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• Five Point Partners Reviews Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management 2.0

  - by caroline.yu

  Oracle recently provided Five Point Partners, Research and Analysis Division's Warren B. Causey and Bart Thielbar a one-hour briefing of Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management 2.0. Based on that briefing, Warren and Bart provided an evaluation of the new software. The review notes that this is the first major rewrite of a mobile system. Oracle Utilities has made numerous updates in structure, architecture and functionality to the software that should well-position Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management 2.0 for the current utility market. Additionally, the reviewers noted that one of the most significant improvements in the new version of Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management is that it has moved to the same Java technical stack of other Oracle Utilities products. Utilities can deploy the software in multiple environments including Linux, Unix and Windows. This will simplify integration with existing Oracle products, as well as with other systems, thus potentially lowering cost of installation and ownership for utilities. Overall, Warren and Bart note that Oracle Utilities now has an impressive, state-of-the-art mobile workforce management system that utilities can readily deploy in a bundle with other Oracle solutions, or use as a stand-alone system with relatively easy integration to other utility systems. They state that Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management 2.0 should significantly strengthen Oracle's competitive position in the mobile workforce management solution space. To take a look at the full review, click here.

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• When runs a product out of support?

  That is a question I get regularly from customers. Microsoft has a great site where you can find that information. Unfortunately this site is not easy to find, and a lot of people are not aware of this site. A good reason to promote it a little. So if you ever get a question on this topic, go to http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/Default.aspx. At that site, you can find also the details of the policy Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy The Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy took effect in October 2002, and applies to most products currently available through retail purchase or volume licensing and most future release products. Through the policy, Microsoft will offer a minimum of: 10 years of support (5 years Mainstream Support and 5 years Extended Support) at the supported service pack level for Business and Developer products 5 years Mainstream Support at the supported service pack level for Consumer/Hardware/Multimedia products 3 years of Mainstream Support for products that are annually released (for example, Money, Encarta, Picture It!, and Streets & Trips) Phases of the Support Lifecycle Mainstream Support Mainstream Support is the first phase of the product support lifecycle. At the supported service pack level, Mainstream Support includes: Incident support (no-charge incident support, paid incident support, support charged on an hourly basis, support for warranty claims) Security update support The ability to request non-security hotfixes Please note: Enrollment in a maintenance program may be required to receive these benefits for certain products Extended Support The Extended Support phase follows Mainstream Support for Business and Developer products. At the supported service pack level, Extended Support includes: Paid support Security update support at no additional cost Non-security related hotfix support requires a separate Extended Hotfix Support Agreement to be purchased (per-fix fees also apply) Please note: Microsoft will not accept requests for warranty support, design changes, or new features during the Extended Support phase Extended Support is not available for Consumer, Hardware, or Multimedia products Enrollment in a maintenance program may be required to receive these benefits for certain products Self-Help Online Support Self-Help Online Support is available throughout a product's lifecycle and for a minimum of 12 months after the product reaches the end of its support. Microsoft online Knowledge Base articles, FAQs, troubleshooting tools, and other resources, are provided to help customers resolve common issues. Please note: Enrollment in a maintenance program may be required to receive these benefits for certain products (source: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/#tab1)

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• SQL SERVER – Concurrency Basics – Guest Post by Vinod Kumar

