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• No GLX on Intel card with multiseat with additional nVidia card

  - by MeanEYE

  I have multiseat configured and my Xorg has 2 server layouts. One is for nVidia card and other is for Intel card. They both work, but display server assigned to Intel card doesn't have hardware acceleration since DRI and GLX module being used is from nVidia driver. So my question is, can I configure layouts somehow to use right DRI and GLX with each card? My Xorg.conf: Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Default" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "TV" Screen 0 "Screen1" 0 0 Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection Section "Monitor" # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "DELL E198WFP" HorizSync 30.0 - 83.0 VertRefresh 56.0 - 75.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor1" VendorName "Unknown" Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "GeForce GT 610" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device1" Driver "intel" BusID "PCI:0:2:0" Option "AccelMethod" "uxa" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 Option "Stereo" "0" Option "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-1" Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +1440+0, DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +0+0" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen1" Device "Device1" Monitor "Monitor1" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Log file for Intel: [ 18.239] X.Org X Server 1.13.0 Release Date: 2012-09-05 [ 18.239] X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 [ 18.239] Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.24-32-xen x86_64 Ubuntu [ 18.239] Current Operating System: Linux bytewiper 3.5.0-18-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 19 10:26:51 UTC 2012 x86_64 [ 18.239] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-18-generic root=UUID=fc0616fd-f212-4846-9241-ba4a492f0513 ro quiet splash [ 18.239] Build Date: 20 September 2012 11:55:20AM [ 18.239] xorg-server 2:1.13.0+git20120920.70e57668-0ubuntu0ricotz (For technical support please see http://www.ubuntu.com/support) [ 18.239] Current version of pixman: 0.26.0 [ 18.239] Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. [ 18.239] Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. [ 18.239] (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.1.log", Time: Wed Nov 21 18:32:14 2012 [ 18.239] (==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" [ 18.239] (==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d" [ 18.239] (++) ServerLayout "TV" [ 18.239] (**) |-->Screen "Screen1" (0) [ 18.239] (**) | |-->Monitor "Monitor1" [ 18.240] (**) | |-->Device "Device1" [ 18.240] (**) Option "Xinerama" "0" [ 18.240] (==) Automatically adding devices [ 18.240] (==) Automatically enabling devices [ 18.240] (==) Automatically adding GPU devices [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (==) FontPath set to: /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc, /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, built-ins [ 18.240] (==) ModulePath set to "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/modules" [ 18.240] (II) The server relies on udev to provide the list of input devices. If no devices become available, reconfigure udev or disable AutoAddDevices. [ 18.240] (II) Loader magic: 0x7f6917944c40 [ 18.240] (II) Module ABI versions: [ 18.240] X.Org ANSI C Emulation: 0.4 [ 18.240] X.Org Video Driver: 13.0 [ 18.240] X.Org XInput driver : 18.0 [ 18.240] X.Org Server Extension : 7.0 [ 18.240] (II) config/udev: Adding drm device (/dev/dri/card0) [ 18.241] (--) PCI: (0:0:2:0) 8086:0152:1043:84ca rev 9, Mem @ 0xf7400000/4194304, 0xd0000000/268435456, I/O @ 0x0000f000/64 [ 18.241] (--) PCI:*(0:1:0:0) 10de:104a:1458:3546 rev 161, Mem @ 0xf6000000/16777216, 0xe0000000/134217728, 0xe8000000/33554432, I/O @ 0x0000e000/128, BIOS @ 0x????????/524288 [ 18.241] (II) Open ACPI successful (/var/run/acpid.socket) [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension Generic Event Extension [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension SHAPE [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension MIT-SHM [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XInputExtension [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XTEST [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension BIG-REQUESTS [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension SYNC [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XKEYBOARD [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XC-MISC [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension SECURITY [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XFIXES [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension RENDER [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension RANDR [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension COMPOSITE [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension DAMAGE [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension DOUBLE-BUFFER [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension RECORD [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension DPMS [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension X-Resource [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XVideo [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XVideo-MotionCompensation [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-VidModeExtension [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-DGA [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-DRI [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension DRI2 [ 18.241] (II) LoadModule: "glx" [ 18.241] (II) Loading /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules/libglx.so [ 18.247] (II) Module glx: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation" [ 18.247] compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.0 [ 18.247] Module class: X.Org Server Extension [ 18.247] (II) NVIDIA GLX Module 310.19 Thu Nov 8 01:12:43 PST 2012 [ 18.247] Loading extension GLX [ 18.247] (II) LoadModule: "intel" [ 18.248] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so [ 18.248] (II) Module intel: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 18.248] compiled for 1.13.0, module version = 2.20.13 [ 18.248] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 18.248] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 13.0 [ 18.248] (II) intel: Driver for Intel Integrated Graphics Chipsets: i810, i810-dc100, i810e, i815, i830M, 845G, 854, 852GM/855GM, 865G, 915G, E7221 (i915), 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 945GME, Pineview GM, Pineview G, 965G, G35, 965Q, 946GZ, 965GM, 965GME/GLE, G33, Q35, Q33, GM45, 4 Series, G45/G43, Q45/Q43, G41, B43, B43, Clarkdale, Arrandale, Sandybridge Desktop (GT1), Sandybridge Desktop (GT2), Sandybridge Desktop (GT2+), Sandybridge Mobile (GT1), Sandybridge Mobile (GT2), Sandybridge Mobile (GT2+), Sandybridge Server, Ivybridge Mobile (GT1), Ivybridge Mobile (GT2), Ivybridge Desktop (GT1), Ivybridge Desktop (GT2), Ivybridge Server, Ivybridge Server (GT2), Haswell Desktop (GT1), Haswell Desktop (GT2), Haswell Desktop (GT2+), Haswell Mobile (GT1), Haswell Mobile (GT2), Haswell Mobile (GT2+), Haswell Server (GT1), Haswell Server (GT2), Haswell Server (GT2+), Haswell SDV Desktop (GT1), Haswell SDV Desktop (GT2), Haswell SDV Desktop (GT2+), Haswell SDV Mobile (GT1), Haswell SDV Mobile (GT2), Haswell SDV Mobile (GT2+), Haswell SDV Server (GT1), Haswell SDV Server (GT2), Haswell SDV Server (GT2+), Haswell ULT Desktop (GT1), Haswell ULT Desktop (GT2), Haswell ULT Desktop (GT2+), Haswell ULT Mobile (GT1), Haswell ULT Mobile (GT2), Haswell ULT Mobile (GT2+), Haswell ULT Server (GT1), Haswell ULT Server (GT2), Haswell ULT Server (GT2+), Haswell CRW Desktop (GT1), Haswell CRW Desktop (GT2), Haswell CRW Desktop (GT2+), Haswell CRW Mobile (GT1), Haswell CRW Mobile (GT2), Haswell CRW Mobile (GT2+), Haswell CRW Server (GT1), Haswell CRW Server (GT2), Haswell CRW Server (GT2+), ValleyView PO board [ 18.248] (++) using VT number 8 [ 18.593] (II) intel(0): using device path '/dev/dri/card0' [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32 [ 18.593] (==) intel(0): RGB weight 888 [ 18.593] (==) intel(0): Default visual is TrueColor [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Option "AccelMethod" "uxa" [ 18.593] (--) intel(0): Integrated Graphics Chipset: Intel(R) Ivybridge Desktop (GT1) [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Relaxed fencing enabled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Wait on SwapBuffers? enabled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Triple buffering? enabled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Framebuffer tiled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Pixmaps tiled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): 3D buffers tiled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): SwapBuffers wait enabled ... [ 20.312] (II) Module fb: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 20.312] compiled for 1.13.0, module version = 1.0.0 [ 20.312] ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4 [ 20.312] (II) Loading sub module "dri2" [ 20.312] (II) LoadModule: "dri2" [ 20.312] (II) Module "dri2" already built-in [ 20.312] (==) Depth 24 pixmap format is 32 bpp [ 20.312] (II) intel(0): [DRI2] Setup complete [ 20.312] (II) intel(0): [DRI2] DRI driver: i965 [ 20.312] (II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 1920x1080 stride 7680, tiled [ 20.312] (II) UXA(0): Driver registered support for the following operations: [ 20.312] (II) solid [ 20.312] (II) copy [ 20.312] (II) composite (RENDER acceleration) [ 20.312] (II) put_image [ 20.312] (II) get_image [ 20.312] (==) intel(0): Backing store disabled [ 20.312] (==) intel(0): Silken mouse enabled [ 20.312] (II) intel(0): Initializing HW Cursor [ 20.312] (II) intel(0): RandR 1.2 enabled, ignore the following RandR disabled message. [ 20.313] (**) intel(0): DPMS enabled [ 20.313] (==) intel(0): Intel XvMC decoder enabled [ 20.313] (II) intel(0): Set up textured video [ 20.313] (II) intel(0): [XvMC] xvmc_vld driver initialized. [ 20.313] (II) intel(0): direct rendering: DRI2 Enabled [ 20.313] (==) intel(0): hotplug detection: "enabled" [ 20.332] (--) RandR disabled [ 20.335] (EE) Failed to initialize GLX extension (Compatible NVIDIA X driver not found) [ 20.335] (II) intel(0): Setting screen physical size to 508 x 285 [ 20.338] (II) XKB: reuse xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-B20D7FC79C7F597315E3E501AEF10E0D866E8E92.xkm [ 20.340] (II) config/udev: Adding input device Power Button (/dev/input/event1) [ 20.340] (**) Power Button: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" [ 20.340] (II) LoadModule: "evdev" [ 20.340] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so

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• T4 Performance Counters explained

