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• Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 now Live!

  - by Tarun Arora

  Today was the formal launch event for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5, a state-of-the-art development solution for building modern applications that span connected devices and continuous services, from the client to the cloud. The event was streamed live from http://visualstudiolaunch.com, S.Somasegar corporate vice president of the Developer Division opened the key note, Jason Zander dived deeper into how to leverage Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 to build modern application. Brian Harry all the awesome features in Visual Studio 2012 to improve the application lifecycle management.   I. Summary of the announcements made today 1. Visual Studio Updates coming this fall –  VS Update will better support agile teams, enable continuous quality, elevate SharePoint development with application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, and expand Visual Studio 2012 Windows development capabilities. It will be available as a community technology preview (CTP) later this month and in final release later this calendar year. A comprehensive list of what will be on offer can be found here. 2. Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop – Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop brings the newest desktop development capabilities in Visual Studio 2012 to Express users, too. You would be excited to know that the express SKU will support Integration with TFS among some of the other cool features I would like to mention Unit Testing, Unit Testing, Code Analysis, dependency management with NuGet a full list and download links can be found here. 3. F# tools for Visual Studio Express 2012 for web –  This F# Tools release adds in F# 3.0 components, such as the F# 3.0 compiler, F# Interactive, IDE support, and new F# features such as type providers and query expressions to your Visual Studio 2012 express for web. More details and download links can be found here. 4. Visual Studio TFS 2012 Power Tools – The TFS 2012 Power tools brings the goodness of Best Practice Analyzer, Process Template Editor, Storyboard Shapes, Team Explorer enhancements, TFPT command line, TFS Server Backups, etc via to your TFS 2012 installation. It can be downloaded right away from here. II. Road shows There will be many more community road shows this month packaged with hours of demos and discussions. The Visual Studio UK Team has just announced that there will be four UK launch events, face to face session including a product group speaker and partner sessions: Edinburgh, 1st October Manchester, 3rd October London, 4th October Reading, 5th October III. Get Started Download Visual Studio 2012 and the additional supporting software's from here. The Visual Studio development team has put together over 60 videos to help you learn about the new Visual Studio 2012 capabilities in more detail, and all of these will be available for watching here. IV. What’s Next A lot more exciting stuff lined up… Windows 8 Anticipated release: Oct. 26 (UPDATED 9/12) Windows Server 2012 Released (UPDATED 9/4) System Center 2012 Released (UPDATED 9/11) SQL Server 2012 Released (UPDATED 4/2) Internet Explorer 10 Anticipated release: Between Q3 2012 and early 2013 (UPDATED 5/3   Office 2013 Anticipated release: Q4 2012 or Q1 2013(UPDATED 9/12) Exchange 2013 Anticipated release: Q4 2012 (UPDATED 7/26) Visual Studio 2012 Released (UPDATED 9/12) Kinect for Windows Released (UPDATED 9/4) Windows Phone "Tango" and 8 "Tango": Released; Anticipated "Windows Phone 8" release: Q4 2012 (UPDATED 9/5) Dynamics ERP Online Anticipated release: September or October 2012 (UPDATED 7/20) Office 365 Anticipated update schedule: "Almost weekly"(UPDATED 9/12) Windows Azure Rumored CTP release: Spring 2012 (UPDATED 9/7) SharePoint 2013 Anticipated release: Q4 2012 (UPDATED 8/21) Enjoy

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• Planning development when academic research is involved

  - by Another Anonymous User

  Dear fellow programmers, how do you do "software planning" when academic research is involved? And, on a side note, how do you convince your boss that writing software is not like building a house and it's more like writing a novel? The gory details are below. I am in charge of a small dev team working in a research lab. We started developing a software with the purpose of going public one day (i.e. sell and make money off that). Such software depends on, amongst other things, at least two independent research lines: that is, there are at least two Ph.D. candidates that will, hopefully, one day come out with a working implementation of what we need. The main software depends also on other, more concrete resources that we as developers can take care of: graphics rendering, soft bodies deformation, etc. My boss asked me to write the specifications, requirements AND a bloody GANTT chart of the entire project. Faced with the fact that I don't have a clue about the research part, and that such research is fundamental for the software, he said "make assumptions." For the clarity of the argument, he is a professor whose Ph.D. students should come up with the research we need. And he comes from a strictly engineering background: plan everything first, write down specifications and only then write down code that "it's the last part". What I am doing now: I broke down the product in features; each 'feature' is, de facto, a separate product; Each feature is built on top of the previous one; Once a feature (A) has a working prototype the team can start working on the next feature (B), while QA for is being done for A (if money allows, more people can be brought in, etc.); Features that depend on research will come last: by then, hopefully, the research part will be completed (when is still a big question) ; Also, I set the team to use SCRUM for the development of 'version 1.0', due in a few months. This deadline could be set based on reasonable assumptions: we listed all required features, we counted our availability, and we gave a reasonable estimate. So my questions, again, are: How do I make my boss happy while at the same time get something out the door? How do I write specifications for something we -the developers- have no clue whether it's possible to do or not? (We still haven't decided which libraries to use for some tasks; we'll do so when we'll need to) How do I get the requirements for that, given that there are yet no clients nor investors, just lots of interests and promises? How do I get peace in the world? I am sure at least one of my questions will be answered :) ps: I am writing this anonymously since a potential investor might backfire if this is discovered. Hope you'll understand. However I must say I do not like this mentality of 'hiding the truth': this program will likely benefit many, and not being able to talk openly about this (with my name and my reputation attached) feels like censorship. But alas, I care more about your suggestions now.

