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• Planning in the Cloud - For Real

  - by jmorourke

  One of the hottest topics at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 this week is “the cloud”.  Over the past few years, Oracle has made major investments in cloud-based applications, including some acquisitions, and now has over 100 applications available through Oracle Cloud services.  At OpenWorld this week, Oracle announced seven new offerings delivered via the Oracle Cloud services platform, one of which is the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service.  Based on Oracle Hyperion Planning, this service is the first of Oracle’s EPM applications to be to be offered in the Cloud.    This solution is targeted to organizations that are struggling with spreadsheets or legacy planning and budgeting applications, want to deploy a world class solution for financial planning and budgeting, but are constrained by IT resources and capital budgets. With the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service, organizations can fast track their way to world-class financial planning, budgeting and forecasting – at cloud speed, with no IT infrastructure investments and with minimal IT resources. Oracle Hyperion Planning is a market-leading budgeting, planning and forecasting application that is used by over 3,300 organizations worldwide.  Prior to this announcement, Oracle Hyperion Planning was only offered on a license and maintenance basis.  It could be deployed on-premise, or hosted through Oracle On-Demand or third party hosting partners.  With this announcement, Oracle’s market-leading Hyperion Planning application will be available as a Cloud Service and through subscription-based pricing. This lowers the cost of entry and deployment for new customers and provides a scalable environment to support future growth. With this announcement, Oracle is the first major vendor to offer one of its core EPM applications as a cloud-based service.  Other major vendors have recently announced cloud-based EPM solutions, but these are only BI dashboards delivered via a cloud platform.   With this announcement Oracle is providing a market-leading, world-class financial budgeting, planning and forecasting as a cloud service, with the following advantages: ·                     Subscription-based pricing ·                     Available standalone or as an extension to Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud Service ·                     Implementation services available from Oracle and the Oracle Partner Network ·                     High scalability and performance ·                     Integrated financial reporting and MS Office interface ·                     Seamless integration with Oracle and non-Oracle transactional applications ·                     Provides customers with more options for their planning and budgeting deployment vs. strictly on-premise or cloud-only solution providers. The OpenWorld announcement of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service is a preview announcement, with controlled availability expected in calendar year 2012.  For more information, check out the links below: Press Release Web site If you have any questions or need additional information, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Migrating a WebLogic Domain from a 32 to a 64 bit JVM/Architecture

  - by adejuanc

  Currently on 32 bit OS which presents a physical constraint when trying to allocate memory. By limit, a 32 bit OS, will not be able to allocate more than 3 GB on a Linux environment, or 2 GB for Windows environment (not considering Physical Address Extension (PAE) implementation, which can increase the maximum allocatable memory). When this limit is reached, a migration to a 64 bit architecture is recommended. Below are the steps on how to install a 64 WebLogic Server version, along with a 64 Bit JVM and then how to migrate the domain to this new environment. Weblogic Server Version: WebLogic Server Version: 10.3.4.0 OS: Linux adejuan-cl.cl.oracle.com 2.6.18-194.el5 #1 SMP Mon Jan 01 22:10:29 EDT 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux JVM:java version "1.6.0_22" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_22-b04) Oracle JRockit(R) (build R28.1.1-13-139783-1.6.0_22-20101206-0136-linux-x86_64, compiled mode) To create migration template: 1. Execute $<WLS_HOME>/wlserver_10.3/common/bin/config_builder.sh 2. Create Domain Template. 3. Select Domain to migrate. 4. Enter the name of template and other info. Click next. 5. Using Add Button, Select libraries you want to add under lib folder. copy jdbc data sources you would like to have under config/jdbc folder. If you want to have log4j configuration, copy log4j.xml under domain_root folder. 6. Select data base for the domain and click next. 7. Enter Admin Server Name and port numbers. Click next. 8. Enter username and password. Click next. Select No if you don want to add users/groups/roles 9. Click next until reach button create. This will create a jar file that is needed for the next action plan. To install and migrate domain to 64 bit architecture. 1. Install JVM Jrockit R28.1.1.13 on environment. (uncompress zip folder on a known location) 2. Go to JRockit_Home/bin and execute $ java -d64 -jar wls1034_generic.jar 3. When prompt, select JRockit JVM in browse menu, and wait for installation to finish. 4. Go to <WLS_HOME>/wlserver_10.3/common/bin and execute $ ./config.sh 5. Select Create a new Weblogic domain 6. Select Base this domain on an existing template and select browse. 7. Select jar file created on previous action plan. 8. Select Name of domain. Maintain in most cases. 9. Select user name and password. Maintain in most cases. 10. Select Jrockit SDK 1.6.0_22 and click next. 11. Confirm all JMS/JDBC/security configuration. 12. On select Optional Configuration, reconfigure if necessary. 13. Check on Configuration summary for all domain configuration. 14. Click on create, to finish up domain import. Note: Always when installing a 64 bit WLS, it's necessary to install first the 64 JVM and then run the generic installer with the -d64 bit option. If this is not performed, the installation will be the 32 default version. For more information, please refer: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13188_01/jrockit/docs50/dev_faq.html#pae

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• Utility to Script SQL Server Configuration

  - by Bill Graziano

  I wrote a small utility to script some key SQL Server configuration information. I had two goals for this utility: Assist with disaster recovery preparation Identify configuration changes I’ve released the application as open source through CodePlex. You can download it from CodePlex at the Script SQL Server Configuration project page. The application is a .NET 2.0 console application that uses SMO. It writes its output to a directory that you specify.  Disaster Planning ScriptSqlConfig generates scripts for logins, jobs and linked servers.  It writes the properties and configuration from the instance to text files. The scripts are designed so they can be run against a DR server in the case of a disaster. The properties and configuration will need to be manually compared. Each job is scripted to its own file. Each linked server is scripted to its own file. The linked servers don’t include the password if you use a SQL Server account to connect to the linked server. You’ll need to store those somewhere secure. All the logins are scripted to a single file. This file includes windows logins, SQL Server logins and any server role membership.  The SQL Server logins are scripted with the correct SID and hashed passwords. This means that when you create the login it will automatically match up to the users in the database and have the correct password. This is the only script that I programmatically generate rather than using SMO. The SQL Server configuration and properties are scripted to text files. These will need to be manually reviewed in the event of a disaster. Or you could DIFF them with the configuration on the new server. Configuration Changes These scripts and files are all designed to be checked into a version control system.  The scripts themselves don’t include any date specific information. In my environments I run this every night and check in the changes. I call the application once for each server and script each server to its own directory.  The process will delete any existing files before writing new ones. This solved the problem I had where the scripts for deleted jobs and linked servers would continue to show up.  To see any changes I just need to query the version control system to show many any changes to the files. Database Scripting Utilities that script database objects are plentiful.  CodePlex has at least a dozen of them including one I wrote years ago. The code is so easy to write it’s hard not to include that functionality. This functionality wasn’t high on my list because it’s included in a database backup.  Unless you specify the /nodb option, the utility will script out many user database objects. It will script one object per file. It will script tables, stored procedures, user-defined data types, views, triggers, table types and user-defined functions. I know there are more I need to add but haven’t gotten around it yet. If there’s something you need, please log an issue and get it added. Since it scripts one object per file these really aren’t appropriate to recreate an empty database. They are really good for checking into source control every night and then seeing what changed. I know everyone tells me all their database objects are in source control but a little extra insurance never hurts. Conclusion I hope this utility will help a few of you out there. My goal is to have it script all server objects that aren’t contained in user databases. This should help with configuration changes and especially disaster recovery.

