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• Gartner PCC: A Shovel & Some Ah-Ha's

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  When Gartner Vice President and leading analyst Whit Andrews kicked off the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit on Monday, March 12 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL by bringing a shovel to the stage, eyebrows raised and a few thoughts went through my head. Either this guy plans to go help the construction workers outside construct that new pool at the Gaylord or he took a wrong turn and is at the wrong conference. Oh and how did he get that shovel through airport security? As Whit explained more his objective became more clear…take everything anyone has ever told you about portals and throw it out the window, as portals have evolved and times they are most certainly changing. The future Web is here, available not only on browsers but also via a broad spectrum of access points, including automobiles, consumer electronics and more and more mobile devices. Not merely prevalent, the future Web is also multimedia-driven and operates in real time, driven by mobility, social media, streaming video and other dynamic services. Applications and user experiences are in the midst of an evolution — from the early, simple mobile Web models to today’s Web 2.0 mobile apps and, ultimately, to a world of predominantly Web apps. Additionally, cloud services will forever change how portals and user experience are designed, built, delivered, sourced and managed. So what does this mean for you? Today’s organizations need software that will enable them to not just do their jobs, but to do it in a way that is familiar and easy for them.  What does this mean for IT? Use software and technology as an enabler, not as a roadblock. Overall, we had a great week in Orlando learning about how to improve the user experience, manage content explosion, launch social initiatives, transition to mobile environments and understand cloud and SaaS options.  We had some great conversations throughout the conference and at the Oracle booth. Lots of demonstrations were given of Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Social Network. And as Christie mentioned earlier this week, our Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for WebCenter Loren Weinberg presented on the topic of customer engagement and talked about how organization’s relationships with their customers have fundamentally changed today and the resulting impact that has on their priorities.  Loren also talked about the importance of customer engagement, why that matters now more than ever, and what you can do to help your company or organization succeed in this new world. The question asked in every keynote and session was a simple one: What is your “ah-ha” moment? I personally had quite a few, some of which I’ve captured below. 70% of internal social initiatives eventually fail. By 2014, refusing to communicate with consumers via social media will be as harmful as ignoring emails/phone calls is today. Customer engagement = multi-channel + social & interactive + personal & relevant + optimized. If people choose to talk about your product/company/service, it's because it's remarkable. -- Seth Godin's keynote (one of the highlights of the conference!) The Web will become the primary method used for delivering content and applications to mobile devices. By 2015, 20% of smart phone users worldwide will conduct commerce using context-enriched services on a weekly basis.  86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. 6 P's of Quality User Experience. Product. Enabled by: People, Patterns, Process, Profit, Priorities. Did you attend the Gartner Summit? What were your ah-ha moments?

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• On The Road with the HR Community

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Steve Boese, Director, Talent Strategy, Oracle One of the best ways to connect with and to get a feel for what is on the minds of Human Resources leaders is to get out of the office and hit the road. I’ve had the great honor to attend and/or present at a number of events recently, including the massive SHRM Annual Conference, the HR Florida Conference, and Taleo World in Chicago. These events, and many others, offer solution providers, talent management professionals, business leaders, and even more casual observers of the Human Resources field with tremendous opportunities to connect, to share information, and to learn from each other. Attending the conferences also give people a sense of how they can improve and enhance their skills and knowledge, learn about the latest workforce technologies, and bring new and innovative ideas back to their organizations. And sure, the parties and conference swag can be pretty nice as well! If you attend a few of these industry events, one of the most beneficial by-products that you can emerge with -- whether you are on the front lines in HR at your organization, or as we are at Oracle, in the business of developing and delivering innovative and impactful technology solutions to our customers -- is to get a larger sense of the big ideas and major trends, concerns, and challenges facing organizations all across the landscape, and to be able to better understand how your strategies and solutions can be improved with this greater perspective. So what are HR folks discussing and debating? What questions and problems keep them up at night? What are the bloggers and large community of HR social media enthusiasts buzzing about? From my perspective some of the common themes you see over and again across the HR community break down (broadly), into three main areas: Talent attraction - How can we locate, attract, recruit, and hire the best talent possible? What new strategies, approaches, and technologies can help us in this critically important area? What role do external social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter play in the increasingly competitive search for talent? Talent Retention - How can we make sure to keep that talent on our team? What engagement, development, recognition, and compensation tools can help us in this regard? How can we continue, (or become), an employer of choice? What is our unique and compelling employer value proposition? Talent Empowerment - How can we put our employees in the best position to succeed? What can we do to better align our talent with the organization’s mission and goals, while simultaneously providing the best and most driven to succeed individuals a clear path to achieve their career goals and aspirations? How can new technologies, particularly social and collaboration tools help in this area? While these are the ‘big themes’ that I know I have seen this year, certainly they are not really new, nor are they likely to fundamentally change in the next year or two. I think the reason is that at the core of any successful enterprise is a collection of smart, interested, engaged, challenged, and empowered group of people. And that was likely the case 10 or 20 years ago, and will probably be the case 10 or 20 years into the future. But what has changed, and what you can see -- evidenced by simply following the Twitter backchannel for an event and by reading some of the many fantastic HR blogs out there -- is that the HR professional's ability, along with technology solution providers like Oracle, to connect, to more openly share information with each other, and to make each other better in the process, (and to create new, improved, and more innovative solutions), has never been greater. And I think it is with this heretofore unprecedented level of opportunity to connect with other members of the community that HR professionals will be better equipped to help their organizations attract, retain, and empower their teams. We at Oracle HCM look forward to continuing to meet, engage, and connect with the HR community in the coming months. Until then -- follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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• To SYNC or not to SYNC – Part 4

  - by AshishRay

  This is Part 4 of a multi-part blog article where we are discussing various aspects of setting up Data Guard synchronous redo transport (SYNC). In Part 1 of this article, I debunked the myth that Data Guard SYNC is similar to a two-phase commit operation. In Part 2, I discussed the various ways that network latency may or may not impact a Data Guard SYNC configuration. In Part 3, I talked in details regarding why Data Guard SYNC is a good thing, and the distance implications you have to keep in mind. In this final article of the series, I will talk about how you can nicely complement Data Guard SYNC with the ability to failover in seconds. Wait - Did I Say “Seconds”? Did I just say that some customers do Data Guard failover in seconds? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Data Guard has an automatic failover capability, aptly called Fast-Start Failover. Initially available with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 for Data Guard SYNC transport mode (and enhanced in Oracle Database 11g to support Data Guard ASYNC transport mode), this capability, managed by Data Guard Broker, lets your Data Guard configuration automatically failover to a designated standby database. Yes, this means no human intervention is required to do the failover. This process is controlled by a low footprint Data Guard Broker client called Observer, which makes sure that the primary database and the designated standby database are behaving like good kids. If something bad were to happen to the primary database, the Observer, after a configurable threshold period, tells that standby, “Your time has come, you are the chosen one!” The standby dutifully follows the Observer directives by assuming the role of the new primary database. The DBA or the Sys Admin doesn’t need to be involved. And - in case you are following this discussion very closely, and are wondering … “Hmmm … what if the old primary is not really dead, but just network isolated from the Observer or the standby - won’t this lead to a split-brain situation?” The answer is No - It Doesn’t. With respect to why-it-doesn’t, I am sure there are some smart DBAs in the audience who can explain the technical reasons. Otherwise - that will be the material for a future blog post. So - this combination of SYNC and Fast-Start Failover is the nirvana of lights-out, integrated HA and DR, as practiced by some of our advanced customers. They have observed failover times (with no data loss) ranging from single-digit seconds to tens of seconds. With this, they support operations in industry verticals such as manufacturing, retail, telecom, Internet, etc. that have the most demanding availability requirements. One of our leading customers with massive cloud deployment initiatives tells us that they know about server failures only after Data Guard has automatically completed the failover process and the app is back up and running! Needless to mention, Data Guard Broker has the integration hooks for interfaces such as JDBC and OCI, or even for custom apps, to ensure the application gets automatically rerouted to the new primary database after the database level failover completes. Net Net? To sum up this multi-part blog article, Data Guard with SYNC redo transport mode, plus Fast-Start Failover, gives you the ideal triple-combo - that is, it gives you the assurance that for critical outages, you can failover your Oracle databases: very fast without human intervention, and without losing any data. In short, it takes the element of risk out of critical IT operations. It does require you to be more careful with your network and systems planning, but as far as HA is concerned, the benefits outweigh the investment costs. So, this is what we in the MAA Development Team believe in. What do you think? How has your deployment experience been? We look forward to hearing from you!