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• Oracle Announces Release of PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Feature Pack 2

  - by Jay Zuckert

  Big things sometimes come in small packages.  Today Oracle announced the availability of PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Feature Pack 2 which delivers a new HR self service user experience that fundamentally changes the way managers and employees interact with the HCM system.  Earlier this year we reviewed a number of new concept designs with our Customer Advisory Boards.  With the accelerated feature pack development cycle we have adopted, these innovations are  now available to all 9.1 customers without the need for an upgrade.   There are no new products that need to be licensed for the capabilities below. For more details on Feature Pack 2, please see the Oracle press release. Included in Feature Pack 2 is a new search-based menu-free navigation that allows managers to search for employees by name and take actions directly from the secure search results.  For example, a manager can now simply type in part of an employee’s first or last name and receive meaningful results from documents related to performance, compensation, learning, recruiting, career planning and more.   Delivered actions can be initiated directly from these search results and the actions are securely tied to HCM security and user role.  The feature pack also includes new pages that will enable managers to be more productive by aggregating key employee data into a single page.  The new Manager Dashboard and Talent Summary provide a consolidated view of data related to a manager’s team and individual team members, respectively.   The Manager Dashboard displays information relevant to their direct reports including team learning, objective alignment, alerts, and pending approvals requiring their attention.  The Talent Summary provides managers with an aggregated view of talent management-related data for an individual employee including performance history, salary history, succession options, total rewards, and competencies.   The information displayed in both the Manager Dashboard and Talent Summary is configurable by system administrators and can be personalized by each of your managers. Other Feature Pack 2 enhancements allow organizations to administer Matrix or Dotted-Line Relationship Management, which addresses the challenge of tracking and maintaining project-based organizations that cut across the enterprise and geographic regions.  From within the Company Directory and Org Viewer organization charts, managers now have access to manager self-service transactions from related actions.  More than 70 manager and employee self-service transactions have been tied into the related action framework accessible from Org Viewer, Manager Dashboard, Talent Summary and Secure Enterprise Search (SES) results.  In addition to making it easier to access manager self-service transactions, the feature pack delivers streamlined transaction pages making everyday tasks such as promoting an employee faster and more efficient. With the delivery of PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Feature Pack 2, Oracle continues to deliver on its commitment to our PeopleSoft customers.  With this feature pack, HCM 9.1 customers will be able to deploy the newest functionality quickly, without a major release upgrade, and realize added value from their existing PeopleSoft investment.    For customers newly deploying 9.1, a new download with all of Feature Pack 2  will be available early next year.   This will aslo include recertified upgrade paths from 8.8, 8.9 and 9.0, for customers in the upgrade process.

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• Installing the AMD Proprietary Drivers broke my 12.10 desktop

  - by Drybones5

  I decided to download and install the AMD Legacy Catalyst driver 12.6 from AMD's website. I ran the .run file and the GUI below in the second image appeared and I install it that way. On reboot, I saw the below first image, though I managed to open Firefox by Open the pictures by right click Open As. No windows, buttons, or launcher / environment. It took some time but I figured out how to remove the driver and got back to normal on the default open source drivers I had before. Purged the old drivers and reconfigured xorg to make sure. How should I be going about installing the AMD made drivers? Is it even compatible with Ubuntu 12.10 yet? And if so would I even need it for 3D heavy applications like Team Fortress 2, or other game applications? I didn't install Ubuntu just for Steam, I've been using it on and off for a few years. Valve has mentioned that they are working on graphics drivers with NVIDA, AMD, and Intel. Nvidia released their new driver on Steam Linux beta release. Is AMD supposed to also have a new driver coming out soon? I'm using an ATi Radeon HD 4850 1GB. My entire desktop after install the proprietary drivers - http://i.stack.imgur.com/jTbQz.jpg GUI for the AMD Catalyst install - http://i.stack.imgur.com/UkYWn.png

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• Bulk Rename Tool is a Lightweight but Powerful File Renaming Tool

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  There’s no need to settle for overly simplistic file renaming tools as long as Bulk Rename Tool is around. It’s lightweight, insanely customizable, portable, and sure to make short work of any renaming task you throw at it. Bulk Rename Tool is a great portable application (available as an installed version if you crave context menu integration) that blasts through file renaming tasks. The main panel is intimidatingly packed with toggles and variables you can alter; this isn’t a one-click solution by any means. That said, once you get comfortable using the interface it’s lightening fast and extremely flexible. One tip that will save you an enormous amount of frustrating when you get started: make sure to highlight the files you want to change in the file preview window (located in the upper right corner) or else you won’t see the preview and won’t know if the changes you’re making in the control panel are yielding the file names you desire. Hit up the link below to read more and grab a copy; Bulk Rename Tool is free, Windows only. Bulk Rename Tool Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Make Disposable Sleeves for Your In-Ear Monitors Macs Don’t Make You Creative! So Why Do Artists Really Love Apple? MacX DVD Ripper Pro is Free for How-To Geek Readers (Time Limited!) HTG Explains: What’s a Solid State Drive and What Do I Need to Know? How to Get Amazing Color from Photos in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Learn To Adjust Contrast Like a Pro in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Bring the Grid to Your Desktop with the TRON Legacy Theme for Windows 7 The Dark Knight and Team Fortress 2 Mashup Movie Trailer [Video] Dirt Cheap DSLR Viewfinder Improves Outdoor DSLR LCD Visibility Lakeside Sunset in the Mountains [Wallpaper] Taskbar Meters Turn Your Taskbar into a System Resource Monitor Create Shortcuts for Your Favorite or Most Used Folders in Ubuntu

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• Open source adventures with... wait for it... Microsoft