  - by pinaldave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versions from SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. Learning is always fun when it comes to SQL Server and learning the basics again can be more fun. I did write about Transaction Logs and recovery over my blogs and the concept of simplifying the basics is a challenge. In the real world we always see checks and queues for a process – say railway reservation, banks, customer supports etc there is a process of line and queue to facilitate everyone. Shorter the queue higher is the efficiency of system (a.k.a higher is the concurrency). Every database does implement this using checks like locking, blocking mechanisms and they implement the standards in a way to facilitate higher concurrency. In this post, let us talk about the topic of Concurrency and what are the various aspects that one needs to know about concurrency inside SQL Server. Let us learn the concepts as one-liners: Concurrency can be defined as the ability of multiple processes to access or change shared data at the same time. The greater the number of concurrent user processes that can be active without interfering with each other, the greater the concurrency of the database system. Concurrency is reduced when a process that is changing data prevents other processes from reading that data or when a process that is reading data prevents other processes from changing that data. Concurrency is also affected when multiple processes are attempting to change the same data simultaneously. Two approaches to managing concurrent data access: Optimistic Concurrency Model Pessimistic Concurrency Model Concurrency Models Pessimistic Concurrency Default behavior: acquire locks to block access to data that another process is using. Assumes that enough data modification operations are in the system that any given read operation is likely affected by a data modification made by another user (assumes conflicts will occur). Avoids conflicts by acquiring a lock on data being read so no other processes can modify that data. Also acquires locks on data being modified so no other processes can access the data for either reading or modifying. Readers block writer, writers block readers and writers. Optimistic Concurrency Assumes that there are sufficiently few conflicting data modification operations in the system that any single transaction is unlikely to modify data that another transaction is modifying. Default behavior of optimistic concurrency is to use row versioning to allow data readers to see the state of the data before the modification occurs. Older versions of the data are saved so a process reading data can see the data as it was when the process started reading and not affected by any changes being made to that data. Processes modifying the data is unaffected by processes reading the data because the reader is accessing a saved version of the data rows. Readers do not block writers and writers do not block readers, but, writers can and will block writers. Transaction Processing A transaction is the basic unit of work in SQL Server. Transaction consists of SQL commands that read and update the database but the update is not considered final until a COMMIT command is issued (at least for an explicit transaction: marked with a BEGIN TRAN and the end is marked by a COMMIT TRAN or ROLLBACK TRAN). Transactions must exhibit all the ACID properties of a transaction. ACID Properties Transaction processing must guarantee the consistency and recoverability of SQL Server databases. Ensures all transactions are performed as a single unit of work regardless of hardware or system failure. A – Atomicity C – Consistency I – Isolation D- Durability Atomicity: Each transaction is treated as all or nothing – it either commits or aborts. Consistency: ensures that a transaction won’t allow the system to arrive at an incorrect logical state – the data must always be logically correct.  Consistency is honored even in the event of a system failure. Isolation: separates concurrent transactions from the updates of other incomplete transactions. SQL Server accomplishes isolation among transactions by locking data or creating row versions. Durability: After a transaction commits, the durability property ensures that the effects of the transaction persist even if a system failure occurs. If a system failure occurs while a transaction is in progress, the transaction is completely undone, leaving no partial effects on data. Transaction Dependencies In addition to supporting all four ACID properties, a transaction might exhibit few other behaviors (known as dependency problems or consistency problems). Lost Updates: Occur when two processes read the same data and both manipulate the data, changing its value and then both try to update the original data to the new value. The second process might overwrite the first update completely. Dirty Reads: Occurs when a process reads uncommitted data. If one process has changed data but not yet committed the change, another process reading the data will read it in an inconsistent state. Non-repeatable Reads: A read is non-repeatable if a process might get different values when reading the same data in two reads within the same transaction. This can happen when another process changes the data in between the reads that the first process is doing. Phantoms: Occurs when membership in a set changes. It occurs if two SELECT operations using the same predicate in the same transaction return a different number of rows. Isolation Levels SQL Server supports 5 isolation levels that control the behavior of read operations. Read Uncommitted All behaviors except for lost updates are possible. Implemented by allowing the read operations to not take any locks, and because of this, it won’t be blocked by conflicting locks acquired by other processes. The process can read data that another process has modified but not yet committed. When using the read uncommitted isolation level and scanning an entire table, SQL Server can decide to do an allocation order scan (in page-number order) instead of a logical order scan (following page pointers). If another process doing concurrent operations changes data and move rows to a new location in the table, the allocation order scan can end up reading the same row twice. Also can happen if you have read a row before it is updated and then an update moves the row to a higher page number than your scan encounters later. Performing an allocation order scan under Read Uncommitted can cause you to miss a row completely – can happen when a row on a high page number that hasn’t been read yet is updated and moved to a lower page number that has already been read. Read Committed Two varieties of read committed isolation: optimistic and pessimistic (default). Ensures that a read never reads data that another application hasn’t committed. If another transaction is updating data and has exclusive locks on data, your transaction will have to wait for the locks to be released. Your transaction must put share locks on data that are visited, which means that data might be unavailable for others to use. A share lock doesn’t prevent others from reading but prevents them from updating. Read committed (snapshot) ensures that an operation never reads uncommitted data, but not by forcing other processes to wait. SQL Server generates a version of the changed row with its previous committed values. Data being changed is still locked but other processes can see the previous versions of the data as it was before the update operation began. Repeatable Read This is a Pessimistic isolation level. Ensures that if a transaction revisits data or a query is reissued the data doesn’t change. That is, issuing the same query twice within a transaction cannot pickup any changes to data values made by another user’s transaction because no changes can be made by other transactions. However, this does allow phantom rows to appear. Preventing non-repeatable read is a desirable safeguard but cost is that all shared locks in a transaction must be held until the completion of the transaction. Snapshot Snapshot Isolation (SI) is an optimistic isolation level. Allows for processes to read older versions of committed data if the current version is locked. Difference between snapshot and read committed has to do with how old the older versions have to be. It’s possible to have two transactions executing simultaneously that give us a result that is not possible in any serial execution. Serializable This is the strongest of the pessimistic isolation level. Adds to repeatable read isolation level by ensuring that if a query is reissued rows were not added in the interim, i.e, phantoms do not appear. Preventing phantoms is another desirable safeguard, but cost of this extra safeguard is similar to that of repeatable read – all shared locks in a transaction must be held until the transaction completes. In addition serializable isolation level requires that you lock data that has been read but also data that doesn’t exist. Ex: if a SELECT returned no rows, you want it to return no. rows when the query is reissued. This is implemented in SQL Server by a special kind of lock called the key-range lock. Key-range locks require that there be an index on the column that defines the range of values. If there is no index on the column, serializable isolation requires a table lock. Gets its name from the fact that running multiple serializable transactions at the same time is equivalent of running them one at a time. Now that we understand the basics of what concurrency is, the subsequent blog posts will try to bring out the basics around locking, blocking, deadlocks because they are the fundamental blocks that make concurrency possible. Now if you are with me – let us continue learning for SQL Server Locking Basics. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Concurrency

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• West Palm Beach Dev Group August 2012 Meeting Recap

