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• Compress a php array

  - by Derek Adair

  I need to take an array that looks something like ... array( 11 => "fistVal", 19 => "secondVal", 120=> "thirdVal", 200 =>"fourthVal"); and convert it to... array( 0 => "fistVal", 1 => "secondVal", 2=> "thirdVal", 3 =>"fourthVal"); This is what I came up with - function compressArray($array){ if(count($array){ $counter = 0; $compressedArray = array(); foreach($array as $cur){ $compressedArray[$count] = $cur; $count++; } return $compressedArray; } else { return false; } } I'm just curious if there is any built-in functionality in php or neat tricks to do this.

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• resource for migrating from C/C++ to C#

  - by EquinoX

  I know there's a lot of resource for this via google, but I just wanted to hear personally from people who have experienced this before. I've programmed in C for 3 years and C++ for a year and now I am moving to C#. I know this is not going to be a so hard transition but could you guys that had this same experience with me share resources on a good book, article, or blog to make my study experience more efficient. Any tips/tricks or gotchas when moving to C#? Here's one article that I can find via google. Looking for more goodies from experienced developers here.

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• Tracking Useful Information

  - by Steve M

  What do the clever programmers here do to keep track of handy programming tricks and useful information they pick up over their many years of experience? Things like useful compiler arguments, IDE short-cuts, clever code snippets, etc. I sometimes find myself frustrated when looking up something that I used to know a year or two ago. My IE favourites probably represent a good chunk of the Internet in the late 1990s, so clearly that isn't effective (at least for me). Or am I just getting old? So.. what do you do?

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• Sidescrolling UI on iPhone

  - by Michael

  Please lead me in the right direction. I need to provide user with small text centered on the iPhone screen. User can make quick scroll left or right in order to get the next or previous text. There can be hundreds of such text pieces. The process itself is similar to Photo application sidescrolling but much simple, no zoom. As far as I can understand I need to use UIScrollView class, then call hundreds of addSubviews? Is it the optimal way or I should always keep 3 subviews and replace them on the fly? What kind of tricks should be used to achieve the "scroll and center" effect? Thanks

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• C# 4.0: Dynamic Programming

  - by Paulo Morgado

  The major feature of C# 4.0 is dynamic programming. Not just dynamic typing, but dynamic in broader sense, which means talking to anything that is not statically typed to be a .NET object. Dynamic Language Runtime The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) is piece of technology that unifies dynamic programming on the .NET platform, the same way the Common Language Runtime (CLR) has been a common platform for statically typed languages. The CLR always had dynamic capabilities. You could always use reflection, but its main goal was never to be a dynamic programming environment and there were some features missing. The DLR is built on top of the CLR and adds those missing features to the .NET platform. The Dynamic Language Runtime is the core infrastructure that consists of: Expression Trees The same expression trees used in LINQ, now improved to support statements. Dynamic Dispatch Dispatches invocations to the appropriate binder. Call Site Caching For improved efficiency. Dynamic languages and languages with dynamic capabilities are built on top of the DLR. IronPython and IronRuby were already built on top of the DLR, and now, the support for using the DLR is being added to C# and Visual Basic. Other languages built on top of the CLR are expected to also use the DLR in the future. Underneath the DLR there are binders that talk to a variety of different technologies: .NET Binder Allows to talk to .NET objects. JavaScript Binder Allows to talk to JavaScript in SilverLight. IronPython Binder Allows to talk to IronPython. IronRuby Binder Allows to talk to IronRuby. COM Binder Allows to talk to COM. Whit all these binders it is possible to have a single programming experience to talk to all these environments that are not statically typed .NET objects. The dynamic Static Type Let’s take this traditional statically typed code: Calculator calculator = GetCalculator(); int sum = calculator.Sum(10, 20); Because the variable that receives the return value of the GetCalulator method is statically typed to be of type Calculator and, because the Calculator type has an Add method that receives two integers and returns an integer, it is possible to call that Sum method and assign its return value to a variable statically typed as integer. Now lets suppose the calculator was not a statically typed .NET class, but, instead, a COM object or some .NET code we don’t know he type of. All of the sudden it gets very painful to call the Add method: object calculator = GetCalculator(); Type calculatorType = calculator.GetType(); object res = calculatorType.InvokeMember("Add", BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, null, calculator, new object[] { 10, 20 }); int sum = Convert.ToInt32(res); And what if the calculator was a JavaScript object? ScriptObject calculator = GetCalculator(); object res = calculator.Invoke("Add", 10, 20); int sum = Convert.ToInt32(res); For each dynamic domain we have a different programming experience and that makes it very hard to unify the code. With C# 4.0 it becomes possible to write code this way: dynamic calculator = GetCalculator(); int sum = calculator.Add(10, 20); You simply declare a variable who’s static type is dynamic. dynamic is a pseudo-keyword (like var) that indicates to the compiler that operations on the calculator object will be done dynamically. The way you should look at dynamic is that it’s just like object (System.Object) with dynamic semantics associated. Anything can be assigned to a dynamic. dynamic x = 1; dynamic y = "Hello"; dynamic z = new List<int> { 1, 2, 3 }; At run-time, all object will have a type. In the above example x is of type System.Int32. When one or more operands in an operation are typed dynamic, member selection is deferred to run-time instead of compile-time. Then the run-time type is substituted in all variables and normal overload resolution is done, just like it would happen at compile-time. The result of any dynamic operation is always dynamic and, when a dynamic object is assigned to something else, a dynamic conversion will occur. Code Resolution Method double x = 1.75; double y = Math.Abs(x); compile-time double Abs(double x) dynamic x = 1.75; dynamic y = Math.Abs(x); run-time double Abs(double x) dynamic x = 2; dynamic y = Math.Abs(x); run-time int Abs(int x) The above code will always be strongly typed. The difference is that, in the first case the method resolution is done at compile-time, and the others it’s done ate run-time. IDynamicMetaObjectObject The DLR is pre-wired to know .NET objects, COM objects and so forth but any dynamic language can implement their own objects or you can implement your own objects in C# through the implementation of the IDynamicMetaObjectProvider interface. When an object implements IDynamicMetaObjectProvider, it can participate in the resolution of how method calls and property access is done. The .NET Framework already provides two implementations of IDynamicMetaObjectProvider: DynamicObject : IDynamicMetaObjectProvider The DynamicObject class enables you to define which operations can be performed on dynamic objects and how to perform those operations. For example, you can define what happens when you try to get or set an object property, call a method, or perform standard mathematical operations such as addition and multiplication. ExpandoObject : IDynamicMetaObjectProvider The ExpandoObject class enables you to add and delete members of its instances at run time and also to set and get values of these members. This class supports dynamic binding, which enables you to use standard syntax like sampleObject.sampleMember, instead of more complex syntax like sampleObject.GetAttribute("sampleMember").

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• Formal Languages, Inductive Proofs &amp; Regular Expressions

  - by MarkPearl

  So I am slogging away at my UNISA stuff. I have just finished doing the initial once non stop read through the first 11 chapters of my COS 201 Textbook - “Introduction to Computer Theory 2nd Edition” by Daniel Cohen. It has been an interesting couple of days, with familiar concepts coming up as well as some new territory. In this posting I am going to cover the first couple of chapters of the book. Let start with Formal Languages… What exactly is a formal language? Pretty much a no duh question for me but still a good one to ask – a formal language is a language that is defined in a precise mathematical way. Does that mean that the English language is a formal language? I would say no – and my main motivation for this is that one can have an English sentence that is correct grammatically that is also ambiguous. For example the ambiguous sentence: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas.” For this and possibly many other reasons that I am unaware of, English is termed a “Natural Language”. So why the importance of formal languages in computer science? Again a no duh question in my mind… If we want computers to be effective and useful tools then we need them to be able to evaluate a series of commands in some form of language that when interpreted by the device no confusion will exist as to what we were requesting. Imagine the mayhem that would exist if a computer misinterpreted a command to print a document and instead decided to delete it. So what is a Formal Language made up of… For my study purposes a language is made up of a finite alphabet. For a formal language to exist there needs to be a specification on the language that will describe whether a string of characters has membership in the language or not. There are two basic ways to do this: By a “machine” that will recognize strings of the language (e.g. Finite Automata). By a rule that describes how strings of a language can be formed (e.g. Regular Expressions). When we use the phrase “string of characters”, we can also be referring to a “word”. What is an Inductive Proof? So I am not to far into my textbook and of course it starts referring to proofs and different types. I have had to go through several different approaches of proofs in the past, but I can never remember their formal names , so when I saw “inductive proof” I thought to myself – what the heck is that? Google to the rescue… An inductive proof is like a normal proof but it employs a neat trick which allows you to prove a statement about an arbitrary number n by first proving it is true when n is 1 and then assuming it is true for n=k and showing it is true for n=k+1. The idea is that if you want to show that someone can climb to the nth floor of a fire escape, you need only show that you can climb the ladder up to the fire escape (n=1) and then show that you know how to climb the stairs from any level of the fire escape (n=k) to the next level (n=k+1). Does this sound like a form of recursion? No surprise then that in the same chapter they deal with recursive definitions. An example of a recursive definition for the language EVEN would the 3 rules below: 2 is in EVEN If x is in EVEN then so is x+2 The only elements in the set EVEN are those that be produced by the rules above. Nothing to exciting… So if a definition for a language is done recursively, then it makes sense that the language can be proved using induction. Regular Expressions So I am wondering to myself what use is this all – in fact – I find this the biggest challenge to any university material is that it is quite hard to find the immediate practical applications of some theory in real life stuff. How great was my joy when I suddenly saw the word regular expression being introduced. I had been introduced to regular expressions on Stack Overflow where I was trying to recognize if some text measurement put in by a user was in a valid form or not. For instance, the imperial system of measurement where you have feet and inches can be represented in so many different ways. I had eventually turned to regular expressions as an easy way to check if my parser could correctly parse the text or not and convert it to a normalize measurement. So some rules about languages and regular expressions… Any finite language can be represented by at least one if not more regular expressions A regular expressions is almost a rule syntax for expressing how regular languages can be formed regular expressions are cool For a regular expression to be valid for a language it must be able to generate all the words in the language and no other words. This is important. It doesn’t help me if my regular expression parses 100% of my measurement texts but also lets one or two invalid texts to pass as well. Okay, so this posting jumps around a bit – but introduces some very basic fundamentals for the subject which will be built on in later postings… Time to go and do some practical examples now…