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• How would I handle input with a Game Component?

  - by Aufziehvogel

  I am currently having problems from finding my way into the component-oriented XNA design. I read an overview over the general design pattern and googled a lot of XNA examples. However, they seem to be right on the opposite site. In the general design pattern, an object (my current player) is passed to InputComponent::update(Player). This means the class will know what to do and how this will affect the game (e.g. move person vs. scroll text in a menu). Yet, in XNA GameComponent::update(GameTime) is called automatically without a reference to the current player. The only XNA examples I found built some sort of higher-level Keyboard engine into the game component like this: class InputComponent: GameComponent { public void keyReleased(Keys); public void keyPressed(Keys); public bool keyDown(Keys); public void override update(GameTime gameTime) { // compare previous state with current state and // determine if released, pressed, down or nothing } } Some others went a bit further making it possible to use a Service Locator by a design like this: interface IInputComponent { public void downwardsMovement(Keys); public void upwardsMovement(Keys); public bool pausedGame(Keys); // determine which keys pressed and what that means // can be done for different inputs in different implementations public void override update(GameTime); } Yet, then I am wondering if it is possible to design an input class to resolve all possible situations. Like in a menu a mouse click can mean "click that button", but in game play it can mean "shoot that weapon". So if I am using such a modular design with game components for input, how much logic is to be put into the InputComponent / KeyboardComponent / GamepadComponent and where is the rest handled? What I had in mind, when I heard about Game Components and Service Locator in XNA was something like this: use Game Components to run the InputHandler automatically in the loop use Service Locator to be able to switch input at runtime (i.e. let player choose if he wants to use a gamepad or a keyboard; or which shall be player 1 and which player 2). However, now I cannot see how this can be done. First code example does not seem flexible enough, as on a game pad you could require some combination of buttons for something that is possible on keyboard with only one button or with the mouse) The second code example seems really hard to implement, because the InputComponent has to know in which context we are currently. Moreover, you could imagine your application to be multi-layered and let the key-stroke go through all layers to the bottom-layer which requires a different behaviour than the InputComponent would have guessed from the top-layer. The general design pattern with passing the Player to update() does not have a representation in XNA and I also cannot see how and where to decide which class should be passed to update(). At most time of course the player, but sometimes there could be menu items you have to or can click I see that the question in general is already dealt with here, but probably from a more elobate point-of-view. At least, I am not smart enough in game development to understand it. I am searching for a rather code-based example directly for XNA. And the answer there leaves (a noob like) me still alone in how the object that should receive the detected event is chosen. Like if I have a key-up event, should it go to the text box or to the player?

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• Calculating for leap year [migrated]

  - by Bradley Bauer

  I've written this program using Java in Eclipse. I was able to utilize a formula I found that I explained in the commented out section. Using the for loop I can iterate through each month of the year, which I feel good about in that code, it seems clean and smooth to me. Maybe I could give the variables full names to make everything more readable but I'm just using the formula in its basic essence :) Well my problem is it doesn't calculate correctly for years like 2008... Leap Years. I know that if (year % 400 == 0 || (year % 4 == 0 && year % 100 != 0)) then we have a leap year. Maybe if the year is a leap year I need to subtract a certain amount of days from a certain month. Any solutions, or some direction would be great thanks :) package exercises; public class E28 { /* * Display the first days of each month * Enter the year * Enter first day of the year * * h = (q + (26 * (m + 1)) / 10 + k + k/4 + j/4 + 5j) % 7 * * h is the day of the week (0: Saturday, 1: Sunday ......) * q is the day of the month * m is the month (3: March 4: April.... January and Feburary are 13 and 14) * j is the century (year / 100) * k is the year of the century (year %100) * */ public static void main(String[] args) { java.util.Scanner input = new java.util.Scanner(System.in); System.out.print("Enter the year: "); int year = input.nextInt(); int j = year / 100; // Find century for formula int k = year % 100; // Find year of century for formula // Loop iterates 12 times. Guess why. for (int i = 1, m = i; i <= 12; i++) { // Make m = i. So loop processes formula once for each month if (m == 1 || m == 2) m += 12; // Formula requires that Jan and Feb are represented as 13 and 14 else m = i; // if not jan or feb, then set m to i int h = (1 + (26 * (m + 1)) / 10 + k + k/4 + j/4 + 5 * j) % 7; // Formula created by a really smart man somewhere // I let the control variable i steer the direction of the formual's m value String day; if (h == 0) day = "Saturday"; else if (h == 1) day = "Sunday"; else if (h == 2) day = "Monday"; else if (h == 3) day = "Tuesday"; else if (h == 4) day = "Wednesday"; else if (h == 5) day = "Thursday"; else day = "Friday"; switch (m) { case 13: System.out.println("January 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 14: System.out.println("Feburary 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 3: System.out.println("March 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 4: System.out.println("April 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 5: System.out.println("May 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 6: System.out.println("June 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 7: System.out.println("July 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 8: System.out.println("August 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 9: System.out.println("September 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 10: System.out.println("October 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 11: System.out.println("November 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 12: System.out.println("December 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; } } } }

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• OpenWorld: Our (Road) Maps are Looking Good!

  - by Tony Berk

  Wow, only one (or two) days down at Oracle OpenWorld! Are you on overload yet? I'm still trying to figure out how to be in 3 sessions at the same time... I guess everyone needs to prioritize! There was a lot to see in Monday's sessions, especially some great forward-looking roadmap sessions. In case you aren't here or you decided to go to other sessions, this is my quick summary of what I could capture from a couple of the roadmaps: In the Fusion CRM Strategy and Roadmap session, Anthony Lye provided an overview of the Fusion CRM strategy including the key design principles of 3 E's: Easy, Effective and Efficient. After an overview of how Oracle has deployed Fusion CRM internally to 25,000 users worldwide, Anthony discussed the features coming in the next release, the releases in the next 12 months and beyond. I can't detail too much since you haven't read Oracle's Safe Harbor statement, but check out Fusion Tap and look for new features and added functionality for sales prediction, marketing, social and integration with a number of the key Customer Experience products.  In the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Vision and Roadmap session, Chris Hamilton presented the focus areas for the RightNow product. As a result of the large increase in development resources after the acquisition, the RightNow CX team is planning a lot of enhancements to the functionality, infrastructure and integrations. As a key piece of the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) strategy, RightNow will be integrated with Oracle Social Network, Oracle Commerce (ATG and Endeca), Oracle Knowledge, Oracle Policy Automation and, of course, further integration with Fusion Sales and Marketing. Look forward to seeing more on the Virtual Assistant, Smart Interaction Hub and Mobility. In addition to the roadmaps, I was looking forward to hearing from Oracle CRM customers. So, I sat in on two great Siebel customer panels: The Maximizing User Adoption Rates for Siebel Sales and Siebel Partner Relationship Management panel consisted of speakers from CSL Behring, McKesson and Intuit. It was great to get an overview of implementations for both B2B and B2C companies. It was great hearing that all of these companies have more than 1,000 sales users (Intuit has 4,000) and how the 360 degree view of the customer in Siebel is helping these customers improve their customers' experience (CX). They are all great examples of centralized implementations which have standardized processes across the globe and across business units.  Waste Management, Farmers Insurance and the US Citizenship & Immigration Services presented in the Driving Great Customer Experiences with Siebel Service Applications session. Talk about serving large customer bases! Is it possible that Farmers with only 10 million households is the smallest of these 3? All of them provided great examples of how they are improving the customer experience (CX) including 60-70% improvements in efficiency or reducing the number of applications the customer service reps (CSRs) need to use from 10 to 1 (Waste Management) and context aware call transfers to avoid the caller explaining their issue 3 times (USCIS). So that's my wrap up of only 4 sessions from Monday. In between sessions, I stopped by the Oracle DEMOgrounds and CRM Pavilion to visit with a group of great partners and see the products and partner integrations in action. Don't miss a recap of Mark Hurd's Keynote. I can't believe there were another 40+ sessions covering CRM, Fusion, Cloud, etc. that I missed today! Anyone else see any great sessions?