  - by user13346607

  Now that T4 is out for a few month some people might have wondered what details of the new pipeline you can monitor. A "cpustat -h" lists a lot of events that can be monitored, and only very few are self-explanatory. I will try to give some insight on all of them, some of these "PIC events" require an in-depth knowledge of T4 pipeline. Over time I will try to explain these, for the time being these events should simply be ignored. (Side note: some counters changed from tape-out 1.1 (*only* used in the T4 beta program) to tape-out 1.2 (used in the systems shipping today) The table only lists the tape-out 1.2 counters) 0 0 1 1058 6033 Oracle Microelectronics 50 14 7077 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} pic name (cpustat) Prose Comment Sel-pipe-drain-cycles, Sel-0-[wait|ready], Sel-[1,2] Sel-0-wait counts cycles a strand waits to be selected. Some reasons can be counted in detail; these are: Sel-0-ready: Cycles a strand was ready but not selected, that can signal pipeline oversubscription Sel-1: Cycles only one instruction or µop was selected Sel-2: Cycles two instructions or µops were selected Sel-pipe-drain-cycles: cf. PRM footnote 8 to table 10.2 Pick-any, Pick-[0|1|2|3] Cycles one, two, three, no or at least one instruction or µop is picked Instr_FGU_crypto Number of FGU or crypto instructions executed on that vcpu Instr_ld dto. for load Instr_st dto. for store SPR_ring_ops dto. for SPR ring ops Instr_other dto. for all other instructions not listed above, PRM footnote 7 to table 10.2 lists the instructions Instr_all total number of instructions executed on that vcpu Sw_count_intr Nr of S/W count instructions on that vcpu (sethi %hi(fc000),%g0 (whatever that is))  Atomics nr of atomic ops, which are LDSTUB/a, CASA/XA, and SWAP/A SW_prefetch Nr of PREFETCH or PREFETCHA instructions Block_ld_st Block loads or store on that vcpu IC_miss_nospec, IC_miss_[L2_or_L3|local|remote]\ _hit_nospec Various I$ misses, distinguished by where they hit. All of these count per thread, but only primary events: T4 counts only the first occurence of an I$ miss on a core for a certain instruction. If one strand misses in I$ this miss is counted, but if a second strand on the same core misses while the first miss is being resolved, that second miss is not counted This flavour of I$ misses counts only misses that are caused by instruction that really commit (note the "_nospec") BTC_miss Branch target cache miss ITLB_miss ITLB misses (synchronously counted) ITLB_miss_asynch dto. but asynchronously [I|D]TLB_fill_\ [8KB|64KB|4MB|256MB|2GB|trap] H/W tablewalk events that fill ITLB or DTLB with translation for the corresponding page size. The “_trap” event occurs if the HWTW was not able to fill the corresponding TLB IC_mtag_miss, IC_mtag_miss_\ [ptag_hit|ptag_miss|\ ptag_hit_way_mismatch] I$ micro tag misses, with some options for drill down Fetch-0, Fetch-0-all fetch-0 counts nr of cycles nothing was fetched for this particular strand, fetch-0-all counts cycles nothing was fetched for all strands on a core Instr_buffer_full Cycles the instruction buffer for a strand was full, thereby preventing any fetch BTC_targ_incorrect Counts all occurences of wrongly predicted branch targets from the BTC [PQ|ROB|LB|ROB_LB|SB|\ ROB_SB|LB_SB|RB_LB_SB|\ DTLB_miss]\ _tag_wait ST_q_tag_wait is listed under sl=20. These counters monitor pipeline behaviour therefore they are not strand specific: PQ_...: cycles Rename stage waits for a Pick Queue tag (might signal memory bound workload for single thread mode, cf. Mail from Richard Smith) ROB_...: cycles Select stage waits for a ROB (ReOrderBuffer) tag LB_...: cycles Select stage waits for a Load Buffer tag SB_...: cycles Select stage waits for Store Buffer tag combinations of the above are allowed, although some of these events can overlap, the counter will only be incremented once per cycle if any of these occur DTLB_...: cycles load or store instructions wait at Pick stage for a DTLB miss tag [ID]TLB_HWTW_\ [L2_hit|L3_hit|L3_miss|all] Counters for HWTW accesses caused by either DTLB or ITLB misses. Canbe further detailed by where they hit IC_miss_L2_L3_hit, IC_miss_local_remote_remL3_hit, IC_miss I$ prefetches that were dropped because they either miss in L2$ or L3$ This variant counts misses regardless if the causing instruction commits or not DC_miss_nospec, DC_miss_[L2_L3|local|remote_L3]\ _hit_nospec D$ misses either in general or detailed by where they hit cf. the explanation for the IC_miss in two flavours for an explanation of _nospec and the reasoning for two DC_miss counters DTLB_miss_asynch counts all DTLB misses asynchronously, there is no way to count them synchronously DC_pref_drop_DC_hit, SW_pref_drop_[DC_hit|buffer_full] L1-D$ h/w prefetches that were dropped because of a D$ hit, counted per core. The others count software prefetches per strand [Full|Partial]_RAW_hit_st_[buf|q] Count events where a load wants to get data that has not yet been stored, i. e. it is still inside the pipeline. The data might be either still in the store buffer or in the store queue. If the load's data matches in the SB and in the store queue the data in buffer takes precedence of course since it is younger [IC|DC]_evict_invalid, [IC|DC|L1]_snoop_invalid, [IC|DC|L1]_invalid_all Counter for invalidated cache evictions per core St_q_tag_wait Number of cycles pipeline waits for a store queue tag, of course counted per core Data_pref_[drop_L2|drop_L3|\ hit_L2|hit_L3|\ hit_local|hit_remote] Data prefetches that can be further detailed by either why they were dropped or where they did hit St_hit_[L2|L3], St_L2_[local|remote]_C2C, St_local, St_remote Store events distinguished by where they hit or where they cause a L2 cache-to-cache transfer, i.e. either a transfer from another L2$ on the same die or from a different die DC_miss, DC_miss_\ [L2_L3|local|remote]_hit D$ misses either in general or detailed by where they hit cf. the explanation for the IC_miss in two flavours for an explanation of _nospec and the reasoning for two DC_miss counters L2_[clean|dirty]_evict Per core clean or dirty L2$ evictions L2_fill_buf_full, L2_wb_buf_full, L2_miss_buf_full Per core L2$ buffer events, all count number of cycles that this state was present L2_pipe_stall Per core cycles pipeline stalled because of L2$ Branches Count branches (Tcc, DONE, RETRY, and SIT are not counted as branches) Br_taken Counts taken branches (Tcc, DONE, RETRY, and SIT are not counted as branches) Br_mispred, Br_dir_mispred, Br_trg_mispred, Br_trg_mispred_\ [far_tbl|indir_tbl|ret_stk] Counter for various branch misprediction events.  Cycles_user counts cycles, attribute setting hpriv, nouser, sys controls addess space to count in Commit-[0|1|2], Commit-0-all, Commit-1-or-2 Number of times either no, one, or two µops commit for a strand. Commit-0-all counts number of times no µop commits for the whole core, cf. footnote 11 to table 10.2 in PRM for a more detailed explanation on how this counters interacts with the privilege levels

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• Rapid Evolution of Society & Technology

  - by Michael Snow

  We caught up with Brian Solis on the phone the other day and Christie Flanagan had a chance to chat with him and learn a bit more about him and some of the concepts he'll be addressing in our Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast on Thursday 12/13/12. «--- Interview with Brian Solis  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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast- mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Be sure and register for this week's webcast ---» ------------------- Guest post by Brian Solis. Reposted (Borrowed) from his posting of May 24, 2012 Dear [insert business name], what’s your promise? - Brian Solis You say you want to get closer to customers, but your actions are different than your words. You say you want to “surprise and delight” customers, but your product development teams are too busy building against a roadmap without consideration of the 5th P of marketing…people. Your employees are your number one asset, however the infrastructure of the organization has turned once optimistic and ambitious intrapreneurs into complacent cogs or worse, your greatest detractors. You question the adoption of disruptive technology by your internal champions yet you’ve not tried to find the value for yourself. You’re a change agent and you truly wish to bring about change, but you’ve not invested time or resources to answer “why” in your endeavors to become a connected or social business. If we are to truly change, we must find purpose. We must uncover the essence of our business and the value it delivers to traditional and connected consumers. We must rethink the spirit of today’s embrace and clearly articulate how transformation is going to improve customer and employee experiences and relationships now and over time. Without doing so, any attempts at evolution will be thwarted by reality. In an era of Digital Darwinism, no business is too big to fail or too small to succeed. These are undisciplined times which require alternative approaches to recognize and pursue new opportunities. But everything begins with acknowledging the 360 view of the world that you see today is actually a filtered view of managed and efficient convenience. Today, many organizations that were once inspired by innovation and engagement have fallen into a process of marketing, operationalizing, managing, and optimizing. That might have worked for the better part of the last century, but for the next 10 years and beyond, new vision, leadership and supporting business models will be written to move businesses from rigid frameworks to adaptive and agile entities. I believe that today’s executives will undergo a great test; a test of character, vision, intention, and universal leadership. It starts with a simple, but essential question…what is your promise? Notice, I didn’t ask about your brand promise. Nor did I ask for you to cite your mission and vision statements. This is much more than value propositions or manufactured marketing language designed to hook audiences and stakeholders. I asked for your promise to me as your consumer, stakeholder, and partner. This isn’t about B2B or B2C, but instead, people to people, person to person. It is this promise that will breathe new life into an organization that on the outside, could be misdiagnosed as catatonic by those who are disrupting your markets. A promise, for example, is meant to inspire. It creates alignment. It serves as the foundation for your vision, mission, and all business strategies and it must come from the top to mean anything. For without it, we cannot genuinely voice what it is we stand for or stand behind. Think for a moment about the definition of community. It’s easy to confuse a workplace or a market where everyone simply shares common characteristics. However, a community in this day and age is much more than belonging to something, it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter The next few years will force a divide where companies are separated by intention as measured by actions and words. But, becoming a social business is not enough. Becoming more authentic and transparent doesn’t serve as a mantra for a renaissance. A promise is the ink that inscribes the spirit of the relationship between you and me. A promise serves as the words that influence change from within and change beyond the halls of our business. It is the foundation for a renewed embrace, one that must then find its way to every aspect of the organization. It’s the difference between a social business and an adaptive business. While an adaptive business can also be social, it is the culture of the organization that strives to not just use technology to extend current philosophies or processes into new domains, but instead give rise to a new culture where striving for relevance is among its goals. The tools and networks simply become enablers of a greater mission You are reading this because you believe in something more than what you’re doing today. While you fight for change within your organization, remember to aim for a higher purpose. Organizations that strive for innovation, imagination, and relevance will outperform those that do not. Part of your job is to lead a missionary push that unites the groundswell with a top down cascade. Change will only happen because you and other internal champions see what others can’t and will do what other won’t. It takes resolve. It takes the ability to translate new opportunities into business value. And, it takes courage. “This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us”-Steve Jobs ----------------------------------------------------------------- So -- where do you begin to evaluate the kind of experience you are delivering for your customers, partners, and employees?  Take a look at this White Paper: Creating a Successful and Meaningful Customer Experience on the Web and then have a cup of coffee while you listen to the sage advice of Guy Kawasaki in a short video below.   An interview with Guy Kawasaki on Maximizing Social Media Channels 

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• Consuming the Amazon S3 service from a Win8 Metro Application

  - by cibrax

  As many of the existing Http APIs for Cloud Services, AWS also provides a set of different platform SDKs for hiding many of complexities present in the APIs. While there is a platform SDK for .NET, which is open source and available in C#, that SDK does not work in Win8 Metro Applications for the changes introduced in WinRT. WinRT offers a complete different set of APIs for doing I/O operations such as doing http calls or using cryptography for signing or encrypting data, two aspects that are absolutely necessary for consuming AWS. All the I/O APIs available as part of WinRT are asynchronous, and uses the TPL model for .NET applications (HTML and JavaScript Metro applications use a model based in promises, which is similar concept).  In the case of S3, the http Authorization header is used for two purposes, authenticating clients and make sure the messages were not altered while they were in transit. For doing that, it uses a signature or hash of the message content and some of the headers using a symmetric key (That's just one of the available mechanisms). Windows Azure for example also uses the same mechanism in many of its APIs. There are three challenges that any developer working for first time in Metro will have to face to consume S3, the new WinRT APIs, the asynchronous nature of them and the complexity introduced for generating the Authorization header. Having said that, I decided to write this post with some of the gotchas I found myself trying to consume this Amazon service. 1. Generating the signature for the Authorization header All the cryptography APIs in WinRT are available under Windows.Security.Cryptography namespace. Many of operations available in these APIs uses the concept of buffers (IBuffer) for representing a chunk of binary data. As you will see in the example below, these buffers are mainly generated with the use of static methods in a WinRT class CryptographicBuffer available as part of the namespace previously mentioned. private string DeriveAuthToken(string resource, string httpMethod, string timestamp) { var stringToSign = string.Format("{0}\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "x-amz-date:{1}\n" + "/{2}/", httpMethod, timestamp, resource); var algorithm = MacAlgorithmProvider.OpenAlgorithm("HMAC_SHA1"); var keyMaterial = CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(this.secret)); var hmacKey = algorithm.CreateKey(keyMaterial); var signature = CryptographicEngine.Sign( hmacKey, CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringToSign)) ); return CryptographicBuffer.EncodeToBase64String(signature); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The algorithm that determines the information or content you need to use for generating the signature is very well described as part of the AWS documentation. In this case, this method is generating a signature required for creating a new bucket. A HmacSha1 hash is computed using a secret or symetric key provided by AWS in the management console. 2. Sending an Http Request to the S3 service WinRT also ships with the System.Net.Http.HttpClient that was first introduced some months ago with ASP.NET Web API. This client provides a rich interface on top the traditional WebHttpRequest class, and also solves some of limitations found in this last one. There are a few things that don't work with a raw WebHttpRequest such as setting the Host header, which is something absolutely required for consuming S3. Also, HttpClient is more friendly for doing unit tests, as it receives a HttpMessageHandler as part of the constructor that can fake to emulate a real http call. This is how the code for consuming the service with HttpClient looks like, public async Task<S3Response> CreateBucket(string name, string region = null, params string[] acl) { var timestamp = string.Format("{0:r}", DateTime.UtcNow); var auth = DeriveAuthToken(name, "PUT", timestamp); var request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Put, "http://s3.amazonaws.com/"); request.Headers.Host = string.Format("{0}.s3.amazonaws.com", name); request.Headers.TryAddWithoutValidation("Authorization", "AWS " + this.key + ":" + auth); request.Headers.Add("x-amz-date", timestamp); var client = new HttpClient(); var response = await client.SendAsync(request); return new S3Response { Succeed = response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK, Message = (response.Content != null) ? await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync() : null }; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You will notice a few additional things in this code. By default, HttpClient validates the values for some well-know headers, and Authorization is one of them. It won't allow you to set a value with ":" on it, which is something that S3 expects. However, that's not a problem at all, as you can skip the validation by using the TryAddWithoutValidation method. Also, the code is heavily relying on the new async and await keywords to transform all the asynchronous calls into synchronous ones. In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, public class FakeHttpMessageHandler : HttpMessageHandler { HttpResponseMessage response; public FakeHttpMessageHandler(HttpResponseMessage response) { this.response = response; } protected override Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<HttpResponseMessage>(); tcs.SetResult(response); return tcs.Task; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You can use this handler for injecting any response while you are unit testing the code.