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

  - by Chris George

  Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

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• Data Mining Resources

  - by Dejan Sarka

  There are many different types of analyses, each one with its own pros and cons. Relational reports have a predefined structure, and end users cannot change it. They are simple to use for end users. Reports can use real-time data and snapshots of data to show the state of a report at specific points in time. One of the drawbacks is that report authoring is limited to IT pros and advanced users. Any kind of dynamic restructuring is very limited. If real-time data is used for a report, the report has a negative impact on the performance of the source system. Processing of the reports might be slow because the data comes from relational database management systems, which are not optimized for reporting only. If you create a semantic model of your data, your end users can create ad-hoc report structures. However, the development is more complex because a developer is needed to create these semantic models. For OLAP, you typically use specialized database management systems. You get lightning speed of analyses. End users can use rich and thin clients to interactively change the structure of the report. Typically, they do it graphically. However, the development of an OLAP system is many times quite complex. It involves the preparation and maintenance of an enterprise data warehouse and OLAP cubes. In order to exploit the possibility of real-time restructuring of reports, the users must be both active and educated. The data is usually stale, as it is loaded into data warehouses and OLAP cubes with a scheduled process. With data mining, a structure is not selected in advance; it searches for the structure. As a result, data mining can give you the most valuable results because you can discover patterns you did not expect. A data mining model structure is limited only by the attributes that you use to train the model. One of the drawbacks is that a lot of knowledge is needed for a successful data mining project. End users have to understand the results. Subject matter experts and IT professionals need to understand business problem thoroughly. The development might be sometimes even more complex than the development of OLAP cubes. Each type of analysis has its own place in an enterprise system. SQL Server has tools for all kinds of analyses. However, data mining is the most advanced way of analyzing the data; this is the “I” in BI. In order to get the most out of it, you need to learn quite a lot. In this blog post, I am gathering together resources for learning, including forthcoming events. Books Multiple authors: SQL Server MVP Deep Dives – I wrote an introductory data mining chapter there. Erik Veerman, Teo Lachev and Dejan Sarka: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-448): Microsoft SQL Server 2008 - Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance – you can find a good overview of a complete BI solution, including data mining, in this book. Jamie MacLennan, ZhaoHui Tang, and Bogdan Crivat: Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – can’t miss this book if you want to mine your data with SQL Server tools. Michael Berry, Gordon Linoff: Mastering Data Mining: The Art and Science of Customer Relationship Management – data mining from both, business and technical perspective. Dorian Pyle: Data Preparation for Data Mining – an in-depth book about data preparation. Thomas and Ronald Wonnacott: Introductory Statistics – if you thought that you could get away without statistics, then you are not serious about data mining. Jiawei Han and Micheline Kamber: Data Mining Concepts and Techniques – in-depth explanation of the most popular data mining algorithms. Michael Berry and Gordon Linoff: Data Mining Techniques – another book that explains data mining algorithms, more fro a business perspective. Paolo Guidici: Applied Data Mining – very mathematical book, only if you enjoy statistics and mathematics in general. Forthcoming presentations I am presenting two data mining related sessions during the PASS Summit in Charlotte, NC: Wednesday, October 16th, 2013 - Fraud Detection: Notes from the Field – I am showing how to use data mining for a specific business problem. The presentation is based on real-life projects. Friday, October 18th: Excel 2013 Advanced Analytics – I am focusing on Excel Data Mining Add-ins, and how to use them together with Power Pivot and other add-ins. This is the most you can get out of Excel. Sinergija 2013, Belgrade, Serbia Tuesday, October 22nd: Excel 2013 Analytics to the Max – another presentation focusing on the most advanced analytics you can get in Excel. SQL Rally Amsterdam, Netherlands Thursday, November 7th: Advanced Analytics in Excel 2013 – and again I am presenting about data mining in Excel. Why three different titles for the same presentation? I don’t know, I guess I forgot the name I proposed every time right after I sent the proposal. Courses Data Mining with SQL Server 2012 – I wrote a 3-day course for SolidQ. If you are interested in this course, which I could also deliver in a shorter seminar way, you can contact your closes SolidQ subsidiary, or, of course, me directly on addresses [email protected] or [email protected]. This course could also complement the existing courseware portfolio of training providers, which are welcome to contact me as well. OK, now you know: no more excuses, start learning data mining, get the most out of your data

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• Towards an F# .NET Reflector add-in

  - by CliveT

  When I had the opportunity to spent some time during Red Gate's recent "down tools" week on a project of my choice, the obvious project was an F# add-in for Reflector . To be honest, this was a bit of a misnomer as the amount of time in the designated week for coding was really less than three days, so it was always unlikely that very much progress would be made in such a small amount of time (and that certainly proved to be the case), but I did learn some things from the experiment. Like lots of problems, one useful technique is to take examples, get them to work, and then generalise to get something that works across the board. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to do the last stage. The obvious first step is to take a few function definitions, starting with the obvious hello world, moving on to a non-recursive function and finishing with the ubiquitous recursive Fibonacci function. let rec printMessage message  =     printfn  message let foo x  =    (x + 1) let rec fib x  =     if (x >= 2) then (fib (x - 1) + fib (x - 2)) else 1 The major problem in decompiling these simple functions is that Reflector has an in-memory object model that is designed to support object-oriented languages. In particular it has a return statement that allows function bodies to finish early. I used some of the in-built functionality to take the IL and produce an in-memory object model for the language, but then needed to write a transformer to push the return statements to the top of the tree to make it easy to render the code into a functional language. This tree transform works in some scenarios, but not in others where we simply regenerate code that looks more like CPS style. The next thing to get working was library level bindings of values where these values are calculated at runtime. let x = [1 ; 2 ; 3 ; 4] let y = List.map  (fun x -> foo x) x The way that this is translated into a set of classes for the underlying platform means that the code needs to follow references around, from the property exposing the calculated value to the class in which the code for generating the value is embedded. One of the strongest selling points of functional languages is the algebraic datatypes, which allow definitions via standard mathematical-style inductive definitions across the union cases. type Foo =     | Something of int     | Nothing type 'a Foo2 =     | Something2 of 'a     | Nothing2 Such a definition is compiled into a number of classes for the cases of the union, which all inherit from a class representing the type itself. It wasn't too hard to get such a de-compilation happening in the cases I tried. What did I learn from this? Firstly, that there are various bits of functionality inside Reflector that it would be useful for us to allow add-in writers to access. In particular, there are various implementations of the Visitor pattern which implement algorithms such as calculating the number of references for particular variables, and which perform various substitutions which could be more generally useful to add-in writers. I hope to do something about this at some point in the future. Secondly, when you transform a functional language into something that runs on top of an object-based platform, you lose some fidelity in the representation. The F# compiler leaves attributes in place so that tools can tell which classes represent classes from the source program and which are there for purposes of the implementation, allowing the decompiler to regenerate these constructs again. However, decompilation technology is a long way from being able to take unannotated IL and transform it into a program in a different language. For a simple function definition, like Fibonacci, I could write a simple static function and have it come out in F# as the same function, but it would be practically impossible to take a mass of class definitions and have a decompiler translate it automatically into an F# algebraic data type. What have we got out of this? Some data on the feasibility of implementing an F# decompiler inside Reflector, though it's hard at the moment to say how long this would take to do. The work we did is included the 6.5 EAP for Reflector that you can get from the EAP forum. All things considered though, it was a useful way to gain more familiarity with the process of writing an add-in and understand difficulties other add-in authors might experience. If you'd like to check out a video of Down Tools Week, click here.

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• MCM Lab exam this week

  - by Rob Farley

  In two days I’ll’ve finished the MCM Lab exam, 88-971. If you do an internet search for 88-971, it’ll tell you the answer is –883. Obviously. It’ll also give you a link to the actual exam page, which is useful too, once you’ve finished being distracted by the calculator instead of going to the thing you’re actually looking for. (Do people actually search the internet for the results of mathematical questions? Really?) The list of Skills Measured for this exam is quite short, but can essentially be broken down into one word “Anything”. The Preparation Materials section is even better. Classroom Training – none available. Microsoft E-Learning – none available. Microsoft Press Books – none available. Practice Tests – none available. But there are links to Readiness Videos and a page which has no resources listed, but tells you a list of people who have already qualified. Three in Australia who have MCM SQL Server 2008 so far. The list doesn’t include some of the latest batch, such as Jason Strate or Tom LaRock. I’ve used SQL Server for almost 15 years. During that time I’ve been awarded SQL Server MVP seven times, but the MVP award doesn’t actually mean all that much when considering this particular certification. I know lots of MVPs who have tried this particular exam and failed – including Jason and Tom. Right now, I have no idea whether I’ll pass or not. People tell me I’ll pass no problem, but I honestly have no idea. There’s something about that “Anything” aspect that worries me. I keep looking at the list of things in the Readiness Videos, and think to myself “I’m comfortable with Resource Governor (or whatever) – that should be fine.” Except that then I feel like I maybe don’t know all the different things that can go wrong with Resource Governor (or whatever), and I wonder what kind of situations I’ll be faced with. And then I find myself looking through the stuff that’s explained in the videos, and wondering what kinds of things I should know that I don’t, and then I get amazingly bored and frustrated (after all, I tell people that these exams aren’t supposed to be studied for – you’ve been studying for the last 15 years, right?), and I figure “What’s the worst that can happen? A fail?” I’m told that the exam provides a list of scenarios (maybe 14 of them?) and you have 5.5 hours to complete them. When I say “complete”, I mean complete – you don’t get to leave them unfinished, that’ll get you ‘nil points’ for that scenario. Apparently no-one gets to complete all of them. Now, I’m a consultant. I get called on to fix the problems that people have on their SQL boxes. Sometimes this involves fixing corruption. Sometimes it’s figuring out some performance problem. Sometimes it’s as straight forward as getting past a full transaction log; sometimes it’s as tricky as recovering a database that has lost its metadata, without backups. Most situations aren’t a problem, but I also have the confidence of being able to do internet searches to verify my maths (in case I forget it’s –883). In the exam, I’ll have maybe twenty minutes per scenario (but if I need longer, I’ll have to take longer – no point in stopping half way if it takes more than twenty minutes, unless I don’t see an end coming up), so I’ll have time constraints too. And of course, I won’t have any of my usual tools. I can’t take scripts in, I can’t take staff members. Hopefully I can use the coffee machine that will be in the room. I figure it’s going to feel like one of those days when I’ve gone into a client site, and found that the problems are way worse than I expected, and that the site is down, with people standing over me needing me to get things right first time... ...so it should be fine, I’ve done that before. :) If I do fail, it won’t make me any less of a consultant. It won’t make me any less able to help all of my clients (including you if you get in touch – hehe), it’ll just mean that the particular problem might’ve taken me more than the twenty minutes that the exam gave me. @rob_farley PS: Apparently the done thing is to NOT advertise that you’re sitting the exam at a particular time, only that you’re expecting to take it at some point in the future. I think it’s akin to the idea of not telling people you’re pregnant for the first few months – it’s just in case the worst happens. Personally, I’m happy to tell you all that I’m going to take this exam the day after tomorrow (which is the 19th in the US, the 20th here). If I end up failing, you can all commiserate and tell me that I’m not actually as unqualified as I feel.