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• Grub2 : Windows 7 can't boot installing with Ubuntu 10.04 on different hard drive

  - by dellphi

  I use a dual boot with two hard disks and two OS is Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7. Windows 7 installed on the first disk, first partition. Grub is installed on a second hard disk MBR, and Ubuntu installed on an extended partition on a second hard drive. When I select Windows 7 on the Grub menu, the HDD lamp lights up briefly and then black screen on the monitor, with the status of the keyboard is still functioning. Until now (with the default boot from first HDD), I have to press F12 to get into the Grub to run Linux on a second HDD. ================ fdisk -l ================================ dellph1@dellph1-desktop:~$ fdisk -l omitting empty partition (5) Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00087dec Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 23104 185582848+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 23105 121601 791177122 5 Extended /dev/sda5 36107 74408 307660783+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda6 74409 100081 206218341 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda7 100082 121601 172859368+ 7 HPFS/NTFS Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x6d43dfb2 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 10030 80560066 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 * 1 5560 44657601 83 Linux /dev/sdb6 5560 9387 30736384 83 Linux /dev/sdb7 9387 10030 5164032 82 Linux swap / Solaris dellph1@dellph1-desktop:~$ ================= grub.cfg ================== # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # It is automatically generated by /usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig using templates from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then load_env fi set default="0" if [ ${prev_saved_entry} ]; then set saved_entry=${prev_saved_entry} save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z ${boot_once} ]; then saved_entry=${chosen} save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n ${have_grubenv} ]; then if [ -z ${boot_once} ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=1024x768 insmod gfxterm insmod vbe if terminal_output gfxterm ; then true ; else # For backward compatibility with versions of terminal.mod that don't # understand terminal_output terminal gfxterm fi fi insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 set locale_dir=($root)/boot/grub/locale set lang=en insmod gettext if [ ${recordfail} = 1 ]; then set timeout=-1 else set timeout=5 fi END /etc/grub.d/00_header BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 insmod jpeg if background_image /usr/share/backgrounds/CurlsbyCandy.jpg ; then set color_normal=white/black set color_highlight=black/light-gray else set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray fi END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-24-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-24-generic root=UUID=2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 ro splash vga=795 quiet splash nomodeset video=uvesafb:mode_option=1280x1024-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-24-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-24-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 echo 'Loading Linux 2.6.32-24-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-24-generic root=UUID=2f014a3a-35f3-4d05-87aa-34ca677160b7 ro single splash vga=795 echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-24-generic } END /etc/grub.d/10_linux BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)" { insmod ntfs set root='(hd0,1)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 5cac2139ac210f58 chainloader +1 } END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_multisystem Ajout de MultiSystem MULTISYSTEM MENU menuentry "PLoP Boot Manager" { linux16 /boot/plpbt } menuentry "Smart Boot Manager" { search --set -f /boot/sbootmgr.dsk linux16 /boot/memdisk initrd16 /boot/sbootmgr.dsk } FIN MULTISYSTEM MENU END /etc/grub.d/40_multisystem ================================================ I want to keep the Grub on the second HDD. I have been using the Startup Manager, Boot Manager and Grub Customizer, and this problem still unsolved. The easiest thing that I can possibly do is to install Grub on first HDD, but I was curious and maybe someone can help.

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• AI to move custom-shaped spaceships (shape affecting movement behaviour)

  - by kaoD

  I'm designing a networked turn based 3D-6DOF space fleet combat strategy game which relies heavily on ship customization. Let me explain the game a bit, since you need to know a bit about it to set the question. What I aim for is the ability to create your own fleet of ships with custom shapes and attached modules (propellers, tractor beams...) which would give advantages and disadvantages to each ship, so you have lots of different fleet distributions. E.g., long ship with two propellers at the side would let the ship spin around that plane easily, bigger ships would move slowly unless you place lots of propellers at the back (therefore spending more "construction" points and energy when moving, and it will only move fast towards that direction.) I plan to balance all the game around this feature. The game would revolve around two phases: orders and combat phase. During the orders phase, you command the different ships. When all players finish the order phase, the combat phase begins and the ship orders get resolved in real-time for some time, then the action pauses and there's a new orders phase. The problem comes when I think about player input. To move a ship, you need to turn on or off different propellers if you want to steer, travel forward, brake, rotate in place... These propellers don't have to work at their whole power, so you can achieve more movement combinations with less propellers. I think this approach is a bit boring. The player doesn't want to fiddle with motors or anything, you just want to MOVE and KILL. The way I intend the player to give orders to these ships is by a destination and a rotation, and then the AI would calculate the correct propeller power to achive that movement and rotation. Propulsion doesn't have to be the same throught the entire turn calculation (after the orders have been given) so it would be cool if the ships reacted as they move, adjusting the power of the propellers for their needs dynamically, but it may be too hard to implement and it's not really needed for the game to work. In both cases, how would that AI decide which propellers to activate for the best (or at least not worst) trajectory to be achieved? I though about some approaches: Learning AI: The ship types would learn about their movement by trial and error, adjusting their behaviour with more uses, and finally becoming "smart". I don't want to get involved THAT far in AI coding, and I think it can be frustrating for the player (even if you can let it learn without playing.) Pre-calculated timestep movement: Upon ship creation, ALL possible movements are calculated for each propeller configuration and power for a given delta-time. Memory intensive, ugly, bad. Pre-calculated trajectories: The same as above but not for each delta-time but the whole trajectory, which would then be fitted as much as possible. Requires a fixed propeller configuration for the whole combat phase and is still memory intensive, ugly and bad. Continuous brute forcing: The AI continously checks ALL possible propeller configurations throughout the entire combat phase, precalculates a few time steps and decides which is the best one based on that. Con: what's good now might not be that good later, and it's too CPU intensive, ugly, and bad too. Single brute forcing: Same as above, but only brute forcing at the beginning of the simulation, so it needs constant propeller configuration throughout the entire combat phase. Coninuous angle check: This is not a full movement method, but maybe a way to discard "stupid" propeller configurations. Given the current propeller's normal vector and the final one, you can approximate the power needed for the propeller based on the angle. You must do this continuously throughout the whole combat phase. I figured this one out recently so I didn't put in too much thought. A priori, it has the "what's good now might not be that good later" drawback too, and it doesn't care about the other propellers which may act together to make a better propelling configuration. I'm really stuck here. Any ideas?

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• Would this be a good web application architecture?