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• Consuming the Amazon S3 service from a Win8 Metro Application

  - by cibrax

  As many of the existing Http APIs for Cloud Services, AWS also provides a set of different platform SDKs for hiding many of complexities present in the APIs. While there is a platform SDK for .NET, which is open source and available in C#, that SDK does not work in Win8 Metro Applications for the changes introduced in WinRT. WinRT offers a complete different set of APIs for doing I/O operations such as doing http calls or using cryptography for signing or encrypting data, two aspects that are absolutely necessary for consuming AWS. All the I/O APIs available as part of WinRT are asynchronous, and uses the TPL model for .NET applications (HTML and JavaScript Metro applications use a model based in promises, which is similar concept).  In the case of S3, the http Authorization header is used for two purposes, authenticating clients and make sure the messages were not altered while they were in transit. For doing that, it uses a signature or hash of the message content and some of the headers using a symmetric key (That's just one of the available mechanisms). Windows Azure for example also uses the same mechanism in many of its APIs. There are three challenges that any developer working for first time in Metro will have to face to consume S3, the new WinRT APIs, the asynchronous nature of them and the complexity introduced for generating the Authorization header. Having said that, I decided to write this post with some of the gotchas I found myself trying to consume this Amazon service. 1. Generating the signature for the Authorization header All the cryptography APIs in WinRT are available under Windows.Security.Cryptography namespace. Many of operations available in these APIs uses the concept of buffers (IBuffer) for representing a chunk of binary data. As you will see in the example below, these buffers are mainly generated with the use of static methods in a WinRT class CryptographicBuffer available as part of the namespace previously mentioned. private string DeriveAuthToken(string resource, string httpMethod, string timestamp) { var stringToSign = string.Format("{0}\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "x-amz-date:{1}\n" + "/{2}/", httpMethod, timestamp, resource); var algorithm = MacAlgorithmProvider.OpenAlgorithm("HMAC_SHA1"); var keyMaterial = CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(this.secret)); var hmacKey = algorithm.CreateKey(keyMaterial); var signature = CryptographicEngine.Sign( hmacKey, CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringToSign)) ); return CryptographicBuffer.EncodeToBase64String(signature); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The algorithm that determines the information or content you need to use for generating the signature is very well described as part of the AWS documentation. In this case, this method is generating a signature required for creating a new bucket. A HmacSha1 hash is computed using a secret or symetric key provided by AWS in the management console. 2. Sending an Http Request to the S3 service WinRT also ships with the System.Net.Http.HttpClient that was first introduced some months ago with ASP.NET Web API. This client provides a rich interface on top the traditional WebHttpRequest class, and also solves some of limitations found in this last one. There are a few things that don't work with a raw WebHttpRequest such as setting the Host header, which is something absolutely required for consuming S3. Also, HttpClient is more friendly for doing unit tests, as it receives a HttpMessageHandler as part of the constructor that can fake to emulate a real http call. This is how the code for consuming the service with HttpClient looks like, public async Task<S3Response> CreateBucket(string name, string region = null, params string[] acl) { var timestamp = string.Format("{0:r}", DateTime.UtcNow); var auth = DeriveAuthToken(name, "PUT", timestamp); var request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Put, "http://s3.amazonaws.com/"); request.Headers.Host = string.Format("{0}.s3.amazonaws.com", name); request.Headers.TryAddWithoutValidation("Authorization", "AWS " + this.key + ":" + auth); request.Headers.Add("x-amz-date", timestamp); var client = new HttpClient(); var response = await client.SendAsync(request); return new S3Response { Succeed = response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK, Message = (response.Content != null) ? await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync() : null }; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You will notice a few additional things in this code. By default, HttpClient validates the values for some well-know headers, and Authorization is one of them. It won't allow you to set a value with ":" on it, which is something that S3 expects. However, that's not a problem at all, as you can skip the validation by using the TryAddWithoutValidation method. Also, the code is heavily relying on the new async and await keywords to transform all the asynchronous calls into synchronous ones. In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, public class FakeHttpMessageHandler : HttpMessageHandler { HttpResponseMessage response; public FakeHttpMessageHandler(HttpResponseMessage response) { this.response = response; } protected override Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<HttpResponseMessage>(); tcs.SetResult(response); return tcs.Task; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You can use this handler for injecting any response while you are unit testing the code.

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• iPhone SDK vs. Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 2: MoveMe

  In this series, I will be taking sample applications from the iPhone SDK and implementing them on Windows Phone 7 Series.  My goal is to do as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as I can.  This series will be written to not only compare and contrast how easy or difficult it is to complete tasks on either platform, how many lines of code, etc., but Id also like it to be a way for iPhone developers to either get started on Windows Phone 7 Series development, or for developers in general to learn the platform. Heres my methodology: Run the iPhone SDK app in the iPhone Simulator to get a feel for what it does and how it works, without looking at the implementation Implement the equivalent functionality on Windows Phone 7 Series using Silverlight. Compare the two implementations based on complexity, functionality, lines of code, number of files, etc. Add some functionality to the Windows Phone 7 Series app that shows off a way to make the scenario more interesting or leverages an aspect of the platform, or uses a better design pattern to implement the functionality. You can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP here, and the Expression Blend 4 Beta here. If youre seeing this series for the first time, check out Part 1: Hello World. A note on methodologyin the prior post there was some feedback about lines of code not being a very good metric for this exercise.  I dont really disagree, theres a lot more to this than lines of code but I believe that is a relevant metric, even if its not the ultimate one.  And theres no perfect answer here.  So I am going to continue to report the number of lines of code that I, as a developer would need to write in these apps as a data point, and Ill leave it up to the reader to determine how that fits in with overall complexity, etc.  The first example was so basic that I think it was difficult to talk about in real terms.  I think that as these apps get more complex, the subjective differences in concept count and will be more important.  MoveMe The MoveMe app is the main end-to-end app writing example in the iPhone SDK, called Creating an iPhone Application.  This application demonstrates a few concepts, including handling touch input, how to do animations, and how to do some basic transforms. The behavior of the application is pretty simple.  User touches the button: The button does a throb type animation where it scales up and then back down briefly. User drags the button: After a touch begins, moving the touch point will drag the button around with the touch. User lets go of the button: The button animates back to its original position, but does a few small bounces as it reaches its original point, which makes the app fun and gives it an extra bit of interactivity. Now, how would I write an app that meets this spec for Windows Phone 7 Series, and how hard would it be?  Lets find out!     Implementing the UI Okay, lets build the UI for this application.  In the HelloWorld example, we did all the UI design in Visual Studio and/or by hand in XAML.  In this example, were going to use the Expression Blend 4 Beta. You might be wondering when to use Visual Studio, when to use Blend, and when to do XAML by hand.  Different people will have different takes on this, but heres mine: XAML by hand simple UI that doesnt contain animations, gradients, etc., and or UI that I want to really optimize and craft when I know exactly what I want to do. Visual Studio Basic UI layout, property setting, data binding, etc. Blend Any serious design work needs to be done in Blend, including animations, handling states and transitions, styling and templating, editing resources. As in Part 1, go ahead and fire up Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (yes, soon it will take longer to say the name of our products than to start them up!), and create a new Windows Phone Application.  As in Part 1, clear out the XAML from the designer.  An easy way to do this is to just: Click on the design surface Hit Control+A Hit Delete Theres a little bit left over (the Grid.RowDefinitions element), just go ahead and delete that element so were starting with a clean state of only one outer Grid element. To use Blend, we need to save this project.  See, when you create a project with Visual Studio Express, it doesnt commit it to the disk (well, in a place where you can find it, at least) until you actually save the project.  This is handy if youre doing some fooling around, because it doesnt clutter your disk with WindowsPhoneApplication23-like directories.  But its also kind of dangerous, since when you close VS, if you dont save the projectits all gone.  Yes, this has bitten me since I was saving files and didnt remember that, so be careful to save the project/solution via Save All, at least once. So, save and note the location on disk.  Start Expression Blend 4 Beta, and chose File > Open Project/Solution, and load your project.  You should see just about the same thing you saw over in VS: a blank, black designer surface. Now, thinking about this application, we dont really need a button, even though it looks like one.  We never click it.  So were just going to create a visual and use that.  This is also true in the iPhone example above, where the visual is actually not a button either but a jpg image with a nice gradient and round edges.  Well do something simple here that looks pretty good. In Blend, look in the tool pane on the left for the icon that looks like the below (the highlighted one on the left), and hold it down to get the popout menu, and choose Border:    Okay, now draw out a box in the middle of the design surface of about 300x100.  The Properties Pane to the left should show the properties for this item. First, lets make it more visible by giving it a border brush.  Set the BorderBrush to white by clicking BorderBrush and dragging the color selector all the way to the upper right in the palette.  Then, down a bit farther, make the BorderThickness 4 all the way around, and the CornerRadius set to 6. In the Layout section, do the following to Width, Height, Horizontal and Vertical Alignment, and Margin (all 4 margin values): Youll see the outline now is in the middle of the design surface.  Now lets give it a background color.  Above BorderBrush select Background, and click the third tab over: Gradient Brush.  Youll see a gradient slider at the bottom, and if you click the markers, you can edit the gradient stops individually (or add more).  In this case, you can select something you like, but wheres what I chose: Left stop: #BFACCFE2 (I just picked a spot on the palette and set opacity to 75%, no magic here, feel free to fiddle these or just enter these numbers into the hex area and be done with it) Right stop: #FF3E738F Okay, looks pretty good.  Finally set the name of the element in the Name field at the top of the Properties pane to welcome. Now lets add some text.  Just hit T and itll select the TextBlock tool automatically: Now draw out some are inside our welcome visual and type Welcome!, then click on the design surface (to exit text entry mode) and hit V to go back into selection mode (or the top item in the tool pane that looks like a mouse pointer).  Click on the text again to select it in the tool pane.  Just like the border, we want to center this.  So set HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment to Center, and clear the Margins: Thats it for the UI.  Heres how it looks, on the design surface: Not bad!  Okay, now the fun part Adding Animations Using Blend to build animations is a lot of fun, and its easy.  In XAML, I can not only declare elements and visuals, but also I can declare animations that will affect those visuals.  These are called Storyboards. To recap, well be doing two animations: The throb animation when the element is touched The center animation when the element is released after being dragged. The throb animation is just a scale transform, so well do that first.  In the Objects and Timeline Pane (left side, bottom half), click the little + icon to add a new Storyboard called touchStoryboard: The timeline view will appear.  In there, click a bit to the right of 0 to create a keyframe at .2 seconds: Now, click on our welcome element (the Border, not the TextBlock in it), and scroll to the bottom of the Properties Pane.  Open up Transform, click the third tab ("Scale), and set X and Y to 1.2: This all of this says that, at .2 seconds, I want the X and Y size of this element to scale to 1.2. In fact you can see this happen.  Push the Play arrow in the timeline view, and youll see the animation run! Lets make two tweaks.  First, we want the animation to automatically reverse so it scales up then back down nicely. Click in the dropdown that says touchStoryboard in Objects and Timeline, then in the Properties pane check Auto Reverse: Now run it again, and youll see it go both ways. Lets even make it nicer by adding an easing function. First, click on the Render Transform item in the Objects tree, then, in the Property Pane, youll see a bunch of easing functions to choose from.  Feel free to play with this, then seeing how each runs.  I chose Circle In, but some other ones are fun.  Try them out!  Elastic In is kind of fun, but well stick with Circle In.  Thats it for that animation. Now, we also want an animation to move the Border back to its original position when the user ends the touch gesture.  This is exactly the same process as above, but just targeting a different transform property. Create a new animation called releaseStoryboard Select a timeline point at 1.2 seconds. Click on the welcome Border element again Scroll to the Transforms panel at the bottom of the Properties Pane Choose the first tab (Translate), which may already be selected Set both X and Y values to 0.0 (we do this just to make the values stick, because the value is already 0 and we need Blend to know we want to save that value) Click on RenderTransform in the Objects tree In the properties pane, choose Bounce Out Set Bounces to 6, and Bounciness to 4 (feel free to play with these as well) Okay, were done. Note, if you want to test this Storyboard, you have to do something a little tricky because the final value is the same as the initial value, so playing it does nothing.  If you want to play with it, do the following: Next to the selection dropdown, hit the little "x (Close Storyboard) Go to the Translate Transform value for welcome Set X,Y to 50, 200, respectively (or whatever) Select releaseStoryboard again from the dropdown Hit play, see it run Go into the object tree and select RenderTransform to change the easing function. When youre done, hit the Close Storyboard x again and set the values in Transform/Translate back to 0 Wiring Up the Animations Okay, now go back to Visual Studio.  Youll get a prompt due to the modification of MainPage.xaml.  Hit Yes. In the designer, click on the welcome Border element.  In the Property Browser, hit the Events button, then double click each of ManipulationStarted, ManipulationDelta, ManipulationCompleted.  Youll need to flip back to the designer from code, after each double click. Its code time.  Here we go. Here, three event handlers have been created for us: welcome_ManipulationStarted: This will execute when a manipulation begins.  Think of it as MouseDown. welcome_ManipulationDelta: This executes each time a manipulation changes.  Think MouseMove. welcome_ManipulationCompleted: This will  execute when the manipulation ends. Think MouseUp. Now, in ManipuliationStarted, we want to kick off the throb animation that we called touchAnimation.  Thats easy: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationStarted(object sender, ManipulationStartedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: touchStoryboard.Begin(); 4: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Likewise, when the manipulation completes, we want to re-center the welcome visual with our bounce animation: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationCompleted(object sender, ManipulationCompletedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: releaseStoryboard.Begin(); 4: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Note there is actually a way to kick off these animations from Blend directly via something called Triggers, but I think its clearer to show whats going on like this.  A Trigger basically allows you to say When this event fires, trigger this Storyboard, so its the exact same logical process as above, but without the code. But how do we get the object to move?  Well, for that we really dont want an animation because we want it to respond immediately to user input. We do this by directly modifying the transform to match the offset for the manipulation, and then well let the animation bring it back to zero when the manipulation completes.  The manipulation events do a great job of keeping track of all the stuff that you usually had to do yourself when doing drags: where you started from, how far youve moved, etc. So we can easily modify the position as below: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationDelta(object sender, ManipulationDeltaEventArgs e) 2: { 3: CompositeTransform transform = (CompositeTransform)welcome.RenderTransform; 4:   5: transform.TranslateX = e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation.X; 6: transform.TranslateY = e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation.Y; 7: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Thats it! Go ahead and run the app in the emulator.  I suggest running without the debugger, its a little faster (CTRL+F5).  If youve got a machine that supports DirectX 10, youll see nice smooth GPU accelerated graphics, which also what it looks like on the phone, running at about 60 frames per second.  If your machine does not support DX10 (like the laptop Im writing this on!), it wont be quite a smooth so youll have to take my word for it! Comparing Against the iPhone This is an example where the flexibility and power of XAML meets the tooling of Visual Studio and Blend, and the whole experience really shines.  So, for several things that are declarative and 100% toolable with the Windows Phone 7 Series, this example does them with code on the iPhone.  In parens is the lines of code that I count to do these operations. PlacardView.m: 19 total LOC Creating the view that hosts the button-like image and the text Drawing the image that is the background of the button Drawing the Welcome text over the image (I think you could technically do this step and/or the prior one using Interface Builder) MoveMeView.m:  63 total LOC Constructing and running the scale (throb) animation (25) Constructing the path describing the animation back to center plus bounce effect (38) Beyond the code count, yy experience with doing this kind of thing in code is that its VERY time intensive.  When I was a developer back on Windows Forms, doing GDI+ drawing, we did this stuff a lot, and it took forever!  You write some code and even once you get it basically working, you see its not quite right, you go back, tweak the interval, or the math a bit, run it again, etc.  You can take a look at the iPhone code here to judge for yourself.  Scroll down to animatePlacardViewToCenter toward the bottom.  I dont think this code is terribly complicated, but its not what Id call simple and its not at all simple to get right. And then theres a few other lines of code running around for setting up the ViewController and the Views, about 15 lines between MoveMeAppDelegate, PlacardView, and MoveMeView, plus the assorted decls in the h files. Adding those up, I conservatively get something like 100 lines of code (19+63+15+decls) on iPhone that I have to write, by hand, to make this project work. The lines of code that I wrote in the examples above is 5 lines of code on Windows Phone 7 Series. In terms of incremental concept counts beyond the HelloWorld app, heres a shot at that: iPhone: Drawing Images Drawing Text Handling touch events Creating animations Scaling animations Building a path and animating along that Windows Phone 7 Series: Laying out UI in Blend Creating & testing basic animations in Blend Handling touch events Invoking animations from code This was actually the first example I tried converting, even before I did the HelloWorld, and I was pretty surprised.  Some of this is luck that this app happens to match up with the Windows Phone 7 Series platform just perfectly.  In terms of time, I wrote the above application, from scratch, in about 10 minutes.  I dont know how long it would take a very skilled iPhone developer to write MoveMe on that iPhone from scratch, but if I was to write it on Silverlight in the same way (e.g. all via code), I think it would likely take me at least an hour or two to get it all working right, maybe more if I ended up picking the wrong strategy or couldnt get the math right, etc. Making Some Tweaks Silverlight contains a feature called Projections to do a variety of 3D-like effects with a 2D surface. So lets play with that a bit. Go back to Blend and select the welcome Border in the object tree.  In its properties, scroll down to the bottom, open Transform, and see Projection at the bottom.  Set X,Y,Z to 90.  Youll see the element kind of disappear, replaced by a thin blue line. Now Create a new animation called startupStoryboard. Set its key time to .5 seconds in the timeline view Set the projection values above to 0 for X, Y, and Z. Save Go back to Visual Studio, and in the constructor, add the following bold code (lines 7-9 to the constructor: 1: public MainPage() 2: { 3: InitializeComponent(); 4:   5: SupportedOrientations = SupportedPageOrientation.Portrait; 6:   7: this.Loaded += (s, e) => 8: { 9: startupStoryboard.Begin(); 10: }; 11: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If the code above looks funny, its using something called a lambda in C#, which is an inline anonymous method.  Its just a handy shorthand for creating a handler like the manipulation ones above. So with this youll get a nice 3D looking fly in effect when the app starts up.  Here it is, in flight: Pretty cool!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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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5: Part 2 – Table per Type (TPT)