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• To Bit or Not To Bit

  - by Johnm

  'Twas a long day of troubleshooting and firefighting and now, with most of the office vacant, you face a blank scripting window to create a new table in his database. Many questions circle your mind like dirty water gurgling down the bathtub drain: "How normalized should this table be?", "Should I use an identity column?", "NVarchar or Varchar?", "Should this column be NULLABLE?", "I wonder what apple blue cheese bacon cheesecake tastes like?" Well, there are times when the mind goes it's own direction. A Bit About Bit At some point during your table creation efforts you will encounter the decision of whether to use the bit data type for a column. The bit data type is an integer data type that recognizes only the values of 1, 0 and NULL as valid. This data type is often utilized to store yes/no or true/false values. An example of its use would be a column called [IsGasoline] which would be intended to contain the value of 1 if the row's subject (a car) had a gasoline engine and a 0 if the subject did not have a gasoline engine. The bit data type can even be found in some of the system tables of SQL Server. For example, the sysssispackages table in the msdb database which contains SQL Server Integration Services Package information for the packages stored in SQL Server. This table contains a column called [IsEncrypted]. A value of 1 indicates that the package has been encrypted while the value of 0 indicates that it is not. I have learned that the most effective way to disperse the crowd that surrounds the office coffee machine is to engage into SQL Server debates. The bit data type has been one of the most reoccurring, as well as the most enjoyable, of these topics. It contains a practical side and a philosophical side. Practical Consideration This data type certainly has its place and is a valuable option for database design; but it is often used in situations where the answer is really not a pure true/false response. In addition, true/false values are not very informative or scalable. Let's use the previously noted [IsGasoline] column for illustration. While on the surface it appears to be a rather simple question when evaluating a car: "Does the car have a gasoline engine?" If the person entering data is entering a row for a Jeep Liberty, the response would be a 1 since it has a gasoline engine. If the person is entering data is entering a row for a Chevrolet Volt, the response would be a 0 since it is an electric engine. What happens when a person is entering a row for the gasoline/electric hybrid Toyota Prius? Would one person's conclusion be consistent with another person's conclusion? The argument could be made that the current intent for the database is to be used only for pure gasoline and pure electric engines; but this is where the scalability issue comes into play. With the use of a bit data type a database modification and data conversion would be required if the business decided to take on hybrid engines. Whereas, alternatively, if the int data type were used as a foreign key to a reference table containing the engine type options, the change to include the hybrid option would only require an entry into the reference table. Philosophical Consideration Since the bit data type is often used for true/false or yes/no data (also called Boolean) it presents a philosophical conundrum of what to do about the allowance of the NULL value. The inclusion of NULL in a true/false or yes/no response simply violates the logical principle of bivalence which states that "every proposition is either true or false". If NULL is not true, then it must be false. The mathematical laws of Boolean logic support this concept by stating that the only valid values of this scenario are 1 and 0. There is another way to look at this conundrum: NULL is also considered to be the absence of a response. In other words, it is the equivalent to "undecided". Anyone who watches the news can tell you that polls always include an "undecided" option. This could be considered a valid option in the world of yes/no/dunno. Through out all of these considerations I have discovered one absolute certainty: When you have found a person, or group of persons, who are willing to entertain a philosophical debate of the bit data type, you have found some true friends.

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• Is Data Science “Science”?

  - by BuckWoody

  I hold the term “science” in very high esteem. I grew up on the Space Coast in Florida, and eventually worked at the Kennedy Space Center, surrounded by very intelligent people who worked in various scientific fields. Recently a new term has entered the computing dialog – “Data Scientist”. Since it’s not a standard term, it has a lot of definitions, and in fact has been disputed as a correct term. After all, the reasoning goes, if there’s no such thing as “Data Science” then how can there be a Data Scientist? This argument has been made before, albeit with a different term – “Computer Science”. In Peter Denning’s excellent article “Is Computer Science Science” (April  2005/Vol. 48, No. 4 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM) there are many points that separate “science” from “engineering” and even “art”.  I won’t repeat the content of that article here (I recommend you read it on your own) but will leverage the points he makes there. Definition of Science To ask the question “is data science ‘science’” then we need to start with a definition of terms. Various references put the definition into the same basic areas: Study of the physical world Systematic and/or disciplined study of a subject area ...and then they include the things studied, the bodies of knowledge and so on. The word itself comes from Latin, and means merely “to know” or “to study to know”. Greek divides knowledge further into “truth” (episteme), and practical use or effects (tekhne). Normally computing falls into the second realm. Definition of Data Science And now a more controversial definition: Data Science. This term is so new and perhaps so niche that the major dictionaries haven’t yet picked it up (my OED reference is older – can’t afford to pop for the online registration at present). Researching the term's general use I created an amalgam of the definitions this way: “Studying and applying mathematical and other techniques to derive information from complex data sets.” Using this definition, data science certainly seems to be science - it's learning about and studying some object or area using systematic methods. But implicit within the definition is the word “application”, which makes the process more akin to engineering or even technology than science. In fact, I find that using these techniques – and data itself – part of science, not science itself. I leave out the concept of studying data patterns or algorithms as part of this discipline. That is actually a domain I see within research, mathematics or computer science. That of course is a type of science, but does not seek for practical applications. As part of the argument against calling it “Data Science”, some point to the scientific method of creating a hypothesis, testing with controls, testing results against the hypothesis, and documenting for repeatability.  These are not steps that we often take in working with data. We normally start with a question, and fit patterns and algorithms to predict outcomes and find correlations. In this way Data Science is more akin to statistics (and in fact makes heavy use of them) in the process rather than starting with an assumption and following on with it. So, is Data Science “Science”? I’m uncertain – and I’m uncertain it matters. Even if we are facing rampant “title inflation” these days (does anyone introduce themselves as a secretary or supervisor anymore?) I can tolerate the term at least from the intent that we use data to study problems across a wide spectrum, rather than restricting it to a single domain. And I also understand those who have worked hard to achieve the very honorable title of “scientist” who have issues with those who borrow the term without asking. What do you think? Science, or not? Does it matter?

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• Why do we use Pythagoras in game physics?

  - by Starkers

  I've recently learned that we use Pythagoras a lot in our physics calculations and I'm afraid I don't really get the point. Here's an example from a book to make sure an object doesn't travel faster than a MAXIMUM_VELOCITY constant in the horizontal plane: MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = <any number>; SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = MAXIMUM_VELOCITY * MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; function animate(){ var squared_horizontal_velocity = (x_velocity * x_velocity) + (z_velocity * z_velocity); if( squared_horizontal_velocity <= SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY ){ scalar = squared_horizontal_velocity / SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; x_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; z_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; } } Let's try this with some numbers: An object is attempting to move 5 units in x and 5 units in z. It should only be able to move 5 units horizontally in total! MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 5; SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 5 * 5; SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 25; function animate(){ var x_velocity = 5; var z_velocity = 5; var squared_horizontal_velocity = (x_velocity * x_velocity) + (z_velocity * z_velocity); var squared_horizontal_velocity = 5 * 5 + 5 * 5; var squared_horizontal_velocity = 25 + 25; var squared_horizontal_velocity = 50; // if( squared_horizontal_velocity <= SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY ){ if( 50 <= 25 ){ scalar = squared_horizontal_velocity / SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; scalar = 50 / 25; scalar = 2.0; x_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; x_velocity = 5 / 2.0; x_velocity = 2.5; z_velocity = z_velocity / scalar; z_velocity = 5 / 2.0; z_velocity = 2.5; // new_horizontal_velocity = x_velocity + z_velocity // new_horizontal_velocity = 2.5 + 2.5 // new_horizontal_velocity = 5 } } Now this works well, but we can do the same thing without Pythagoras: MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 5; function animate(){ var x_velocity = 5; var z_velocity = 5; var horizontal_velocity = x_velocity + z_velocity; var horizontal_velocity = 5 + 5; var horizontal_velocity = 10; // if( horizontal_velocity >= MAXIMUM_VELOCITY ){ if( 10 >= 5 ){ scalar = horizontal_velocity / MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; scalar = 10 / 5; scalar = 2.0; x_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; x_velocity = 5 / 2.0; x_velocity = 2.5; z_velocity = z_velocity / scalar; z_velocity = 5 / 2.0; z_velocity = 2.5; // new_horizontal_velocity = x_velocity + z_velocity // new_horizontal_velocity = 2.5 + 2.5 // new_horizontal_velocity = 5 } } Benefits of doing it without Pythagoras: Less lines Within those lines, it's easier to read what's going on ...and it takes less time to compute, as there are less multiplications Seems to me like computers and humans get a better deal without Pythagoras! However, I'm sure I'm wrong as I've seen Pythagoras' theorem in a number of reputable places, so I'd like someone to explain me the benefit of using Pythagoras to a maths newbie. Does this have anything to do with unit vectors? To me a unit vector is when we normalize a vector and turn it into a fraction. We do this by dividing the vector by a larger constant. I'm not sure what constant it is. The total size of the graph? Anyway, because it's a fraction, I take it, a unit vector is basically a graph that can fit inside a 3D grid with the x-axis running from -1 to 1, z-axis running from -1 to 1, and the y-axis running from -1 to 1. That's literally everything I know about unit vectors... not much :P And I fail to see their usefulness. Also, we're not really creating a unit vector in the above examples. Should I be determining the scalar like this: // a mathematical work-around of my own invention. There may be a cleverer way to do this! I've also made up my own terms such as 'divisive_scalar' so don't bother googling var divisive_scalar = (squared_horizontal_velocity / SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY); var divisive_scalar = ( 50 / 25 ); var divisive_scalar = 2; var multiplicative_scalar = (divisive_scalar / (2*divisive_scalar)); var multiplicative_scalar = (2 / (2*2)); var multiplicative_scalar = (2 / 4); var multiplicative_scalar = 0.5; x_velocity = x_velocity * multiplicative_scalar x_velocity = 5 * 0.5 x_velocity = 2.5 Again, I can't see why this is better, but it's more "unit-vector-y" because the multiplicative_scalar is a unit_vector? As you can see, I use words such as "unit-vector-y" so I'm really not a maths whiz! Also aware that unit vectors might have nothing to do with Pythagoras so ignore all of this if I'm barking up the wrong tree. I'm a very visual person (3D modeller and concept artist by trade!) and I find diagrams and graphs really, really helpful so as many as humanely possible please!