  - by Jeff

  Last week, Microsoft announced that it was going to open source the rest of the ASP.NET MVC Web stack. The core MVC framework has been open source for a long time now, but the other pieces around it are also now out in the wild. Not only that, but it's not what I call "big bang" open source, where you release the source with each version. No, they're actually committing in real time to a public repository. They're also taking contributions where it makes sense. If that weren't exciting enough, CodePlex, which used to be a part of the team I was on, has been re-org'd to a different part of the company where it is getting the love and attention (and apparently money) that it deserves. For a period of several months, I lobbied to get a PM gig with that product, but got nowhere. A year and a half later, I'm happy to see it finally treated right. In any case, I found a bug in Razor, the rendering engine, before the beta came out. I informally sent the bug info to some people, but it wasn't fixed for the beta. Now, with the project being developed in the open, I was able to submit the issue, and went back and forth with the developer who wrote the code (I met him once at a meet up in Bellevue, I think), and he committed a fix. I tried it a day later, and the bug was gone. There's a lot to learn from all of this. That open source software is surprisingly efficient and often of high quality is one part of it. For me the win is that it demonstrates how open and collaborative processes, as light as possible, lead to better software. In other words, even if this were a project being developed internally, at a bank or something, getting stakeholders involved early and giving people the ability to respond leads to awesomeness. While there is always a place for big thinking, experience has shown time and time again that trying to figure everything out up front takes too long, and rarely meets expectations. This is a lesson that probably half of Microsoft has yet to learn, including the team I was on before I split. It's the reason that team still hasn't shipped anything to general availability. But I've seen what an open and iterative development style can do for teams, at Microsoft and other places that I've worked. When you can have a conversation with people, and take ideas and turn them into code quickly, you're winning. So why don't people like winning? I think there are a lot of reasons, and they can generally be categorized into fear, skepticism and bad experiences. I can't give the Web stack teams enough credit. Not only did they dream big, but they changed a culture that often seems immovable and hopelessly stuck. This is a very public example of this culture change, but it's starting to happen at every scale in Microsoft. It's really interesting to see in a company that has been written off as dead the last decade.

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• Additional new material WebLogic Community

  - by JuergenKress

  Virtual Developer Conference On Demand - Register Updated Book: WebLogic 12c: Distinctive Recipes - Architecture, Development, Administration by Oracle ACE Director Frank Munz - Blog | YouTube Webcast: Migrating from GlassFish to WebLogic - Replay Reliance Commercial Finance Accelerates Time-to-Market, Improves IT Staff Productivity by 70% - Blog | Oracle Magazine Retrieving WebLogic Server Name and Port in ADF Application by Andrejus Baranovskis, Oracle Ace Director - Blog Using Oracle WebLogic 12c with NetBeans IDEOracle ACE Director Markus Eisele walks you through installing and configuring all the necessary components, and helps you get started with a simple Hello World project. Read the article. Video: Oracle A-Team ADF Mobile Persistence SampleThis video by Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team architect Steven Davelaar demonstrates how to use the ADF Mobile Persistence Sample JDeveloper extension to generate a fully functional ADF Mobile application that reads and writes data using an ADF BC SOAP web service. Watch the video. Java ME 8 ReleaseDownload Java ME today! This release is an implementation of the Java ME 8 standards JSR 360 (CLDC 8) and JSR 361 (MEEP 8), and includes support of alignment with Java SE 8 language features and APIs, an enhanced services-enabled application platform, the ability to "right-size" the platform to address a wide range of target devices, and more. Learn more Download Java ME SDK 8It includes application development support for Oracle Java ME Embedded 8 platforms and includes plugins for NetBeans 8. See the Java ME 8 Developer Tools Documentation to learn JavaOne 2014 Early Bird RateRegister early to save $400 off the onsite price. With the release of Java 8 this year, we have exciting new sessions and an interactive demo space! NetBeans IDE 8.0 Patch UpdateThe NetBeans Team has released a patch for NetBeans IDE 8.0. Download it today to get fixes that enhance stability and performance. Java 8 Questions ForumFor any questions about this new release, please join the conversation on the Java 8 Questions Forum. Java ME 8: Getting Started with Samples and Demo CodeLearn in few steps how to get started with Java ME 8! The New Java SE 8 FeaturesJava SE 8 introduces enhancements such as lambda expressions that enable you to write more concise yet readable code, better utilize multicore systems, and detect more errors at compile time. See What's New in JDK 8 and the new Java SE 8 documentation portal. Pay Less for Java-Related Books!Save 20% on all new Oracle Press books related to Java. Download the free preview sampler for the Java 8 book written by Herbert Schildt, Maurice Naftain, Henrik Ebbers and J.F. DiMarzio. New book: EJB 3 in Action, Second Edition WebLogic 12c Does WebSockets Getting Started by C2B2 Video: Building Robots with Java Embedded Video: Nighthacking TV Watch presentations by Stephen Chin and community members about Java SE, Java Embedded, Java EE, Hadoop, Robots and more. Migrating the Spring Pet Clinic to Java EE 7 Trip report : Jozi JUG Java Day in Johannesburg How to Build GlassFish 4 from Source 4,000 posts later : The Aquarium WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Huge procedurally generated 'wilderness' worlds

  - by The Communist Duck

  I'm sure you all know of games like Dwarf Fortress - massive, procedural generated wilderness and land. Something like this, taken from this very useful article. However, I was wondering how I could apply this to a much larger scale; the scale of Minecraft comes to mind (isn't that something like 8x the size of the Earth's surface?). Pseudo-infinite, I think the best term would be. The article talks about fractal perlin noise. I am no way an expert on it, but I get the general idea (it's some kind of randomly generated noise which is semi-coherent, so not just random pixel values). I could just define regions X by X in size, add some region loading type stuff, and have one bit of noise generating a region. But this would result in just huge amounts of islands. On the other extreme, I don't think I can really generate a supermassive sheet of perlin noise. And it would just be one big island, I think. I am pretty sure Perlin noise, or some noise, would be the answer in some way. I mean, the map is really nice looking. And you could replace the ascii with tiles, and get something very nice looking. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks. :D