  - by mortezam

  In the previous blog post you saw that there are three different approaches to representing an inheritance hierarchy and I explained Table per Hierarchy (TPH) as the default mapping strategy in EF Code First. We argued that the disadvantages of TPH may be too serious for our design since it results in denormalized schemas that can become a major burden in the long run. In today’s blog post we are going to learn about Table per Type (TPT) as another inheritance mapping strategy and we'll see that TPT doesn’t expose us to this problem. Table per Type (TPT)Table per Type is about representing inheritance relationships as relational foreign key associations. Every class/subclass that declares persistent properties—including abstract classes—has its own table. The table for subclasses contains columns only for each noninherited property (each property declared by the subclass itself) along with a primary key that is also a foreign key of the base class table. This approach is shown in the following figure: For example, if an instance of the CreditCard subclass is made persistent, the values of properties declared by the BillingDetail base class are persisted to a new row of the BillingDetails table. Only the values of properties declared by the subclass (i.e. CreditCard) are persisted to a new row of the CreditCards table. The two rows are linked together by their shared primary key value. Later, the subclass instance may be retrieved from the database by joining the subclass table with the base class table. TPT Advantages The primary advantage of this strategy is that the SQL schema is normalized. In addition, schema evolution is straightforward (modifying the base class or adding a new subclass is just a matter of modify/add one table). Integrity constraint definition are also straightforward (note how CardType in CreditCards table is now a non-nullable column). Another much more important advantage is the ability to handle polymorphic associations (a polymorphic association is an association to a base class, hence to all classes in the hierarchy with dynamic resolution of the concrete class at runtime). A polymorphic association to a particular subclass may be represented as a foreign key referencing the table of that particular subclass. Implement TPT in EF Code First We can create a TPT mapping simply by placing Table attribute on the subclasses to specify the mapped table name (Table attribute is a new data annotation and has been added to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in CTP5): public abstract class BillingDetail {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } } [Table("BankAccounts")] public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } } [Table("CreditCards")] public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } } public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; } } If you prefer fluent API, then you can create a TPT mapping by using ToTable() method: protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder) {     modelBuilder.Entity<BankAccount>().ToTable("BankAccounts");     modelBuilder.Entity<CreditCard>().ToTable("CreditCards"); } Generated SQL For QueriesLet’s take an example of a simple non-polymorphic query that returns a list of all the BankAccounts: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails.OfType<BankAccount>() select b; Executing this query (by invoking ToList() method) results in the following SQL statements being sent to the database (on the bottom, you can also see the result of executing the generated query in SQL Server Management Studio): Now, let’s take an example of a very simple polymorphic query that requests all the BillingDetails which includes both BankAccount and CreditCard types: projects some properties out of the base class BillingDetail, without querying for anything from any of the subclasses: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails             select new { b.BillingDetailId, b.Number, b.Owner }; -- var query = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; This LINQ query seems even more simple than the previous one but the resulting SQL query is not as simple as you might expect: -- As you can see, EF Code First relies on an INNER JOIN to detect the existence (or absence) of rows in the subclass tables CreditCards and BankAccounts so it can determine the concrete subclass for a particular row of the BillingDetails table. Also the SQL CASE statements that you see in the beginning of the query is just to ensure columns that are irrelevant for a particular row have NULL values in the returning flattened table. (e.g. BankName for a row that represents a CreditCard type) TPT ConsiderationsEven though this mapping strategy is deceptively simple, the experience shows that performance can be unacceptable for complex class hierarchies because queries always require a join across many tables. In addition, this mapping strategy is more difficult to implement by hand— even ad-hoc reporting is more complex. This is an important consideration if you plan to use handwritten SQL in your application (For ad hoc reporting, database views provide a way to offset the complexity of the TPT strategy. A view may be used to transform the table-per-type model into the much simpler table-per-hierarchy model.) SummaryIn this post we learned about Table per Type as the second inheritance mapping in our series. So far, the strategies we’ve discussed require extra consideration with regard to the SQL schema (e.g. in TPT, foreign keys are needed). This situation changes with the Table per Concrete Type (TPC) that we will discuss in the next post. References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: Blue; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } p.MsoNormal { margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11.0pt; font-family: "Calibri" , "sans-serif"; }

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• Benchmarking MySQL Replication with Multi-Threaded Slaves

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 1145 6530 Homework 54 15 7660 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} The objective of this benchmark is to measure the performance improvement achieved when enabling the Multi-Threaded Slave enhancement delivered as a part MySQL 5.6. As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves delivers 5x higher replication performance based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For real-world deployments, higher replication performance directly translates to: · Improved consistency of reads from slaves (i.e. reduced risk of reading "stale" data) · Reduced risk of data loss should the master fail before replicating all events in its binary log (binlog) The multi-threaded slave splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads that isolate application data using databases - e.g. multi-tenant systems deployed in cloud environments. Multi-Threaded Slaves are just one of many enhancements to replication previewed as part of the MySQL 5.6 Development Release, which include: · Global Transaction Identifiers coupled with MySQL utilities for automatic failover / switchover and slave promotion · Crash Safe Slaves and Binlog · Optimized Row Based Replication · Replication Event Checksums · Time Delayed Replication These and many more are discussed in the “MySQL 5.6 Replication: Enabling the Next Generation of Web & Cloud Services” Developer Zone article  Back to the benchmark - details are as follows. Environment The test environment consisted of two Linux servers: · one running the replication master · one running the replication slave. Only the slave was involved in the actual measurements, and was based on the following configuration: - Hardware: Oracle Sun Fire X4170 M2 Server - CPU: 2 sockets, 6 cores with hyper-threading, 2930 MHz. - OS: 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.1 - Memory: 48 GB Test Procedure Initial Setup: Two MySQL servers were started on two different hosts, configured as replication master and slave. 10 sysbench schemas were created, each with a single table: CREATE TABLE `sbtest` (    `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,    `k` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',    `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    PRIMARY KEY (`id`),    KEY `k` (`k`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 10,000 rows were inserted in each of the 10 tables, for a total of 100,000 rows. When the inserts had replicated to the slave, the slave threads were stopped. The slave data directory was copied to a backup location and the slave threads position in the master binlog noted. 10 sysbench clients, each configured with 10 threads, were spawned at the same time to generate a random schema load against each of the 10 schemas on the master. Each sysbench client executed 10,000 "update key" statements: UPDATE sbtest set k=k+1 WHERE id = <random row> In total, this generated 100,000 update statements to later replicate during the test itself. Test Methodology: The number of slave workers to test with was configured using: SET GLOBAL slave_parallel_workers=<workers> Then the slave IO thread was started and the test waited for all the update queries to be copied over to the relay log on the slave. The benchmark clock was started and then the slave SQL thread was started. The test waited for the slave SQL thread to finish executing the 100k update queries, doing "select master_pos_wait()". When master_pos_wait() returned, the benchmark clock was stopped and the duration calculated. The calculated duration from the benchmark clock should be close to the time it took for the SQL thread to execute the 100,000 update queries. The 100k queries divided by this duration gave the benchmark metric, reported as Queries Per Second (QPS). Test Reset: The test-reset cycle was implemented as follows: · the slave was stopped · the slave data directory replaced with the previous backup · the slave restarted with the slave threads replication pointer repositioned to the point before the update queries in the binlog. The test could then be repeated with identical set of queries but a different number of slave worker threads, enabling a fair comparison. The Test-Reset cycle was repeated 3 times for 0-24 number of workers and the QPS metric calculated and averaged for each worker count. MySQL Configuration The relevant configuration settings used for MySQL are as follows: binlog-format=STATEMENT relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE As described in the test procedure, the slave_parallel_workers setting was modified as part of the test logic. The consequence of changing this setting is: 0 worker threads:    - current (i.e. single threaded) sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread and 1 x SQL thread    - SQL thread both reads and executes the events 1 worker thread:    - sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 1 x Worker thread    - coordinator reads the event and hands it to the worker who executes 2+ worker threads:    - parallel execution    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 2+ Worker threads    - coordinator reads events and hands them to the workers who execute them Results Figure 1 below shows that Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver ~5x higher replication performance when configured with 10 worker threads, with the load evenly distributed across our 10 x schemas. This result is compared to the current replication implementation which is based on a single SQL thread only (i.e. zero worker threads). Figure 1: 5x Higher Performance with Multi-Threaded Slaves The following figure shows more detailed results, with QPS sampled and reported as the worker threads are incremented. The raw numbers behind this graph are reported in the Appendix section of this post. Figure 2: Detailed Results As the results above show, the configuration does not scale noticably from 5 to 9 worker threads. When configured with 10 worker threads however, scalability increases significantly. The conclusion therefore is that it is desirable to configure the same number of worker threads as schemas. Other conclusions from the results: · Running with 1 worker compared to zero workers just introduces overhead without the benefit of parallel execution. · As expected, having more workers than schemas adds no visible benefit. Aside from what is shown in the results above, testing also demonstrated that the following settings had a very positive effect on slave performance: relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE For 5+ workers, it was up to 2.3 times as fast to run with TABLE compared to FILE. Conclusion As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver significant performance increases to MySQL replication when handling multiple schemas. This, and the other replication enhancements introduced in MySQL 5.6 are fully available for you to download and evaluate now from the MySQL Developer site (select Development Release tab). You can learn more about MySQL 5.6 from the documentation  Please don’t hesitate to comment on this or other replication blogs with feedback and questions. Appendix – Detailed Results

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• How do I do Collisions in my JavaScript Game Code Below?