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• Why do we use the Pythagorean theorem in game physics?

  - by Starkers

  I've recently learned that we use Pythagorean theorem a lot in our physics calculations and I'm afraid I don't really get the point. Here's an example from a book to make sure an object doesn't travel faster than a MAXIMUM_VELOCITY constant in the horizontal plane: MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = <any number>; SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = MAXIMUM_VELOCITY * MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; function animate(){ var squared_horizontal_velocity = (x_velocity * x_velocity) + (z_velocity * z_velocity); if( squared_horizontal_velocity <= SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY ){ scalar = squared_horizontal_velocity / SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; x_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; z_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; } } Let's try this with some numbers: An object is attempting to move 5 units in x and 5 units in z. It should only be able to move 5 units horizontally in total! MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 5; SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 5 * 5; SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 25; function animate(){ var x_velocity = 5; var z_velocity = 5; var squared_horizontal_velocity = (x_velocity * x_velocity) + (z_velocity * z_velocity); var squared_horizontal_velocity = 5 * 5 + 5 * 5; var squared_horizontal_velocity = 25 + 25; var squared_horizontal_velocity = 50; // if( squared_horizontal_velocity <= SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY ){ if( 50 <= 25 ){ scalar = squared_horizontal_velocity / SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; scalar = 50 / 25; scalar = 2.0; x_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; x_velocity = 5 / 2.0; x_velocity = 2.5; z_velocity = z_velocity / scalar; z_velocity = 5 / 2.0; z_velocity = 2.5; // new_horizontal_velocity = x_velocity + z_velocity // new_horizontal_velocity = 2.5 + 2.5 // new_horizontal_velocity = 5 } } Now this works well, but we can do the same thing without Pythagoras: MAXIMUM_VELOCITY = 5; function animate(){ var x_velocity = 5; var z_velocity = 5; var horizontal_velocity = x_velocity + z_velocity; var horizontal_velocity = 5 + 5; var horizontal_velocity = 10; // if( horizontal_velocity >= MAXIMUM_VELOCITY ){ if( 10 >= 5 ){ scalar = horizontal_velocity / MAXIMUM_VELOCITY; scalar = 10 / 5; scalar = 2.0; x_velocity = x_velocity / scalar; x_velocity = 5 / 2.0; x_velocity = 2.5; z_velocity = z_velocity / scalar; z_velocity = 5 / 2.0; z_velocity = 2.5; // new_horizontal_velocity = x_velocity + z_velocity // new_horizontal_velocity = 2.5 + 2.5 // new_horizontal_velocity = 5 } } Benefits of doing it without Pythagoras: Less lines Within those lines, it's easier to read what's going on ...and it takes less time to compute, as there are less multiplications Seems to me like computers and humans get a better deal without Pythagorean theorem! However, I'm sure I'm wrong as I've seen Pythagoras' theorem in a number of reputable places, so I'd like someone to explain me the benefit of using Pythagorean theorem to a maths newbie. Does this have anything to do with unit vectors? To me a unit vector is when we normalize a vector and turn it into a fraction. We do this by dividing the vector by a larger constant. I'm not sure what constant it is. The total size of the graph? Anyway, because it's a fraction, I take it, a unit vector is basically a graph that can fit inside a 3D grid with the x-axis running from -1 to 1, z-axis running from -1 to 1, and the y-axis running from -1 to 1. That's literally everything I know about unit vectors... not much :P And I fail to see their usefulness. Also, we're not really creating a unit vector in the above examples. Should I be determining the scalar like this: // a mathematical work-around of my own invention. There may be a cleverer way to do this! I've also made up my own terms such as 'divisive_scalar' so don't bother googling var divisive_scalar = (squared_horizontal_velocity / SQUARED_MAXIMUM_VELOCITY); var divisive_scalar = ( 50 / 25 ); var divisive_scalar = 2; var multiplicative_scalar = (divisive_scalar / (2*divisive_scalar)); var multiplicative_scalar = (2 / (2*2)); var multiplicative_scalar = (2 / 4); var multiplicative_scalar = 0.5; x_velocity = x_velocity * multiplicative_scalar x_velocity = 5 * 0.5 x_velocity = 2.5 Again, I can't see why this is better, but it's more "unit-vector-y" because the multiplicative_scalar is a unit_vector? As you can see, I use words such as "unit-vector-y" so I'm really not a maths whiz! Also aware that unit vectors might have nothing to do with Pythagorean theorem so ignore all of this if I'm barking up the wrong tree. I'm a very visual person (3D modeller and concept artist by trade!) and I find diagrams and graphs really, really helpful so as many as humanely possible please!

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• Determining the angle to fire a shot when target and shooter moves, and bullet moves with shooter velocity added in

  - by Azaral

  I saw this question: Predicting enemy position in order to have an object lead its target and followed the link in the answer to stack overflow. In the stack overflow page I used the 2nd answer, the one that is a large mathematical derivation. My situation is a little different though. My first question though is will the answer provided in the stack overflow page even work to begin with, assuming the original circumstances of moving target and stationary shooter. My situation is a little different than that situation. My target moves, the shooter moves, and the bullets from the shooter start off with the velocities in x and y added to the bullets' x and y velocities. If you are sliding to the right, the bullets will remain in front of you as you move so as long as your velocity remains constant. What I'm trying to do is to get the enemy to be able to determine where they need to shoot in order to hit the player. Unless the player and enemy is stationary, the velocity from the ship adding to the velocity of the bullets will cause a miss. I'd rather like to prevent that. I used the formula in the stack overflow answer and did what I thought were the appropriate adjustments. I've been banging at this for the last four hours and I just can't make it click. It is probably something really simple and boneheaded that I am missing (that seems to be a lot of my problems lately). Here is the solution presented from the stack overflow answer: It boils down to solving a quadratic equation of the form: a * sqr(x) + b * x + c == 0 Note that by sqr I mean square, as opposed to square root. Use the following values: a := sqr(target.velocityX) + sqr(target.velocityY) - sqr(projectile_speed) b := 2 * (target.velocityX * (target.startX - cannon.X) + target.velocityY * (target.startY - cannon.Y)) c := sqr(target.startX - cannon.X) + sqr(target.startY - cannon.Y) Now we can look at the discriminant to determine if we have a possible solution. disc := sqr(b) - 4 * a * c If the discriminant is less than 0, forget about hitting your target -- your projectile can never get there in time. Otherwise, look at two candidate solutions: t1 := (-b + sqrt(disc)) / (2 * a) t2 := (-b - sqrt(disc)) / (2 * a) Note that if disc == 0 then t1 and t2 are equal. If there are no other considerations such as intervening obstacles, simply choose the smaller positive value. (Negative t values would require firing backward in time to use!) Substitute the chosen t value back into the target's position equations to get the coordinates of the leading point you should be aiming at: aim.X := t * target.velocityX + target.startX aim.Y := t * target.velocityY + target.startY Here is my code, after being corrected by Sam Hocevar (thank you again for your help!). It still doesn't work. For some reason it never enters the section of code inside the if(disc = 0) (obviously because it is always less than zero but...). However, if I plug the numbers from my game log on the enemy and player positions and velocities it outputs a valid firing solution. I have looked at the code side by side a couple of times now and I can't find any differences. There has got to be something simple I'm missing here. If someone else could look at this code and determine what is going on here I'd appreciate it. I know it's not going through that section because if it were, shouldShoot would become true and the enemy would be blasting away at the player. This section calls the function in question, CalculateShootHeading() if(shouldMove) { UseEngines(); } x += xVelocity; y += yVelocity; CalculateShootHeading(); if(shouldShoot) { ShootWeapons(); } UpdateWeapons(); This is CalculateShootHeading(). This is inside the enemy class so x and y are the enemy's x and y and the same with velocity. One output from my game log gives Player X = 2108, Player Y = -180.956, Player X velocity = 10.9949, Player Y Velocity = -6.26017, Enemy X = 1988.31, Enemy Y = -339.051, Enemy X velocity = 1.81666, Enemy Y velocity = -9.67762, 0 enemy projectiles. The output from the console tester is Bullet position = 2210.49, -239.313 and Player Position = 2210.49, -239.313. This doesn't make any sense. The only thing that could be different is the code or the input into my function in the game and I've checked that and I don't think that it is wrong as it's updated before this and never changed. float const bulletSpeed = 30.f; float const dx = playerX - x; float const dy = playerY - y; float const vx = playerXVelocity - xVelocity; float const vy = playerYVelocity - yVelocity; float const a = vx * vx + vy * vy - bulletSpeed * bulletSpeed; float const b = 2.f * (vx * dx + vy * dy); float const c = dx * dx + dy * dy; float const disc = b * b - 4.f * a * c; shouldShoot = false; if (disc >= 0.f) { float t0 = (-b - std::sqrt(disc)) / (2.f * a); float t1 = (-b + std::sqrt(disc)) / (2.f * a); if (t0 < 0.f || (t1 < t0 && t1 >= 0.f)) { t0 = t1; } if (t0 >= 0.f) { float shootx = vx + dx / t0; float shooty = vy + dy / t0; heading = std::atan2(shooty, shootx) * RAD2DEGREE; } shouldShoot = true; }