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• The Latest Major Release of AutoVue is Now Available!

  - by Pam Petropoulos

  Click here to read the full press release. To learn more about AutoVue 20.2, check out the What's New in AutoVue 20.2 Datasheet AutoVue 20.2 continues to set the standard for enterprise level visualization with Augmented Business Visualization, a new paradigm which reconciles information and business data from multiple sources into a single view, providing rich and actionable visual decision-making environments. The release also includes; capabilities that enhance end-to-end approval workflow; solutions to visually enable the mobile workforce; and support for the latest manufacturing and high tech formats.     New capabilities in release 20.2 include: ·         Enhancements to the Augmented Business Visualization framework o    Creation of 2D hotspots has been extended in 2D drawings, PDF and image files and can now be defined as regional boxes, rather than just text strings o    New 3D Hotspot links in models and drawings. Parts or components of 3D models can be selected to create hotspot links. ·         Enhanced end-to-end approval workflows with digital stamping and batch stamping improvements ·         Solutions that visually enable the mobile workforce and extend enterprise visualization to mobile devices, including iPads through OVDI (Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) ·         Enhancements to AutoVue enterprise readiness: reliability and performance improvements, as well as security enhancements which adhere to Oracle’s Software Security Assurance standards ·         Timely support for new MCAD, ECAD, and Office formats ·         New 20.2 versions of AutoVue Document Print Services and Integration SDK (iSDK) ·         New Dutch language availability   The press release also contains terrific supporting quotes from AutoVue customers and partners.        “AutoVue’s stamping enhancements will greatly benefit our building permit management processes,” said Ties Kremer, Information Manager, Noordenveld Municipality, Netherlands. “The ability to batch stamp documents will speed up our approval processes, enable us to save time and money, and help us meet our regulatory compliance obligations.”          “AutoVue provides our non-technical teams in marketing and sales with access to customer order requirements and supporting CAD documents and drawings,” said James Lim, Regional Technical Systems Manager at Molex Incorporated. “AutoVue 20.2 has enabled us to refine our quotation process, and reduce order errors.”         “We are excited about our use of AutoVue’s Augmented Business Visualization framework, which will offer Meridian users enhanced access to related technical documentation,” said Edwin van Dijk, Director of Product Management, BlueCielo.  “By including AutoVue’s new regional hotspot capabilities within BlueCielo Meridian Enterprise, the context of engineering information is carried over into the visual representation of complex assets, thereby helping us to improve productivity and operational excellence.”    

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• What is Devops and Why You Should Care?

  - by Tanu Sood

  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;} According to Wikipedia, DevOps (a portmanteau of development and operations) is a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) professionals. DevOps is a response to the interdependence of software development and IT operations. It aims to help an organization rapidly produce software products and services. That definition of DevOps is the – what. The “why” is even easier. Standardized development methodology, clear communication and documented processes supported by a standards-based, proven middleware platform improves application development and management cycles, brings agility and provides greater availability and security to your IT infrastructure. Clearly, DevOps is about connecting people, products and processes. Ultimately, DevOps is about connecting IT to business. If you haven’t already seen it, do check out Bob Rhubart’s feature on DevOps in the latest issue of Oracle Magazine. And for more information on how Oracle Fusion Middleware, the #1 application infrastructure foundation, visit us on oracle.com 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;}

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• My 2D collision code does not work as expected. How do I fix it?

  - by farmdve

  I have a simple 2D game with a tile-based map. I am new to game development, I followed the LazyFoo tutorials on SDL. The tiles are in a bmp file, but each tile inside it corresponds to an internal number of the type of tile(color, or wall). The game is simple, but the code is a lot so I can only post snippets. // Player moved out of the map if((player.box.x < 0)) player.box.x += GetVelocity(player, 0); if((player.box.y < 0)) player.box.y += GetVelocity(player, 1); if((player.box.x > (LEVEL_WIDTH - DOT_WIDTH))) player.box.x -= GetVelocity(player, 0); if((player.box.y > (LEVEL_HEIGHT - DOT_HEIGHT))) player.box.y -= GetVelocity(player, 1); // Now that we are here, we check for collisions if(touches_wall(player.box)) { if(player.box.x < player.prev_x) { player.box.x += GetVelocity(player, 0); } if(player.box.x > player.prev_x) { player.box.x -= GetVelocity(player, 0); } if(player.box.y < player.prev_y) { player.box.y += GetVelocity(player, 1); } if(player.box.y > player.prev_y) { player.box.y -= GetVelocity(player, 1); } } player.prev_x = player.box.x; player.prev_y = player.box.y; Let me explain, player is a structure with the following contents typedef struct { Rectangle box; //Player position on a map(tile or whatever). int prev_x, prev_y; // Previous positions int key_press[3]; // Stores which key was pressed/released. Limited to three keys. E.g Left,right and perhaps jump if possible in 2D int velX, velY; // Velocity for X and Y coordinate. //Health int health; bool main_character; uint32_t jump_ticks; } Player; And Rectangle is just a typedef of SDL_Rect. GetVelocity is a function that according to the second argument, returns the velocity for the X or Y axis. This code I have basically works, however inside the if(touches_wall(player.box)) if statement, I have 4 more. These 4 if statements are responsible for detecting collision on all 4 sides(up,down,left,right). However, they also act as a block for any other movement. Example: I move down the object and collide with the wall, as I continue to move down and still collide with the wall, I wish to move left or right, which is indeed possible(not to mention in 3D games), but remember the 4 if statements? They are preventing me from moving anywhere. The original code on the LazyFoo Productions website has no problems, but it was written in C++, so I had to rewrite most of it to work, which is probably where the problem comes from. I also use a different method of moving, than the one in the examples. Of course, that was just an example. I wish to be able to move no matter at which wall I collide. Before this bit of code, I had another one that had more logic in there, but it was flawed.