  - by Henry

  I'm trying to figure out how would I add collision detection to my code so that when the "Man" character touches the "RedHouse" the RedHouse disappears? Thanks. By the way, I'm new to how things are done on this site, so thus, if there is anything else needed or so, let me know. <title>HMan</title> <body style="background:#808080;"> <br> <canvas id="canvasBg" width="800px" height="500px"style="display:block;background:#ffffff;margin:100px auto 0px;"></canvas> <canvas id="canvasRedHouse" width="800px" height="500px" style="display:block;margin:-500px auto 0px;"></canvas> <canvas id="canvasEnemy" width="800px" height="500px" style="display:block;margin:-500px auto 0px;"></canvas> <canvas id="canvasEnemy2" width="800px" height="500px" style="display:block;margin:-500px auto 0px;"></canvas> <canvas id="canvasMan" width="800px" height="500px" style="display:block;margin:-500px auto 0px;"></canvas> <script> var isPlaying = false; var requestAnimframe = window.requestAnimationFrame || window.webkitRequestAnimationFrame || window.mozRequestAnimationFrame || window.msRequestAnimationFrame || window.oRequestAnimationFrame; var canvasBg = document.getElementById('canvasBg'); var ctxBg = canvasBg.getContext('2d'); var canvasRedHouse = document.getElementById('canvasRedHouse'); var ctxRedHouse = canvasRedHouse.getContext('2d'); var House1; House1 = new RedHouse(); var canvasMan = document.getElementById('canvasMan'); var ctxMan = canvasMan.getContext('2d'); var Man1; Man1 = new Man(); var imgSprite = new Image(); imgSprite.src = 'SpritesI.png'; imgSprite.addEventListener('load',init,false); function init() { drawBg(); startLoop(); document.addEventListener('keydown',checkKeyDown,false); document.addEventListener('keyup',checkKeyUp,false); } function drawBg() { var SpriteSourceX = 0; var SpriteSourceY = 0; var drawManOnScreenX = 0; var drawManOnScreenY = 0; ctxBg.drawImage(imgSprite,SpriteSourceX,SpriteSourceY,800,500,drawManOnScreenX, drawManOnScreenY,800,500); } function clearctxBg() { ctxBg.clearRect(0,0,800,500); } function Man() { this.SpriteSourceX = 10; this.SpriteSourceY = 540; this.width = 40; this.height = 115; this.DrawManOnScreenX = 100; this.DrawManOnScreenY = 260; this.speed = 10; this.actualFrame = 1; this.speed = 2; this.isUpKey = false; this.isRightKey = false; this.isDownKey = false; this.isLeftKey = false; } Man.prototype.draw = function () { clearCtxMan(); this.updateCoors(); this.checkDirection(); ctxMan.drawImage(imgSprite,this.SpriteSourceX,this.SpriteSourceY+this.height* this.actualFrame, this.width,this.height,this.DrawManOnScreenX,this.DrawManOnScreenY, this.width,this.height); } Man.prototype.updateCoors = function(){ this.leftX = this.DrawManOnScreenX; this.rightX = this.DrawManOnScreenX + this.width; this.topY = this.DrawManOnScreenY; this.bottomY = this.DrawManOnScreenY + this.height; } Man.prototype.checkDirection = function () { if (this.isUpKey && this.topY > 240) { this.DrawManOnScreenY -= this.speed; } if (this.isRightKey && this.rightX < 800) { this.DrawManOnScreenX += this.speed; } if (this.isDownKey && this.bottomY < 500) { this.DrawManOnScreenY += this.speed; } if (this.isLeftKey && this.leftX > 0) { this.DrawManOnScreenX -= this.speed; } if (this.isRightKey && this.rightX < 800) { if (this.actualFrame > 0) { this.actualFrame = 0; } else { this.actualFrame++; } } if (this.isLeftKey) { if (this.actualFrame > 2) { this.actualFrame = 2; } function checkKeyDown(var keyID = e.keyCode || e.which; if (keyID === 38) { Man1.isUpKey = true; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 39 ) { Man1.isRightKey = true; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 40 ) { Man1.isDownKey = true; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 37 ) { Man1.isLeftKey = true; e.preventDefault(); } } function checkKeyUp(e) { var keyID = e.keyCode || e.which; if (keyID === 38 || keyID === 87) { Man1.isUpKey = false; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 39 || keyID === 68) { Man1.isRightKey = false; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 40 || keyID === 83) { Man1.isDownKey = false; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 37 || keyID === 65) { Man1.isLeftKey = false; e.preventDefault(); } } function clearCtxMan() { ctxMan.clearRect(0,0,800,500); } function RedHouse() { this.srcX = 135; this.srcY = 525; this.width = 265; this.height = 245; this.drawX = 480; this.drawY = 85; } RedHouse.prototype.draw = function () { clearCtxRedHouse(); ctxRedHouse.drawImage(imgSprite,this.srcX,this.srcY, this.width,this.height,this.drawX,this.drawY,this.width,this.height); }; function clearCtxRedHouse() { ctxRedHouse.clearRect(0,0,800,500); } function loop() { if (isPlaying === true){ Man1.draw(); House1.draw(); requestAnimframe(loop); } } function startLoop(){ isPlaying = true; loop(); } function stopLoop(){ isPlaying = false; } </script> <style> .top{ position: absolute; top: 4px; left: 10px; color:black; } .top2{ position: absolute; top: 60px; left: 10px; color:black; } </style> <div class="top"> <p><font face="arial" color="black" size="4"><b>HGame</b><font/><p/> <p><font face="arial" color="black" size="3"> My Game Here <font/><p/> </div> <div class="top2"> <p><font face="arial" color="black" size="3"> It will start now <font/><p/> </div>

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• Dark or light theme for Android apps?

  - by Philip Sheard

  My app allows the user to choose between a dark and a light theme, but which should it use as the default? It is a field sales app, a kind of glorified invoicing app for enterprise users. It is much larger than most apps in Google Play, and targets a vertical market. Originally I developed the app with a dark font, which was fairly standard at the time. That is still my personal preference, but most modern apps seem to have a light font.

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• Oracle SOA Suite - Highlighted Travel and Transportation Customer References

  - by Bruce Tierney

  0 0 1 1137 6483 - 54 15 7605 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Next in this series on industry-specific highlights of Oracle SOA Suite customers is the Travel and Transportation industry.  If you are in the travel or transportation industry, take a look at how these Oracle SOA Suite integration customers have addressed common business requirements to enable better customer service, lower costs, and deliver new business services. For example, All Nippon Airways (ANA) has significantly lowered management costs associated with their hybrid on-premise/cloud ticketing system deployments for domestic and international flights. Their lead-time for changes or new applications has been greatly reduced compared to their old mainframe-based systems, enabling ANA to rapidly develop new services in response to changing market needs. Another example is Schneider National, a leading provider of truckload logistics, and how they have integrated Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management and customers applications using Oracle SOA Suite. Schneider National has 400 BPEL processes that generate over 60 million composite instances over five SOA clusters.  Take a deeper look into any of these case studies, videos, and Oracle Magazine articles that closely align with your industry:  Customers fly and airline succeeds with an IT transformation. Company:  All Nippon Airways  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on January 06, 2014 Any successful business must ensure ongoing customer satisfaction, respond to increased competition, and minimize costs. Running a successful airline in today’s economic climate requires all of those things, as well a... Openmatics Revolutionizes Fleet Management with Standards-Based Vehicle Telematics Platform New Company:  Openmatics s.r.o.  Customer Snapshot   |   Automotive   |   Published on May 20, 2014 Openmatics uses Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle Application Development Framework as a foundation for Openmatics, a vehicle telematics service for next-generation fleet management. It integrated its own app shop wi... Future Proof: To keep pace with mobile, social, and location-based services, smart technologists are using middleware to innovate Company:  SFpark  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Professional Services   |   Published on August 01, 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware is at the heart of a recently completed and very ambitious project to change how people handle the challenge of finding a parking space in San Francisco, California. “Parking is a universal is... Globalia Corporación Empresarial Accelerates Hotel Bookings, Boosts Sales by 40% with In-Memory Data Grid Solution Company:  Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 29, 2013 Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. deployed Oracle Coherence to reengineer the group’s core system for hotel bookings, now serving booking requests involving 80 hotels within an average response time of 100 millise... Choice Hotels Uses Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite to Modernize Global IT Architecture Company:  Choice Hotels  Press Release   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on August 07, 2012 Choice Hotels International, one of the largest and most successful hotel franchises in the world, has implemented Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite. Sascar Consolidates Fleet Management Infrastructure and Accelerates Customers’ Data Access Company:  Sascar  Customer Case Study   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 07, 2014 Description – Sascar used Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g to consolidate fleet management and perform real-time vehicle tracking 4x faster. Directorate General of Civil Aviation Streamlines Key Aviation Applications Access, Improves Productivity and Reduces Maintenance Costs Company:  Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC)  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on May 24, 2013 With Oracle Fusion Middleware, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) provided its 12,500 employees a virtual office environment that integrates team workspaces, business applications, and e-mails within a n... Schneider National Implements Next-Generation IT Infrastructure to Continue Leadership in Transportation and Logistics Industry Company:  Schneider National, Inc.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 26, 2013 Schneider National, Inc. deployed Oracle applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle development tools as the foundation for its next-generation IT environment, which is driving new levels of efficiency, profit... DGAC Cuts Subscription Costs with Oracle Company:  DGAC  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on October 31, 2012 Using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Exalogic, DGAC reduces the cost of subscriptions to newsletters and provide to its 12,500 employees a collaborative workspace portal. Asiana Airlines Builds PIP System with Oracle Solutions Company:  Asiana Airlines  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on July 26, 2012 With Oracle Exalogic and the Oracle SOA Suite, Asiana Airlines builds a passenger service integrated platform providing various services such as integration between its interface and internal systems and a data wareho... Choice Hotels Reduces Time to Market with Oracle WebCenter Company:  Choice Hotels  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 11, 2014 Using Oracle WebCenter and Oracle SOA standardization, Choice Hotels consolidated multiple platforms, reduced IT dependency and realized tremendous benefits in total cost of ownership and faster time to market support... An Interview with Schneider National's Judy Lemke Company:  Schneider National  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on December 17, 2013 Judy Lemke talks with Mark Sunday about the challenges Schneider National faced and how they overcame them through a companywide transformational change. For more details on these case studies, you can use this pre-filtered search on “Travel and Transportation” / “Middleware” / “Service Oriented Architecture” or browse on your own at www.oracle.com/customers

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• PowerPivot: editing measures when you reach 45

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  I have always been used to small fonts but now, as I am getting older, I’d better admit that a greater font is much more relaxing. Editing PowerPivot measures has always been a pain, since all you have available is a small text box and I hate to admit that I got used to leverage ZoomIt for a long time to edit measures. Today I ran into a great Windows feature that I did not know about: ctrl-wheel on the mouse inside a textbox increases the font size of the text box. It seems to work with most textboxes...(read more)

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• How do I remove the unity 2D option in lightdm (login sceen) in ubuntu 12.04?

  - by user113460

  Because I wish to view my full username at login, I want to remove the "Unity 2D" option at the login screen. Currently the last part of the username (after the 20th digit) is hidden behind the Ubuntu-icon which enables switching to Unity 2D. Another option would be to decrease the font-size of the username, is any of this possible? Btw this is not an issue in Ubuntu 12.10, where the username font-size is smaller, and Unity 2D unsupported!

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• Change color of Date and Weather app in Ubuntu 12.04 & Mate

  - by haunted85

  I have recentely installed Ubuntu 12.04 and as I am a truly Gnome 2 lover I also switched from Unity to Mate. The font color of the Weather/Date applet is barely visible so I was wondering how I can change it. I Already tried to explore all the options shown in the menu when I right-click on the applet, but apparently there's no such feature. So is there anything I could do in order to customize the font color in order to make the text more readable?