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• Handling early/late/dropped packets for interpolation in a 3D multiplayer game

  - by Ben Cracknell

  I'm working on a multiplayer game that for the purposes of this question, is most similar to Team Fortress. Each network data packet will contain the 3D position of the target moving object. (this object could be another player) The packets are sent on a fixed interval, and linear interpolation will be used to smooth the transition between packets. Under normal circumstances, interpolation will occur between the second-to-last packet, and the last packet received. The linear interpolation algorithm is the same as this post: Interpolating positions in a multiplayer game I have the same issue as in that post, but the answers don't seem like they will work in my situation. Consider the following scenario: Normal packet timing, everything is okay The next expected packet is late. That's okay, we'll just extrapolate based on previous positions The late packet eventually arrives with corrections to our extrapolation. Now what do we do with its information? The answers on the above post suggest we should just interpolate to this new packet's position, but that would not work at all. If we have already extrapolated past that point in time, moving back would cause rubber-banding. The issue is similar in the case of an early or dropped packet. So I believe what I am looking for is some way to smoothly deal with new information in an ongoing interpolation/extrapolation process. Since I might be moving on to quadratic or even cubic interpolation, it would be great if the same solutiuon could be applied to those as well.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 7-13, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 items shared via the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the week of October 7-13, 2012. OOW12: Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices | Andrejus Baranovskis The Oracle OpenWorld presentations keep coming! Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis shares the slides from "Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices," co-presented with Danilo Schmiedel from Opitz Consulting. Oracle's Analytics, Engineered Systems, and Big Data Strategy | Mark Rittman Part 1 of 3 in Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman's series on Oracle Exalytics, Oracle R Enterprise and Endeca. Adaptive ADF/WebCenter template for the iPad | Maiko Rocha Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Maiko Rocha responds to a a customer request for information about how to create an adaptive iPad template for their WebCenter Portal application, "a specific template to streamline their workflow on the iPad." Following the Thread in OSB | Antony Reynolds Antony Reynolds recently led an Oracle Service Bus POC in which his team needed to get high throughput from an OSB pipeline. "Imagine our surprise when, on stressing the system, we saw it lock up, with large numbers of blocked threads." He shares the details of the problem and the solution in this extensive technical post. WebCenter Sites Gadget Development Concepts Quickstart | John Brunswick What are Gadgets? "At their most basic level they can be thought of as lightweight portlets that run largely on the client side of an architecture," says John Brunswick. "Gadgets provide a cross-platform container to run reusable UI modules that generally expose dynamic information to an end user, allowing for some level of end user customization." Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: OAM and OIM 11g Academies Looking for technical how-to content covering Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager? The people behind the Oracle Middleware Security blog have indexed relevant blog posts into what they call Academies. "These indexes contain the articles we've written that we believe provide long lasting guidance on OAM and OIM. Posts covered in these series include articles on key aspects of OAM and OIM 11g, best practice architectural guidance, integrations, and customizations." Fusion Applications Technical Tips | Naveen Nahata "Setting memory parameters for Admin and Managed servers of various domains in Fusion Applications can be, let us say, a little daunting," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Naveen Nahata. "While all this may look complicated and intimidating, it is actually relatively simple once you understand how it all works." Updated Agenda for OTN Architect Day Los Angeles (Oct 25) In less than two weeks Oracle Architect Day rolls into Los Angeles, with a full slate of sessions devoted to cloud computing, engineered systems, and SOA. Follow the link for the updated event agenda. ORCLville: OOW 2012 - A Not So Brief Recap Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter, an Applications & Apps Technology specialists, shares his personal, frank, and and extensive recap or Oracle OpenWorld 2012. SOA Suite create partition in Enterprise Manager | Peter Paul van de Beek "In Oracle SOA Suite 10g, or more specific BPEL 10g, one could group functionality in domains," says Peter Paul van de Beek. "This feature has been away in the early versions of SOA Suite 11g. They have returned in more recent version and can be used for all SCA composites (instead of BPEL only). Nowadays these 10g domains are called partitions." Thought for the Day "I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away." — Helmut Jahn Source: BrainyQuote.com

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• Museum of Modern Art Starts Video Game Collection; Acquires Myst, Pac-Man, and More

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  The Museum of Modern Art is weighing in on the video-games-as-art debate by starting a collection of iconic video games and putting them up for public display. Read on to see what games are included in the initial batch and the MoMA’s reasons behind starting a video game collection. Although the MoMA is slated to grow to over 40 titles, the seed batch is 14 titles including: Pac-Man, Tetris, Sim City 2000, Myst, Portal, and Dwarf Fortress. In the announcement they explain the motivation for building a video game collection: Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design—a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity. Our criteria, therefore, emphasize not only the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, but also the many other aspects—from the elegance of the code to the design of the player’s behavior—that pertain to interaction design. In order to develop an even stronger curatorial stance, over the past year and a half we have sought the advice of scholars, digital conservation and legal experts, historians, and critics, all of whom helped us refine not only the criteria and the wish list, but also the issues of acquisition, display, and conservation of digital artifacts that are made even more complex by the games’ interactive nature. This acquisition allows the Museum to study, preserve, and exhibit video games as part of its Architecture and Design collection. The above quote is only a small snippet of a much lengthier look at the benefits of examining and preserving video games, hit up the link below to check out the full post including future titles the MoMA would like to include in their archive. Video Games: 14 in the Collection, for Starters [Inside/Out] How To Boot Your Android Phone or Tablet Into Safe Mode HTG Explains: Does Your Android Phone Need an Antivirus? How To Use USB Drives With the Nexus 7 and Other Android Devices

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• The Three-Legged Milk Stool - Why Oracle Fusion Incentive Compensation makes the difference!