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• Where should you put constants and why?

  - by Tim Meyer

  In our mostly large applications, we usually have a only few locations for constants: One class for GUI and internal contstants (Tab Page titles, Group Box titles, calculation factors, enumerations) One class for database tables and columns (this part is generated code) plus readable names for them (manually assigned) One class for application messages (logging, message boxes etc) The constants are usually separated into different structs in those classes. In our C++ applications, the constants are only defined in the .h file and the values are assigned in the .cpp file. One of the advantages is that all strings etc are in one central place and everybody knows where to find them when something must be changed. This is especially something project managers seem to like as people come and go and this way everybody can change such trivial things without having to dig into the application's structure. Also, you can easily change the title of similar Group Boxes / Tab Pages etc at once. Another aspect is that you can just print that class and give it to a non-programmer who can check if the captions are intuitive, and if messages to the user are too detailed or too confusing etc. However, I see certain disadvantages: Every single class is tightly coupled to the constants classes Adding/Removing/Renaming/Moving a constant requires recompilation of at least 90% of the application (Note: Changing the value doesn't, at least for C++). In one of our C++ projects with 1500 classes, this means around 7 minutes of compilation time (using precompiled headers; without them it's around 50 minutes) plus around 10 minutes of linking against certain static libraries. Building a speed optimized release through the Visual Studio Compiler takes up to 3 hours. I don't know if the huge amount of class relations is the source but it might as well be. You get driven into temporarily hard-coding strings straight into code because you want to test something very quickly and don't want to wait 15 minutes just for that test (and probably every subsequent one). Everybody knows what happens to the "I will fix that later"-thoughts. Reusing a class in another project isn't always that easy (mainly due to other tight couplings, but the constants handling doesn't make it easier.) Where would you store constants like that? Also what arguments would you bring in order to convince your project manager that there are better concepts which also comply with the advantages listed above? Feel free to give a C++-specific or independent answer. PS: I know this question is kind of subjective but I honestly don't know of any better place than this site for this kind of question. Update on this project I have news on the compile time thing: Following Caleb's and gbjbaanb's posts, I split my constants file into several other files when I had time. I also eventually split my project into several libraries which was now possible much easier. Compiling this in release mode showed that the auto-generated file which contains the database definitions (table, column names and more - more than 8000 symbols) and builds up certain hashes caused the huge compile times in release mode. Deactivating MSVC's optimizer for the library which contains the DB constants now allowed us to reduce the total compile time of your Project (several applications) in release mode from up to 8 hours to less than one hour! We have yet to find out why MSVC has such a hard time optimizing these files, but for now this change relieves a lot of pressure as we no longer have to rely on nightly builds only. That fact - and other benefits, such as less tight coupling, better reuseability etc - also showed that spending time splitting up the "constants" wasn't such a bad idea after all ;-)

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

  - by Tarun Arora

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

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• The gestures of Windows 8 (Consumer preview): part 2, More about Search

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  This is part 2 of a multipart blog post about the gestures and shortcuts in Windows 8 consumer preview. Part 1 can be found here! More about the Search charm In the first installment of this series, we talked about the charms and mentioned a few gestures to display the Search charm. Search is a very central and powerful feature in Windows 8, and allows you to search in Apps, Settings, Files and within Metro applications that support the Search contract. There are a few cool features around the Search, and especially the applications associated to it. I already mentioned the keyboard shortcuts you can use: Win-C shows the Charms bar (same as swiping from the right bevel towards the center of the screen). Win-Q open the Search fly out with Apps preselected. Win-W open the Search fly out with Settings preselected. Win-F open the Search fly out with Files preselected. Searching in Metro apps In addition to these three search domains, you can also search a Metro app, as long as it supports the Search contract (check this Build video to learn more about the Search contract). These apps show up in the Search flyout as shown here: Notice the list of apps below the Files button? That’s what we are talking about. First of all, the list order changes when you search in some applications. For instance, in the image above, I had used the Store with the Search charm. This is why the store shows up as the first app. I am not 100% what algorithm is used here (sorting according to number of searches is my guess), but try it out and try to figure it out Applications that have never been searched are sorted alphabetically. Does it mean we will see cool app names like ___AAA_MyCoolApp? I certainly hope not!! Pinning You can also pin often used apps to the Search flyout. To pin an app with the mouse, right click on it in the Search flyout and select Pin from the context menu. With the keyboard, use the arrow keys to go down to the selected app, and then open the context menu. With the finger, simply tap and hold until you see a semi transparent rectangle indicating that the context menu will be shown, then release. The context menu opens up and you can select Pin. Pin context menu Pinned apps Unpinning, Hiding Using the same technique as for pinning here above, you can also unpin a pinned application. Finally, you can also choose to hide an app from the Search flyout altogether. This is a convenient way to clean up and make it easy to find stuff. Note: At this point, I am not sure how to re-add a hidden app to the Search flyout. If anyone knows, please mention it in the comments, thanks! Reordering You can also reorder pinned apps. To do this, with the finger, tap, hold and pull the app to the side, then pull it vertically to reorder it. You can also reorder with the mouse, simply by clicking on an app and pulling it vertically to the place you want to put it. I don’t think there is a way to do that with the keyboard though. That’s it for now More gestures will follow in a next installment! Have fun with Windows 8   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• My frustum culling is culling from the wrong point [SOLVED]