  - by Gustav Bertram

  My problem Our MVC based framework does not allow us to cache only part of our output. Ideally we want to cahce static and semi-static bits, and run dynamic bits. In addition, we need to consider data caching that reacts to database changes. My idea The concept I came up with was to represent a page as a tree of XML fragment objects. (I say XML, but I mean XHTML). Some of the fragments are dynamic, and can pull their data directly from models or other sources, but most of the fragments are static scaffolding. If a subtree of fragments is completely static, then I imagine that they could unfold into pure XML that would then be cached as the text representation of their parent element. This process would ideally continue until we are left with a root element that contains all of the static XML, and has a couple of dynamic XML fragments that are resolved and attached to the relevant nodes of the XML tree just before the page is displayed. In addition to separating content into dynamic and static fragments, some fragments could be dynamic and cached. A simple expiry time which propagates up through the XML fragment tree would indicate that a specific fragment should periodically be refreshed. A newspaper section or front page does not need to be updated each second. Minutes or sometimes even longer is sufficient. Other fragments would be dynamic and uncached. Typically too many articles are viewed for them to be cached - the cache would overflow. Some individual articles may be cached if they are extremely popular. Functional notes The folding mechanism could be to be smart enough to judge when it would be more profitable to fold a dynamic cached fragment and propagate the expiry date to the parent fragment, or to keep it separate and simple attach to the XML tree when resolving the page. If some dynamic cached fragments are associated to database objects through mechanisms like a globally unique content id, then changes to the database could trigger changes to the output cache. If fragments store the identifiers of parent fragments, then they could trigger a refolding process that would then include the updated data. A set of pure XML with an ordered array of fragment objects (that each store the identifying information of the node to which they should be attached), can be resolved in a fairly simple way by walking the XML tree, and merging the data from the fragments. Because it is not necessary to parse and construct the entire tree in memory before attaching nodes, processing should be fairly fast. The identifiers of each fragment would be a combination of relevant identity data and the type of fragment object. Cached parent fragments would contain references to these identifiers, in order to then either pull them from the fragment cache, or to run their code. The controller's responsibility is reduced to making changes to the database, and telling the root XML fragment object to render itself. The Question My question has two parts: Is this a good design? Are there any obvious flaws I'm missing? Has somebody else thought of this before? References? Is there an existing alternative that I should consider? A cool templating engine maybe?

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• lvm disappeared after disc replacement on raid10

  - by user142295

  here my problem: I am running ubuntu 12.04 on a raid10 (4 disks), on top of which I installed an lvm with two volume groups (one for /, one for /home). The layout of the disks are as follows: Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0003f3b6 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 481949 240943+ 83 Linux /dev/sda2 481950 2910640634 1455079342+ fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sda3 2910640635 2930272064 9815715 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sdb: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00069785 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 63 2910158684 1455079311 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sdb2 2910158685 2930272064 10056690 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sdc: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 63 2910158684 1455079311 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sdc2 2910158685 2930272064 10056690 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sdd: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000f14de Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdd1 63 2910158684 1455079311 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sdd2 2910158685 2930272064 10056690 82 Linux swap / Solaris The first disk (/dev/sda) contains the /boot partition on /dev/sda1. I use grub2 to boot the system off this partition. On top of this raid10 I installed two volume groups, one for /, one for /home. This system worked well, I even exchanged two disks during the last two years. It always worked. But not this time. For the first time, /dev/sda broke. I do not know if this is an issue – I know I would have struggled anyways to overcome the problem with /boot installed on that disk and grub2 installed on the mbr of /dev/sda. Anyways, I did what I always did: start knoppix fire up the raid sudo mdadm --examine -scan which returns ARRAY /dev/md127 UUID=0dbf4558:1a943464:132783e8:19cdff95 start it up sudo mdadm --assemble /dev/md127 fail the failing disk (smart event) sudo mdadm /dev/md127 --fail /dev/sda2 remove the failing disk sudo mdadm /dev/md127 --remove /dev/sda2 stop the raid sudo mdadm -S /dev/md127 take out the disk replace it with a new one create the same partitions as on the failling one add it to the raid sudo mdadm --assemble /dev/md127 sudo mdadm /dev/md127 --add /dev/sda2 wait 4 hours All looks fine: cat /proc/mdstat returns: Personalities : [raid10] md127 : active raid10 sda2[0] sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1] 2910158464 blocks 64K chunks 2 near-copies [4/4] [UUUU] unused devices: <none> and sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md127 returns /dev/md127: Version : 0.90 Creation Time : Wed Jun 10 13:08:46 2009 Raid Level : raid10 Array Size : 2910158464 (2775.34 GiB 2980.00 GB) Used Dev Size : 1455079232 (1387.67 GiB 1490.00 GB) Raid Devices : 4 Total Devices : 4 Preferred Minor : 127 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Thu Mar 21 16:27:40 2013 State : clean Active Devices : 4 Working Devices : 4 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Layout : near=2 Chunk Size : 64K UUID : 0dbf4558:1a943464:132783e8:19cdff95 (local to host Microknoppix) Events : 0.4824680 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 2 0 active sync /dev/sda2 1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1 2 8 33 2 active sync /dev/sdc1 3 8 49 3 active sync /dev/sdd1 However, there is no trace of the volume groups. Rebooting into knoppix does not help Restarting the old system (I actually replugged and re-added the failing disk for that – the system begins to start, but then fails to see the / partition – no wonder if the volume group is gone) does not help. sudo vgscan, sudo vgdisplay, sudo lvs, sudo lvdisplay, sudo vgscan –mknodes all returned No volume groups found. I am completely at a loss. Can anyone tell me if and how I can recover my data? Thanks in advance!

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• Making it GREAT! Oracle Partners Building Apps Workshop with UX and ADF in UK

  - by ultan o'broin

  Yes, making is what it's all about. This time, Oracle Partners in the UK were making great looking usable apps with the Oracle Applications Development Framework (ADF) and user experience (UX) toolkit. And what an energy-packed and productive event at the Oracle UK, Thames Valley Park, location it was. Partners learned the fundamentals of enterprise applications UX, why it's important, all about visual design, how to wireframe designs, and then how to build their already-proven designs in ADF. There was a whole day on mobile apps, learning about mobile design principles, free mobile UX and ADF resources from Oracle, and then trying it out. The workshop wrapped up with the latest Release 7 simplified UIs, Mobilytics, and other innovations from Oracle, and a live demo of a very neat ADF Mobile Android app built by an Oracle contractor. And, what a fun two days both Grant Ronald of ADF and myself had in running the workshop with such a great audience, too! I particularly enjoyed the wireframing and visual design sessions interaction; and seeing some outstanding work done by partners. Of note from the UK workshop were innovative design features not seen before and made me all the happier that developers were bringing their own ideas from the consumer IT world of mobility, simplicity, and social to the world of work apps in a smart way within an enterprise methodology too.  Partner wireframe exercise. Applying mobile design principles and UX design patterns means you've already productively making great usable apps! Next, over to Oracle ADF Mobile with it! One simple example from the design of a mobile field service app was that participants immediately saw how the UX and device functionality of the super UK-based app Hailo app could influence their designs (the London cabbie influence maybe?), as well as how we all use maps, cameras, barcode scanners and microphones on our phones could be used in work. And, of course, ADF Mobile has the device integration solutions there too! I wonder will U.S. workshops in Silicon Valley see an Uber UX influence (LOL)! That we also had partners experienced with Oracle Forms who could now offer a roadmap from Forms to Simplified UI and Mobile using ADF, and do it through through the cloud, really made this particular workshop go "ZING!" for me. Many thanks to the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) team for organizing this event with us, and to the representatives of the Oracle Partners that showed and participated so well. That's what I love out this outreach. It's a two-way, solid value-add for all. Interested? Why would partners and developers with ADF skills sign up for this workshop? Here's why: Learn to use the Oracle Applications User Experience design patterns as the usability building blocks for applications development in Oracle Application Development Framework. The workshop enables attendees to build modern and visually compelling desktop and mobile applications that look and behave like Oracle Cloud Applications, and that can co-exist with partner integrations, new, or existing applications deployments. Partners learn to offer customers and clients more than just coded functionality; instead they can provide a complete user experience with a roadmap for continued ROI from applications that also creating more business and attracts the kudos and respect from other makers of apps as they're wowed by the results. So, if you're a partner and interested in attending one of these workshops and benefitting from such learning, as well as having a platform to show off some of your own work, stay well tuned to your OPN channels, to this blog, to the VoX blog, and to the @usableapps Twitter account too. Can't wait? For developers and partners, some key mobile resources to explore now Oracle ADF Mobile UX Patterns and Components Wiki Oracle ADF Academy (Mobile) Oracle ADF Insider Essentials Oracle Applications Mobile User Experience Design Patterns and Guidance

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• Internet of Things Becoming Reality