  - by Sam Abraham

  As the saying goes, it’s better late than never. Such is the case with my overdue West Palm Beach Dev Group August 2012 meeting report. Our August meeting was full of both knowledge and adventure. It comes as no surprise that the knowledge was brought to us by our favorite DotNetNuke Technical Evangelist, Will Strohl. Will introduced and thoroughly presented the new social features in DNN 6.2. Unfortunately, our meeting date coincided with Hurricane Isaac having just passed us by. Aside from road closures and floods that kept public schools closed for two days, our meeting host, PC Professor, had to close the school the day of our meeting on a short notice due to flooding which we found out about at midnight on the day of the event.  This left us scrambling to find an available alternate meeting location close enough to our original venue. Cancelling the meeting was always an option, but we opted to keep it as the very last resort. Luckily, we were fortunate to find a meeting room at the Hampton Inn only a few minutes away from our original location. Having heard of our challenge, our event sponsor, Applied Innovations, stepped-in and covered the meeting room cost in addition to the food and beverages. We would like to thank our volunteers and sponsors who made that event a success: Jess Coburn, CEO and Cara Pluff, Director of Sales at Applied Innovations, Dave Noderer for suggesting the alternate venue and Venkat Subramanian for his hard work keeping our members informed of the venue change and for being our event photographer.   We look forward to seeing you at our upcoming meetings: -September 25th, 2012 with Jonas Stawski, Microsoft MVP -October 23rd, 2012 with our Microsoft Developer Evangelist, Joe “DevFish” Healy -Ending an exciting year will be our November 27th meeting with Dycom Industries’ Senior Software Developer, Tom Huynh.   All the best, --Sam

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• Magic Mouse for Windows 7 (Touch Mouse)

  - by samsudeen

  Microsoft has unveiled the launch of the new product named “Touch Mouse” at the on going Consumer Electronic show (CES). This mouse allows us to do the normal mouse functions such as  Click, flick, scroll and swipe easily without using any buttons.The features of this mouse is similar to the “Magic Mouse” from Apple hence we can call this as “Microsoft’s Magic Mouse”. This mouse is designed specially for “Windows 7″ to expose the touch features of the OS as per the Microsoft’s below statement Touch Mouse brings a new dimension to Windows 7. By quickly responding to single finger gestures, it speeds up everyday tasks that are already fast in Windows 7: scrolling, panning, paging forward and back, docking, minimizing/ maximizing, showing desktop, and more. Touch Mouse also provides elegant touch functionality to non-touch Windows 7 PCs, so you can enjoy dynamic touch sensitivity at a fraction of the cost of a new PC. The below video clip explains the “Touch Mouse” features using the “Windows 7″ operating system   Touch Mouse This mouse will be launched only in June at an estimated price of $80. You can find more details about the “Touch Mouse” at the below  Microsoft web site. http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/touch-mouse/ This article titled,Magic Mouse for Windows 7 (Touch Mouse), was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• SQL Sharding and SQL Azure&hellip;

  - by Dave Noderer

  Herve Roggero has just published a paper that outlines patterns for scaling using SQL Azure and the Blue Syntax (he and Scott Klein’s company) sharding api. You can find the paper at: http://www.bluesyntax.net/files/EnzoFramework.pdf Herve and Scott have also just released an Apress book Pro SQL Azure. The idea of being able to split (shard) database operations automatically and control them from a web based management console is very appealing. These ideas have been talked about for a long time and implemented in thousands of very custom ways that have been costly, complicated and fragile. Now, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Scaling database access will become easier and move into the mainstream of application development. The main cost is using an api whenever accessing the database. The api will direct the query to the correct database(s) which may be located locally or in the cloud. It is inevitable that the api will change in the future, perhaps incorporated into a Microsoft offering. Even if this is the case, your application has now been architected to utilize these patterns and details of the actual api will be less important. Herve does a great job of laying out the concepts which every developer and architect should be familiar with!

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• Robbanásszeruen no az Exadata értékesítés

  - by Fekete Zoltán

  Olvassa el a HWSW cikkét is: Úgy veszik az Exadatát mintha kötelezo lenne Az Oracle 2011-es pénzügyi évének 2. negyedévének zárásakor kiadott közleményben ezt nyilatkozta Mark Hurd, az Oracle elnöke. "Since joining Oracle I've met with and visited many customers that have expressed a high level of enthusiasm around our strategy of engineering hardware and software that works together," said Oracle President, Mark Hurd. "That enthusiasm translates into an Exadata pipeline that has now grown to nearly $2 billion. That number is a good leading indicator that customers are planning to increase their investment in Oracle technology." azaz Mark Hurdnek sok Oracle ügyfél fejezte ki magas szintu elismerését az Oracle stratégiájáért, mely az együtt tervezett és együtt múködo hardver és szoftver fejlesztését tuzte a zászlóra. Ez az ügyfél oldali elismerés vezetett oda, hogy az Exadata pipeline 2 milliárd dollárra nott. Ez a szám azt jelzi, hogy az Oracle ügyfelek terveiben növelik az Oracle technológiai befektetéseiket. Larry Ellison, az Oracle vezére a következot nyilatkozta: "Our new generation of Exadata, Exalogic and SPARC Supercluster computers deliver much better performance and much lower cost than the fastest machines from IBM and HP." azaz Az új generációs Exadata, Exalogic és SPARC Supercluster szerverek sokkal jobb teljesítményuek és lényegesen kisebb költséguek, mint az IBM vagy a HP leggyorsabb gépei. Olvassa el a HWSW cikkét is: Úgy veszik az Exadatát mintha kötelezo lenne