  - by Xbetas

  I'm having problems with my frustum being in the wrong origin. It follows the rotation of my camera but not the position. In my camera class I'm generating a view-matrix: void Camera::Update() { UpdateViewMatrix(); glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); //glLoadIdentity(); glLoadMatrixf(GetViewMatrix().m); } Then extracting the planes using the projection matrix and modelview matrix: void UpdateFrustum() { Matrix4x4 projection, model, clip; glGetFloatv(GL_PROJECTION_MATRIX, projection.m); glGetFloatv(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, model.m); clip = model * projection; m_Planes[RIGHT][0] = clip.m[ 3] - clip.m[ 0]; m_Planes[RIGHT][1] = clip.m[ 7] - clip.m[ 4]; m_Planes[RIGHT][2] = clip.m[11] - clip.m[ 8]; m_Planes[RIGHT][3] = clip.m[15] - clip.m[12]; NormalizePlane(RIGHT); m_Planes[LEFT][0] = clip.m[ 3] + clip.m[ 0]; m_Planes[LEFT][1] = clip.m[ 7] + clip.m[ 4]; m_Planes[LEFT][2] = clip.m[11] + clip.m[ 8]; m_Planes[LEFT][3] = clip.m[15] + clip.m[12]; NormalizePlane(LEFT); m_Planes[BOTTOM][0] = clip.m[ 3] + clip.m[ 1]; m_Planes[BOTTOM][1] = clip.m[ 7] + clip.m[ 5]; m_Planes[BOTTOM][2] = clip.m[11] + clip.m[ 9]; m_Planes[BOTTOM][3] = clip.m[15] + clip.m[13]; NormalizePlane(BOTTOM); m_Planes[TOP][0] = clip.m[ 3] - clip.m[ 1]; m_Planes[TOP][1] = clip.m[ 7] - clip.m[ 5]; m_Planes[TOP][2] = clip.m[11] - clip.m[ 9]; m_Planes[TOP][3] = clip.m[15] - clip.m[13]; NormalizePlane(TOP); m_Planes[NEAR][0] = clip.m[ 3] + clip.m[ 2]; m_Planes[NEAR][1] = clip.m[ 7] + clip.m[ 6]; m_Planes[NEAR][2] = clip.m[11] + clip.m[10]; m_Planes[NEAR][3] = clip.m[15] + clip.m[14]; NormalizePlane(NEAR); m_Planes[FAR][0] = clip.m[ 3] - clip.m[ 2]; m_Planes[FAR][1] = clip.m[ 7] - clip.m[ 6]; m_Planes[FAR][2] = clip.m[11] - clip.m[10]; m_Planes[FAR][3] = clip.m[15] - clip.m[14]; NormalizePlane(FAR); } void NormalizePlane(int side) { float length = 1.0/(float)sqrt(m_Planes[side][0] * m_Planes[side][0] + m_Planes[side][1] * m_Planes[side][1] + m_Planes[side][2] * m_Planes[side][2]); m_Planes[side][0] *= length; m_Planes[side][1] *= length; m_Planes[side][2] *= length; m_Planes[side][3] *= length; } And check against it with: bool PointInFrustum(float x, float y, float z) { for(int i = 0; i < 6; i++) { if( m_Planes[i][0] * x + m_Planes[i][1] * y + m_Planes[i][2] * z + m_Planes[i][3] <= 0 ) return false; } return true; } Then i render using: camera->Update(); UpdateFrustum(); int numCulled = 0; for(int i = 0; i < (int)meshes.size(); i++) { if(!PointInFrustum(meshCenter.x, meshCenter.y, meshCenter.z)) { meshes[i]->SetDraw(false); numCulled++; } else meshes[i]->SetDraw(true); } Matrices look like (Camera is at (5, 0, 0)): ModelView [0,0,0.99,0] [0,1,0,0] [-0.99,0,0,0] [0,0,-5,1] Projection [0.814,0,0,0] [0,1.303,0,0] [0,0,-1,0] [0,0,-0.02,0] Clip [0,0,-1,-0.999] [0,1.30,0,0] [-0.814,0,0,0] [0,0,4.98,4.99] What am i doing wrong?

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• The Rise of Project Intelligence and Why It Matters

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} By Amy DeWolf Are you doing any of these in your organization? How are you leveraging historical data to forecast projects? There’s a lot going on in government today. The economic pressures agencies feel from the uncertainty of budget cuts and sequestration effect every part of an organization, including the Project Management Office (PMO).  The PMO is responsible for monitoring and administering government IT projects. As time goes on, priorities shift, technology advances, and new regulations are imposed, all of which make planning and executing projects more difficult.  For example, think about your own projects.  How many boxes do you need to check and hoops do you need to jump through to ensure you comply with new regulations? While new regulations and technology advancements can be a good thing, they add an additional layer of complexity to already complex projects. To overcome some of these pressures, particularly new regulations, many in the PMO world are adopting a new approach- Project Intelligence (PI). According to a new Oracle Primavera white paper, The Rise of Project Intelligence: When Project Management is Just Not Enough, “PI uses Business Intelligence methods to leverage historical project data to make more informed decisions and greatly enhance project execution.” Currently, project managers plan and forecast the possible phases in an execution cycle.  However, most project managers don’t have the proper tools to do this as effectively as they would like. As the white paper noted, “The underlying deficiencies in most forecasting approaches are that 1) the PM fails in most instances to leverage historical data and 2) the PM doesn’t employ current Business Intelligence tools.” PI seeks to overturn this by combining modeling tools used in Business Intelligence for projects with the understanding of Emotional Intelligence for managing people.   Simply put, Project Intelligence is built off four main pillars: Actively use historical data to forecast project cycles Understand the intricacies of complex projects Enhance social and emotional intelligence in projects Actively use Business intelligence tools Read our complimentary whitepaper and discover the importance of emotional intelligence and best practices for improving projects, specifically in terms of communication.

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• The Connected Company: WebCenter Portal - Feedback - Analytics and Polls