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  During the London Olympics, we were exposed to dozens of athletes who worked with sports psychologists to maximize their performance. Executives often hire business psychologists to coach their teams to excellence. In the same vein, Fusion Incentive Compensation can be used to get people to change their sales behavior so we can make our numbers. But what about using incentive compensation solutions in a non-sales scenario to drive change? Recently, I was working an opportunity where a company was having a low user adoption rate for Salesforce.com, which was causing problems for them. I suggested they use Fusion Incentive Comp to change the reps' behavior. We tossed around the idea of tracking user adoption by creating a variable bonus for reps based on how well they forecasted revenues in the new system. Another thought was to reward the reps for how often they logged into the system or for the percentage of leads that became opportunities and turned into revenue. A new twist on a great product. Fusion CRM's Sweet Spot I'm excited about the sales performance management (SPM) tools in Fusion CRM. This trio of Incentive Compensation, Territory Management, and Quota Management sets us apart from the competition because Oracle is the only vendor that provides all three of these capabilities on a single tech stack, in a single application, and with a single look and feel. The niche vendors offer standalone territory or incentive compensation solutions, but then the customer has to custom build the other tools and can end up with a Frankenstein-type environment. On average, companies overpay sales commissions by three to eight percent. You calculate that number for a company the size of Oracle for one quarter and it makes a pretty air-tight financial case for using SPM tools to figure accurate commissions. Plus when sales reps get the right compensation, they can be out selling rather than spending precious time figuring out what they didn't get paid or looking for another job. And one more thing ... Oracle knows incentive comp. We have been a Gartner Market Scope leader in this space for the last five years. Our solution gets high marks because of its scalability and because of its interoperability with other technologies. And now that we're leading with Fusion, our incentive compensation offering includes the innovations that the Fusion team built, plus enhancements from the E-Business Suite Incentive Comp team. It's a case of making a good thing even better. (See product video.) The "Wedge" Apps In a number of accounts that I'm working on, there is a non-Oracle CRM system of record. That gives me the perfect opportunity to introduce the benefits of our SPM tools and to get the customer using Fusion. Then the door is wide open for the company to uptake more of Fusion CRM, especially since all the integrations they need are out of the box. I really believe that implementing this wedge of SPM tools is the ticket to taking market share away from other vendors. It allows us to insert ourselves in an environment where no other CRM solution in the market has the extending capabilities of Fusion. Not Just Your Usual Suspects Usually the stakeholders that I talk to for Territory Management are tightly aligned with the sales management team. When I sell the quota planning tool, I'm talking to finance people on the ERP side of the house who are measuring quotas and forecasting revenue. And then Incentive Comp is of most interest to the sales operations people, and generally these people roll up to either HR or the payroll department. I think of our Fusion SPM tools as a three-legged stool straddling an organization's Sales, Finance, and HR departments. So when you're prospecting for opportunities -- yes, people with a CRM perspective will be very interested -- but don't limit yourselves to that constituency. You might find stakeholders in accounting, revenue planning, or HR compensation teams. You just might discover, as I did at United Airlines, that the HR organization is spearheading the CRM project because incentive compensation is what they need ... and they're the ones with the budget. Jason Loh Global Solutions Manager, Fusion CRM Sales Planning Oracle Corporation

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• Deliberate Practice

  - by Jeff Foster

  It’s easy to assume, as software engineers, that there is little need to “practice” writing code. After all, we write code all day long! Just by writing a little each day, we’re constantly learning and getting better, right? Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Of course, developers do improve with experience. Each time we encounter a problem we’re more likely to avoid it next time. If we’re in a team that deploys software early and often, we hone and improve the deployment process each time we practice it. However, not all practice makes perfect. To develop true expertise requires a particular type of practice, deliberate practice, the only goal of which is to make us better programmers. Everyday software development has other constraints and goals, not least the pressure to deliver. We rarely get the chance in the course of a “sprint” to experiment with potential solutions that are outside our current comfort zone. However, if we believe that software is a craft then it’s our duty to strive continuously to raise the standard of software development. This requires specific and sustained efforts to get better at something we currently can’t do well (from Harvard Business Review July/August 2007). One interesting way to introduce deliberate practice, in a sustainable way, is the code kata. The term kata derives from martial arts and refers to a set of movements practiced either solo or in pairs. One of the better-known examples is the Bowling Game kata by Bob Martin, the goal of which is simply to write some code to do the scoring for 10-pin bowling. It sounds too easy, right? What could we possibly learn from such a simple example? Trust me, though, that it’s not as simple as five minutes of typing and a solution. Of course, we can reach a solution in a short time, but the important thing about code katas is that we explore each technique fully and in a controlled way. We tackle the same problem multiple times, using different techniques and making different decisions, understanding the ramifications of each one, and exploring edge cases. The short feedback loop optimizes opportunities to learn. Another good example is Conway’s Game of Life. It’s a simple problem to solve, but try solving it in a functional style. If you’re used to mutability, solving the problem without mutating state will push you outside of your comfort zone. Similarly, if you try to solve it with the focus of “tell-don’t-ask“, how will the responsibilities of each object change? As software engineers, we don’t get enough opportunities to explore new ideas. In the middle of a development cycle, we can’t suddenly start experimenting on the team’s code base. Code katas offer an opportunity to explore new techniques in a safe environment. If you’re still skeptical, my challenge to you is simply to try it out. Convince a willing colleague to pair with you and work through a kata or two. It only takes an hour and I’m willing to bet you learn a few new things each time. The next step is to make it a sustainable team practice. Start with an hour every Friday afternoon (after all who wants to commit code to production just before they leave for the weekend?) for month and see how that works out. Finally, consider signing up for the Global Day of Code Retreat. It’s like a daylong code kata, it’s on December 8th and there’s probably an event in your area!