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• E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Max Arderius

  Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is almost here! We're looking forward to updating you on our products, strategy, and roadmaps. This year, the E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group (ATG) will participate in 25 speaker sessions, two Meet the Experts round-table discussions, five demoground booths and seven Special Interest Group meetings as guest speakers. We hope to see you at our sessions.  Please join us to hear the latest news and connect with senior ATG development staff. Here's a downloadable listing of all Applications Technology Group-related sessions with times and locations: FOCUS ON Oracle E-Business Suite - Applications Tools and Technology (PDF) General Sessions GEN8474 - Oracle E-Business Suite - Strategy, Update, and RoadmapCliff Godwin, SVP, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM - Moscone West 2002/2004 In this session, hear Oracle E-Business Suite General Manager Cliff Godwin deliver an update on the Oracle E-Business Suite product line. This session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle’s overall applications strategy. You’ll come away with an understanding of the value Oracle E-Business Suite applications deliver now and will deliver in the future. GEN9173 - Optimize and Extend Oracle Applications - The Path to Oracle Fusion ApplicationsNadia Bendjedou, Oracle; Corre Curtice, Bhavish Madurai (CSC) Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3002/3004 One of the main objectives of this session is to help organizations build their IT roadmap for the next five years and be aligned with the Oracle Applications strategy in general and the Oracle Fusion Applications strategy in particular. Come hear about some of the common sense, practical steps you can take to optimize the performance of your Oracle Applications today and prepare your path to Oracle Fusion Applications for when your organization is ready to embrace them. Each step you take in adopting Oracle Fusion technology gets you partway to Oracle Fusion Applications. Conference Sessions CON9024 - Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and Roadmap Lisa Parekh, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session provides a comprehensive overview of Oracle’s product strategy for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, and a review of capabilities on the product roadmap. This is the cornerstone session for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack. Come hear about the latest new usability enhancements of the user interface; systems administration and configuration management tools; security-related updates; and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. CON9021 - Oracle E-Business Suite Future Directions: Deployment and System AdministrationMax Arderius, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West 2016  What’s coming in the next major version of Oracle E-Business Suite 12? This Oracle Development session covers the latest technology stack, including the use of Oracle WebLogic Server (Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g) and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2). Topics include an architectural overview of the latest updates, installation and upgrade options, new configuration options, and new tools for hot cloning and automated “lights-out” cloning. Come learn how online patching (based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature) will reduce your database patching downtimes to however long it takes to bounce your database server. CON9017 - Desktop Integration in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Padmaprabodh Ambale, Gustavo Jimenez, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 This presentation covers the latest functional enhancements in Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and Oracle Report Manager, enhanced Microsoft Office support, and greater support for building custom desktop integration solutions. The session also presents tips and tricks for upgrading from Oracle Applications Desktop Integrator to Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and Oracle Report Manager. CON9023 - Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Primer and Roadmap Steven Chan, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2016  Is your Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack up to date? Are you taking advantage of all the latest options and capabilities? This Oracle development session summarizes the latest certifications and roadmap for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, including elements such as database releases and options, Java, Oracle Forms, Oracle Containers for J2EE, desktop operating systems, browsers, JRE releases, development and Web authoring tools, user authentication and management, business intelligence, Oracle Application Management Packs, security options, clouds, Oracle VM, and virtualization. The session also covers the most commonly asked questions about tech stack component support dates and upgrade implications. CON9028 - Minimizing Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance DowntimesSantiago Bastidas, Elke Phelps, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session features a survey of the best techniques sysadmins can use to minimize patching downtimes. It starts with an architectural-level review of Oracle E-Business Suite fundamentals and then moves to a practical view of the various tools and approaches for downtimes. Topics include patching shortcuts, merging patches, distributing worker processes across multiple servers, running ADPatch in noninteractive mode, staged APPL_TOPs, shared file systems, deferring systemwide database tasks, avoiding resource bottlenecks, and more. An added bonus: hear about the upcoming Oracle E-Business Suite 12 online patching capabilities based on the groundbreaking Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature. CON9116 - Extending the Use of Oracle E-Business Suite with the Oracle Endeca PlatformOsama Elkady, Muhannad Obeidat, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2018 The Oracle Endeca platform includes a leading unstructured data correlation and analytics engine, together with a best-in class catalog search and guided navigation solution, to improve the productivity of all types of users in your enterprise. This development session focuses on the details behind the Oracle Endeca platform’s integration into Oracle E-Business Suite. It demonstrates how easily you can extend the use of the Oracle Endeca platform into other areas of Oracle E-Business Suite and how you can bring in your own data and build new Oracle Endeca applications for Oracle E-Business Suite. CON9005 - Oracle E-Business Suite Integration Best PracticesVeshaal Singh, Oracle, Jeffrey Hand, Zebra Technologies Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Oracle is investing across applications and technologies to make the application integration experience easier for customers. Today Oracle has certified Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and provides a comprehensive set of integration technologies. Learn about Oracle’s integration offering across data- and process-centric integrations. These technologies can be used to address various application integration challenges and styles. In this session, you will get an understanding of how, when, and where you can leverage Oracle’s integration technologies to connect end-to-end business processes across your enterprise, including your Oracle Applications portfolio.  CON9026 - Latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 User Interface and Usability EnhancementsPadmaprabodh Ambale, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session details the latest UI enhancements to Oracle Application Framework in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. Developers will get a detailed look at new features to enhance usability, offer more capabilities for personalization and extensions, and support the development and use of dashboards and Web services. Topics include new rich UI capabilities such as new home page features, Navigator and Favorites pull-down menus, REST interface, embedded widgets for analytics content, Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) task flows, third-party widgets, a look-ahead list of values, inline attachments, pop-ups, personalization and extensibility enhancements, business layer extensions, Oracle ADF integration, and mobile devices. CON8805 - Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from 11i to Release 12.1 and BeyondAnne Carlson, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 3002/3004 Attend this session to hear the latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 upgrade planning tips from Oracle’s support, consulting, development, and IT organizations. You’ll get specific cross-product advice on how to understand the factors that affect your project’s duration, decide on your project’s scope, develop a robust testing strategy, leverage Oracle Support resources, and more. In a nutshell, this session tells you things you need to know before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project. CON9053 - Advanced Management of Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Enterprise ManagerAngelo Rosado, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 2016 The task of managing and monitoring Oracle E-Business Suite environments can be very challenging. Oracle Enterprise Manager is the only product on the market that is designed to monitor and manage all the different technologies that constitute Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including end user, midtier, configuration, host, and database management—to name just a few. Customers that have implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager have experienced dramatic improvements in system visibility and diagnostic capability as well as administrator productivity. The purpose of this session is to highlight the key features and benefits of Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite. CON8809 - Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Upgrade Best Practices: Technical InsightIsam Alyousfi, Udayan Parvate, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3011 This session is ideal for organizations thinking about upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. It covers the fundamentals of upgrading to Release 12.1, including the technology stack components and supported upgrade paths. Hear from Oracle Development about the set of best practices for patching in general and executing the Release 12.1 technical upgrade, with special considerations for minimizing your downtime. Also get to know about relatively recent upgrade resources. CON9032 - Upgrading Your Customizations of Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1Sara Woodhull, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2016 Have you personalized Oracle Forms or Oracle Application Framework screens in Oracle E-Business Suite? Have you used mod_plsql in Release 11i? Have you extended or customized your Release 11i environment with other tools? The technical options for upgrading these customizations as part of your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 upgrade can be bewildering. Come to this Oracle development session to learn about selecting the best upgrade approach for your existing customizations. The session will help you understand customization scenarios and use cases, tools, and technologies to ensure that your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 environment fits your users’ needs closely and that any future customizations will be easy to upgrade. CON9259 - Oracle E-Business Suite Internationalization and Multilingual FeaturesMaher Al-Nubani, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2018 Oracle E-Business Suite supports more countries, languages, and regions than ever. Come to this Oracle development session to get an overview of internationalization features and capabilities and see new Release 12 features such as calendar support for Hijra and Thai, new group separators, lightweight multilingual support (MLS) setup, new character sets such as AL32UTF, newly supported languages, Mac certifications, Oracle iSetup support for moving MLS setups, new file export options for Unicode, new MLS number spelling options, and more. CON7188 - Mobile Apps for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA SuiteSrikant Subramaniam, Joe Huang, Veshaal Singh, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3001 Follow your mobile customers, employees, and partners with Oracle Fusion Middleware. See how native iPhone and iPad applications can easily be built for Oracle E-Business Suite with the new Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA Suite. Using Oracle ADF Mobile, developers can quickly develop native applications for Apple iOS and other mobile platforms. The Oracle SOA Suite/Oracle ADF Mobile combination can execute business transactions on Oracle E-Business Suite. This session includes a demo in which a mobile user approves a business transaction in Oracle E-Business Suite and a demo of the tools used to build a native on-device solution. These concepts for mobile applications also apply to other Oracle applications.CON9029 - Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Slashing Downtimes with Online PatchingKevin Hudson, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 Oracle E-Business Suite will soon include online patching (based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature), which will reduce your database patching downtimes to however long it takes to bounce your database server. This Oracle development session details how online patching works, with special attention to what’s happening at a database object level when database patches are applied to an Oracle E-Business Suite environment that’s still running. Come learn about the operational and system management implications for minimizing maintenance downtimes when applying database patches with this new technology and the related impact on customizations you might have built on top of Oracle E-Business Suite. CON8806 - Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1: Technical and Functional PanelAndrew Katz, Komori America Corporation; Sandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. ;Srini Chavali, Cummins Inc.; Amrita Mehrok, Nadia Bendjedou, Anne Carlson Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 In this panel discussion, Oracle experts, customers, and partners share their experiences in upgrading to the latest release of Oracle E-Business Suite, Release 12.1. The panelists cover aspects of a typical Release 12 upgrade, technical (upgrading the technical infrastructure) as well as functional (upgrading to the new financial infrastructure). Hear directly from the experts who either develop the product or support, implement, or upgrade it, and find out how to apply their lessons learned to your organization. CON9027 - Personalize and