  - by Michael Snow

  Evernote Export body, td { }Guest Post by: Mitchell Palski, Staff Sales Consultant The importance of connecting peers has been widely recognized and socialized as a critical component of employee intranets. Organizations are striving to provide mediums for sharing knowledge and improving awareness across their enterprise. Indirectly, the socialization of your enterprise should lead to cost savings and improved product/service quality. However, many times the direct effects of connecting an organization’s leadership with its employees are overlooked. Oracle WebCenter Portal can help you bridge that gap by gathering implicit and explicit feedback. Implicit Feedback Through Usage Analytics Analytics allows administrators to track and analyze WebCenter Portal traffic and usage. Analytics provides the following basic functionality: Usage Tracking Metrics: Analytics collects and reports metrics of common WebCenter Portal functions, including community and portlet traffic. Behavior Tracking: Analytics can be used to analyze WebCenter Portal metrics to determine usage patterns, such as page visit duration and usage over time. User Profile Correlation: Analytics can be used to correlate metric information with user profile information. Usage tracking reports can be viewed and filtered by user profile data such as country, company or title. Usage analytics help measure how users interact with website content – allowing your IT staff and business analysts to make informed decisions when planning development for your next intranet enhancement. For example: If users are not accessing your Announcements page and missing critical information that they need to be aware of, you may elect to use graphical links on the home page to direct more users to that page. As a result, the number of employee help-requests to HR decreases. If users are not accessing your News page to read recent articles, you may elect to stop spending as much time updating the page with new stories and cut costs in your communications department. You notice that there is a high volume of users accessing the Employee Dashboard page so your organization decides to continue making personalization enhancements to the page and investing in the Portal tool that most users are accessing. Usage analytics aren’t necessarily a new concept in the IT industry. What sets WebCenter Portal Analytics apart is: Reports are tailored for WebCenter specific tools Report can be easily added to a page as simple as a drag-and-drop Explicit Feedback Through Polls WebCenter Portal users can create, edit, take, and analyze online polls. With polls, you can survey your audience (such as their opinions and their experience level), check whether they can recall important information, and gather feedback and metrics. How many times have you been involved in a requirements discussion and someone has asked a question similar to “Well how do you know that no one likes our home page?” and the response is “Everyone says they hate it! That’s all anyone complains about.” No one has any measurable, quantifiable metric to gauge user satisfaction. Analytics measure usage, but your organization also needs to measure the quality of your portal as defined by the actual people that use it. With that information, your leadership can make informed decisions that will not only match usage patterns but also relate to employees on a personal level. The end result is a connection between employees and leadership that gives everyone in the organization a sense of ownership of their Portal rather than the feeling of development decisions being segregated to leadership only. Polls can be created and edited through the Poll Manager: Polls and View Poll Results can easily be added to a page through drag-and-drop. What did we learn? Being a “connected” company doesn’t just mean helping employees connect with each other horizontally across your enterprise. It also means connecting those employees to the decisions that affect their everyday activities. Through WebCenter Portal Usage Analytics and Polls, any decision that is made to remove a Portal page, update a Portal page, or develop new Portal functionality, can be justified by quantifiable metrics. Instead of fielding complaints and hearing that your employees don’t have a voice, give those employees a voice and listen!

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• Musings on the launch of SQL Monitor

  - by Phil Factor

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

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• Ubiquitous BIP

  - by Tim Dexter

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

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• Minecraft style XNA game collision?

  - by Levi

  I've been trying to get this working for ages now, I can detect if there's a solid block at any place on the map and I can check how far something is inside of it, but I don't understand how to fix the collision. I've tried loads of ways and all of them end up by the player getting stuck, glitching around, incorrect responses and I really have no idea how to go about this :/. int Chnk = Utility.GetChunkFromPosition(origin); if (Chnk == -1) return; Vector3 Pos = Utility.GetCubeVectorFromPosition(origin); if (GlobalWorld.LoadedChunks[Chnk].Blocks[(byte)Pos.X, (byte)Pos.Y, (byte)Pos.Z] != 0) { isInIllegalState = true; if (velocity.Y < 0f) velocity.Y = 0f; } while (isInIllegalState) { if (GlobalWorld.LoadedChunks[Chnk].Blocks[(byte)Pos.X, (byte)origin.Y, (byte)Pos.Z] != 0) origin.Y = (int)(origin.Y + 1); else isInIllegalState = false; } if (origin.Y < Chunk.YSize - 2 && GlobalWorld.LoadedChunks[Chnk].Blocks[(byte)Pos.X, (byte)(origin.Y + playerHeight.Y), (byte)Pos.Z] != 0) { velocity.Y = 0f; //Acceleration.Y = 0f; origin.Y = (int)origin.Y;// -0.5f; } for (int x = -1; x <= 1; x+=2) { for (int z = -1; z <= 1; z += 2) { Vector3 CornerPosition = new Vector3(boundingSize * x, 0, boundingSize * z); bool CorrectX = false; bool CorrectZ = false; Vector3 RoundedOrigin = Utility.RoundVector(origin); Vector3 RoundedCorner = Utility.RoundVector(origin + CornerPosition); byte BlockAdjacent = Utility.GetCubeFromPosition(origin + CornerPosition); if (BlockAdjacent == 0) continue; if (RoundedCorner.X != RoundedOrigin.X && RoundedCorner.Z != RoundedOrigin.Z) { CorrectX = true; CorrectZ = true; } if (RoundedCorner.Z != RoundedOrigin.Z && RoundedCorner.X == RoundedOrigin.X) CorrectZ = true; if (RoundedCorner.X != RoundedOrigin.X && RoundedCorner.Z == RoundedOrigin.Z) CorrectX = true; if (CorrectX && CornerPosition.X > 0) { if (origin.X > 0f) origin.X = (int)(origin.X + 1) - boundingSize; else origin.X = (int)origin.X - boundingSize; } else if (CorrectX && CornerPosition.X < 0) { if (origin.X > 0f) origin.X = (int)(origin.X) + boundingSize; else origin.X = (int)(origin.X - 1) + boundingSize; } if (CorrectZ && CornerPosition.Z > 0) { if (origin.Z > 0f) origin.Z = (int)(origin.Z + 1) - boundingSize; else origin.Z = (int)origin.Z - boundingSize; } else if (CorrectZ && CornerPosition.Z < 0) { if (origin.Z > 0f) origin.Z = (int)(origin.Z) + boundingSize; else origin.Z = (int)(origin.Z - 1) + boundingSize; } } }

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• Apps UX Launches Blueprints for Mobile User Experiences