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• OTN Developer Days (Review) - San Juan, PR - April 29, 2010

  - by dana.singleterry

  A quick update on the San Juan, PR event. First off it was a great success with the Keynote audience of 200+. Mickey Ralat, Managing Director Oracle Caribbean, kicked off the event with a quick introduction followed by me delivering the Keynote Message - The Fusion Development Platform which is the first session in the regular OTN DD events that we run in North America. Following this session was a partner, SDT, basically marketing their services which covers the Oracle stack and then following was a very brief presentation on APEX. After this we broke out into the various tracks of Java, (APEX) DB SQL Developer, .NET on Oracle. After the breakout we ran the following sessions in the Java track: Developing with JDBC, UCP, and Java in Database, Rich Internet Applications in Web 2.0, Development Made Simple Without Coding: Developing Reusable Business Components. As expected with the various tracks, we ended up with 50 - 70 in the various sessions within the JAVA track and the audience was very impressed with the power of JDeveloper/ADF 11g and we got a number of questions from licensing cost to upgrading / integrating from Forms. As for the Forms questions, I fielded a number of them and for those I couldn't, I pointed them towards Grants resources which seemed to suffice. They were all, for the most part, unaware of the recent 11.1.1.3 release which occurred only a couple of days prior to the event. The indication was that they were going to download it and use it for the lab that was included on the DVD which we did not have the time for them to even start on. For those of you that attended the event, you can download the updated presentations as follows: Keynote - The Fusion Development Platform Rich Internet Applications in Web 2.0 Development Made Simple Without Coding - Developing Reusable Business Components

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• Borrow Harry Potter’s eBooks from Amazon Kindle Owner’s Lending Library

  - by Rekha

  From June 19, 2012, Amazon.com customers can borrow All 7 Harry Potter books from Kindle Owner’s Lending Library (KOLL). The books are available in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. Prime Members of Amazon owning Kindle, can choose from 145,000 titles. US customers can borrow for free with no due dates and also as frequently as a month. There are no limits on the number of copies available for the customers. Anyone can read the books simultaneously by borrowing them. The bookmarks in the borrowed books are saved, for the customers to continue reading where they stopped even when they re-borrow the book. Prime members also have the opportunity to enjoy free two day shipping on millions of items and  unlimited streaming of over 18,000 movies and TV episodes. Amazon has got an exclusive license from J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore. The series cost between $7.99 and $9.99 for the individual books. Pottermore’s investment on these books are compensated by Amazon’s large payment. Via Amazon. CC Image Credit Amazon KOLL.

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• OBIEE 11.1.1 - User Interface (UI) Performance Is Slow With Internet Explorer 8

  - by Ahmed A

  The OBIEE 11g UI is performance is slow in IE 8 and faster in Firefox.  For VPN or WAN users, it takes long time to display links on Dashboards via IE 8. Cause is IE 8 generates many HTTP 304 return calls and this caused the 11g UI slower when compared to the Mozilla FireFox browser. To resolve this issue, you can implement HTTP compression and caching. This is a best practice.Why use Web Server Compression / Caching for OBIEE? Bandwidth Savings: Enabling HTTP compression can have a dramatic improvement on the latency of responses. By compressing static files and dynamic application responses, it will significantly reduce the remote (high latency) user response time. Improves request/response latency: Caching makes it possible to suppress the payload of the HTTP reply using the 304 status code.  Minimizing round trips over the Web to re-validate cached items can make a huge difference in browser page load times. This screen shot depicts the flow and where the compression and decompression occurs: Solution: a. How to Enable HTTP Caching / Compression in Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) 11.1.1.x 1. To implement HTTP compression / caching, install and configure Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) 11.1.1.x for the bi_serverN Managed Servers (refer to "OBIEE Enterprise Deployment Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence" document for details). 2. On the OHS machine, open the file HTTP Server configuration file (httpd.conf) for editing. This file is located in the OHS installation directory.For example: ORACLE_HOME/Oracle_WT1/instances/instance1/config/OHS/ohs13. In httpd.conf file, verify that the following directives are included and not commented out: LoadModule expires_module "${ORACLE_HOME}/ohs/modules/mod_expires.soLoadModule deflate_module "${ORACLE_HOME}/ohs/modules/mod_deflate.so 4. Add the following lines in httpd.conf file below the directive LoadModule section and restart the OHS: Note: For the Windows platform, you will need to enclose any paths in double quotes ("), for example:Alias "/analytics ORACLE_HOME/bifoundation/web/app"<Directory "ORACLE_HOME/bifoundation/web/app"> Alias /analytics ORACLE_HOME/bifoundation/web/app#Pls replace the ORACLE_HOME with your actual BI ORACLE_HOME path<Directory ORACLE_HOME/bifoundation/web/app>#We don't generate proper cross server ETags so disable themFileETag noneSetOutputFilter DEFLATE# Don't compress imagesSetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpeg|png|js|x-javascript|javascript|css)$">#Enable future expiry of static filesExpiresActive onExpiresDefault "access plus 1 week"     #1 week, this will stops the HTTP304 calls i.e. generated by IE 8Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800"</FilesMatch>DirectoryIndex default.jsp</Directory>#Restrict access to WEB-INF<Location /analytics/WEB-INF>Order Allow,DenyDeny from all</Location> Note: Make sure you replace above placeholder "ORACLE_HOME" to your correct path for BI ORACLE_HOME.For example: my BI Oracle Home path is /Oracle/BIEE11g/Oracle_BI1/bifoundation/web/app Important Notes: Above caching rules restricted to static files found inside the /analytics directory(/web/app). This approach is safer instead of setting static file caching globally. In some customer environments you may not get 100% performance gains in IE 8.0 browser. So in that case you need to extend caching rules to other directories with static files content. If OHS is installed on separate dedicated machine, make sure static files in your BI ORACLE_HOME (../Oracle_BI1/bifoundation/web/app) is accessible to the OHS instance. The following screen shot summarizes the before and after results and improvements after enabling compression and caching:

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• Keep Oracle VM 3 Up to Date

  - by Honglin Su

  More and more customers turn to Oracle VM 3 to virtualize their enterprise applications. Oracle VM support subscription is an integrated part of their successes. Customers enjoy the benefit of the industry-leading global support 24x7 for their server virtualization implementation, and receive access to patches, fixes, and updates via Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). For customers running Oracle systems, Oracle VM support is included in Oracle Premium Support for Systems at no extra cost, and customers receive comprehensive systems coverage that includes single point accountability for Oracle server and storage hardware; integrated software (for example, firmware); and operating system software (Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, and Oracle VM). To run a successful virtualization infrastructure, it's important to keep Oracle VM 3 environment up to date by leveraging Oracle VM support resources.  Oracle VM Server Updates: You can easily upgrade Oracle VM Server using a Yum repository. You can download the latest server patch updates from ULN. To receive notification on the software update delivered to Oracle ULN for Oracle VM, you can sign up here. For information on setting up an Oracle VM Server Yum repository and using Oracle VM Manager to perform the upgrade of Oracle VM Servers, see Updating and Upgrading Oracle VM Servers in the Oracle VM User's Guide .  Oracle VM Manager Updates: Get the download instructions at OTN, and apply latest Oracle VM Manager patch. Be sure to review the patch README before you apply the patches. Support customers have access to extremely valuable knowledge notes from My Oracle Support. They are the first to receive useful tips to help address issues in Oracle VM deployments. For example, Upgrade to Oracle VM 3.1.1 using Yum Repository may cause network configuration scripts to be renamed causing network failure after reboot (Doc ID 1464126.1) Oracle VM server reboots after network becomes unresponsive due to deep C-State power management setting (Doc ID 1440197.1) For more information about Oracle's virtualization, visit oracle.com/virtualization.

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• Here’s How to Filter Anything from Twitter’s Web Interface

  - by The Geek

  As a geek, I’m not subject to the normal whims of the populace, which can be annoying when you hang out on Twitter and there’s a flood of tweets about things you don’t care about. Here’s how to filter tweets in the Twitter web interface. To accomplish this, we’re going to use a user script, which means all you Internet Explorer users are pretty much left out in the cold. You’ll probably want to resort to using a client like TweetDeck instead. Image by catspyjamasnz Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) Preliminary List of Keyboard Shortcuts for Unity Now Available Bring a Touch of the Wild West to Your Desktop with the Rango Theme for Windows 7 Manage Your Favorite Social Accounts in Chrome and Iron with Seesmic E.T. II – Extinction [Fake Movie Sequel Video] Remastered King’s Quest Games Offer Classic Gaming on Modern Machines Compare Your Internet Cost and Speed to Global Averages [Infographic]

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• Sam's Story: It's About Life

  - by user801960

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle recently released a video illustrating how Oracle products and services impact people every day of their lives. This overview demonstrates just how many different industries rely on Oracle’s world-leading technology solutions to gather and process data, enabling them to engineer systems together in the cloud and in the data centre. The video explores how Oracle solutions are impacting the retail, automotive, pharmaceutical, medical and travel industries. Through the central character, Sam, this video highlights how cross-industry solutions like collaboration software, data processing and business intelligence platforms can improve business performance, reliability and flexibility; lower the cost and complexity of IT implementation and management; and deliver greater productivity, agility and better business intelligence. To find out more about how Oracle’s products and services can help you to deliver better results, visit www.oracle.com/retail

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• Is Agile the new micromanagement?