Extend Oracle E-Business Suite Applications with Rich MashupsGustavo Jimenez, Padmaprabodh Ambale, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session covers the use of several Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies to personalize and extend your existing Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies covered include Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Endeca applications, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition with Oracle E-Business Suite Oracle Application Framework applications. CON9036 - Advanced Oracle E-Business Suite Architectures: Maximum Availability, Security, and MoreElke Phelps, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session includes architecture diagrams and configuration instructions for building a maximum availability architecture (MAA) that will help you design a disaster recovery solution that fits the needs of your business. Database and application high-availability features it describes include Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Active Data Guard, load-balancing Web and forms services, parallel concurrent processing, and the use of Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata to provide a highly available environment. The session also covers the latest updates to systems management tools, AutoConfig, cloud computing, virtualization, and Oracle WebLogic Server and provides sneak previews of upcoming functionality. CON9047 - Efficiently Scaling Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Exadata and Oracle ExalogicIsam Alyousfi, Nishit Rao, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 2016 Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic are designed from the ground up with optimizations in software and hardware to deliver superfast performance for mission-critical applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle E-Business Suite applications run three to eight times as fast on the Oracle Exadata/Oracle Exalogic platform in standard benchmark tests. Besides performance, customers benefit from simplified support, enhanced manageability, and the ability to consolidate multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Attend this session to understand best practices for Oracle E-Business Suite deployment on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata through customer case studies. Learn how adopting the Exa* platform increases efficiency, simplifies scaling, and boosts performance for peak loads. CON8716 - Web Services and SOA Integration Options for Oracle E-Business SuiteRekha Ayothi, Veshaal Singh, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session provides a deep dive into a subset of the Web services and SOA-related integration options available to Oracle E-Business Suite systems integrators. It offers a technical look at Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Application Adapters for Data Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite, and other Web services options for integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Systems integrators and developers will get an overview of the latest integration capabilities and technologies available out of the box with Oracle E-Business Suite and possibly a sneak preview of upcoming functionality and features. CON9030 - Recommendations for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance TuningIsam Alyousfi, Samer Barakat, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Need to squeeze more performance out of your existing servers? This packed Oracle development session summarizes practical tips and lessons learned from performance-tuning and benchmarking the world’s largest Oracle E-Business Suite environments. Apps sysadmins will learn concrete tips and techniques for identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks on all layers, with special attention to application- and database-tier servers. Learn about tuning Oracle Forms, Oracle Concurrent Manager, Apache, and Oracle Discoverer. Track down memory leaks and other issues at the Java and JVM layers. The session also covers Oracle E-Business Suite product-level tuning, including Oracle Workflow, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Payroll, and other modules. CON3429 - Using Oracle ADF with Oracle E-Business Suite: The Full Integration ViewSiva Puthurkattil, Lake County; Juan Camilo Ruiz, Sara Woodhull, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 3003 Oracle E-Business Suite delivers functionality for handling the core business of your organization. However, user requirements and new technologies are driving an emerging need to implement new types of user interfaces for these applications. This session provides an overview of how to use Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) to deliver cutting-edge Web 2.0 and mobile rich user interfaces that front existing Oracle E-Business Suite processes, and it also explores all the existing types of integration between the two worlds. CON9020 - Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Identity Management SolutionsSunil Ghosh, Elke Phelps, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 Need to integrate Oracle E-Business Suite with Microsoft Windows Kerberos, Active Directory, CA Netegrity SiteMinder, or other third-party authentication systems? Want to understand your options when Oracle Premier Support for Oracle Single Sign-On ends in December 2011? This Oracle Development session covers the latest certified integrations with Oracle Access Manager 11g and Oracle Internet Directory 11g, which can be used individually or as bridges for integrating with third-party authentication solutions. The session presents an architectural overview of how Oracle Access Manager, its WebGate and AccessGate components, and Oracle Internet Directory work together, with implications for Oracle Discoverer, Oracle Portal, and other Oracle Fusion identity management products. CON9019 - Troubleshooting, Diagnosing, and Optimizing Oracle E-Business Suite TechnologyGustavo Jimenez, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session covers how you can proactively diagnose Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including extensions built with Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies such as Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) and Oracle WebCenter to catch potential issues in the middle tier before they become more serious. Topics include debugging, logging infrastructure, warning signs, performance tuning, information required when logging service requests, general JVM optimization, and an overall picture of all the moving parts that make it possible for Oracle E-Business Suite to isolate and fix problems. Also learn how Oracle Diagnostics Framework will help prevent downtime caused by failures. CON9031 - The Top 10 Things You Can Do to Secure Your Oracle E-Business Suite InstanceEric Bing, Erik Graversen, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Learn the top 10 things you can do to secure your applications and your sensitive data. This Oracle development session for system administrators and security professionals explores some of the most important and overlooked things you can do to secure your Oracle E-Business Suite instance. It also covers data masking and other mechanisms for protecting sensitive data. Special Interest Groups (SIG) Some of our most senior staff have been invited to participate on the following SIG meetings as guest speakers: SIG10525 - OAUG - Archive & Purge SIGBrian Bent - Pre-Sales Engineer, TierData, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3011 The Archive and Purge SIG is an organization in which users can share their experiences and solicit functional and technical advice on archiving and purging data in Oracle E-Business Suite. This session provides an opportunity for users to network and share best practices, tips, and tricks. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Database Performance, Archive & Purging - Q&A SessionIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle SIG10547 - OAUG - Oracle E-Business (EBS) Applications Technology SIGSrini Chavali - IT Director, Cummins Inc Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3018 The general purpose of the EBS Applications Technology SIG is to inform and educate its members about current and future components of the tech stack as they relate to Oracle E-Business Suite. Attend this meeting for networking and education and to share best practices. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Roadmap - Presentation and Q&ASteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10559 - OAUG - User Management SIGSusan Behn - VP of Oracle Delivery, Infosemantics, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3024 The E-Business Suite User Management SIG focuses on the components of user management that enable Oracle E-Business Suite users to define administrative functions and manage users’ access to functions and data based on roles within an organization—rather than the user’s individual identity—which is referred to as role-based access control (RBAC). This meeting includes an introduction to Oracle User Management that covers the Oracle User Management building blocks and presents an example of creating a security policy.Guest: Security and User Management - Q&A SessionEric Bing, Sr. Director, EBS Security, OracleSara Woodhull, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10515 - OAUG – Upgrade SIGBarbara Matthews - Consultant, On Call DBASandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM - Moscone West 3009 This Upgrade SIG session starts with a business meeting and then features a Q&A panel discussion on Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade topics. The session• Reviews Upgrade SIG goals and objectives• Provides answers, during the Q&A session, to questions related to Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades• Shares “real world” experiences, tips, and techniques for Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades to Release 12.1. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade - Q&A SessionAnne Carlson - Sr. Director, Oracle E-Business Suite Product Strategy, OracleUdayan Parvate - Director, EBS Release Engineering, OracleSuzana Ferrari, Sr. Principal Consultant, OracleIsam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle SIG10552 - OAUG - Oracle E-Business Suite SIGDonna Rosentrater - Manager, Global Sourcing & Procurement Systems, TJX Sunday, Sep 30, 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 3020 The E-Business Suite SIG, affiliated with OAUG, supports Oracle E-Business Suite users through networking, education, and sharing of best practices. This SIG meeting will feature a general discussion of Oracle E-Business Suite product strategies in Release 12 and migration to Oracle Fusion Applications. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite - Q&A SessionJeanne Lowell, Vice President, EBS Product Strategy, OracleNadia Bendjedou, Sr. Director, Product Strategy, Oracle SIG10556 - OAUG - SysAdmin SIGRandy Giefer - Sr Systems and Security Architect, Solution Beacon, LLC Sunday, Sep 30, 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 3022 The SysAdmin SIG provides a forum in which OAUG members and participants can share updates, tips, and successful practices relating to system administration in an Oracle applications environment. The SysAdmin SIG strives to enable system administrators to become more effective and efficient in their jobs by providing them with access to people and information that can increase their system administration knowledge and experience. Attend this meeting to network, share best practices, and benefit from educational content. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Online Patching- Presentation and Q&AKevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10553 - OAUG - Database SIGMichael Brown - Senior DBA, COLIBRI LTD LC Sunday, Sep 30, 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 3020 The OAUG Database SIG provides an opportunity for applications database administrators to learn from and share their experiences with supporting the various Oracle applications environments. This session will include a brief business meeting followed by a short presentation. It will end with an open discussion among the attendees about items of interest to those present. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Database Performance - Presentation and Q&AIsam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Meet the Experts We're planning two round-table discussions where you can review your questions with senior E-Business Suite ATG staff: MTE9648 - Meet the Experts for Oracle E-Business Suite: Planning Your Upgrade Jeanne Lowell - VP, EBS Product Strategy, Oracle John Abraham - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Oracle Nadia Bendjedou - Sr. Director - Product Strategy, Oracle Anne Carlson - Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Udayan Parvate - Director, EBS Release Engineering, Oracle Isam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West 2001A Don’t miss this Oracle Applications Meet the Experts session with experts who specialize in Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade best practices. This is the place where attendees can have informal and semistructured but open one-on-one discussions with Strategy and Development regarding Oracle Applications strategy and your specific business and IT strategy. The experts will be available to discuss the value of the latest releases and share insights into the best path for your enterprise, so come ready with your questions. Space is limited, so make sure you register. MTE9649 - Meet the Oracle E-Business Suite Tools and Technology Experts Lisa Parekh - Vice President, Technology Integration, Oracle Steven Chan - Sr. Director, Oracle Elke Phelps - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Max Arderius - Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2001A Don’t miss this Oracle Applications Meet the Experts session with experts who specialize in Oracle E-Business Suite technology. This is the place where attendees can have informal and semistructured but open one-on-one discussions with Strategy and Development regarding Oracle Applications strategy and your specific business and IT strategy. The experts will be available to discuss the value of the latest releases and share insights into the best path for your enterprise, so come ready with your questions. Space is limited, so make sure you register. Demos We have five booths in the exhibition demogrounds this year, where you can try ATG technologies firsthand and get your questions answered. Please stop by and meet our staff at the following locations: Advanced Architecture and Technology Stack for Oracle E-Business Suite (W-067) New User Productivity Capabilities in Oracle E-Business Suite (W-065) End-to-End Management of Oracle E-Business Suite (W-063) Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Technical Upgrade Best Practices (W-066) SOA-Based Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite (W-064)

