custom subject areas for custom objects that are of parent:child type, as well as those those with dynamic-choice-list relationships. &lt;span id=&quot;XinhaEditingPostion&quot;&gt;&lt;/span&gt; Flexfields Dynamic and Extensible Flexfields satisfy a similar requirement as custom fields (for Application Composer), with flexfields common across the Fusion Financials, Supply Chain and Procurement, and HCM applications. The basic principle is when you enable and configure your flexfields, in the edit page under each segment region (for both global and context segments) there is a BI Enabled check box. Once this is checked and you've completed your configuration, you run the Scheduled Process job named 'Import Oracle Fusion Data Extensions for Transactional Business Intelligence' to generate and migrate the related BI artifacts and data. This applies for dynamic, key, and extensible flexfields. Of course there is more to consider in terms of how you wish your flexfields to be implemented and exposed in your reports, and details are given in Chapter 4 of the Extending Applications guide.

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 4

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Explain the characteristics of memory systems Describe the memory hierarchy Discuss cache memory principles Discuss issues relevant to cache design Describe the cache organization of the Pentium Computer Memory Systems There are key characteristics of memory… Location – internal or external Capacity – expressed in terms of bytes Unit of Transfer – the number of bits read out of or written into memory at a time Access Method – sequential, direct, random or associative From a users perspective the two most important characteristics of memory are… Capacity Performance – access time, memory cycle time, transfer rate The trade off for memory happens along three axis… Faster access time, greater cost per bit Greater capacity, smaller cost per bit Greater capacity, slower access time This leads to people using a tiered approach in their use of memory   As one goes down the hierarchy, the following occurs… Decreasing cost per bit Increasing capacity Increasing access time Decreasing frequency of access of the memory by the processor The use of two levels of memory to reduce average access time works in principle, but only if conditions 1 to 4 apply. A variety of technologies exist that allow us to accomplish this. Thus it is possible to organize data across the hierarchy such that the percentage of accesses to each successively lower level is substantially less than that of the level above. A portion of main memory can be used as a buffer to hold data temporarily that is to be read out to disk. This is sometimes referred to as a disk cache and improves performance in two ways… Disk writes are clustered. Instead of many small transfers of data, we have a few large transfers of data. This improves disk performance and minimizes processor involvement. Some data designed for write-out may be referenced by a program before the next dump to disk. In that case the data is retrieved rapidly from the software cache rather than slowly from disk. Cache Memory Principles Cache memory is substantially faster than main memory. A caching system works as follows.. When a processor attempts to read a word of memory, a check is made to see if this in in cache memory… If it is, the data is supplied, If it is not in the cache, a block of main memory, consisting of a fixed number of words is loaded to the cache. Because of the phenomenon of locality of references, when a block of data is fetched into the cache, it is likely that there will be future references to that same memory location or to other words in the block. Elements of Cache Design While there are a large number of cache implementations, there are a few basic design elements that serve to classify and differentiate cache architectures… Cache Addresses Cache Size Mapping Function Replacement Algorithm Write Policy Line Size Number of Caches Cache Addresses Almost all non-embedded processors support virtual memory. Virtual memory in essence allows a program to address memory from a logical point of view without needing to worry about the amount of physical memory available. When virtual addresses are used the designer may choose to place the cache between the MMU (memory management unit) and the processor or between the MMU and main memory. The disadvantage of virtual memory is that most virtual memory systems supply each application with the same virtual memory address space (each application sees virtual memory starting at memory address 0), which means the cache memory must be completely flushed with each application context switch or extra bits must be added to each line of the cache to identify which virtual address space the address refers to. Cache Size We would like the size of the cache to be small enough so that the overall average cost per bit is close to that of main memory alone and large enough so that the overall average access time is close to that of the cache alone. Also, larger caches are slightly slower than smaller ones. Mapping Function Because there are fewer cache lines than main memory blocks, an algorithm is needed for mapping main memory blocks into cache lines. The choice of mapping function dictates how the cache is organized. Three techniques can be used… Direct – simplest technique, maps each block of main memory into only one possible cache line Associative – Each main memory block to be loaded into any line of the cache Set Associative – exhibits the strengths of both the direct and associative approaches while reducing their disadvantages For detailed explanations of each approach – read the text book (page 148 – 154) Replacement Algorithm For associative and set associating mapping a replacement algorithm is needed to determine which of the existing blocks in the cache must be replaced by a new block. There are four common approaches… LRU (Least recently used) FIFO (First in first out) LFU (Least frequently used) Random selection Write Policy When a block resident in the cache is to be replaced, there are two cases to consider If no writes to that block have happened in the cache – discard it If a write has occurred, a process needs to be initiated where the changes in the cache are propagated back to the main memory. There are several approaches to achieve this including… Write Through – all writes to the cache are done to the main memory as well at the point of the change Write Back – when a block is replaced, all dirty bits are written back to main memory The problem is complicated when we have multiple caches, there are techniques to accommodate for this but I have not summarized them. Line Size When a block of data is retrieved and placed in the cache, not only the desired word but also some number of adjacent words are retrieved. As the block size increases from very small to larger sizes, the hit ratio will at first increase because of the principle of locality, which states that the data in the vicinity of a referenced word are likely to be referenced in the near future. As the block size increases, more useful data are brought into cache. The hit ratio will begin to decrease as the block becomes even bigger and the probability of using the newly fetched information becomes less than the probability of using the newly fetched information that has to be replaced. Two specific effects come into play… Larger blocks reduce the number of blocks that fit into a cache. Because each block fetch overwrites older cache contents, a small number of blocks results in data being overwritten shortly after they are fetched. As a block becomes larger, each additional word is farther from the requested word and therefore less likely to be needed in the near future. The relationship between block size and hit ratio is complex, and no set approach is judged to be the best in all circumstances.   Pentium 4 and ARM cache organizations The processor core consists of four major components: Fetch/decode unit – fetches program instruction in order from the L2 cache, decodes these into a series of micro-operations, and stores the results in the L2 instruction cache Out-of-order execution logic – Schedules execution of the micro-operations subject to data dependencies and resource availability – thus micro-operations may be scheduled for execution in a different order than they were fetched from the instruction stream. As time permits, this unit schedules speculative execution of micro-operations that may be required in the future Execution units – These units execute micro-operations, fetching the required data from the L1 data cache and temporarily storing results in registers Memory subsystem – This unit includes the L2 and L3 caches and the system bus, which is used to access main memory when the L1 and L2 caches have a cache miss and to access the system I/O resources