  - by kristin.jellison

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

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• Pro/con of using Angular directives for complex form validation/ GUI manipulation

  - by tengen

  I am building a new SPA front end to replace an existing enterprise's legacy hodgepodge of systems that are outdated and in need of updating. I am new to angular, and wanted to see if the community could give me some perspective. I'll state my problem, and then ask my question. I have to generate several series of check boxes based on data from a .js include, with data like this: $scope.fieldMappings.investmentObjectiveMap = [ {'id':"CAPITAL PRESERVATION", 'name':"Capital Preservation"}, {'id':"STABLE", 'name':"Moderate"}, {'id':"BALANCED", 'name':"Moderate Growth"}, // etc {'id':"NONE", 'name':"None"} ]; The checkboxes are created using an ng-repeat, like this: <div ng-repeat="investmentObjective in fieldMappings.investmentObjectiveMap"> ... </div> However, I needed the values represented by the checkboxes to map to a different model (not just 2-way-bound to the fieldmappings object). To accomplish this, I created a directive, which accepts a destination array destarray which is eventually mapped to the model. I also know I need to handle some very specific gui controls, such as unchecking "None" if anything else gets checked, or checking "None" if everything else gets unchecked. Also, "None" won't be an option in every group of checkboxes, so the directive needs to be generic enough to accept a validation function that can fiddle with the checked state of the checkbox group's inputs based on what's already clicked, but smart enough not to break if there is no option called "NONE". I started to do that by adding an ng-click which invoked a function in the controller, but in looking around Stack Overflow, I read people saying that its bad to put DOM manipulation code inside your controller - it should go in directives. So do I need another directive? So far: (html): <input my-checkbox-group type="checkbox" fieldobj="investmentObjective" ng-click="validationfunc()" validationfunc="clearOnNone()" destarray="investor.investmentObjective" /> Directive code: .directive("myCheckboxGroup", function () { return { restrict: "A", scope: { destarray: "=", // the source of all the checkbox values fieldobj: "=", // the array the values came from validationfunc: "&" // the function to be called for validation (optional) }, link: function (scope, elem, attrs) { if (scope.destarray.indexOf(scope.fieldobj.id) !== -1) { elem[0].checked = true; } elem.bind('click', function () { var index = scope.destarray.indexOf(scope.fieldobj.id); if (elem[0].checked) { if (index === -1) { scope.destarray.push(scope.fieldobj.id); } } else { if (index !== -1) { scope.destarray.splice(index, 1); } } }); } }; }) .js controller snippet: .controller( 'SuitabilityCtrl', ['$scope', function ( $scope ) { $scope.clearOnNone = function() { // naughty jQuery DOM manipulation code that // looks at checkboxes and checks/unchecks as needed }; The above code is done and works fine, except the naughty jquery code in clearOnNone(), which is why I wrote this question. And here is my question: after ALL this, I think to myself - I could be done already if I just manually handled all this GUI logic and validation junk with jQuery written in my controller. At what point does it become foolish to write these complicated directives that future developers will have to puzzle over more than if I had just written jQuery code that 99% of us would understand with a glance? How do other developers draw the line? I see this all over Stack Overflow. For example, this question seems like it could be answered with a dozen lines of straightforward jQuery, yet he has opted to do it the angular way, with a directive and a partial... it seems like a lot of work for a simple problem. Specifically, I suppose I would like to know: how SHOULD I be writing the code that checks whether "None" has been selected (if it exists as an option in this group of checkboxes), and then check/uncheck the other boxes accordingly? A more complex directive? I can't believe I'm the only developer that is having to implement code that is more complex than needed just to satisfy an opinionated framework.

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• Bowing to User Experience

  As a consumer of geeky news it is hard to check my Google Reader without running into two or three posts about Apples iPad and in particular the changes to the developer guidelines which seemingly restrict developers to using Apples Xcode tool and Objective-C language for iPad apps. One of the alternatives to Objective-C affected, is MonoTouch, an option with some appeal to me as it is based on the Mono implementation of C#. Seemingly restricted is the key word here, as far as I can tell, no official announcement has been made about its fate. For more details around MonoTouch for iPhone OS, check out Miguel de Icazas post: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Apr-28.html. These restrictions have provoked some outrage as the perception is that Apple is arrogantly restricting developers freedom to create applications as they choose and perhaps unwittingly shortchanging iPhone/iPad users who wont benefit from these now never-to-be-made great applications. Apples response has mostly been to say they are concentrating on providing a certain user experience to their customers, and to do this, they insist everyone uses the tools they approve. Which isnt a surprising line of reasoning given Apple restricts the hardware used and content of the apps already. The vogue term for this approach is curated, as in a benevolent museum director selecting only the finest artifacts for display or a wise gardener arranging the plants in a garden just so. If this is what a curated experience is like it is hard to argue that consumers are not responding. My iPhone is probably the most satisfying piece of technology I own. Coming from the Razr, it really was an revolution in how the form factor, interface and user experience all tied together. While the curated approach reinvented the smart phone genre, it is easy to forget that this is not a new approach for Apple. Macbooks and Macs are Apple hardware that run Apple software. And theyve been successful, but not quite in the same way as the iPhone or iPad (based on early indications). Why not? Well a curated approach can only be wildly successful if the curator a) makes the right choices and b) offers choices that no one else has. Although its advantages are eroding, the iPhone was different from other phones, a unique, focused, touch-centric experience. The iPad is an attempt to define another category of computing. Macs and Macbooks are great devices, but are not fundamentally a different user experience than a PC, you still have windows, file folders, mouse and keyboard, and similar applications. So the big question for Apple is can they hold on to their market advantage, continuing innovating in user experience and stay on top? Or are they going be like Xerox, and the rest of the world says thank you for the windows metaphor, now let me implement that better? It will be exciting to watch, with Android already a viable competitor and Microsoft readying Windows Phone 7. And to close the loop back to the restrictions on developing for iPhone OS. At this point the main target appears to be Adobe and Adobe Flash. Apples calculation is that a) they dont need those developers or b) the developers they want will learn Apples stuff anyway. My guess is that they are correct; that as much as I like the idea of developers having more options, I am not going to buy a competitors product to spite Apple unless that product is just as usable. For a non-technical consumer, I dont know that this conversation even factors into the buying decision. If it did, wed be talking about how Microsoft is trying to retake a slice of market share from the behemoth that is Linux.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Some PowerShell goodness

  - by KyleBurns

  Ever work somewhere where processes dump files into folders to maintain an archive?  Me too and Windows Explorer hates it.  Very often I find myself needing to organize these files into subfolders so that I can go after files without locking up Windows Explorer and my answer used to be to write a program in something like C# to do the job.  These programs will typically enumerate the files in a folder and move each file to a subdirectory named based on a datestamp.  The last such program I wrote had to use lower-level Win32 API calls to perform the enumeration because it appears the standard .Net calls make use of the same method of enumerating the directories that Windows Explorer chokes on when dealing with a large number of entries in a particular directory, so a simple task was accomplished with a lot of code. Of course, this little utility was just something I used to make my life easier and "not a production app", so it was in my local source folder and not source control when my hard drive died.  So... I was getting ready to re-create it and thought it might be a good idea to play with PowerShell a bit - something I had been wanting to do but had not yet met a requirement to make me do it.  The resulting script was amazingly succinct and even building the flexibility for parameterization and adding line breaks for readability was only about 25 lines long.  Here's the code with discussion following: param(     [Parameter(         Mandatory = $false,         Position = 0,         HelpMessage = "Root of the folders or share to archive.  Be sure to end with appropriate path separator"     )]     [String] $folderRoot="\\fileServer\pathToFolderWithLotsOfFiles\",       [Parameter(         Mandatory = $false,         Position = 1     )]     [int] $days = 1 ) dir $folderRoot|?{(!($_.PsIsContainer)) -and ((get-date) - $_.lastwritetime).totaldays -gt $days }|%{     [string]$year=$([string]$_.lastwritetime.year)     [string]$month=$_.lastwritetime.month     [string]$day=$_.lastwritetime.day     $dir=$folderRoot+$year+"\"+$month+"\"+$day     if(!(test-path $dir)){         new-item -type container $dir     }     Write-output $_     move-item $_.fullname $dir } The script starts by declaring two parameters.  The first parameter holds the path to the folder that I am going to be sorting into subdirectories.  The path separator is intended to be included in this argument because I didn't want to mess with determining whether this was local or UNC and picking the right separator in code, but this could be easily improved upon using Path.Combine since PowerShell has access to the full framework libraries.  The second parameter holds a minimum age in days for files to be removed from the root folder.  The script then pipes the dir command through a query to include only files (by excluding containers) and of those, only entries that meet the age requirement based on the last modified datestamp.  For each of those, the datestamp is used to construct a folder name in the format YYYY\MM\DD (if you're in an environment where even a day's worth of files need further divided, you could make this more granular) and the folder is created if it does not yet exist.  Finally, the file is moved into the directory. One of the things that was really cool about using PowerShell for this task is that the new-item command is smart enough to create the entire subdirectory structure with a single call.  In previous code that I have written to do this kind of thing, I would have to test the entire tree leading down to the subfolder I want, leading to a lot of branching code that detracted from being able to quickly look at the code and understand the job it performs. Overall, I have to say I'm really pleased with what has been done making PowerShell powerful and useful.