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• View Maps and Get Directions in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  Every so often we all need to look at a map for reference purposes or to get directions. If you are looking for a great quick reference app then join us as we look at the Mini Google Maps extension for Google Chrome. Mini Google Maps in Action While this may look like a rather basic map extension there is more to it than meets the eye at first glance. Here is the default view when you open Mini Google Maps for the first time. Things that we really liked about this extension were: Three different aerial views available (Map, Satellite, & Terrain) Three different viewing sizes available (and the extension remembers your chosen size) The ability to get directions in combination with a map We decided to try each of the viewing sizes available…here you can see the “Medium Setting”. Notice that the scale stays the same but you get more territory included to view. Then the “Large Setting”…which we infinitely preferred to the others. Once again look at the amount of territory included by default…very nice. Switching over to the “Satellite View”… Followed by the “Terrain View”. For our first example we decided to peek at Vancouver, British Columbia. After zooming out a little bit we had a very nice looking map. For the next test we asked for directions from Vancouver to Toronto. Both the directions and map turned out very well. And just for fun we looked up Paris, France with the “Satellite View”. Conclusion If you find yourself needing to view a map or get directions often then the Mini Google Maps extension will be a very useful tool for you. Links Download the Mini Google Maps extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Get Maps and Directions to Your Contacts in Outlook 2007Stupid Geek Tricks: Browse the Web from OutlookView the Time & Date in Chrome When Hiding Your TaskbarHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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• Top 31 Favorite Features in Windows Server 2012

  - by KeithMayer

  Over the past month, my fellow IT Pro Technical Evangelists and I have authored a series of articles about our Top 31 Favorite Features in Windows Server 2012.  Now that our series is complete, I’m providing a clickable index below of all of the articles in the series for your convenience, just in case you perhaps missed any of them when they were first released.  Hope you enjoy our Favorite Features in Windows Server 2012! Top 31 Favorite Features in Windows Server 2012 The Cloud OS Platform by Kevin Remde Server Manager in Windows Server 2012 by Brian Lewis Feel the Power of PowerShell 3.0 by Matt Hester Live Migrate Your VMS in One Line of PowerShell by Keith Mayer Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Replica by Kevin Remde Right-size IT Budgets with “Storage Spaces” by Keith Mayer Yes, there is an “I” in Team – the NIC Team! by Kevin Remde Hyper-V Network Virtualization by Keith Mayer Get Happy over the FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 by Matt Hester Simplified BranchCache in Windows Server 2012 by Brian Lewis Getting Snippy with PowerShell 3.0 by Matt Hester How to Get Unbelievable Data Deduplication Results by Chris Henley of Veeam Simplified VDI Configuration and Management by Brian Lewis Taming the New Task Manager by Keith Mayer Improve File Server Resiliency with ReFS by Keith Mayer Simplified DirectAccess by Sumeeth Evans SMB 3.0 – The Glue in Windows Server 2012 by Matt Hester Continuously Available File Shares by Steven Murawski of Edgenet Server Core - Improved Taste, Less Filling, More Uptime by Keith Mayer Extend Your Hyper-V Virtual Switch by Kevin Remde To NIC or to Not NIC Hardware Requirements by Brian Lewis Simplified Licensing and Server Versions by Kevin Remde I Think, Therefore IPAM! by Kevin Remde Windows Server 2012 and the RSATs by Kevin Remde Top 3 New Tricks in the Active Directory Admin Center by Keith Mayer Dynamic Access Control by Brian Lewis Get the Gremlin out of Your Active Directory Virtualized Infrastructure by Matt Hester Scoping out the New DHCP Failover by Keith Mayer Gone in 8 Seconds – The New CHKDSK by Matt Hester New Remote Desktop Services (RDS) by Brian Lewis No Better Time Than Now to Choose Hyper-V by Matt Hester What’s Next? Keep Learning! Want to learn more about Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012?  Want to prepare for certification on Windows Server 2012? Do It: Join our Windows Server 2012 “Early Experts” Challenge online peer study group for FREE at http://earlyexperts.net. You’ll get FREE access to video-based lectures, structured study materials and hands-on lab activities to help you study and prepare!  Along the way, you’ll be part of an IT Pro community of over 1,000+ IT Pros that are all helping each other learn Windows Server 2012! What are Your Favorite Features? Do you have a Favorite Feature in Windows Server 2012 that we missed in our list above?  Feel free to share your favorites in the comments below! Keith Build Your Lab! Download Windows Server 2012 Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines Want to Get Certified? Join our Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Study Group

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• Tales from the Trenches – Building a Real-World Silverlight Line of Business Application

  - by dwahlin

  There's rarely a boring day working in the world of software development. Part of the fun associated with being a developer is that change is guaranteed and the more you learn about a particular technology the more you realize there's always a different or better way to perform a task. I've had the opportunity to work on several different real-world Silverlight Line of Business (LOB) applications over the past few years and wanted to put together a list of some of the key things I've learned as well as key problems I've encountered and resolved. There are several different topics I could cover related to "lessons learned" (some of them were more painful than others) but I'll keep it to 5 items for this post and cover additional lessons learned in the future. The topics discussed were put together for a TechEd talk: Pick a Pattern and Stick To It Data Binding and Nested Controls Notify Users of Successes (and failures) Get an Agent – A Service Agent Extend Existing Controls The first topic covered relates to architecture best practices and how the MVVM pattern can save you time in the long run. When I was first introduced to MVVM I thought it was a lot of work for very little payoff. I've since learned (the hard way in some cases) that my initial impressions were dead wrong and that my criticisms of the pattern were generally caused by doing things the wrong way. In addition to MVVM pros the slides and sample app below also jump into data binding tricks in nested control scenarios and discuss how animations and media can be used to enhance LOB applications in subtle ways. Finally, a discussion of creating a re-usable service agent to interact with backend services is discussed as well as how existing controls make good candidates for customization. I tried to keep the samples simple while still covering the topics as much as possible so if you’re new to Silverlight you should definitely be able to follow along with a little study and practice. I’d recommend starting with the SilverlightDemos.View project, moving to the SilverlightDemos.ViewModels project and then going to the SilverlightDemos.ServiceAgents project. All of the backend “Model” code can be found in the SilverlightDemos.Web project. Custom controls used in the app can be found in the SivlerlightDemos.Controls project.   Sample Code and Slides

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• The right way of using index.html

  - by Jeyekomon

  I have quite a lot of issues I'd like to hear your opinion on, so I hope I'll manage to explain it well enough. I should also note that I'm beginner equipped only with the knowledge of HTML and CSS so although I'm almost sure that there is a simple solution using powerful PHP, it won't help me. Let's say that I have my personal blog on the address example.com/blog.html and there are links to several sub-blogs example.com/blog/math.html, example.com/blog/coding.html etc. So my root folder contains blog.html and blog folder, the blog folder itself contains files math.html and coding.html. First of all, I learned (from Google Webmasters Tools) that for SEO and aesthetical purposes it's good to unify example.com.com and example.com/index.html by adding _rel="canonical"_ attribute into the source of the index.html. Using a couple of other tricks (like linking to ../ and ./) I got rid of the ugly index.html appearing in my web addresses. And now I wonder if this trick can be used not only for the root folder but for any folder? I mean, I would move my blog.html into the blog folder, rename it into the index.html and add rel="canonical" to unify example.com/blog/index.html with example.com/blog/. This trick would change the address of my blog from example.com/blog.html into example.com/blog/. Not finished! I'm also experiencing problems with the google robot indexing my folders. So when I type site:example.com/ into the google search, the link to my folder example.com/blog/ with raw files, icons etc. appears among the other results. I guess there are also other ways how to fix it, but IMHO the change mentioned above would do the trick too - the index.html in the blog folder would preserve the user from viewing the actual raw content of that folder, there would appear only the right link example.com/blog/ in the google search and (I hope that) _rel="canonical"_ would make the second, unwanted link example.com/blog/index.html not to appear in the search results. So my questions are: Is it a good practice to have the index.html file in every subfolder or is it intended to be only in the root folder? Are there any disadvantages or problems that may occur when using the second, "index in every folder" method? Which one of the two ways of structuring the website described above would you prefer?