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• Hybrid IT or Cloud Initiative – a Perfect Enterprise Architecture Maturation Opportunity

  - by Ted McLaughlan

  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-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;} All too often in the growth and maturation of Enterprise Architecture initiatives, the effort stalls or is delayed due to lack of “applied traction”. By this, I mean the EA activities - whether targeted towards compliance, risk mitigation or value opportunity propositions – may not be attached to measurable, active, visible projects that could advance and prove the value of EA. EA doesn’t work by itself, in a vacuum, without collaborative engagement and a means of proving usefulness. A critical vehicle to this proof is successful orchestration and use of assets and investment resources to meet a high-profile business objective – i.e. a successful project. More and more organizations are now exploring and considering some degree of IT outsourcing, buying and using external services and solutions to deliver their IT and business requirements – vs. building and operating in-house, in their own data centers. The rapid growth and success of “Cloud” services makes some decisions easier and some IT projects more successful, while dramatically lowering IT risks and enabling rapid growth. This is particularly true for “Software as a Service” (SaaS) applications, which essentially are complete web applications hosted and delivered over the Internet. Whether SaaS solutions – or any kind of cloud solution - are actually, ultimately the most cost-effective approach truly depends on the organization’s business and IT investment strategy. This leads us to Enterprise Architecture, the connectivity between business strategy and investment objectives, and the capabilities purchased or created to meet them. If an EA framework already exists, the approach to selecting a cloud-based solution and integrating it with internal IT systems (i.e. a “Hybrid IT” solution) is well-served by leveraging EA methods. If an EA framework doesn’t exist, or is simply not mature enough to address complex, integrated IT objectives – a hybrid IT/cloud initiative is the perfect project to advance and prove the value of EA. Why is this? For starters, the success of any complex IT integration project - spanning multiple systems, contracts and organizations, public and private – depends on active collaboration and coordination among the project stakeholders. For a hybrid IT initiative, inclusive of one or more cloud services providers, the IT services, business workflow and data governance challenges alone can be extremely complex, requiring many diverse layers of organizational expertise and authority. Establishing subject matter expertise, authorities and strategic guidance across all the disciplines involved in a hybrid-IT or hybrid-cloud system requires top-level, comprehensive experience and collaborative leadership. Tools and practices reflecting industry expertise and EA alignment can also be very helpful – such as Oracle’s “Cloud Candidate Selection Tool”. Using tools like this, and facilitating this critical collaboration by leading, organizing and coordinating the input and expertise into a shared, referenceable, reusable set of authority models and practices – this is where EA shines, and where Enterprise Architects can be most valuable. The “enterprise”, in this case, becomes something greater than the core organization – it includes internal systems, public cloud services, 3rd-party IT platforms and datacenters, distributed users and devices; a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Through facilitated project collaboration, leading to identification or creation of solid governance models and processes, a durable and useful Enterprise Architecture framework will usually emerge by itself, if not actually identified and managed as such. The transition from planning collaboration to actual coordination, where the program plan, schedule and resources become synchronized and aligned to other investments in the organization portfolio, is where EA methods and artifacts appear and become most useful. The actual scope and use of these artifacts, in the context of this project, can then set the stage for the most desirable, helpful and pragmatic form of the now-maturing EA framework and community of practice. Considering or starting a hybrid-IT or hybrid-cloud initiative? Running into some complex relationship challenges? This is the perfect time to take advantage of your new, growing or possibly latent Enterprise Architecture practice.

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