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• What Counts For a DBA – Depth

  - by Louis Davidson

  SQL Server offers very simple interfaces to many of its features. Most people could open up SSMS, connect to a server, write a simple query and see the results. Even several of the core DBA tasks are deceptively straightforward. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to perform a basic database backup or run a trace (even using the newfangled Extended Events!). However, appearances can be deceptive, and often times it is really important that a DBA understands not just the basics of how to perform a task, but why we do a task, and how that task works. As an analogy, consider a child walking into a darkened room. Most would know that they need to turn on the light, and how to do it, so they flick the switch. But what happens if light fails to shine forth. Most would immediately tell you that you need to consider changing the light bulb. So you hop in the car and take them to the local home store and instruct them to buy a replacement. Confronted with a 40 foot display of light bulbs, how will they decide which of the hundreds of types of bulbs, of different types, fittings, shapes, colors, power and efficiency ratings, is the right choice? Obviously the main lesson the child is going to learn this day is how to use their cell phone as a flashlight so they don’t have to ask for help the next time. Likewise, when the metaphorical toddlers who use your database server have issues, they will instinctively know something is wrong, and may even have some idea what caused it, but will have no depth of knowledge to figure out the right solution. That is where the DBA comes in and attempts to save the day. However, when one looks beneath the shiny UI, SQL Server has its own “40 foot display of light bulbs”, in the form of the tremendous number of tools and the often-bewildering amount of information they can present to the DBA, to help us find issues. Unfortunately, resorting to guesswork, to trying different “bulbs” over and over, hoping to stumble on the answer. This is where the right depth of knowledge goes a long way. If we need to write a SELECT statement, then knowing the syntax and where to find the data is not enough. Knowledge of indexes and query plans is essential. Without it, we might hit on a query that “works”, but we are basically still a user, not a programmer, because we have no real control over our platform. Is that level of knowledge deep enough? Probably not, since knowledge of the underlying metadata and structures would be very useful in helping us make sense of any query plan. Understanding the structure of an index makes the “key lookup” operator not sound like what you do when someone tapes your car key to the ceiling. So is even this level of understanding deep enough? Do we need to understand the memory architecture used to process the query? It might be a comforting level of knowledge, and will doubtless come in handy at some point, but is not strictly necessary in most cases. Beyond that lies (more or less) full knowledge of SQL language and the intricacies of every step the SQL Server engine takes to process our query. My personal theory is that, as a professional, our knowledge of a given task should extend, at a minimum, one level deeper than is strictly necessary to perform the task. Anything deeper can be left to the ridiculously smart, or obsessive, or both. As an example. tasked with storing an integer value between 0 and 99999999, it’s essential that I know that choosing an Integer over Decimal(8,0) will likely offer performance benefits. It is then useful that I also understand the value of adding a CHECK constraint, to make sure the values are valid to the desired range; and comforting that I know a little about the underlying processors, registers and computer math. Anything further, I leave to the likes of Joe Chang, whose recent blog post on the topic offers depth by the bucketful!  

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• Rethinking Oracle Optimizer Statistics for P6 Part 2

  - by Brian Diehl

  In the previous post (Part 1), I tried to draw some key insights about the relationship between P6 and Oracle Optimizer Statistics.  The first is that average cardinality has the greatest impact on query optimization and that the particular queries generated by P6 are more likely to use this average during calculations. The second is that these are statistics that are unlikely to change greatly over the life of the application. Ultimately, our goal is to get the best query optimization possible.  Or is it? Stability No application administrator wants to get the call at 9am that their application users cannot get there work done because everything is running slow. This is a possibility with a regularly scheduled nightly collection of statistics. It may not just be slow performance, but a complete loss of service because one or more queries are optimized poorly. Ideally, this should not be the case. The database optimizer should make better decisions with more up-to-date data. Better statistics may give incremental performance benefit. However, this benefit must be balanced against the potential cost of system down time.  It is stability that we ultimately desire and not absolute optimal performance. We do want the benefit from more accurate statistics and better query plans, but not at the risk of an unusable system. As a result, I've developed the following methodology around managing database statistics for the P6 database.  1. No Automatic Re-Gathering - The daily, weekly, or other interval of statistic gathering is unlikely to be beneficial. Quite the opposite. It is more likely to cause problems. 2. Smart Re-Gathering - The time to collect statistics is when things have changed significantly. For a new installation of P6, this is happening more often because the data is growing from a few rows to thousands and more. But for a mature system, the data is not changing significantly from week-to-week. There are times to collect statistics: New releases of the application Changes in the underlying hardware or software versions (ex. new Oracle RDBMS version) When additional user groups are added. The new groups may use the software in significantly different ways. After significant changes in the data. This may be monthly, quarterly or yearly.  3. Always Test - If you take away one thing from this post, it would be to always have a plan to test after changing statistics. In reality, statistics can be collected as often as you desire provided there are tests in place to verify that performance is the same or better. These might be automated tests or simply a manual script of application functions. 4. Have a Way Out - Never change the statistics without a way to return to the previous set. Think of the statistics as one part of the overall application code that also includes the source code--both application and RDBMS. It would be foolish to change to the new code without a way to get back to the previous version. In the final post, I will talk about the actual script I created for P6 PMDB and possible future direction for managing query performance. 

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• How do you go from a so so programmer to a great one? [closed]

  - by Cervo

  How do you go from being an okay programmer to being able to write maintainable clean code? For example David Hansson was writing Basecamp when in the process he created Rails as part of writing Basecamp in a clean/maintainable way. But how do you know when there is value in a side project like that? I have a bachelors in computer science, and I am about to get a masters and I will say that colleges teach you to write code to solve problems, not neatly or anything. Basically you think of a problem, come up with a solution, and write it down...not necessarily the most maintainable way in the world. Also my first job was in a startup, and now my third is in a small team in a large company where the attitude was/is get it done yesterday (also most of my jobs are mainly database development with SQL with a few ASP.NET web pages/.NET apps on the side). So of course cut/paste is more favored than making things more cleanly. And they would rather have something yesterday even if you have to rewrite it next month rather than to have something in a week that lasts for a year. Also spaghetti code turns up all over the place, and it takes very smart people to write/understand/maintain spaghetti code...However it would be better to do things so simple/clean that even a caveman/woman could do maintenance. Also I get very bored/unmotivated having to go modify the same things cut/pasted in a few locations. Is this the type of skill that you need to learn by working with a serious software organization that has an emphasis on maintenance and maybe even an architect who designs a system architecture and reviews code? Could you really learn it by volunteering on an open source project (it seems to me that a full time programmer job is way more practice than a few hours a week on an open source project)? Is there some course where you can learn this? I can attest that graduate school and undergraduate school do not really emphasize clean software at all. They just teach the structures/algorithms and then send you off into the world to solve problems. Overall I think the first thing is learning to write clean/maintainable code within the bounds of the project in order to become a good programmer. Then the next thing is learning when you need to do a side project (like a framework) to make things more maintainable/clean even while you still deliver things for the deadline in order to become a great programmer. For example, you are making an SQL report and someone gives you 100 calculations for individual columns. At what point does it make sense to construct a domain specific language to encode the rules in simply and then generate all the SQL as opposed to cut/pasting the query from the table a bunch of times and then adjusting each query to do the appropriate calculations. This is the type of thing I would say a great programmer would know. He/she would maybe even know ways to avoid the domain specific language and to still do all the calculations without creating an unmaintainable mess or a ton of repetitive code to cut/paste everywhere.

