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• Lease Accounting Closed for Comment

  - by Theresa Hickman

  December 15, 2010 marked the last day to send public comments to FASB and IASB on lease accounting. June 2011 is the deadline for the final consideration of the Leases Exposure Draft that will be given to standard setters in order to create a new lease accounting standard. Landlords, lessees, retailers, airlines industry, etc. are all worried right now about the changes to lease accounting. They feel the changes will be too costly and complex without adding significant improvement to the quality and relevance of financial statements. In a nutshell, IASB and FASB want to abolish operating leases where the lessee records the periodic payments as an expense over time. The proposed changes will mean that the accounting for leases will move from the P&L and hit both the lessee's and lessor's balance sheets. For companies that occupy a lot of property, this could significantly increase their liabilities not to mention front-load much of the costs that they were able to spread out over time before. Why are IASB and FASB doing this? Their goal is to have consistent accounting for both the lessees and lessors with higher quality financial statements. Leasing is one of four major projects being undertaken by the IASB and FASB in order to complete convergence between US GAAP and IFRS. I spoke to our resident accounting expert Seamus Moran about this to better understand how this might impact accounting software. He reminded me that the proposed changes to both US GAAP and IFRS in respect to leases are "proposed." It is still inappropriate to account for leases the way they are being proposed and we still need to account for them in accordance to the current regulations, which is what current accounting software programs, such as E-Business Suite Release 12.1 and prior and PeopleSoft Enterprise support. The FASB (US GAAP) and IASB (IFRS) exposure drafts (EDs) that outline the proposal were published. The FASB edition was published on August 17th, with comments due by December 15th. The IASB edition was published on the same date, and comments were due in London on the same date. Exposure drafts are the method both the FASB and the IASB use to solicit General Acceptance, the "GA" in GAAP. Both Boards will consider the input they have received, and perhaps revise the proposal. The proposal has come in for some criticism, both from the finance houses and the uses of the leased assets. There is, given the opposition to it, an excellent chance that the Leasing proposal will be modified or rewritten. We will know this in about six months, the usual time it takes for the FASB and IASB to digest the comments they receive. If they feel the proposal has General Acceptance, they will issue the final Standard at that time; if not, they will issue a revised proposal with another year of comment of drafting. Oracle participates in the standard setting process and is fully aware of the leasing proposal. We have designs that would reflect the proposal in hand. These designs will be finalized when the proposal is finalized. It is likely that customers will develop new financial arrangements if the proposal is finalized, and we are working with customers and partners to stay in touch with people's business responses to the proposal. The IASB and FASB are aware that ERP companies will have to revise their software, and that the companies filing results under IFRS or under US GAAP will have to implement such software. The form and timing of the release of the updated software will depend on the schedule of the take up of the new standard, the complexity of the standard, and the releases supported at the time the standard becomes effective.

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• Indentify Codecs & Technical Information About Video Files

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Have you ever wanted to play an audio or video file but didn’t have the proper codec installed? Today we’ll show how to determine codecs, along with a host of other technical details about your media files with MediaInfo. Installation Download and install MediaInfo. You can find the download link at the bottom of the page. Note: When installing MediaInfo there is a recommended software bundle which you can opt out of by selecting Do not install option. Each recommended software choice may be different, like in this example it offers Spyware Terminator. The cool thing though is they use Open Candy which opts you out of the install. Just double check to make sure you’re not installing extra crapware. Using MediaInfo The first time you run MediaInfo it will display the Preferences window. There are various option such as language, output format, and whether or not you want MediaInfo to check for new versions. Click OK. Select a file or folder to analyze by clicking on the File or Folder icons on the left of the application window or by selecting File > Open from the menu. You can also drag and drop a file directly onto the application. MediaInfo will display details of your media file. In Basic view, you’ll see basic information. Notice in the example below the video and audio codecs, along with file size, running time of the media file, and even the application used to create the video file (Writing application).    You can switch to some of the other views by selecting View from the Menu and choosing form the dropdown list.   Sheet View will present the information a bit more clearly. You can see in the example below that the video and audio codec are listing in clearly identified columns. (AVC is often more commonly referred to H.264.)   Tree View is perhaps the most detailed. You can see from the example below the codec used for this AVI file is XviD.   Scrolling down even further you’ll see additional information like video and audio bit rates, frame rate, aspect ratio, and more.   In Basic View (and also in Sheet view) you can click to find a player for your file. In this instance with an MP4 file, it took me to the download page for Quicktime. This is by no means the only media player for this file, but if you are stuck for how to play a media file, this will forward you to a solution that works. You can do the same thing with Video codec. Click Go to the web site of this video codec to find a download.   MediaInfo is a simple but powerful tool that can be used to discover the details of a media file, or just to find a compatible codec. It works with most any video file type and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Some Mac and Linux versions, however, are currently command line only. Download MediaInfo Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Convert Videos to 3GP for Mobile PhonesFix for VLC Skipping and Lagging Playing High-Def Video FilesUsing VLC Player Under VistaUse Your Mac Mini as a Media Server Part 2How to Play .OGM Video Files in Windows Vista 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere)

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• How can I draw an arrow at the edge of the screen pointing to an object that is off screen?