  - by mvaughan

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User ExperienceAt Oracle OpenWorld 2012 this year, the Oracle Applications User Experience (Apps UX) team announced the release of Mobile User Experience Functional Design Patterns. These patterns are designed to work directly with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware, specifically, ADF Mobile.  The Oracle Application Development Framework for mobile users enables developers to build one application that can be deployed to multiple mobile device platforms. These same mobile design patterns provide the guidance for Oracle teams to develop Fusion Mobile expenses. Application developers can use Oracle’s mobile design patterns to design iPhone, Android, or browser-based smartphone applications. We are sharing our mobile design patterns and their baked-in, scientifically proven usability to enable Oracle customers and partners to build mobile applications quickly.A different way of thinking and designing. Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, Senior Manager of Mobile User Experiences for Apps UX, says mobile design has to be compelling. “It needs to be optimized for the device, and be visually rich and simple,” she said. “What is really key is that you are designing for a user’s most personal device, the device that they will have with them at all times of the day.”Katy Massucco, director of the overall design patterns site, said: “You need to start with a simplified task flow. Everything should be a natural interaction. The action should be relevant and leveraging the device. It should be seamless.”She suggests that developers identify the essential tasks that a user would want to do while mobile. “They need to understand the user and the context,” she added. ?A sample inline action design patternWhat people are sayingReactions to the release of the design patterns have been positive. Debra Lilley, Oracle ACE Director and Fusion User Experience Advocate (FXA), has already demo’ed Fusion Mobile Expenses widely.  Fellow Oracle Ace Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen, called it a “cool demo by @debralilley of the new mobile expenses app.” FXA member Floyd Teter says he is already cooking up some plans for using mobile design patterns.  We hope to see those ideas at Collaborate or ODTUG in 2013. For another perspective on why user experience is such an important focus for mobile applications, check out this video by John King, Director, and Monty Latiolais, President, both from ODTUG, or the Oracle Development Tools User Group.In a separate interview by e-mail, Latiolais wrote: “I enjoy the fact we can take something that, in the past, has been largely subjective, and now apply to it a scientifically proven look and feel. Trusting Oracle’s UX Design Patterns, the presentation really can become one less thing to worry about. As someone with limited ADF experience, that is extremely beneficial.”?King, who was also interviewed by e-mail, wrote: “User Experience is about making the task at hand as easy and error-free as possible. Oracle's UX labs worked hard to make the User Experience in the new Fusion Applications as good as possible; ADF makes adding tested, consistent, user experiences a declarative exercise by leveraging that work. As we move applications onto mobile platforms, user experience is the driving factor. Customers are "spoiled" by a bevy of fantastic applications, and ours cannot disappoint them. Creating applications that enable users to quickly and effectively accomplish whatever task is at hand takes thought and practice. Developers must become ’power users’ and then create applications that they and their users will love.”

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• The Future of Air Travel: Intelligence and Automation

  - by BobEvans

  Remember those white-knuckle flights through stormy weather where unexpected plunges in altitude result in near-permanent relocations of major internal organs? Perhaps there’s a better way, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article: “Pilots of a Honeywell International Inc. test plane stayed on their initial flight path, relying on the company's latest onboard radar technology to steer through the worst of the weather. The specially outfitted Boeing 757 barely shuddered as it gingerly skirted some of the most ferocious storm cells over Fort Walton Beach and then climbed above the rest in zero visibility.” Or how about the multifaceted check-in process, which might not wreak havoc on liver location but nevertheless makes you wonder if you’ve been trapped in some sort of covert psychological-stress test? Another WSJ article, called “The Self-Service Airport,” says there’s reason for hope there as well: “Airlines are laying the groundwork for the next big step in the airport experience: a trip from the curb to the plane without interacting with a single airline employee. At the airport of the near future, ‘your first interaction could be with a flight attendant,’ said Ben Minicucci, chief operating officer of Alaska Airlines, a unit of Alaska Air Group Inc.” And in the topsy-turvy world of air travel, it’s not just the passengers who’ve been experiencing bumpy rides: the airlines themselves are grappling with a range of challenges—some beyond their control, some not—that make profitability increasingly elusive in spite of heavy demand for their services. A recent piece in The Economist illustrates one of the mega-challenges confronting the airline industry via a striking set of contrasting and very large numbers: while the airlines pay $7 billion per year to third-party computerized reservation services, the airlines themselves earn a collective profit of only $3 billion per year. In that context, the anecdotes above point unmistakably to the future that airlines must pursue if they hope to be able to manage some of the factors outside of their control (e.g., weather) as well as all of those within their control (operating expenses, end-to-end visibility, safety, load optimization, etc.): more intelligence, more automation, more interconnectedness, and more real-time awareness of every facet of their operations. Those moves will benefit both passengers and the air carriers, says the WSJ piece on The Self-Service Airport: “Airlines say the advanced technology will quicken the airport experience for seasoned travelers—shaving a minute or two from the checked-baggage process alone—while freeing airline employees to focus on fliers with questions. ‘It's more about throughput with the resources you have than getting rid of humans,’ said Andrew O'Connor, director of airport solutions at Geneva-based airline IT provider SITA.” Oracle’s attempting to help airlines gain control over these challenges by blending together a range of its technologies into a solution called the Oracle Airline Data Model, which suggests the following steps: • To retain and grow their customer base, airlines need to focus on the customer experience. • To personalize and differentiate the customer experience, airlines need to effectively manage their passenger data. • The Oracle Airline Data Model can help airlines jump-start their customer-experience initiatives by consolidating passenger data into a customer data hub that drives realtime business intelligence and strategic customer insight. • Oracle’s Airline Data Model brings together multiple types of data that can jumpstart your data-warehousing project with rich out-of-the-box functionality. • Oracle’s Intelligent Warehouse for Airlines brings together the powerful capabilities of Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Airline Data Model to give you real-time strategic insights into passenger demand, revenues, sales channels and your flight network. The airline industry aside, the bullet points above offer a broad strategic outline for just about any industry because the customer experience is becoming pre-eminent in each and there is simply no way to deliver world-class customer experiences unless a company can capture, manage, and analyze all of the relevant data in real-time. I’ll leave you with two thoughts from the WSJ article about the new in-flight radar system from Honeywell: first, studies show that a single episode of serious turbulence can wrack up $150,000 in additional costs for an airline—so, it certainly behooves the carriers to gain the intelligence to avoid turbulence as much as possible. And second, it’s back to that top-priority customer-experience thing and the value that ever-increasing levels of intelligence can deliver. As the article says: “In the cabin, reporters watched screens showing the most intense parts of the nearly 10-mile wide storm, which churned some 7,000 feet below, in vibrant red and other colors. The screens also were filled with tiny symbols depicting likely locations of lightning and hail, which can damage planes and wreak havoc on the nerves of white-knuckle flyers.”  (Bob Evans is senior vice-president, communications, for Oracle.)  