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• Watch ON-Demand Oracle's 4th Annual Primavera Virtual Summit

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Did you miss Oracle's 4th Annual Primavera Virtual Summit? Or, maybe you attended the virtual event live, but want to re-watch some presentations or download industry-specific assets - well you can! Watch and visit here, on-demand.  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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} This event is now available On-Demand for your convenience. Feel free to log-in anytime to listen again about: New cloud based PPM solutions presentations. Special Primavera Roadmap presentation- what's new and what's coming. Customer stories highlighting their successes with Primavera Unifier, Oracle Instantis and Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management. And don't forget to visit the Resource Library to check out all the latest product information, whitepapers, and demos which are all available to download and read at your convenience. During your visit to the Virtual Summit ON-Demand, we would appreciate you visiting the Networking Lounge and taking a few minutes to fill out the survey. We would really like to hear what you think. You can also visit the Primavera Website for more information about the newest EPPM solutions and offerings.

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• Introducing the WebFont Loader in Collaboration with Typekit

  Moments ago we introduced the Google Font API and Google Font Directory . In addition to Google’s support of web fonts, we’re excited to announce a second launch...

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• C++ problem with assimp 3D model loader

  - by Brendan Webster

  In my game I have model loading functions for Assimp model loading library. I can load the model and render it, but the model displays incorrectly. The models load in as if they were using a seperate projection matrix. I have looked over my code over and over again, but I probably keep on missing the obvious reason why this is happening. Here is an image of my game: It's simply a 6 sided cube, but it's off big time! Here are my code snippets for rendering the cube to the screen: void C_MediaLoader::display(void) { float tmp; glTranslatef(0,0,0); // rotate it around the y axis glRotatef(angle,0.f,0.f,1.f); glColor4f(1,1,1,1); // scale the whole asset to fit into our view frustum tmp = scene_max.x-scene_min.x; tmp = aisgl_max(scene_max.y - scene_min.y,tmp); tmp = aisgl_max(scene_max.z - scene_min.z,tmp); tmp = (1.f / tmp); glScalef(tmp/5, tmp/5, tmp/5); // center the model //glTranslatef( -scene_center.x, -scene_center.y, -scene_center.z ); // if the display list has not been made yet, create a new one and // fill it with scene contents if(scene_list == 0) { scene_list = glGenLists(1); glNewList(scene_list, GL_COMPILE); // now begin at the root node of the imported data and traverse // the scenegraph by multiplying subsequent local transforms // together on GL's matrix stack. recursive_render(scene, scene->mRootNode); glEndList(); } glCallList(scene_list); } void C_MediaLoader::recursive_render (const struct aiScene *sc, const struct aiNode* nd) { unsigned int i; unsigned int n = 0, t; struct aiMatrix4x4 m = nd->mTransformation; // update transform aiTransposeMatrix4(&m); glPushMatrix(); glMultMatrixf((float*)&m); // draw all meshes assigned to this node for (; n < nd->mNumMeshes; ++n) { const struct aiMesh* mesh = scene->mMeshes[nd->mMeshes[n]]; apply_material(sc->mMaterials[mesh->mMaterialIndex]); if(mesh->mNormals == NULL) { glDisable(GL_LIGHTING); } else { glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); } for (t = 0; t < mesh->mNumFaces; ++t) { const struct aiFace* face = &mesh->mFaces[t]; GLenum face_mode; switch(face->mNumIndices) { case 1: face_mode = GL_POINTS; break; case 2: face_mode = GL_LINES; break; case 3: face_mode = GL_TRIANGLES; break; default: face_mode = GL_POLYGON; break; } glBegin(face_mode); for(i = 0; i < face->mNumIndices; i++) { int index = face->mIndices[i]; if(mesh->mColors[0] != NULL) glColor4fv((GLfloat*)&mesh->mColors[0][index]); if(mesh->mNormals != NULL) glNormal3fv(&mesh->mNormals[index].x); glVertex3fv(&mesh->mVertices[index].x); } glEnd(); } } // draw all children for (n = 0; n < nd->mNumChildren; ++n) { recursive_render(sc, nd->mChildren[n]); } glPopMatrix(); } Sorry there is so much code to look through, but I really cannot find the problem, and I would love to have help.

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• Problem with Assimp 3D model loader

  - by Brendan Webster

  In my game I have model loading functions for Assimp model loading library. I can load the model and render it, but the model displays incorrectly. The models load in as if they were using a seperate projection matrix. I have looked over my code over and over again, but I probably keep on missing the obvious reason why this is happening. Here is an image of my game: It's simply a 6 sided cube, but it's off big time! Here are my code snippets for rendering the cube to the screen: void C_MediaLoader::display(void) { float tmp; glTranslatef(0,0,0); // rotate it around the y axis glRotatef(angle,0.f,0.f,1.f); glColor4f(1,1,1,1); // scale the whole asset to fit into our view frustum tmp = scene_max.x-scene_min.x; tmp = aisgl_max(scene_max.y - scene_min.y,tmp); tmp = aisgl_max(scene_max.z - scene_min.z,tmp); tmp = (1.f / tmp); glScalef(tmp/5, tmp/5, tmp/5); // center the model //glTranslatef( -scene_center.x, -scene_center.y, -scene_center.z ); // if the display list has not been made yet, create a new one and // fill it with scene contents if(scene_list == 0) { scene_list = glGenLists(1); glNewList(scene_list, GL_COMPILE); // now begin at the root node of the imported data and traverse // the scenegraph by multiplying subsequent local transforms // together on GL's matrix stack. recursive_render(scene, scene->mRootNode); glEndList(); } glCallList(scene_list); } void C_MediaLoader::recursive_render (const struct aiScene *sc, const struct aiNode* nd) { unsigned int i; unsigned int n = 0, t; struct aiMatrix4x4 m = nd->mTransformation; // update transform aiTransposeMatrix4(&m); glPushMatrix(); glMultMatrixf((float*)&m); // draw all meshes assigned to this node for (; n < nd->mNumMeshes; ++n) { const struct aiMesh* mesh = scene->mMeshes[nd->mMeshes[n]]; apply_material(sc->mMaterials[mesh->mMaterialIndex]); if(mesh->mNormals == NULL) { glDisable(GL_LIGHTING); } else { glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); } for (t = 0; t < mesh->mNumFaces; ++t) { const struct aiFace* face = &mesh->mFaces[t]; GLenum face_mode; switch(face->mNumIndices) { case 1: face_mode = GL_POINTS; break; case 2: face_mode = GL_LINES; break; case 3: face_mode = GL_TRIANGLES; break; default: face_mode = GL_POLYGON; break; } glBegin(face_mode); for(i = 0; i < face->mNumIndices; i++) { int index = face->mIndices[i]; if(mesh->mColors[0] != NULL) glColor4fv((GLfloat*)&mesh->mColors[0][index]); if(mesh->mNormals != NULL) glNormal3fv(&mesh->mNormals[index].x); glVertex3fv(&mesh->mVertices[index].x); } glEnd(); } } // draw all children for (n = 0; n < nd->mNumChildren; ++n) { recursive_render(sc, nd->mChildren[n]); } glPopMatrix(); } Sorry there is so much code to look through, but I really cannot find the problem, and I would love to have help.

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• Problems with 3D Array for Voxel Data

  - by Sean M.

  I'm trying to implement a voxel engine in C++ using OpenGL, and I've been working on the rendering of the world. In order to render, I have a 3D array of uint16's that hold that id of the block at the point. I also have a 3D array of uint8's that I am using to store the visibility data for that point, where each bit represents if a face is visible. I have it so the blocks render and all of the proper faces are hidden if needed, but all of the blocks are offset by a power of 2 from where they are stored in the array. So the block at [0][0][0] is rendered at (0, 0, 0), and the block at 11 is rendered at (1, 1, 1), but the block at [2][2][2] is rendered at (4, 4, 4) and the block at [3][3][3] is rendered at (8, 8, 8), and so on and so forth. This is the result of drawing the above situation: I'm still a little new to the more advanced concepts of C++, like triple pointers, which I'm using for the 3D array, so I think the error is somewhere in there. This is the code for creating the arrays: uint16*** _blockData; //Contains a 3D array of uint16s that are the ids of the blocks in the region uint8*** _visibilityData; //Contains a 3D array of bytes that hold the visibility data for the faces //Allocate memory for the world data _blockData = new uint16**[REGION_DIM]; for (int i = 0; i < REGION_DIM; i++) { _blockData[i] = new uint16*[REGION_DIM]; for (int j = 0; j < REGION_DIM; j++) _blockData[i][j] = new uint16[REGION_DIM]; } //Allocate memory for the visibility _visibilityData = new uint8**[REGION_DIM]; for (int i = 0; i < REGION_DIM; i++) { _visibilityData[i] = new uint8*[REGION_DIM]; for (int j = 0; j < REGION_DIM; j++) _visibilityData[i][j] = new uint8[REGION_DIM]; } Here is the code used to create the block mesh for the region: //Check if the positive x face is visible, this happens for every face //Block::VERT_X_POS is just an array of non-transformed cube verts for one face //These checks are in a triple loop, which goes over every place in the array if (_visibilityData[x][y][z] & 0x01 > 0) { _vertexData->AddData(&(translateVertices(Block::VERT_X_POS, x, y, z)[0]), sizeof(Block::VERT_X_POS)); } //This is a seperate method, not in the loop glm::vec3* translateVertices(const glm::vec3 data[], uint16 x, uint16 y, uint16 z) { glm::vec3* copy = new glm::vec3[6]; memcpy(&copy, &data, sizeof(data)); for(int i = 0; i < 6; i++) copy[i] += glm::vec3(x, -y, z); //Make +y go down instead return copy; } I cannot see where the blocks may be getting offset by more than they should be, and certainly not why the offsets are a power of 2. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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• Detect multitouch (two fingers touch) on a sprite to apply pinch zoom behaviour

  - by Tahreem

  I am using andengine, want to move, zoom and rotate multiple sprites individually on a scene. I have achieved "move" but for pinch zoom i am unable to get the event to two fingers' touch. Below is the code: public class Main extends SimpleBaseGameActivity { private Camera camera; private BitmapTextureAtlas mBitmapTextureAtlas; private ITextureRegion mFaceTextureRegion; private ITextureRegion mFaceTextureRegion2; Sprite face2; private static final int CAMERA_WIDTH = 800; private static final int CAMERA_HEIGHT = 480; @Override public EngineOptions onCreateEngineOptions() { camera = new Camera(0, 0, CAMERA_WIDTH, CAMERA_HEIGHT); EngineOptions engineOptions = new EngineOptions(true, ScreenOrientation.LANDSCAPE_FIXED, new RatioResolutionPolicy( CAMERA_WIDTH, CAMERA_HEIGHT), camera); return engineOptions; } @Override protected void onCreateResources() { BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory.setAssetBasePath("gfx/"); this.mBitmapTextureAtlas = new BitmapTextureAtlas( this.getTextureManager(), 1024, 1600, TextureOptions.NEAREST); BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory.createTiledFromAsset(this.mBitmapTextureAtlas, // this, "ui_ball_1.png", 0, 0, 1, 1), // this.getVertexBufferObjectManager()); this.mFaceTextureRegion = BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory .createFromAsset(this.mBitmapTextureAtlas, this, "ui_ball_1.png", 0, 0); this.mFaceTextureRegion2 = BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory .createFromAsset(this.mBitmapTextureAtlas, this, "ui_ball_1.png", 0, 0); this.mBitmapTextureAtlas.load(); this.mEngine.getTextureManager().loadTexture(this.mBitmapTextureAtlas); } @Override protected Scene onCreateScene() { this.mEngine.registerUpdateHandler(new FPSLogger()); final Scene scene = new Scene(); scene.setBackground(new Background(0.09804f, 0.6274f, 0.8784f)); final float centerX = (CAMERA_WIDTH - this.mFaceTextureRegion .getWidth()) / 2; final float centerY = (CAMERA_HEIGHT - this.mFaceTextureRegion .getHeight()) / 2; final Sprite face = new Sprite(centerX, centerY, this.mFaceTextureRegion, this.getVertexBufferObjectManager()) { @Override public boolean onAreaTouched(final TouchEvent pSceneTouchEvent, final float pTouchAreaLocalX, final float pTouchAreaLocalY) { this.setPosition(pSceneTouchEvent.getX() - this.getWidth() / 2, pSceneTouchEvent.getY() - this.getHeight() / 2); return true; } }; face.setScale(2); scene.attachChild(face); scene.registerTouchArea(face); face2 = new Sprite(200, 200, this.mFaceTextureRegion2, this.getVertexBufferObjectManager()) { @Override public boolean onAreaTouched(final TouchEvent pSceneTouchEvent, final float pTouchAreaLocalX, final float pTouchAreaLocalY) { switch(pSceneTouchEvent.getAction()){ case TouchEvent.ACTION_DOWN: int count = pSceneTouchEvent.getMotionEvent().getPointerCount() ; for(int i= 0; i <count; i++) { int id = pSceneTouchEvent.getMotionEvent().getPointerId(i); } break; case TouchEvent.ACTION_MOVE: this.setPosition(pSceneTouchEvent.getX() -this.getWidth() / 2, pSceneTouchEvent.getY()-this.getHeight() / 2); break; case TouchEvent.ACTION_UP: break; } return true; } }; face2.setScale(2); scene.attachChild(face2); scene.registerTouchArea(face2); scene.setTouchAreaBindingOnActionDownEnabled(true); return scene; } } This line int count = pSceneTouchEvent.getMotionEvent().getPointerCount() ; should set 2 to the count variable if i touch the sprite with to fingers, then i can apply zooming functionality (setScale method) on the sprite by getting the distance between the coordinates of two fingers. Can anyone help me? why it does not detect two fingers? and without this how can i zoom the sprite on pinch of two fingers? I am very new to game development, any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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• Problem cube mapping in OpenGL using DDS compressed images