  - by Smith James

  This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial basis. It has been 4 months with 3 iterations and they continue to do it without going fully agile for the rest of us. This is due to the fact that management's trust to meet business requirements with a quite a bit of ad hoc type request from high above. Recently, I talked to the developers who are part of this initiative; they tell me that it's not fun. They are not allowed to talk to other developers by their Scrum master and are not allowed to take any phone calls in the work area (which maybe fine to an extent). For example, if I want to talk to my friend for kicks who is in the agile team, I am not allowed without the approval of the Scrum master; who is sitting right next to the agile team. The idea of all this or the agile is to provide a complete vacuum for agile developers from any interruptions and to have them put in good 6+ productive hours. Well, guys, I am no agile guru but what I have read Yahoo agile rollout document and similar for other organizations, it gives me a feeling that agile is not cheap. It require resources and budget to instill agile into the teams and correct issue as they arrive to put them back on track. For starters, it requires training for developers and coaching for managers and etc, etc... The current Scrum master was a manager who took a couple days agile training class paid by the management is now leading this agile team. I have also heard in the meeting that agile manifesto doesn't dictate that agile is not set in stones and is customized differently for each company. Well, it all sounds good and reason. In conclusion, I always thought the agile was supposed to bring harmony in the development teams which results in happy developers. However, I am getting a very opposite feeling when talking to the developers in the agile team. They are unhappy that they cannot talk anything but work, sitting quietly all day just working, and they feel it's just another way for management to make them work more. Tell me please, if this is one of the examples of good practices used for the purpose of selfish advantage for more dollars? Or maybe, it's just us the developers like me and this agile team feels that they don't like to work in an environment where they only breathe work because they are at work. Thanks. Edit: It's a company in healthcare domain that has offices across US. It definitely feels like a cowboy style agile which makes me really not wanting to go for agile at all, esp at my current company. All of it has to do with the management being completely cheap. Cutting out expensive coffee for cheaper version, emphasis on savings and being productive while staying as lean as possible. My feeling is that someone in the management behind the door threw out this idea, that agile makes you produce more so we can show our bosses we're producing more with the same headcount. Or, maybe, it will allow us to reduce headcount if that's the case. EDITED: They are having their 5 min daily meeting. But not allowed to chat or talk with someone outside of their team. All focus is on work.

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• You Can't Win on Price

  - by David Dorf

  This year I did the majority of my Christmas shopping from the comfort of my home office. There aren't many things in stores you can't find online these days. I find it easier to search, research, and compare products online rather than walking the mall anyway. But there's a segment of the population that likes to be in the store, touching the products. For those people, smartphones avail them some of the e-commerce features I mentioned right there in the aisles. First it was RedLaser, then TheFind, ShopSavvy and many others. But the one that should be scaring retailers is Amazon's PriceCheck application. It lets you scan the product barcode, take a picture of the product, or speak the product's name. Once the product is identified, it shows the online prices, with Amazon at the top of the list. Within 10 seconds you can order the item and Amazon Prime members get free 2-day shipping too. I don't think fashion and grocery retailers need to worry much, but I have to believe smartphones are helping Amazon win a little more of the brand-name hardgoods market. So what's a retailer to do? Best Buy has begun to put QR Codes on their shelf labels that are easily scanned by smartphones and take the consumer to a Best Buy Web page where they can get extended information about the product. The consumer is getting the additional information they want, and Best Buy avoids the price comparisons. Of course if a consumer chooses to use the Amazon PriceCheck app, then all bets are off. That's when Best Buy has to hope the in-store experience and customer service will save the sale. My point is that the internet makes information available to everyone, and smartphones make it available anywhere. Unless you want your store to be Amazon's local showroom, you need to be price-competitive but differentiate on other aspects of the shopping experience. With the cost of running a physical store, you can't win on price.

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• The Other "C" in CRM

  - by Brian Dayton

  Folks who know me know that I rarely, if ever, talk politics. And I never talk politicians. Having grown up in a household with one parent leaning left and the other leaning to the right it was the best way to keep the peace. This isn't about politics. It's about "constituents" and the need to improve the services and service levels for people--at the city, county, state/province, etc. level all the way up to national governments. As a citizen and tax payer it's also important to me that these services be provided at a reasonable cost. If there's a better and more efficient way to do something then it's my hope that a public sector organization takes advantage of technology the same way private sector companies do. Social services organizations have a complex job. They provide the services that people need, from healthcare and children's assistance to helping people find jobs. But many of these organizations are still managing these processes manually or outdated, home-grown applications that could have been written up to 30 years ago. A lot has changed in technology. On the (this is as political as I'm going to get) political front, stakeholders like you and me are expecting greater transparency on where and how funds are spent. I'll admit that most of the time, when I think about CRM systems, I think about my experience as a customer of my bank, utilities company or cable operator. But now that I'm older, have children and a house--I find myself interacting more and more with agencies and services organizations. My experiences are sometimes good and sometimes not so good. Along those lines, last week's announcement of Siebel CRM 8.2 for Public Sector caught my eye. You may not work in the public sector, but you are a constituent of some--actually a lot--of public sector organizations. I don't know which CRM systems city and county utilize but I'm going to start paying closer attention.

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• Great Free Courses on Building HTML5 apps using ASP.NET Web API, Knockout.js and jQuery

  - by ScottGu

  Pluralsight has developed some great training courses on the new .NET 4.5 and VS 2012 release, including two fantastic courses from John Papa that cover how to build HTML5 web apps using ASP.NET Web API, Knockout and jQuery: Single Page Apps with HTML5, Web API, Knockout and jQuery Building HTML5 and JavaScript Apps with MVVM and Knockout Free 1-Month Subscription to the Courses Pluralsight is offering a special promotion that allows you to get a free 1-month subscription to watch the above courses at no cost.  There is no obligation to buy anything at the end of the offer and you don’t need to supply a credit card in order to take part in it. To get access to the course you simply follow @pluralsight and @john_papa on Twitter and then visit this page and enter your Twitter name using the form on it.  Pluralsight will then send you a private twitter message containing the access code that you can use to subscribe to the courses (and download the course exercise files).  Once you are subscribed to the course you have one month to watch the course (and you can watch it as many times as you want during the month). Pluralsight is running the promotion through Sept 18th – so sign-up now to get access.  Once you are signed up you then have a month to watch the course. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. And if you are new to Twitter you can also optionally follow me: @scottgu