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• BEHIND THE SCENES AT A FLASH-MOB...

  - by OliviaOC

  Today, we interviewed Aarti, who recently organised a flash-mob for Oracle Campus, which you can see on our facebook page Hi Aarti, perhaps you could give us a quick introduction of yourself, and what you do at Oracle? I’ve been with Campus Recruitment for just over a year. I’ve been with Oracle for three years. I was keen to get into the campus role after having watched other colleagues working in campus and when the opportunity arrived I jumped at it. The journey has been fantastic thus far. I’m responsible for the GBU hiring at Oracle. Why did you record the flash-mob video - what were your goals? Flash-mobs were one thing that took off really big in India after the first one in Mumbai. It’s the hot thing in the student community at the moment. A better way to reach out and connect with students. I think that it is also a good way to demonstrate our openness and culture at Oracle – demonstrate that we are very flexible and that we have a cool culture. I knew the video could be shared on our social media pages and reach out to a wider student community What was the preparation and rehearsal for the video like? When I decided to do the video, I had to decide who I would like to do the flash-mob. The new campus hires to Oracle would be ideal for this. We were 2 teams at 2 different locations and Each team took 2-3 songs and choreographed it themselves. Every day at 5pm, each team would meet up and every other weekend the whole group met. Practicing went on for about a month like this. How was the video received by participants and by students on the University campus? The event was well received. We did it during the lunch break at the University so that there was a large presence of students around while the flash mob took place. We set up about an hour beforehand to get everything ready. The break-bell sounded and the students came out, that’s when the flash-mob started. The students were pleasantly surprised that a company was doing this. They also recognised some of the participants involved as former graduates. Since the flash-mob and the video of it that you recorded, have you had much response due to it? We have, especially in the past two weeks. We went back to the college to make some hires. The flash-mob was still fresh in their minds and they knew well who Oracle was as a result. Would you like to repeat this kind of creative initiative again with the recruitment team? Yes, absolutely! I’m over the moon with the flash-mob. My mind is working overtime now with ideas about the next things to do!

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• Planning development when academic research is involved

  - by Another Anonymous User

  Dear fellow programmers, how do you do "software planning" when academic research is involved? And, on a side note, how do you convince your boss that writing software is not like building a house and it's more like writing a novel? The gory details are below. I am in charge of a small dev team working in a research lab. We started developing a software with the purpose of going public one day (i.e. sell and make money off that). Such software depends on, amongst other things, at least two independent research lines: that is, there are at least two Ph.D. candidates that will, hopefully, one day come out with a working implementation of what we need. The main software depends also on other, more concrete resources that we as developers can take care of: graphics rendering, soft bodies deformation, etc. My boss asked me to write the specifications, requirements AND a bloody GANTT chart of the entire project. Faced with the fact that I don't have a clue about the research part, and that such research is fundamental for the software, he said "make assumptions." For the clarity of the argument, he is a professor whose Ph.D. students should come up with the research we need. And he comes from a strictly engineering background: plan everything first, write down specifications and only then write down code that "it's the last part". What I am doing now: I broke down the product in features; each 'feature' is, de facto, a separate product; Each feature is built on top of the previous one; Once a feature (A) has a working prototype the team can start working on the next feature (B), while QA for is being done for A (if money allows, more people can be brought in, etc.); Features that depend on research will come last: by then, hopefully, the research part will be completed (when is still a big question) ; Also, I set the team to use SCRUM for the development of 'version 1.0', due in a few months. This deadline could be set based on reasonable assumptions: we listed all required features, we counted our availability, and we gave a reasonable estimate. So my questions, again, are: How do I make my boss happy while at the same time get something out the door? How do I write specifications for something we -the developers- have no clue whether it's possible to do or not? (We still haven't decided which libraries to use for some tasks; we'll do so when we'll need to) How do I get the requirements for that, given that there are yet no clients nor investors, just lots of interests and promises? How do I get peace in the world? I am sure at least one of my questions will be answered :) ps: I am writing this anonymously since a potential investor might backfire if this is discovered. Hope you'll understand. However I must say I do not like this mentality of 'hiding the truth': this program will likely benefit many, and not being able to talk openly about this (with my name and my reputation attached) feels like censorship. But alas, I care more about your suggestions now.

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• Cities from Space: A Tour of Urban Planning Patterns

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  While many cities developed haphazardly and organically with little structured planning, other cities were developed following strict organization–organization that reveals itself beautifully when seen from space. Wired magazine shares a roundup of ten well-planned cities viewed with a satellite’s eye. Among the roundup our favorite is the oldest, seen in the photo above: This nine-pointed fortress is perhaps the best example of a planned city from the Renaissance. Palmanova was built in 1593 and is located in the northeastern corner of Italy near the border with Slovenia. It was intended to be home to a completely self-reliant utopian community that could also defend itself against the Ottomans. It had three guarded entrances, ramparts between each of the star points and eventually a moat. Sadly, nobody was willing to move there. Eventually it was used as free housing for pardoned criminals. Today it is a national monument, a tourist destination and home to around 5,000 people. Hit up the link below to check out the other nine well-planned entries in the roundup. How To Boot Your Android Phone or Tablet Into Safe Mode HTG Explains: Does Your Android Phone Need an Antivirus? How To Use USB Drives With the Nexus 7 and Other Android Devices

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• Dependency injection: How to sell it