  - by Paul Jones

  Hi All, I am having trouble cube mapping when using a DDS cube map, I'm just getting a black cube which leads me to believe I have missing something simple, here's the code so far: DDS_IMAGE_DATA *pDDSImageData = LoadDDSFile(filename); //compressedTexture = -1; if(pDDSImageData != NULL) { int height = pDDSImageData->height; int width = pDDSImageData->width; int numMipMaps = pDDSImageData->numMipMaps; int blockSize; GLenum cubefaces[6] = { GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_X, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_NEGATIVE_X, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_Y, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_NEGATIVE_Y, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_Z, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_NEGATIVE_Z, }; if( pDDSImageData->format == GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT ) blockSize = 8; else blockSize = 16; glGenTextures( 1, &textureId ); int nSize; int nOffset = 0; glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_R, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); for(int face = 0; face < 6; face++) { for( int i = 0; i < numMipMaps; i++ ) { if( width == 0 ) width = 1; if( height == 0 ) height = 1; glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_GENERATE_MIPMAP, GL_TRUE); nSize = ((width+3)>>2) * ((height+3)>>2) * blockSize; glCompressedTexImage2D(cubefaces[face] , i, pDDSImageData->format, width, height, 0, nSize, pDDSImageData->pixels + nOffset ); nOffset += nSize; // Half the image size for the next mip-map level... width = (width / 2); height = (height / 2); } } } Once this code is called I bind the texture using glBindTexture and draw a cube using GL_QUADS and glTexCoord3f. Thank you for reading and all comments are welcome, sorry if any of the formatting comes out wrong.

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• How do I make XTerm not use bold?

  - by mike

  I like using XTerm, I like its default "fixed" font, and I like using terminal colors rather than having a monochromatic terminal. However, XTerm seems to insist on using a bold version of the font whenever it's displaying a bright color: I hate hate hate the bold version of the font, but I like the brightness. The man page seems to suggest that adding "XTerm.VT100.boldMode:false" to my ~/.Xresources would disable this "feature", but it doesn't seem to have any effect. I've had it in there for months, so it's not a rebooting issue. How can I force XTerm to always use the standard, non-bold version of the fixed font, even when it's displaying bright text? Edit: Some have suggested putting "XTerm*boldMode: false" in my ~/.Xresources. That didn't help either. I've confirmed that the changes have taken effect with xrdb, though: $ xrdb -query | grep boldMode XTerm*boldMode: false And if i run xprop and click an xterm, I get "WM_CLASS(STRING) = "xterm", "XTerm"" .. so i'm definitely running real xterms. BTW, this is just a plain-vanilla Ubuntu Intrepid box. If anyone else here is running the same, can you try running: echo -e '#\e[1m#' ...and let me know whether the # on the right has a black pixel in the middle like the one on the left does?

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5 Part 1: Table per Hierarchy (TPH)

  - by mortezam

  A simple strategy for mapping classes to database tables might be “one table for every entity persistent class.” This approach sounds simple enough and, indeed, works well until we encounter inheritance. Inheritance is such a visible structural mismatch between the object-oriented and relational worlds because object-oriented systems model both “is a” and “has a” relationships. SQL-based models provide only "has a" relationships between entities; SQL database management systems don’t support type inheritance—and even when it’s available, it’s usually proprietary or incomplete. There are three different approaches to representing an inheritance hierarchy: Table per Hierarchy (TPH): Enable polymorphism by denormalizing the SQL schema, and utilize a type discriminator column that holds type information. Table per Type (TPT): Represent "is a" (inheritance) relationships as "has a" (foreign key) relationships. Table per Concrete class (TPC): Discard polymorphism and inheritance relationships completely from the SQL schema.I will explain each of these strategies in a series of posts and this one is dedicated to TPH. In this series we'll deeply dig into each of these strategies and will learn about "why" to choose them as well as "how" to implement them. Hopefully it will give you a better idea about which strategy to choose in a particular scenario. Inheritance Mapping with Entity Framework Code FirstAll of the inheritance mapping strategies that we discuss in this series will be implemented by EF Code First CTP5. The CTP5 build of the new EF Code First library has been released by ADO.NET team earlier this month. EF Code-First enables a pretty powerful code-centric development workflow for working with data. I’m a big fan of the EF Code First approach, and I’m pretty excited about a lot of productivity and power that it brings. When it comes to inheritance mapping, not only Code First fully supports all the strategies but also gives you ultimate flexibility to work with domain models that involves inheritance. The fluent API for inheritance mapping in CTP5 has been improved a lot and now it's more intuitive and concise in compare to CTP4. A Note For Those Who Follow Other Entity Framework ApproachesIf you are following EF's "Database First" or "Model First" approaches, I still recommend to read this series since although the implementation is Code First specific but the explanations around each of the strategies is perfectly applied to all approaches be it Code First or others. A Note For Those Who are New to Entity Framework and Code-FirstIf you choose to learn EF you've chosen well. If you choose to learn EF with Code First you've done even better. To get started, you can find a great walkthrough by Scott Guthrie here and another one by ADO.NET team here. In this post, I assume you already setup your machine to do Code First development and also that you are familiar with Code First fundamentals and basic concepts. You might also want to check out my other posts on EF Code First like Complex Types and Shared Primary Key Associations. A Top Down Development ScenarioThese posts take a top-down approach; it assumes that you’re starting with a domain model and trying to derive a new SQL schema. Therefore, we start with an existing domain model, implement it in C# and then let Code First create the database schema for us. However, the mapping strategies described are just as relevant if you’re working bottom up, starting with existing database tables. I’ll show some tricks along the way that help you dealing with nonperfect table layouts. Let’s start with the mapping of entity inheritance. -- The Domain ModelIn our domain model, we have a BillingDetail base class which is abstract (note the italic font on the UML class diagram below). We do allow various billing types and represent them as subclasses of BillingDetail class. As for now, we support CreditCard and BankAccount: Implement the Object Model with Code First As always, we start with the POCO classes. Note that in our DbContext, I only define one DbSet for the base class which is BillingDetail. Code First will find the other classes in the hierarchy based on Reachability Convention. public abstract class BillingDetail  {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }             public string Number { get; set; } } public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } } public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }                     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } } public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; } } This object model is all that is needed to enable inheritance with Code First. If you put this in your application you would be able to immediately start working with the database and do CRUD operations. Before going into details about how EF Code First maps this object model to the database, we need to learn about one of the core concepts of inheritance mapping: polymorphic and non-polymorphic queries. Polymorphic Queries LINQ to Entities and EntitySQL, as object-oriented query languages, both support polymorphic queries—that is, queries for instances of a class and all instances of its subclasses, respectively. For example, consider the following query: IQueryable<BillingDetail> linqQuery = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; List<BillingDetail> billingDetails = linqQuery.ToList(); Or the same query in EntitySQL: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE b FROM BillingDetails AS b"; ObjectQuery<BillingDetail> objectQuery = ((IObjectContextAdapter)context).ObjectContext                                                                          .CreateQuery<BillingDetail>(eSqlQuery); List<BillingDetail> billingDetails = objectQuery.ToList(); linqQuery and eSqlQuery are both polymorphic and return a list of objects of the type BillingDetail, which is an abstract class but the actual concrete objects in the list are of the subtypes of BillingDetail: CreditCard and BankAccount. Non-polymorphic QueriesAll LINQ to Entities and EntitySQL queries are polymorphic which return not only instances of the specific entity class to which it refers, but all subclasses of that class as well. On the other hand, Non-polymorphic queries are queries whose polymorphism is restricted and only returns instances of a particular subclass. In LINQ to Entities, this can be specified by using OfType<T>() Method. For example, the following query returns only instances of BankAccount: IQueryable<BankAccount> query = from b in context.BillingDetails.OfType<BankAccount>() select b; EntitySQL has OFTYPE operator that does the same thing: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE b FROM OFTYPE(BillingDetails, Model.BankAccount) AS b"; In fact, the above query with OFTYPE operator is a short form of the following query expression that uses TREAT and IS OF operators: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE TREAT(b as Model.BankAccount)                       FROM BillingDetails AS b                       WHERE b IS OF(Model.BankAccount)"; (Note that in the above query, Model.BankAccount is the fully qualified name for BankAccount class. You need to change "Model" with your own namespace name.) Table per Class Hierarchy (TPH)An entire class hierarchy can be mapped to a single table. This table includes columns for all properties of all classes in the hierarchy. The concrete subclass represented by a particular row is identified by the value of a type discriminator column. You don’t have to do anything special in Code First to enable TPH. It's the default inheritance mapping strategy: This mapping strategy is a winner in terms of both performance and simplicity. It’s the best-performing way to represent polymorphism—both polymorphic and nonpolymorphic queries perform well—and it’s even easy to implement by hand. Ad-hoc reporting is possible without complex joins or unions. Schema evolution is straightforward. Discriminator Column As you can see in the DB schema above, Code First has to add a special column to distinguish between persistent classes: the discriminator. This isn’t a property of the persistent class in our object model; it’s used internally by EF Code First. By default, the column name is "Discriminator", and its type is string. The values defaults to the persistent class names —in this case, “BankAccount” or “CreditCard”. EF Code First automatically sets and retrieves the discriminator values. TPH Requires Properties in SubClasses to be Nullable in the Database TPH has one major problem: Columns for properties declared by subclasses will be nullable in the database. For example, Code First created an (INT, NULL) column to map CardType property in CreditCard class. However, in a typical mapping scenario, Code First always creates an (INT, NOT NULL) column in the database for an int property in persistent class. But in this case, since BankAccount instance won’t have a CardType property, the CardType field must be NULL for that row so Code First creates an (INT, NULL) instead. If your subclasses each define several non-nullable properties, the loss of NOT NULL constraints may be a serious problem from the point of view of data integrity. TPH Violates the Third Normal FormAnother important issue is normalization. We’ve created functional dependencies between nonkey columns, violating the third normal form. Basically, the value of Discriminator column determines the corresponding values of the columns that belong to the subclasses (e.g. BankName) but Discriminator is not part of the primary key for the table. As always, denormalization for performance can be misleading, because it sacrifices long-term stability, maintainability, and the integrity of data for immediate gains that may be also achieved by proper optimization of the SQL execution plans (in other words, ask your DBA). Generated SQL QueryLet's take a look at the SQL statements that EF Code First sends to the database when we write queries in LINQ to Entities or EntitySQL. For example, the polymorphic query for BillingDetails that you saw, generates the following SQL statement: SELECT  [Extent1].[Discriminator] AS [Discriminator],  [Extent1].[BillingDetailId] AS [BillingDetailId],  [Extent1].[Owner] AS [Owner],  [Extent1].[Number] AS [Number],  [Extent1].[BankName] AS [BankName],  [Extent1].[Swift] AS [Swift],  [Extent1].[CardType] AS [CardType],  [Extent1].[ExpiryMonth] AS [ExpiryMonth],  [Extent1].[ExpiryYear] AS [ExpiryYear] FROM [dbo].[BillingDetails] AS [Extent1] WHERE [Extent1].[Discriminator] IN ('BankAccount','CreditCard') Or the non-polymorphic query for the BankAccount subclass generates this SQL statement: SELECT  [Extent1].[BillingDetailId] AS [BillingDetailId],  [Extent1].[Owner] AS [Owner],  [Extent1].[Number] AS [Number],  [Extent1].[BankName] AS [BankName],  [Extent1].[Swift] AS [Swift] FROM [dbo].[BillingDetails] AS [Extent1] WHERE [Extent1].[Discriminator] = 'BankAccount' Note how Code First adds a restriction on the discriminator column and also how it only selects those columns that belong to BankAccount entity. Change Discriminator Column Data Type and Values With Fluent API Sometimes, especially in legacy schemas, you need to override the conventions for the discriminator column so that Code First can work with the schema. The following fluent API code will change the discriminator column name to "BillingDetailType" and the values to "BA" and "CC" for BankAccount and CreditCard respectively: protected override void OnModelCreating(System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.ModelBuilder modelBuilder) {     modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()                 .Map<BankAccount>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue("BA"))                 .Map<CreditCard>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue("CC")); } Also, changing the data type of discriminator column is interesting. In the above code, we passed strings to HasValue method but this method has been defined to accepts a type of object: public void HasValue(object value); Therefore, if for example we pass a value of type int to it then Code First not only use our desired values (i.e. 1 & 2) in the discriminator column but also changes the column type to be (INT, NOT NULL): modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()             .Map<BankAccount>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue(1))             .Map<CreditCard>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue(2)); SummaryIn this post we learned about Table per Hierarchy as the default mapping strategy in Code First. The disadvantages of the TPH strategy may be too serious for your design—after all, denormalized schemas can become a major burden in the long run. Your DBA may not like it at all. In the next post, we will learn about Table per Type (TPT) strategy that doesn’t expose you to this problem. References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: Blue; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } p.MsoNormal { margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11.0pt; font-family: "Calibri" , "sans-serif"; }