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• My Upcoming Talk at South Florida&rsquo;s ITPalooza 2012 - NuGet for Open Source and Enterprise Environments

  - by Sam Abraham

  I am very excited to be speaking at IT Palooza next week. As this event’s audience will span professionals working in different facets of Information Technology, I chose to speak on NuGet, an essential tool for any Microsoft Stack developer, as the topic can be of value to managers, architects, IT personnel, as well as developers. For more information on ITPalooza, please visit: http://itpalooza.e2mktg.com/ To register please visit: http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=627   Below are the abstract and speaker bio: Leveraging NuGet for Open Source and Enterprise Environments NuGet is an open source package management system for .NET and Visual Studio that makes it easy to add, update, or remove external libraries in a .Net Project. In this session, we will be covering how NuGet makes open source libraries easily discoverable and usable. We will then move to demonstrate "NuGet for the Enterprise" as we setup a local library repository and configure NuGet to ensure external library versioning is consistent among project developers. Speakers: Sam Abraham is a Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS ASP.Net 3.5, 4.0 and Silverlight 4) and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) striving to leverage proven technology solutions to produce cost-effective, quality software that meets customer needs, timelines and budgets. He is currently a member of the Software Engineering Team at SISCO, the leader in maritime security solutions with customers including Princess, Carnival, and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines as well as the US Coast Guard. A strong believer in learning through sharing and the value of community fellowship, Sam has been actively involved in the local community as leader of the West Palm Beach Developers' Group, volunteer board member at the International Association for All IT Architects South Florida Chapter (IASA), and former volunteer at the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI).

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• What is the economic rationale behind programmers who work on a open source project (free) instead of a commercial project (not free)?

  - by Kim Jong Woo

  I can't understand why some people dedicate so much hour into a completely open source project without closing it and yielding greater profit from it. I don't think profiting from your code is evil, I think it's a great motivator. Why do some people feel that commercial software and generating money from it is bad? There seems to be this black and white thinking that open source = good, commercial = bad. I hardly find this convincing, and often commercial companies which are supported by sales produce very good results. An open source software in the same niche can't compete against the corporation. Of course, sometimes this is completely the other way around where private companies produce inferior product compared to open source counterparts. So help me understand, why do programmers open source their code when there is commercial prospects for it? Shouldn't the rational programmer or human being make every effort to capitalize on their opportunity cost? Working on a open source project for months when you could've spent the same number of hours at commidity wage or some other monetary compensation?

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• VSTO is Free But Aspose is Speed

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  I’ve taken over the completion, deployment, and maintenance of an ASP.NET Web site that generates Office documents using VSTO. VSTO’s a decent concept and works fine for small-scale scenarios like a desktop app or small intranet. However, with multiple simultaneous requests via ASP.NET, we found the Web server performance suffered badly. To spread out the server’s workload, I implemented MSMQ task queuing via a WCF Windows service.  That helped a lot. IIS didn’t drag with only one VSTO/Office instance running. But I  still found it taking too long to produce a single report. A nicely formatted VSTO Excel document was taking 45 minutes.  (The client  didn’t know any better and therefore considered 45 minutes tolerable.) On my own time, I pulled out an old copy of Aspose.Total for .NET. Within an hour, I had converted the VSTO Excel C# code to Aspose Cells code. The improvement was astonishing: Instead of the 45-minutes, the report took under a minute! I’ve pasted the client’s exact chat response after he tried the speedy Aspose version: “WWWWWOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Microsoft’s VSTO is a free product while the Aspose components cost $$$.  Certainly, it can be a tough call when budgets are tight. If you’re trying to convince the client to shell out for something more suitable for the application, get an eval version of Aspose.Total and offer a direct comparison demo. Ken Full Disclosure: Aspose (like several other component vendors) gives free copies of their suite to MVPs and other .NET influencers.

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• News about Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition

  - by Susanne Hale

  Updates come from the Documaker front on two counts: Oracle Documaker Awarded XCelent Award for Best Functionality Celent has published a NEW report entitled Document Automation Solution Vendors for Insurers 2011. In the evaluation, Oracle received the XCelent award for Functionality, which recognizes solutions as the leader in this category of the evaluation. According to Celent, “Insurers need to address issues related to the creation and handling of all sorts of documents. Key issues in document creation are complexity and volume. Today, most document automation vendors provide an array of features to cope with the complexity and volume of documents insurers need to generate.” The report ranks ten solution providers on Technology, Functionality, Market Penetration, and Services. Each profile provides detailed information about the vendor and its document automation system, the professional services and support staff it offers, product features, insurance customers and reference feedback, its technology, implementation process, and pricing.  A summary of the report is available at Celent’s web site. Documaker User Group in Wisconsin Holds First Meeting Oracle Documaker users in Wisconsin made the first Documaker User Group meeting a great success, with representation from eight companies. On April 19, over 25 attendees got together to share information, best practices, experiences and concepts related to Documaker and enterprise document automation; they were also able to share feedback with Documaker product management. One insurer shared how they publish and deliver documents to both internal and external customers as quickly and cost effectively as possible, since providing point of sale documents to the sales force in real time is crucial to obtaining and maintaining the book of business. They outlined best practices that ensure consistent development and testing strategies processes are in place to maximize performance and reliability. And, they gave an overview of the supporting applications they developed to monitor and improve performance as well as monitor and track each transaction. Wisconsin User Group meeting photos are posted on the Oracle Insurance Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/OracleInsurance. The Wisconsin User Group will meet again on October 26. If you and other Documaker customers in your area are interested in setting up a user group in your area, please contact Susanne Hale ([email protected]), (703) 927-0863.