  - by Mel

  Let it be known that I am a big fan of dependency injection (DI) and automated testing. I could talk all day about it. Background Recently, our team just got this big project that is to built from scratch. It is a strategic application with complex business requirements. Of course, I wanted it to be nice and clean, which for me meant: maintainable and testable. So I wanted to use DI. Resistance The problem was in our team, DI is taboo. It has been brought up a few times, but the gods do not approve. But that did not discourage me. My Move This may sound weird but third-party libraries are usually not approved by our architect team (think: "thou shalt not speak of Unity, Ninject, NHibernate, Moq or NUnit, lest I cut your finger"). So instead of using an established DI container, I wrote an extremely simple container. It basically wired up all your dependencies on startup, injects any dependencies (constructor/property) and disposed any disposable objects at the end of the web request. It was extremely lightweight and just did what we needed. And then I asked them to review it. The Response Well, to make it short. I was met with heavy resistance. The main argument was, "We don't need to add this layer of complexity to an already complex project". Also, "It's not like we will be plugging in different implementations of components". And "We want to keep it simple, if possible just stuff everything into one assembly. DI is an uneeded complexity with no benefit". Finally, My Question How would you handle my situation? I am not good in presenting my ideas, and I would like to know how people would present their argument. Of course, I am assuming that like me, you prefer to use DI. If you don't agree, please do say why so I can see the other side of the coin. It would be really interesting to see the point of view of someone who disagrees. Update Thank you for everyone's answers. It really puts things into perspective. It's nice enough to have another set of eyes to give you feedback, fifteen is really awesome! This are really great answers and helped me see the issue from different sides, but I can only choose one answer, so I will just pick the top voted one. Thanks everyone for taking the time to answer. I have decided that it is probably not the best time to implement DI, and we are not ready for it. Instead, I will concentrate my efforts on making the design testable and attempt to present automated unit testing. I am aware that writing tests is additional overhead and if ever it is decided that the additional overhead is not worth it, personally I would still see it as a win situation since the design is still testable. And if ever testing or DI is a choice in future, the design can easily handle it.

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• Do all mods simply alter game files? [on hold]

  - by Starkers

  When you install some mods you drag certain files into your game directory and replace the files. Other mods, though, come with an installer where you can set parameters first. Does the installer then go and automatically replace the certain files? At the end of the day, is that all the installation of any mod is? Is the installation of a mod simply the replacement of certain files inside the game's root directory? Do mods exist which don't fit the above statement? That install outside the game's root? Why do they do this? All the mods I can think of do just replace certain files inside the game's root. However, I know Team Fortress was spawned from a multiplayer halflife 1 mod. Do you reckon that mod installed files outside the root to enable multiplayer via a network for a single player game? How rare are these mods? Or do they not even exist? Do even extensive mods make all their changes inside the root?

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• Ubuntu 14.04 stalling. Problem with LightDM. Plymouth (and logging out) switches over to a black screen w/ white cursor

  - by Kage

  if its a duplicate, sorry. Couldn't find anything that fits my issue, much less that was on 14.04. I changed a few things recently. Switched to the Numix theme (from PPA), installed lm-sensors and psensor (ran all the I/O probes), Ubuntu Tweak, Pinta, and well, Team Fortress 2 on Steam. :P The system will get to the Plymouth 'ubuntu' screen, load load, all dots filled, switches over to LightDM, but wait! No LightDM. :I Just a blank screen with that white cursor. Can't switch out to tty1-6 - not sure if the Ctrl-Alt-F1 is disabled in 14.04 or if its literally just locked down. If I change any files, I have access to the filesystem from my Windows 8 partition. That's it. :/ I'm pretty familiar with Linux, especially Ubuntu, but I think I'm still at the point I know just enough to break things and not always how to fix 'em. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! UPDATE I was just able to get into my desktop briefly. I booted Ubuntu. When the black screen froze, I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del. When it started switching off, I hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. It rebooted. I plugged the second monitor in I had been using before the issue ever came about. Plymouth displayed on both. LightDM came up, displayed on both (it used to show only the ubuntu logo on the unfocused monitor though). I logged in just fine. Even ran some pending software updates. I logged out of the desktop though, and LightDM refused to show again. xP

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• Bad Performance With Games Under Wine in Ubuntu 12.04

  - by Pandem

  I'm somewhat new to Linux. I've dabbled with it before but never more than just experimentation in a VM or dual boot where I almost always reverted back to Windows soon after (more due to a lack of commitment than a dislike for the OS). Anyway my problem is that in the two games (Guild Wars and Team Fortress 2) I've tried so far I get fairly bad performance. Despite both games having a "Platinum" rating I've still been forced to run both in DirectX 8, otherwise they either crash, have texture defects or the UI is missing. By "bad performance" I mean sub-30 FPS where there are some players and regular large framerate drops with video settings on low. Currently in my mind I believe the performance issues are just a problem with the drivers because my graphics card is a AMD 7850 which is virtually brand new and probably not properly supported yet but I'm unsure and would appreciate advice or tips to improve things. I have Ubuntu 12.04 installed and I am usually logged in a Gnome Classic session. I have installed AMD's proprietary drivers (Catalyst version 12.4) and have Wine 1.4 installed. I have used Winetricks to install DX9/DX10 dlls and other things.

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• Ubuntu 12.04 login screen flickers. “Could not write bytes: broken pipes”

  - by Brayn

  I use Ubuntu 12.04 x64 with a dual-boot setup. Yesterday it worked fine but this morning when I attempted to boot it gets to the login screen and then it just flickers, alternating between the login screen and the console showing boot items (mainly Apache, the last one being "Battery status" although it's a desktop) all with [OK] status. The only error that I can see is: "Could not write bytes: broken pipes" on top of the screen. The only things I can think of that could cause this are: This morning I had a removable hdd plugged in during boot time, which I usually don't have Yesterday I've installed Dwarven Fortress that requires some x32 libraries so I've installed ia32 using synaptic. As far as I know this shouldn't brake the system but I didn't reboot yesterday so I can't be sure. I've tried booting in recovery mode and tried running the utils there but still no luck. I've ran out of ideas. Thanks. EDIT: Forgot to mention that all partitions have plenty of free space EDIT2: In the end I just reinstalled Ubuntu as time was of the essence.