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• Is there any kind of established architecture for browser based games?

  - by black_puppydog

  I am beginning the development of a broser based game in which players take certain actions at any point in time. Big parts of gameplay will be happening in real life and just have to be entered into the system. I believe a good kind of comparison might be a platform for managing fantasy football, although I have virtually no experience playing that, so please correct me if I am mistaken here. The point is that some events happen in the program (i.e. on the server, out of reach for the players) like pulling new results from some datasource, starting of a new round by a game master and such. Other events happen in real life (two players closing a deal on the transfer of some team member or whatnot - again: have never played fantasy football) and have to be entered into the system. The first part is pretty easy since the game masters will be "staff" and thus can be trusted to a certain degree to not mess with the system. But the second part bothers me quite a lot, especially since the actions may involve multiple steps and interactions with different players, like registering a deal with the system that then has to be approved by the other party or denied and passed on to a game master to decide. I would of course like to separate the game logic as far as possible from the presentation and basic form validation but am unsure how to do this in a clean fashion. Of course I could (and will) put some effort into making my own architectural decisions and prototype different ideas. But I am bound to make some stupid mistakes at some point, so I would like to avoid some of that by getting a little "book smart" beforehand. So the question is: Is there any kind of architectural works that I can read up on? Papers, blogs, maybe design documents or even source code? Writing this down this seems more like a business application with business rules, workflows and such... Any good entry points for that? EDIT: After reading the first answers I am under the impression of having made a mistake when including the "MMO" part into the title. The game will not be all fancy (i.e. 3D or such) on the client side and the logic will completely exist on the server. That is, apart from basic form validation for the user which will also be mirrored on the server side. So the target toolset will be HTML5, JavaScript, probably JQuery(UI). My question is more related to the software architecture/design of a system that enforces certain rules. Separation of ruleset and presentation One problem I am having is that I want to separate the game rules from the presentation. The first step would be to make an own module for the game "engine" that only exposes an interface that allows all actions to be taken in a clean way. If an action fails with regard to some pre/post condition, the engine throws an exception which is then presented to the user like "you cannot sell something you do not own" or "after that you would end up in a situation which is not a valid game state." The problem here is that I would like to be able to not even present invalid action in the first place or grey out the corresponding UI elements. Changing and tweaking the ruleset Another big thing is the ruleset. It will probably evolve over time and most definitely must be tweaked. What's more, it should be possible (to a certain extent) to build a ruleset that fits a specific game round, i.e. choosing different kinds of behaviours in different aspects of the game. This would do something like "we play it with extension A today but we throw out extension B." For me, this screams "Architectural/Design pattern" but I have no idea on who might have published on something like this, not even what to google for.

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• ????????????????

  - by Yusuke.Yamamoto

  ????????? ????????? ????????? ????·???? ?????:Oracle???????·??????(????)??:?????????????? Pickup!:IT???????????!|????????:100???????!|???????????? ????????:?Oracle DB?????????????????????Windows?VMware?? ?????:Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2012|JavaOne Tokyo 2012|??????:151 ?OTN ???? ?????? ????????:???????100???????! ?????????????????Amazon????Get! ???? Oracle Technology Network, ????/????, ??IT???????·?????????????? ???????/???MySQL?????? ?????? ???????/???MySQL????? ?????????Oracle VM VirtualBox????Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 11g Release 2????? ???????/??????????????????????????????? ???????/?????????????/????·????????Flashback Database with SSD? ????? ????? Oracle?????????????????????????!???????????? Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c(EM12c):????????? ~????????~ ???????????!??????·??????? Oracle Linux 5.8?????????? ???DB?????Oracle SQL Developer 3.1???????????? Oracle??????(OUI:Oracle Universal Installer)???? ????? ???? ????????? ????????????·???????? ????????????? ???????? 11gR2 ?????????? Oracle Database 11g R2 Oracle WebLogic Server 11g R1 Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g R1 ????? ????????? Oracle Database ????????????????·?? ???????/???????????????? ?????????(????????, ???, etc) ????????(???, ?????, REDO, ???·????, etc) ????·?????????????????(?????, ???, ??, ??, ??? etc) ????·?????????(??, etc) ????????????? ???????????????????·?????? ??????? ???? ????????·??|SQL Server Windows Server ??????????PL/SQL|Java|.NET|PHP ??/??? ORACLE MASTER ???? DWH(?????????)??·?? ????? ?????(SAN, NAS, SSD, etc) Oracle Database ??????? Amazon EC2 Microsoft Excel Microsoft Visual Studio MSFC/MSCS(Microsoft Cluster Service) SAP ??·??????? Oracle Database Oracle Database 11g Release 2(11gR2) Oracle Database Standard Edition ????????: Advanced Compression ?????????: Advanced Security Application Express(APEX) Automatic Storage Management(ASM) SSD???Oracle???: Database Smart Flash Cache ??????????: Data Guard/Active Data Guard Data Pump Oracle Data Provider for .NET(ODP.NET) ????: Oracle Text Partitioning(???????/?????????) DB????: Real Application Clusters(RAC) Real Application Testing Recovery Manager(RMAN) SQL*Loader|SQL*Plus|Statspack ??????|????????|???????? Database Appliance Database Firewall Exadata Database Machine SQL Developer ?????DB: TimesTen In-Memory Database Oracle Fusion Middleware Java Oracle Coherence Oracle Data Integrator(ODI) Oracle GoldenGate Oracle JRockit JVM Oracle WebLogic Server Oracle Enterprise Manager for Database|for Middleware ????????????: Oracle Application Testing Suite Oracle Linux Oracle Solaris DTrace|ZFS|???/???? Oracle VM Server for x86 ?????? ???????? ?????????Oracle???????????????·????????????????? ?????????(??·??????) OTN??????(??????) ???????(????????) Oracle University(??) ??????! ?????... ????? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????|?Sun?? ???????? OTN???????? OTN(????) ?????? ???? OTN???|???? OTN?????? ??????? ?????? ???????? ???? ???????