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• UV Atlas Generation and Seam Removal

  - by P. Avery

  I'm generating light maps for scene mesh objects using DirectX's UV Atlas Tool( D3DXUVAtlasCreate() ). I've succeeded in generating an atlas, however, when I try to render the mesh object using the atlas the seams are visible on the mesh. Below are images of a lightmap generated for a cube. Here is the code I use to generate a uv atlas for a cube: struct sVertexPosNormTex { D3DXVECTOR3 vPos, vNorm; D3DXVECTOR2 vUV; sVertexPosNormTex(){} sVertexPosNormTex( D3DXVECTOR3 v, D3DXVECTOR3 n, D3DXVECTOR2 uv ) { vPos = v; vNorm = n; vUV = uv; } ~sVertexPosNormTex() { } }; // create a light map texture to fill programatically hr = D3DXCreateTexture( pd3dDevice, 128, 128, 1, 0, D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8, D3DPOOL_MANAGED, &pLightmap ); if( FAILED( hr ) ) { DebugStringDX( "Main", "Failed to D3DXCreateTexture( lightmap )", __LINE__, hr ); return hr; } // get the zero level surface from the texture IDirect3DSurface9 *pS = NULL; pLightmap->GetSurfaceLevel( 0, &pS ); // clear surface pd3dDevice->ColorFill( pS, NULL, D3DCOLOR_XRGB( 0, 0, 0 ) ); // load a sample mesh DWORD dwcMaterials = 0; LPD3DXBUFFER pMaterialBuffer = NULL; V_RETURN( D3DXLoadMeshFromX( L"cube3.x", D3DXMESH_MANAGED, pd3dDevice, &pAdjacency, &pMaterialBuffer, NULL, &dwcMaterials, &g_pMesh ) ); // generate adjacency DWORD *pdwAdjacency = new DWORD[ 3 * g_pMesh->GetNumFaces() ]; g_pMesh->GenerateAdjacency( 1e-6f, pdwAdjacency ); // create light map coordinates LPD3DXMESH pMesh = NULL; LPD3DXBUFFER pFacePartitioning = NULL, pVertexRemapArray = NULL; FLOAT resultStretch = 0; UINT numCharts = 0; hr = D3DXUVAtlasCreate( g_pMesh, 0, 0, 128, 128, 3.5f, 0, pdwAdjacency, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, 0, &pMesh, &pFacePartitioning, &pVertexRemapArray, &resultStretch, &numCharts ); if( SUCCEEDED( hr ) ) { // release and set mesh SAFE_RELEASE( g_pMesh ); g_pMesh = pMesh; // write mesh to file hr = D3DXSaveMeshToX( L"cube4.x", g_pMesh, 0, ( const D3DXMATERIAL* )pMaterialBuffer->GetBufferPointer(), NULL, dwcMaterials, D3DXF_FILEFORMAT_TEXT ); if( FAILED( hr ) ) { DebugStringDX( "Main", "Failed to D3DXSaveMeshToX() at OnD3D9CreateDevice()", __LINE__, hr ); } // fill the the light map hr = BuildLightmap( pS, g_pMesh ); if( FAILED( hr ) ) { DebugStringDX( "Main", "Failed to BuildLightmap()", __LINE__, hr ); } } else { DebugStringDX( "Main", "Failed to D3DXUVAtlasCreate() at OnD3D9CreateDevice()", __LINE__, hr ); } SAFE_RELEASE( pS ); SAFE_DELETE_ARRAY( pdwAdjacency ); SAFE_RELEASE( pFacePartitioning ); SAFE_RELEASE( pVertexRemapArray ); SAFE_RELEASE( pMaterialBuffer ); Here is code to fill lightmap texture: HRESULT BuildLightmap( IDirect3DSurface9 *pS, LPD3DXMESH pMesh ) { HRESULT hr = S_OK; // validate lightmap texture surface and mesh if( !pS || !pMesh ) return E_POINTER; // lock the mesh vertex buffer sVertexPosNormTex *pV = NULL; pMesh->LockVertexBuffer( D3DLOCK_READONLY, ( void** )&pV ); // lock the mesh index buffer WORD *pI = NULL; pMesh->LockIndexBuffer( D3DLOCK_READONLY, ( void** )&pI ); // get the lightmap texture surface description D3DSURFACE_DESC desc; pS->GetDesc( &desc ); // lock the surface rect to fill with color data D3DLOCKED_RECT rct; hr = pS->LockRect( &rct, NULL, 0 ); if( FAILED( hr ) ) { DebugStringDX( "main.cpp:", "Failed to IDirect3DTexture9::LockRect()", __LINE__, hr ); return hr; } // iterate the pixels of the lightmap texture // check each pixel to see if it lies between the uv coordinates of a cube face BYTE *pBuffer = ( BYTE* )rct.pBits; for( UINT y = 0; y < desc.Height; ++y ) { BYTE* pBufferRow = ( BYTE* )pBuffer; for( UINT x = 0; x < desc.Width * 4; x+=4 ) { // determine the pixel's uv coordinate D3DXVECTOR2 p( ( ( float )x / 4.0f ) / ( float )desc.Width + 0.5f / 128.0f, y / ( float )desc.Height + 0.5f / 128.0f ); // for each face of the mesh // check to see if the pixel lies within the face's uv coordinates for( UINT i = 0; i < 3 * pMesh->GetNumFaces(); i +=3 ) { sVertexPosNormTex v[ 3 ]; v[ 0 ] = pV[ pI[ i + 0 ] ]; v[ 1 ] = pV[ pI[ i + 1 ] ]; v[ 2 ] = pV[ pI[ i + 2 ] ]; if( TexcoordIsWithinBounds( v[ 0 ].vUV, v[ 1 ].vUV, v[ 2 ].vUV, p ) ) { // the pixel lies b/t the uv coordinates of a cube face // light contribution functions aren't needed yet //D3DXVECTOR3 vPos = TexcoordToPos( v[ 0 ].vPos, v[ 1 ].vPos, v[ 2 ].vPos, v[ 0 ].vUV, v[ 1 ].vUV, v[ 2 ].vUV, p ); //D3DXVECTOR3 vNormal = v[ 0 ].vNorm; // set the color of this pixel red( for demo ) BYTE ba[] = { 0, 0, 255, 255, }; //ComputeContribution( vPos, vNormal, g_sLight, ba ); // copy the byte array into the light map texture memcpy( ( void* )&pBufferRow[ x ], ( void* )ba, 4 * sizeof( BYTE ) ); } } } // go to next line of the texture pBuffer += rct.Pitch; } // unlock the surface rect pS->UnlockRect(); // unlock mesh vertex and index buffers pMesh->UnlockIndexBuffer(); pMesh->UnlockVertexBuffer(); // write the surface to file hr = D3DXSaveSurfaceToFile( L"LightMap.jpg", D3DXIFF_JPG, pS, NULL, NULL ); if( FAILED( hr ) ) DebugStringDX( "Main.cpp", "Failed to D3DXSaveSurfaceToFile()", __LINE__, hr ); return hr; } bool TexcoordIsWithinBounds( const D3DXVECTOR2 &t0, const D3DXVECTOR2 &t1, const D3DXVECTOR2 &t2, const D3DXVECTOR2 &p ) { // compute vectors D3DXVECTOR2 v0 = t1 - t0, v1 = t2 - t0, v2 = p - t0; float f00 = D3DXVec2Dot( &v0, &v0 ); float f01 = D3DXVec2Dot( &v0, &v1 ); float f02 = D3DXVec2Dot( &v0, &v2 ); float f11 = D3DXVec2Dot( &v1, &v1 ); float f12 = D3DXVec2Dot( &v1, &v2 ); // Compute barycentric coordinates float invDenom = 1 / ( f00 * f11 - f01 * f01 ); float fU = ( f11 * f02 - f01 * f12 ) * invDenom; float fV = ( f00 * f12 - f01 * f02 ) * invDenom; // Check if point is in triangle if( ( fU >= 0 ) && ( fV >= 0 ) && ( fU + fV < 1 ) ) return true; return false; } Screenshot Lightmap I believe the problem comes from the difference between the lightmap uv coordinates and the pixel center coordinates...for example, here are the lightmap uv coordinates( generated by D3DXUVAtlasCreate() ) for a specific face( tri ) within the mesh, keep in mind that I'm using the mesh uv coordinates to write the pixels for the texture: v[ 0 ].uv = D3DXVECTOR2( 0.003581, 0.295631 ); v[ 1 ].uv = D3DXVECTOR2( 0.003581, 0.003581 ); v[ 2 ].uv = D3DXVECTOR2( 0.295631, 0.003581 ); the lightmap texture size is 128 x 128 pixels. The upper-left pixel center coordinates are: float halfPixel = 0.5 / 128 = 0.00390625; D3DXVECTOR2 pixelCenter = D3DXVECTOR2( halfPixel, halfPixel ); will the mapping and sampling of the lightmap texture will require that an offset be taken into account or that the uv coordinates are snapped to the pixel centers..? ...Any ideas on the best way to approach this situation would be appreciated...What are the common practices?

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• Real Time BI in the Real World

  - by tobin.gilman(at)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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} One of my favorite BI offerings from Oracle is a solution called Oracle Real Time Decisions.  Whenever I mention this product in customer meetings, eyes light up.  There are some fascinating examples of customers using it to up-sell, cross-sell, increase customer retention, and reduce risk in real time, with off the charts return on investment. I plan to share some of those stories in a future blog.  In this post however, I want to share some far more common real time analytics use case scenarios that are being addressed with widely deployed Oracle BI and data integration technologies Not all real time BI applications require continuous learning, predictive modeling, and data mining.  Many simply require the ability to integrate, aggregate, and access information that is current (typically within in few minutes or a few seconds).  The use cases are infinite.  A few I've seen: ·         Purchasing agents need to match demand against available inventory ·         Manufacturing planners need to monitor current parts and material against scheduled build plans ·         Airline agents need to match ticket demand against flight schedules, ·         Human resources managers need to track the status of global hiring requisitions against current headcount authorizations...you get the idea. One way of doing this is to run reports or federated queries directly against transactional systems.  That approach can be viable if you only need to access simple data sets on rare occasions.  High volume and complex queries can quickly bog down performance of mission critical transactional systems.  There is an architecturally simple way of solving the problem, and it's being applied by real companies around the world to solve real needs in real time.    Cbeyond is an Atlanta, GA based  provider of voice, data and mobile business applications delivers.  They deliver real time information to its call center agents  as they are interacting with their customers. The data they need resides in production CRM and other transactional systems, but  instead or reporting directly off the those systems, data is first moved to an operational data store (ODS).  Rather than running data intensive, time consuming, and performance degrading batch ETL routines to populate the ODS, Cbeyond uses Oracle Golden Gate software to incrementally capture and move only the changed records from log files of the transactional systems every few minutes.  There is no impact on transactional system performance, and the information needed by call center representatives is up to date.  Oracle Business Intelligence software presents the information to services reps in a rich, visual, and highly interactive format. Avea is similar to Cbeyond.  They are a telecommunications company who integrates billing and customer information in an ODS that is accessed by their call center agents in real time using Oracle Golden Gate and Oracle Business Intelligence.  They've taken it a step further by using the ODS to feed a data warehouse.  The operational data store provides the current information needed by call center agents during "in flight" customer interactions.  The data warehouse is used for more sophisticated analysis of historical data.  For maximum performance, both the ODS and data warehouse run on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. These are practical illustrations of companies addressing real time reporting and analysis needs using established business intelligence/data warehousing methodologies and tools common to many IT departments.  If real time BI could benefit your organization, you may be already be closer than you thought to having the pieces in place to solving the problem.    Give us a shout if you are interested in learning more or if you have an interesting use or approach to real-time BI.

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