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• Desktop Fun: Abstract Icon Packs

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you prefer a more unique, artistic, or alternative look for your desktop setup? Then you will definitely want to have a look through our Abstract Icon Packs collection. Just set your imagination loose and enjoy the wonderful desktops that these icon packs can inspire for you. Note: To customize the icon setup on your Windows 7 & Vista systems see our article here. Using Windows XP? We have you covered here. Sneak Preview For this week’s preview desktop we created an Alien Desert Planet theme using the Abstract Symbol Icons pack shown below. Note: The original, unmodified version of this wallpaper can be found here. Here is a closer look at the icons we used for our new theme… The Icon Packs Match-stick-play Icons *.ico format only Download Abstract Symbol Icons *.ico format only Download Allomantic Metals *.ico format only Download Mutated Snowflake Icon Set *.ico format only Download Shades of Geometry *.ico format only Download Starry Objects Icons *.ico format only Download New Sin – Abstract Human Icons *.ico, .png, and .psd format Note: While most of the icons in this pack look similar at first glance, there are differences when viewed at a larger size. Download Mysterious Icons *.ico format only Download Alien Icons *.ico format only Download Beads Icons *.ico format only Download Magic Flowers Icons *.ico format only Download Circle Shapes Icons *.ico format only Download geometric doc icons *.png format only Download alumina *.png format only Download Citiscape dockicons *.png format only Download Wanting more great icon sets to look through? Be certain to visit our Desktop Fun section for more icon goodness! Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? Add Falling Snow to Webpages with the Snowfall Extension for Opera [Browser Fun] Automatically Keep Up With the Latest Releases from Mozilla Labs in Firefox 4.0 A Look Back at 2010 Through Infographics Monitor the Weather with the Weather Forecast Extension for Opera Orbiting at the Edge of the Atmosphere Wallpaper Simon’s Cat Explores the Christmas Tree! [Video]

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• Easy Listening = CRM On Demand Podcasts

  - by Anne

  OK, here's my NEW favorite resource for CRM On Demand info -- podcasts! Specifically, the CRM On Demand Podcast site -- signed, sealed, and delivered with humor and know-how. Yes, I admit, I know the cast of characters. But let's face it, sometimes dealing with software is just soooo dry! Not so when discussed by the two main commentators, Louis Peters and Robert Davidson, whom someone once referred to as CRM On Demand's "Click and Clack." (Thought that was too good not to pass along!) Anyhow, another huge plus about the site is the option to listen OR to read. Out walking my dog or doing the dishes? Just turn up the podcast. Listening to music or watching TV? I'll read Louis's entertaining write-ups to glean great info about CRM On Demand in a very short period of time. So that you get a better understanding of why I like this site so much, here's a sampling of what's discussed: Five Things about Books of Business As Louis Peters put it in his entry, when you see "Five Things" in the title, "you'll know you're going to get some concrete advice that you can put to work right away." Well, Louis and Robert do just that, pointing you in the right direction when using Books of Business to segment data. Moving to Indexed Fields - A Rough Guide (only an article, not a podcast) I've read all about performance and even helped develop material around it. But nowhere have I heard indexed custom fields referred to as "super heroes." Louis and Robert use imaginative language to describe the process for moving your data to indexed fields for optimal performance. Data Access QA from the Forums I think that everyone would admit that data access and visibility is the most difficult topic to understand in CRM On Demand. Following up on their previous podcast on the same topic, Louis and Robert answer a few key questions from the many postings on the Oracle CRM On Demand forums. And I bet that the scenarios match many companies' business requirements...maybe even yours! We Need to Talk About Adoption Another expert, Tim Koehler, joins Louis to talk about how to drive user adoption: aligning product usage with business results, communicating why and how to use the product, getting feedback on usability, and so on. Hope I've made my point -- turn to these podcasts to hear knowledgeable folks discuss CRM On Demand tips and tricks in entertaining ways. One podcast is even called "SaaS Talk"!

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• DevConnections jQuery Session Slides and Samples posted

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’ve posted all of my slides and samples from the DevConnections VS 2010 Launch event last week in Vegas. All three sessions are contained in a single zip file which contains all slide decks and samples in one place: www.west-wind.com/files/conferences/jquery.zip There were 3 separate sessions: Using jQuery with ASP.NET Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors to select document elements, manipulate these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The session also covers AJAX interaction between jQuery and the .NET server side code using several different approaches including sending HTML and JSON data and how to avoid user interface duplication by using client side templating. This session relies heavily on live examples and walk-throughs. jQuery Extensibility and Integration with ASP.NET Server Controls One of the great strengths of the jQuery Javascript framework is its simple, yet powerful extensibility model that has resulted in an explosion of plug-ins available for jQuery. You need it - chances are there's a plug-in for it! In this session we'll look at a few plug-ins to demonstrate the power of the jQuery plug-in model before diving in and creating our own custom jQuery plug-ins. We'll look at how to create a plug-in from scratch as well as discussing when it makes sense to do so. Once you have a plug-in it can also be useful to integrate it more seamlessly with ASP.NET by creating server controls that coordinate both server side and jQuery client side behavior. I'll demonstrate a host of custom components that utilize a combination of client side jQuery functionality and server side ASP.NET server controls that provide smooth integration in the user interface development process. This topic focuses on component development both for pure client side plug-ins and mixed mode controls. jQuery Tips and Tricks This session was kind of a last minute substitution for an ASP.NET AJAX talk. Nothing too radical here :-), but I focused on things that have been most productive for myself. Look at the slide deck for individual points and some of the specific samples.   It was interesting to see that unlike in previous conferences this time around all the session were fairly packed – interest in jQuery is definitely getting more pronounced especially with microsoft’s recent announcement of focusing on jQuery integration rather than continuing on the path of ASP.NET AJAX – which is a welcome change. Most of the samples also use the West Wind Web & Ajax Toolkit and the support tools contained within it – a snapshot version of the toolkit is included in the samples download. Specicifically a number of the samples use functionality in the ww.jquery.js support file which contains a fairly large set of plug-ins and helper functionality – most of these pieces while contained in the single file are self-contained and can be lifted out of this file (several people asked). Hopefully you'll find something useful in these slides and samples.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  jQuery  

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• Friday Fun: Factory Balls – Christmas Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  Your weekend is almost here, but until the work day is over we have another fun holiday game for you. This week your job is to correctly decorate/paint the ornaments that go on the Christmas tree. Simple you say? Maybe, but maybe not! Factory Balls – Christmas Edition The object of the game is to correctly decorate/paint each Christmas ornament exactly as shown in the “sample image” provided for each level. What starts off as simple will quickly have you working to figure out the correct combination or sequence to complete each ornament. Are you ready? The first level serves as a tutorial to help you become comfortable with how to decorate/paint the ornaments. To move an ornament to a paint bucket or cover part of it with one of the helper items simply drag the ornament towards that area. The ornament will automatically move back to its’ starting position when the action is complete. First, a nice coat of red paint followed by covering the middle area with a horizontal belt. Once the belt is on move the ornament to the bucket of yellow paint. Next, you will need to remove the belt, so move the ornament back to the belt’s original position. One ornament finished! As soon as you complete decorating/painting an ornament, you move on to the next level and will be shown the next “sample Image” in the upper right corner. Starting with a coat of orange paint sounds good… Pop the little serrated edge cap on top… Add some blue paint… Almost have it… Place the large serrated edge cap on top… Another dip in the orange paint… And the second ornament is finished. Level three looks a little bit tougher…just work out your pattern of helper items & colors and you will definitely get it! Have fun decorating/painting those ornaments! Note: Starting with level four you will need to start using a combination of two helper items combined at times to properly complete the ornaments. Play Factory Balls – Christmas Edition 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 Exploring the Jungle Ruins Wallpaper Protect Your Privacy When Browsing with Chrome and Iron Browser Free Shipping Day is Friday, December 17, 2010 – National Free Shipping Day Find an Applicable Quote for Any Programming Situation Winter Theme for Windows 7 from Microsoft Score Free In-Flight Wi-Fi Courtesy of Google Chrome

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• Speaking at SPTechCon SF 2011 and SPSNOLA 2011

  - by Brian Jackett

  From Feb 7th-9th I’ll be presenting two sessions at SPTechCon San Francisco 2011.  My first presentation is a new session called “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which covers many of the new tools and functionality available to SharePoint 2010 developers.  My second sessions is called “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” (presented at last SPTech Con Boston) which covers tips, tricks, and advice on deploying SharePoint 2007 solutions.  If you hurry you may still be able to register for this SPTechCon.  Click here for registration information.  Hope to see you there.     In addition to SPTechCon, I’ll also be speaking at SharePoint Saturday New Orleans 2011 on Feb 26th.  My presentation is called “Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell”.  I’ve given this presentation at a number of recent conferences and it has been popular.  I’m excited for this weekend as well since it will be my first time visiting New Orleans.  Click here for registration information.   Sessions Where: SPTech Con San Francisco 2011 Title: The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010 Audience and Level: Developer, Beginner/Intermediate Abstract: LINQ to SharePoint, native Visual Studio 2010 support, easier access to logging, Business Connectivity Services… The list of new features and tools available to developers rapidly grew between SharePoint 2007 and 2010.  In this session we will cover these and many of the other newest features added for SharePoint developers to utilize.  This session is targeted to SharePoint 2007 developers upgrading their skills to SharePoint 2010 or developers new to SharePoint 2010.   Where: SPTech Con San Francisco 2011 Title: Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions Audience and Level: Admin/Developer, Intermediate Abstract: “All I have to do is run some STSADM commands to deploy my SharePoint solutions, right?”  If you are saying that to yourself then you are missing out on some of the more advanced processes you can employ to deploy and maintain your SharePoint solutions and farm.  In this session we will cover lessons learned from 3 years of deploying and automating SharePoint solutions.  This will include using a combination of STSADM, PowerShell, SharePoint API and a number of other tools in a real world situation to deploy an entire suite of custom SharePoint solutions.  This session is targeted to farm administrators and developers.  Prior experience with SharePoint solutions, STSADM and minimal PowerShell experience is suggested.   Where: SharePoint Saturday New Orleans Title: Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell Audience and Level: Admin, Beginner Abstract: Having you been using STSADM (or worse hand editing processes) to manage your SharePoint 2007 farms? Are you hearing about needing to learn PowerShell to manage SharePoint 2010 farms? This session will serve as part introduction to PowerShell and part overview of how you can use PowerShell to more efficiently and effectively manage your SharePoint 2010 farm. This session is targeted to farm administrators and IT pros and no previous experience with PowerShell is required.         -Frog Out

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