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• pylucene: install error

  - by Pradeep

  I am trying to install Pylucene (pylucene-3.3-3-src.tar.gz) on my ubuntu linux 11.10. I have python 2.7.2. I was able to compile JCC (I think) because I didnt see any error when I installed it. When I tried to install Pylucene I get the following error. Can someone help? Thanks. ICU not installed /usr/bin/python -m jcc --shared --jar lucene-java-3.3/lucene/build/lucene-core-3.3.jar --jar lucene-java-3.3/lucene/build/contrib/analyzers/common/lucene-analyzers-3.3.jar --jar lucene-java-3.3/lucene/build/contrib/memory/lucene-memory-3.3.jar --jar lucene-java-3.3/lucene/build/contrib/highlighter/lucene-highlighter-3.3.jar --jar build/jar/extensions.jar --jar lucene-java-3.3/lucene/build/contrib/queries/lucene-queries-3.3.jar --jar lucene-java-3.3/lucene/build/contrib/grouping/lucene-grouping-3.3.jar --package java.lang java.lang.System java.lang.Runtime --package java.util java.util.Arrays java.util.HashMap java.util.HashSet java.text.SimpleDateFormat java.text.DecimalFormat java.text.Collator --package java.util.regex --package java.io java.io.StringReader java.io.InputStreamReader java.io.FileInputStream --exclude org.apache.lucene.queryParser.Token --exclude org.apache.lucene.queryParser.TokenMgrError --exclude org.apache.lucene.queryParser.QueryParserTokenManager --exclude org.apache.lucene.queryParser.ParseException --exclude org.apache.lucene.search.regex.JakartaRegexpCapabilities --exclude org.apache.regexp.RegexpTunnel --exclude org.apache.lucene.analysis.cn.smart.AnalyzerProfile --python lucene --mapping org.apache.lucene.document.Document 'get:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/String;' --mapping java.util.Properties 'getProperty:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/String;' --sequence java.util.AbstractList 'size:()I' 'get:(I)Ljava/lang/Object;' --rename org.apache.lucene.search.highlight.SpanScorer=HighlighterSpanScorer --version 3.3 --module python/collections.py --module python/ICUNormalizer2Filter.py --module python/ICUFoldingFilter.py --module python/ICUTransformFilter.py --files 3 --build /usr/bin/python: No module named jcc make: *** [compile] Error 1 Here is my Makefile configuration which I uncommented PREFIX_PYTHON=/usr ANT=ant PYTHON=$(PREFIX_PYTHON)/bin/python JCC=$(PYTHON) -m jcc --shared NUM_FILES=3

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• Hidden Features of C#?

  - by Serhat Özgel

  This came to my mind after I learned the following from this question: where T : struct We, C# developers, all know the basics of C#. I mean declarations, conditionals, loops, operators, etc. Some of us even mastered the stuff like Generics, anonymous types, lambdas, linq, ... But what are the most hidden features or tricks of C# that even C# fans, addicts, experts barely know? Here are the revealed features so far: Keywords yield by Michael Stum var by Michael Stum using() statement by kokos readonly by kokos as by Mike Stone as / is by Ed Swangren as / is (improved) by Rocketpants default by deathofrats global:: by pzycoman using() blocks by AlexCuse volatile by Jakub Šturc extern alias by Jakub Šturc Attributes DefaultValueAttribute by Michael Stum ObsoleteAttribute by DannySmurf DebuggerDisplayAttribute by Stu DebuggerBrowsable and DebuggerStepThrough by bdukes ThreadStaticAttribute by marxidad FlagsAttribute by Martin Clarke ConditionalAttribute by AndrewBurns Syntax ?? operator by kokos number flaggings by Nick Berardi where T:new by Lars Mæhlum implicit generics by Keith one-parameter lambdas by Keith auto properties by Keith namespace aliases by Keith verbatim string literals with @ by Patrick enum values by lfoust @variablenames by marxidad event operators by marxidad format string brackets by Portman property accessor accessibility modifiers by xanadont ternary operator (?:) by JasonS checked and unchecked operators by Binoj Antony implicit and explicit operators by Flory Language Features Nullable types by Brad Barker Currying by Brian Leahy anonymous types by Keith __makeref __reftype __refvalue by Judah Himango object initializers by lomaxx format strings by David in Dakota Extension Methods by marxidad partial methods by Jon Erickson preprocessor directives by John Asbeck DEBUG pre-processor directive by Robert Durgin operator overloading by SefBkn type inferrence by chakrit boolean operators taken to next level by Rob Gough pass value-type variable as interface without boxing by Roman Boiko programmatically determine declared variable type by Roman Boiko Static Constructors by Chris Easier-on-the-eyes / condensed ORM-mapping using LINQ by roosteronacid Visual Studio Features select block of text in editor by Himadri snippets by DannySmurf Framework TransactionScope by KiwiBastard DependantTransaction by KiwiBastard Nullable<T> by IainMH Mutex by Diago System.IO.Path by ageektrapped WeakReference by Juan Manuel Methods and Properties String.IsNullOrEmpty() method by KiwiBastard List.ForEach() method by KiwiBastard BeginInvoke(), EndInvoke() methods by Will Dean Nullable<T>.HasValue and Nullable<T>.Value properties by Rismo GetValueOrDefault method by John Sheehan Tips & Tricks nice method for event handlers by Andreas H.R. Nilsson uppercase comparisons by John access anonymous types without reflection by dp a quick way to lazily instantiate collection properties by Will JavaScript-like anonymous inline-functions by roosteronacid Other netmodules by kokos LINQBridge by Duncan Smart Parallel Extensions by Joel Coehoorn

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• Why isn't uploadify and asp.net mvc 2 playing nice for me?

  - by Paperino

  First of all, I've checked out all the SO threads, and googled my brains out. I must be missing something obvious. I'd really appreciate some help! This is what I've got. UploadController.cs using System.Web; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace NIMDocs.Controllers { public class UploadController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public string Procssed(HttpPostedFileBase FileData) { // DO STUFF return "DUHR I AM SMART"; } } } Index for Upload <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <title>ITS A TITLE </title> <script src="../../Content/jqueryPlugins/uploadify/jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="../../Content/jqueryPlugins/uploadify/swfobject.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="../../Content/jqueryPlugins/uploadify/jquery.uploadify.v2.1.0.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $('#uploadify').fileUpload({ 'uploader': '../../Content/jqueryPlugins/uploadify/uploadify.swf', 'script': '/Upload/Processed', 'folder': '/uploads', 'multi': 'true', 'buttonText': 'Browse', 'displayData': 'speed', 'simUploadLimit': 2, 'cancelImg': '/Content/Images/cancel.png' }); }); </script> </head> <body> <input type="file" name="uploadify" id="uploadify" /> <p><a href="javascript:jQuery('#uploadify').uploadifyClearQueue()">Cancel All Uploads</a></p> </body> </html> What am I missing here? I've tried just about every path permutation for uploadify's "uploader" option. Absolute path, '/' prefixed, etc.

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• Making flexible C# code in MVC2 for Stored Procedures

  - by cc0

  Thanks to Darin Dimitrov's suggestion I got a big step further in understanding good MVC code, but I'm having some problems making it flexible. I implemented Darin's suggested solution, and it works perfectly for single controllers. However I'm having some trouble implementing it with some flexibility. What I'm looking for is this; To be able to make dynamic column names in json Instead of using "Column1: 'value', ..." and "Column2: 'value', ..." inside the json, I'd like to use for example "id: 'value', ..." and "place: 'value' ..." for one stored procedure, and "animal" and "type" in another (inside the json format). To be able to make dynamic amounts of columns dependent on which stored procedure is called Some stored procedures I'll want to read more than 2 rows from, is there a smart way of accomplishing that? To be able to make numeric (floats and integers) rows from the database be presented inside the json without quotes Like this (name and age); { Column1: "John", Column2: 53 }, I would be very grateful for any feedback and suggestions / code examples I can get here. Even imperfect ones.

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• Is this an acceptable UI design decision?

  - by DVK

  OK, while I'm on record as stating that StackExchange UI is pretty much one of the best websites and overall GUIs that I have ever seen as far as usability goes, there's one particular aspect of the trilogy that bugs me. For an example, head on to http://meta.stackoverflow.com . Look at the banner on top (the one that says "reminder -- it's April Fool's Day depending on your time zone!"). Personally, I feel that this is a "make the user do the figuring out work" anti-pattern (whatever it's officially called) - namely, instead of making your app smart enough to only present a certain mode of operations in the conditions when that mode is appropriate, you simply turn on the mode full on and put an explanation to the user of why the mode is on when it should not be (in this particular example, the mode is of course displaying the unicorn gravatars starting with 00:00 in the first timezone, despite the fact that some users still live in March 31st). The Great Recalc was also handled the same way - instead of proactively telling the user "your rep was changed from X to Y" the same nearly invisible banner was displayed on meta. So, the questions are: Is there such an official anti-pattern, and if so,m what the heck do i call it? Do you have any other well-known examples of such design anti-pattern? How would you fix either the SO example I made or you your own example? Is there a pattern of fixing or must it be a case-by-case solution?

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