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• When good programmers go bad!

  - by Ed Bloom

  Hi, I'm a team lead/dev who manages a team of 10 programmers. Most of them are hard working talented guys. But of late, I've got this one person who while highly talented and has delivered great work for me in the past, has just become completely unreliable. It's not his ability - that is not in question - he's proven that many times. He just looks bored now. Is blatantly not doing much work (despite a LOT of pressure being put on the team to meet tight deadlines etc.) He just doesn't seem to care and looks bored. I'm partially guilty for not having addressed this before now - I was afraid to have to lose a talented guy given the workload I've got on. But at this stage it's becoming a problem and affecting those around him. Can anyone spare their thoughts or words of wisdom on how I should go about dealing this. I want the talented AND motivated guy back. Otherwise he's gonna have to go. Thanks, Ed

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• C++ Set Erase Entry Question

  - by Wallace

  Hi. I encountered a problem here. I'm using C++ multiset. This is the test file. Score: 3-1 Ben Steven Score: 1-0 Ben Score: 0-0 Score: 1-1 Cole Score: 1-2 Ben I'm using while loop and ifstream (fin1) to read in from the test file above. multiset<string, less<string> > myset; while(!fin1.eof()) { fin1 >> scoreName; if(scoreName == "Score:") { //calculates number of matches played } else { goalCheck = scoreName.substr(1,1); if(goalCheck == "-") { string lGoal, rGoal; lGoal = scoreName.substr(0,1); rGoal = scoreName.substr(2,1); int leftGoal, rightGoal; leftGoal = atoi(lGoal.c_str()); rightGoal = atoi(rGoal.c_str()); if(leftGoal > rightGoal) //if team wins { //some computations } else if(leftGoal < rightGoal) //if team loses { //computations } else if(leftGoal == rightGoal) //if team draws { //computations } else { myset.insert(myset.begin(), scoreName); } } } I'm inserting all names into myset (regardless of wins/loses/draws) in my last else statement. But I only require the names of those matches who won/draw. Those names whose matches lost will not be included in myset. In the test file above, there's only one match that lost (1-2) and I wanted to remove "Ben". How can I do that? I tried to use myset.erase(), but I'm not sure how to get it point to Ben and remove it from myset. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks.

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• When should I be cautious using about data binding in .NET?

  - by Ben McCormack

  I just started working on a small team of .NET programmers about a month ago and recently got in a discussion with our team lead regarding why we don't use databinding at all in our code. Every time we work with a data grid, we iterate through a data table and populate the grid row by row; the code usually looks something like this: Dim dt as DataTable = FuncLib.GetData("spGetTheData ...") Dim i As Integer For i = 0 To dt.Rows.Length - 1 '(not sure why we do not use a for each here)' gridRow = grid.Rows.Add() gridRow(constantProductID).Value = dt("ProductID").Value gridRow(constantProductDesc).Value = dt("ProductDescription").Value Next '(I am probably missing something in the code, but that is basically it)' Our team lead was saying that he got burned using data binding when working with Sheridan Grid controls, VB6, and ADO recordsets back in the nineties. He's not sure what the exact problem was, but he remembers that binding didn't work as expected and caused him some major problems. Since then, they haven't trusted data binding and load the data for all their controls by hand. The reason the conversation even came up was because I found data binding to be very simple and really liked separating the data presentation (in this case, the data grid) from the in-memory data source (in this case, the data table). "Loading" the data row by row into the grid seemed to break this distinction. I also observed that with the advent of XAML in WPF and Silverlight, data-binding seems like a must-have in order to be able to cleanly wire up a designer's XAML code with your data. When should I be cautious of using data-binding in .NET?

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• Why is Microsoft under-supporting or under-developping VBNET?

  - by Will Marcouiller

  I ran into a situation where the lack of some features has become somewhat frustrating while developping in VB.NET 2.0. Since my first day of programming, I've always been a C programmer, and still am. Naturally, I chose C# as my favorite .NET language. Recently, a customer of mine has obliged that all of his development projects which disregard SharePoint development have to be written in VB.NET 2.0, that is to avoid conflictual systems to come into some problems. That is a legitimate choice of his which I approve somehow, since he's running some old central systems and is slowly migrating toward latest technologies. As for me, I would have prefered to go with C#, but then, never having done much VB in my life, I see it as an opportunity to learn somethings new, how to handle this and that in VBNET, etc. Except that the syntax is really too verbose for me, which is a pain! I got used to it and that is fine. However, I recently wanted to use the InternalsVisibleToAttribute which I discovered lastly here on SO. But then, in addition to not being able to have lambda expression that returns no value, which I discovered months ago, today I learn that I can't use the attribute in VBNET! Here is what I have read in an article: [...] Sorry VB.Net developers, Microsoft is again shunning you guys and this attribute is NOT available to you.... :( And here is the link: InternalsVisibleTo: Testing internal methods in .Net 2.0 I have heard from Anders Hejlsberg mouth while watching a Webcast from his presentation of .NET 4.0 Framework that the VBNET team was working or has worked in collaboration with the C# team (Eric Lippert and others) in order to bring VBNET to offer the same features as C# offers. But then, I say to myself that the VBNET team has a huge step forward to make, if already in .NET 2.0, some of the most important features lacked! So my question is this: Why is Microsoft under-supporting or under-developping VBNET? Will VBNET ever be lacking the C# features?

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