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• How to Create Quality Photo Prints With Free Software

  - by Eric Z Goodnight

  Photoshop may be the professional standard for high quality photo prints, but that doesn’t mean you have to pay hundreds of dollars for printing software. Freeware program Google Picasa can create excellent quality photo prints that’ll only cost you a download. Picasa and other freeware graphics programs are hardly news to savvy geeks, although with a little patience, they can produce quality prints few could tell apart from thousand dollar graphics suites. Stay tuned for links to various graphics programs, and a simple how-to on getting the perfect print settings for your photos Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Deathwing the Destroyer – WoW Cataclysm Dragon Wallpaper Drag2Up Lets You Drag and Drop Files to the Web With Ease The Spam Police Parts 1 and 2 – Goodbye Spammers [Videos] Snow Angels Theme for Windows 7 Exploring the Jungle Ruins Wallpaper Protect Your Privacy When Browsing with Chrome and Iron Browser

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• Nice take on Open Source

  - by EmbeddedInsider

  I just revisited the “Micro Framework”- Microsoft’s bootable runtime, essentially an OS that allows managed code to run on small 32bit CPUs, even without Memory Management.  Things are happening http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb267253.aspx Abstract The Microsoft .NET Micro Framework is a bootable runtime module that brings the advantages of .NET programming to devices too resource-constrained to run other Microsoft embedded platforms. The benefits of developing with the .NET Micro Framework include the C# programming language, a managed execution environment, a substantial subset of the .NET libraries, and Visual Studio™ deployment and debugging. In this white paper we explain why the .NET Micro Framework is an ideal choice for embedded development and provide technical details of the platform’s Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and Common Language Runtime (CLR). “Micro Framework” is an interesting product, it is very low cost, like zero. And it is largely community controlled under the Apache License.  A partner network is building, and the application environment is .NET. I have been following this for some time, and the community open source approach seems to be working.  There are new features/packages emerging, for example an F# programming language (ARGH! I am still wresting with VB and C#). Anyway, what I found most interesting was a port to Tron.  Tron is a very popular Japanese open source intuitive.  It is a very real time, very compact kernel, and is, like the Micro Framework, ‘free as beer’.  One limit on MF was it was not real time.  But the merger with Tron may eliminate that problem.  Certainly, if I were dealing with a consumer product with quantities in the millions (like a SmartGrid device, or a toy) I would seriously consider something out of this technology pool.

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• 4 Top Tips from the Exceptional DBA Award judges

  - by Rebecca Amos

  There's still time to celebrate your achievements as a DBA – or those of a DBA you know – by submitting a nomination for the Exceptional DBA Awards 2011. To help you get started, here are some top tips from the judges on what they're looking for from this year's winner [hint: it's very likely you're already exceptional!]: "An Exceptional DBA must be able to communicate effectively and clearly with both technical people and the client." Steve Jones. "Exceptional DBAs are like police officers: we're here to serve and protect. Both serving and protecting are vital parts of the job, and we can't just focus on one." Brent Ozar "DBA work can be routine. Exceptional DBAs are enthusiastic about their work and are rarely bored, as there is always something new to learn and master." Brad McGehee. "Remember that cost is an important factor for your company. The ability to save your company money with a different technical solution will make you an Exceptional DBA, and can make you exceptionally well liked." Rodney Landrum. So whether you've brought a team together for a project, taken steps to protect the security of your servers, or learnt a new topic to understand an element of your job better, it's likely you’re already taking the steps that make you the Exceptional DBA the judges are looking for. To get more insider info from the judges, download your free poster of their top tips, and then get started on your entry: www.exceptionaldba.com.

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• Remastered King’s Quest Games Offer Classic Gaming on Modern Machines

  - by ETC

  If you were a fan of the King’s Quest series of adventure games from the 1980s and 1990s, you’ll be thrilled to see them remastered with enhanced graphics, polished voice acting, and more. Gaming studio AGD Interactive has been engaged in a multi-year project to remaster and freely release the classic King’s Quest games. They started with King’s Quest I in 2001, moved on to King’s Quest II, and just recently released King’s Quest III (see in the screenshot above). The gameplay for all three games is excellent and really captures the feel of the original games (with better graphics, quality voice acting, and adjustments made for modern computers). When you run the game you first get a small pre-launch console. There you can make adjusts to the game before launching it. We’d recommend you enable the pixel doubling filter. It make the game a little blockier (hey you are playing a 1980s remake!) but it fills up high resolution monitors more effectively. Hit up the link below to download King’s Quest Redux I-III free of charge for both Windows and Mac computers. King’s Quest Redux [AGD Interactive via @cbeust] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) Manage Your Favorite Social Accounts in Chrome and Iron with Seesmic E.T. II – Extinction [Fake Movie Sequel Video] Remastered King’s Quest Games Offer Classic Gaming on Modern Machines Compare Your Internet Cost and Speed to Global Averages [Infographic] Orbital Battle for Terra Wallpaper WizMouse Enables Mouse Over Scrolling on Any Window

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