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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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• How to automate a monitoring system for ETL runs

  - by Jeffrey McDaniel

  Upon completion of the Primavera ETL process there are a few ways to determine if the process finished successfully.  First, in the <installation directory>\log folder,  there is a staretlprocess.log and staretl.html files. These files will give the output results of the ETL run. The staretl.html file will give a detailed summary of each step of the process, its run time, and its status. The .log file, based on the logging level set in the Configuration tool, can give extensive information about the ETL process. The log file can be used as a validation for process completion.  To automate the monitoring of these log files, perform the following steps: 1. Write a custom application to parse through the log file and search for [ERROR] . In most cases,  a major [ERROR] could cause the ETL process to fail. Searching the log and finding this value is worthy of an alert. 2. Determine the total number of steps in the ETL process, and validate that the log file recorded and entry for the final step.  For example validate that your log file contains an entry for Step 39/39 (could be different based on the version you are running). If there is no Step 39/39, then either the process is taking longer than expected or it didn't make it to the end.  Either way this would be a good cause for an alert. 3. Check the last line in the log file. The last line of the log file should contain an indication that the ETL run completed successfully. For example, the last line of a log file will say (results could be different based on Reporting Database versions):   [INFO] (Message) Finished Writing Report 4. You could write an Ant script to execute the ETL process and have it set to - failonerror="true" - and from there send results to an external tool to monitor the jobs, send to email, or send to database. With each ETL run, the log file appends to the existing log file by default. Because of this behavior, I would recommend renaming the existing log files before running a new ETL process. By doing this,  only log entries for the currently running ETL process is recorded in the new log files. Based on these log entries, alerts can be setup to notify the administrator or DBA. Another way to determine if the ETL process has completed successfully is to monitor the etl_processmaster table.  Depending on the Reporting Database version this could be in the Stage or Star databases. As of Reporting Database 2.2 and higher this would be in the Star database.  The etl_processmaster table records entries for the ETL run along with a Start and Finish time.  If the ETl process has failed the Finish date should be null. This table can be queried at a time when ETL process is expected to be finished and if null send an alert.  These are just some options. There are additional ways this can be accomplished based around these two areas - log files or database. Here is an additional query to gather more information about your ETL run (connect as Staruser): SELECT SYSDATE,test_script,decode(loc, 0, PROCESSNAME, trim(SUBSTR(PROCESSNAME, loc+1))) PROCESSNAME ,duration duration from ( select (e.endtime - b.starttime) * 1440 duration, to_char(b.starttime, 'hh24:mi:ss') starttime, to_char(e.endtime, 'hh24:mi:ss') endtime,  b.PROCESSNAME, instr(b.PROCESSNAME, ']') loc, b.infotype test_script from ( select processid, infodate starttime, PROCESSNAME, INFOMSG, INFOTYPE from etl_processinfo  where processid = (select max(PROCESSID) from etl_processinfo) and infotype = 'BEGIN' ) b  inner Join ( select processid, infodate endtime, PROCESSNAME, INFOMSG, INFOTYPE from etl_processinfo  where processid = (select max(PROCESSID) from etl_processinfo) and infotype = 'END' ) e on b.processid = e.processid  and b.PROCESSNAME = e.PROCESSNAME order by b.starttime)

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• X server with nvidia driver crashing: 12.04

  - by Raster

  My X server consistently crashes. It seems like this is happening when the X server is idle. This behaviour is new with 12.04. This is only happening on the second display of a multiseat system. Is there a configuration change I can make to stop this? X.Org X Server 1.11.3 Release Date: 2011-12-16 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.42-26-generic x86_64 Ubuntu Current Operating System: Linux Desktop 3.2.0-29-generic #46-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 27 17:03:23 UTC 2012 x86_64 Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.2.0-29-generic root=/dev/mapper/Group1-Root ro ramdisk_size=512000 quiet splash vt.handoff=7 Build Date: 04 August 2012 01:51:23AM xorg-server 2:1.11.4-0ubuntu10.7 (For technical support please see http://www.ubuntu.com/support) Current version of pixman: 0.24.4 Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.1.log", Time: Sun Sep 2 22:37:06 2012 (==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" (==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d" Backtrace: 0: /usr/bin/X (xorg_backtrace+0x26) [0x7fcee86be846] 1: /usr/bin/X (0x7fcee8536000+0x18c6ea) [0x7fcee86c26ea] 2: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x7fcee785c000+0xfcb0) [0x7fcee786bcb0] 3: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so (0x7fcee14ba000+0x902a9) [0x7fcee154a2a9] 4: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so (0x7fcee14ba000+0xfd5e7) [0x7fcee15b75e7] 5: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so (0x7fcee14ba000+0x4d6b92) [0x7fcee1990b92] 6: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so (0x7fcee14ba000+0x4d74d5) [0x7fcee19914d5] 7: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so (0x7fcee14ba000+0x4d767d) [0x7fcee199167d] 8: /usr/bin/X (0x7fcee8536000+0x1196ec) [0x7fcee864f6ec] 9: /usr/bin/X (0x7fcee8536000+0xe8ad5) [0x7fcee861ead5] 10: /usr/bin/X (0x7fcee8536000+0xe9d45) [0x7fcee861fd45] /etc/X11/xorg.conf Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Desktop" Screen 0 "DesktopScreen" 0 0 InputDevice "DesktopMouse" "CorePointer" InputDevice "DesktopKeyboard" "CoreKeyboard" Option "AutoAddDevices" "false" Option "AllowEmptyInput" "true" Option "AutoEnableDevices" "false" EndSection Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Desktop2" Screen 1 "Desktop2Screen" 0 0 InputDevice "Desktop2Mouse" "CorePointer" InputDevice "Desktop2Keyboard" "CoreKeyboard" Option "AutoAddDevices" "false" Option "AllowEmptyInput" "true" Option "AutoEnableDevices" "false" EndSection Section "Module" Load "dbe" Load "extmod" Load "type1" Load "freetype" Load "glx" EndSection Section "Files" EndSection Section "ServerFlags" Option "AutoAddDevices" "false" Option "AutoEnableDevices" "false" Option "AllowMouseOpenFail" "on" Option "AllowEmptyInput" "on" Option "ZapWarning" "on" Option "HandleSepcialKeys" "off" # Zapping on Option "DRI2" "on" Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection # Desktop Mouse Section "InputDevice" Identifier "DesktopMouse" Driver "evdev" Option "Device" "/dev/input/event3" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "GrabDevice" "on" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no" Option "Buttons" "5" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" Option "SendCoreEvents" "true" EndSection # Desktop2 Mouse Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Desktop2Mouse" Driver "evdev" Option "Device" "/dev/input/event5" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "GrabDevice" "on" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no" Option "Buttons" "5" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" Option "SendCoreEvents" "true" EndSection Section "InputDevice" Identifier "DesktopKeyboard" Driver "evdev" Option "Device" "/dev/input/event4" Option "XkbRules" "xorg" Option "XkbModel" "105" Option "XkbLayout" "us" Option "Protocol" "Standard" Option "GrabDevice" "on" EndSection Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Desktop2Keyboard" Driver "evdev" Option "Device" "/dev/input/event6" Option "XkbRules" "xorg" Option "XkbModel" "105" Option "XkbLayout" "us" Option "Protocol" "Standard" Option "GrabDevice" "on" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Desktop2Monitor" VendorName "Acer" ModelName "Acer G235H" HorizSync 30.0 - 83.0 VertRefresh 56.0 - 75.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "DesktopMonitor" VendorName "Acer" ModelName "Acer H213H" HorizSync 30.0 - 83.0 VertRefresh 56.0 - 75.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "EVGACard" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "GeForce GTX 560 Ti" Option "Coolbits" "1" BusID "PCI:2:0:0" Screen 0 EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "XFXCard" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "GeForce GTX 9800" Option "Coolbits" "1" BusID "PCI:5:0:0" Screen 0 EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "DesktopScreen" Device "EVGACard" Monitor "DesktopMonitor" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Desktop2Screen" Device "XFXCard" Monitor "Desktop2Monitor" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection

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

  - by MHarrison

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

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• Call For Papers Tips and Tricks

  - by speakjava

  This year's JavaOne session review has just been completed and by now everyone who submitted papers should know whether they were successful or not.  I had the pleasure again this year of leading the review of the 'JavaFX and Rich User Experiences' track.  I thought it would be useful to write up a few comments to help people in future when submitting session proposals, not just for JavaOne, but for any of the many developer conferences that run around the world throughout the year.  This also draws on conversations I recently had with various Java User Group leaders at the Oracle User Group summit in Riga.  Many of these leaders run some of the biggest and most successful Java conferences in Europe. Try to think of a title which will sound interesting.  For example, "Experiences of performance tuning embedded Java for an ARM architecture based single board computer" probably isn't going to get as much attention as "Do you like coffee with your dessert? Java on the Raspberry Pi".  When thinking of the subject and title for your talk try to steer clear of sessions that might be too generic (and so get lost in a group of similar sessions).  Introductory talks are great when the audience is new to a subject, but beware of providing sessions that are too basic when the technology has been around for a while and there are lots of tutorials already available on the web. JavaOne, like many other conferences has a number of fields that need to be filled in when submitting a paper.  Many of these are selected from pull-down lists (like which track the session is applicable to).  Check these lists carefully.  A number of sessions we had needed to be shuffled between tracks when it was thought that the one selected was not appropriate.  We didn't count this against any sessions, but it's always a good idea to try and get the right one from the start, just in case. JavaOne, again like many other conferences, has two fields that describe the session being submitted: abstract and summary.  These are the most critical to a successful submission.  The two fields have different names and that is significant; a frequent mistake people make is to write an abstract for a session and then duplicate it for the summary.  The abstract (at least in the case of JavaOne) is what gets printed in the show guide and is typically what will be used by attendees when deciding what sessions to attend.  This is where you need to sell your session, not just to the reviewers, but also the people who you want in your audience.  Submitting a one line abstract (unless it's a really good one line) is not usually enough to decide whether this is worth investing an hour of conference time.  The abstract typically has a limit of a few hundred characters.  Try to use as many of them as possible to get as much information about your session across.  The summary should be different from the abstract (and don't leave it blank as some people do).  This field is where you can give the reviewers more detail about things like the structure of the talk, possible demonstrations and so on.  As a reviewer I look to this section to help me decide whether the hard-sell of the title and abstract will actually be reflected in the final content.  Try to make this comprehensive, but don't make it excessively long.  When you have to review possibly hundreds of sessions a certain level of conciseness can make life easier for reviewers and help the cause of your session. If you've not made many submissions for talks in the past, or if this is your first, try to give reviewers places to find background on you as a presenter.  Having an active blog and Twitter handle can also help reviewers if they're not sure what your level of expertise is.  Many call-for-papers have places for you to include this type of information.  It's always good to have new and original presenters and presentations for conferences.  Hopefully these tips will help you be successful when you answer the next call-for-papers.

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• Extrapolation breaks collision detection

  - by user22241

  Before applying extrapolation to my sprite's movement, my collision worked perfectly. However, after applying extrapolation to my sprite's movement (to smooth things out), the collision no longer works. This is how things worked before extrapolation: However, after I implement my extrapolation, the collision routine breaks. I am assuming this is because it is acting upon the new coordinate that has been produced by the extrapolation routine (which is situated in my render call ). After I apply my extrapolation How to correct this behaviour? I've tried puting an extra collision check just after extrapolation - this does seem to clear up a lot of the problems but I've ruled this out because putting logic into my rendering is out of the question. I've also tried making a copy of the spritesX position, extrapolating that and drawing using that rather than the original, thus leaving the original intact for the logic to pick up on - this seems a better option, but it still produces some weird effects when colliding with walls. I'm pretty sure this also isn't the correct way to deal with this. I've found a couple of similar questions on here but the answers haven't helped me. This is my extrapolation code: public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { //Set/Re-set loop back to 0 to start counting again loops=0; while(System.currentTimeMillis() > nextGameTick && loops < maxFrameskip){ SceneManager.getInstance().getCurrentScene().updateLogic(); nextGameTick+=skipTicks; timeCorrection += (1000d/ticksPerSecond) % 1; nextGameTick+=timeCorrection; timeCorrection %=1; loops++; tics++; } extrapolation = (float)(System.currentTimeMillis() + skipTicks - nextGameTick) / (float)skipTicks; render(extrapolation); } Applying extrapolation render(float extrapolation){ //This example shows extrapolation for X axis only. Y position (spriteScreenY is assumed to be valid) extrapolatedPosX = spriteGridX+(SpriteXVelocity*dt)*extrapolation; spriteScreenPosX = extrapolationPosX * screenWidth; drawSprite(spriteScreenX, spriteScreenY); } Edit As I mentioned above, I have tried making a copy of the sprite's coordinates specifically to draw with.... this has it's own problems. Firstly, regardless of the copying, when the sprite is moving, it's super-smooth, when it stops, it's wobbling slightly left/right - as it's still extrapolating it's position based on the time. Is this normal behavior and can we 'turn it off' when the sprite stops? I've tried having flags for left / right and only extrapolating if either of these is enabled. I've also tried copying the last and current positions to see if there is any difference. However, as far as collision goes, these don't help. If the user is pressing say, the right button and the sprite is moving right, when it hits a wall, if the user continues to hold the right button down, the sprite will keep animating to the right, while being stopped by the wall (therefore not actually moving), however because the right flag is still set and also because the collision routine is constantly moving the sprite out of the wall, it still appear to the code (not the player) that the sprite is still moving, and therefore extrapolation continues. So what the player would see, is the sprite 'static' (yes, it's animating, but it's not actually moving across the screen), and every now and then it shakes violently as the extrapolation attempts to do it's thing....... Hope this help

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