  - by Adam Henderson

  I am wishing to do what is described in this topic: http://www.allegro.cc/forums/print-thread/283220 I have attempted a variety of the methods mentioned here. First I tried to use the method described by Carrus85: Just take the ratio of the two triangle hypontenuses (doesn't matter which triagle you use for the other, I suggest point 1 and point 2 as the distance you calculate). This will give you the aspect ratio percentage of the triangle in the corner from the larger triangle. Then you simply multiply deltax by that value to get the x-coordinate offset, and deltay by that value to get the y-coordinate offset. But I could not find a way to calculate how far the object is away from the edge of the screen. I then tried using ray casting (which I have never done before) suggested by 23yrold3yrold: Fire a ray from the center of the screen to the offscreen object. Calculate where on the rectangle the ray intersects. There's your coordinates. I first calculated the hypotenuse of the triangle formed by the difference in x and y positions of the two points. I used this to create a unit vector along that line. I looped through that vector until either the x coordinate or the y coordinate was off the screen. The two current x and y values then form the x and y of the arrow. Here is the code for my ray casting method (written in C++ and Allegro 5) void renderArrows(Object* i) { float x1 = i->getX() + (i->getWidth() / 2); float y1 = i->getY() + (i->getHeight() / 2); float x2 = screenCentreX; float y2 = ScreenCentreY; float dx = x2 - x1; float dy = y2 - y1; float hypotSquared = (dx * dx) + (dy * dy); float hypot = sqrt(hypotSquared); float unitX = dx / hypot; float unitY = dy / hypot; float rayX = x2 - view->getViewportX(); float rayY = y2 - view->getViewportY(); float arrowX = 0; float arrowY = 0; bool posFound = false; while(posFound == false) { rayX += unitX; rayY += unitY; if(rayX <= 0 || rayX >= screenWidth || rayY <= 0 || rayY >= screenHeight) { arrowX = rayX; arrowY = rayY; posFound = true; } } al_draw_bitmap(sprite, arrowX - spriteWidth, arrowY - spriteHeight, 0); } This was relatively successful. Arrows are displayed in the bottom right section of the screen when objects are located above and left of the screen as if the locations of the where the arrows are drawn have been rotated 180 degrees around the center of the screen. I assumed this was due to the fact that when I was calculating the hypotenuse of the triangle, it would always be positive regardless of whether or not the difference in x or difference in y is negative. Thinking about it, ray casting does not seem like a good way of solving the problem (due to the fact that it involves using sqrt() and a large for loop). Any help finding a suitable solution would be greatly appreciated, Thanks Adam

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• Silverlight ProgressBar issues with Binding

  - by Chris Skardon

  The ProgressBar pretty much does what it says on the tin, displays progress, in a bar form (well, by default anyhow). It’s pretty simple to use: <ProgressBar Minimum="0" Maximum="100" Value="50"/> Gives you a progress bar with 50% of it filled: Easy! But of course, we’re wanting to use binding to change the value, again, pretty easy, have a ViewModel with a ‘Value’ in it, and bind: <ProgressBar Minimum="0" Maximum="100" Value="{Binding Value}"/> Spiffy, and whilst we’re at it, why not bind the Maximum value as well – after all, we can’t be sure of the size of the progress, and it’s a pain to have to work out the percentage (when the progress bar can do it for us): <ProgressBar Minimum="0" Maximum="MaximumValue" Value="{Binding Value}"/> Right, this will work absolutely fine. Or will it??? On the face of it, it looks good, and testing it shows no issues, until at one point we go from: Maximum = 100; Value = 90; to Maximum=60; Value=50; On the face of it not unreasonable. The problem is more obvious if we look at the states of the properties after each set (initially Maximum is set at 1, Value = 0): Code Maximum Value Value < Maximum Maximum = 100; 100 0 True Value = 90; 100 90 True Maximum = 60; 60 90 False Value = 50; 60 50 True Everything is good until the Value is less than the Maximum, at this point the Progress Bar breaks. That’s right, it no longer updates itself, it will always look 100% full. The simple solution – always ensuring you set Value before Maximum is fine unless you’re using a ProgressBar in a less controlled environment – where for example you’re setting a ‘container’ with both values at the same time. The example I have is in a DataTemplate, I have a DataTemplate for a BusyIndicator, (specifically the BusyContentTemplate). The binding works this way: <BusyIndicator BusyContent="{Binding BusyContent}" BusyContentTemplate="{Binding ProgressTemplate}"/> With the template as the ProgressBar defined above… I was setting my BusyContent like this: BusyContent = content; aaaaaand finally, ‘content’ is a class: public class ContentClass : INotifyPropertyChanged { //Obviously this is properly implemented… public double Maximum { get;set;} public double Value { get;set;} } Soooo… As I was replacing the BusyContent wholesale, the order of the binding being set was outside of my control, so – how to go about it? Basically? Fudge it. Modify the ContentClass to include a method: public void Update(double value, double max) { Value = value; Maximum = max; } and change where the setting is to be: BusyContent.Update(content.Value, content.Maximum); Thereby getting the order correct.. Obvious really. Meh :|

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• New R Interface to Oracle Data Mining Available for Download

  - by charlie.berger

    The R Interface to Oracle Data Mining ( R-ODM) allows R users to access the power of Oracle Data Mining's in-database functions using the familiar R syntax. R-ODM provides a powerful environment for prototyping data analysis and data mining methodologies. R-ODM is especially useful for: Quick prototyping of vertical or domain-based applications where the Oracle Database supports the application Scripting of "production" data mining methodologies Customizing graphics of ODM data mining results (examples: classification, regression, anomaly detection) The R-ODM interface allows R users to mine data using Oracle Data Mining from the R programming environment. It consists of a set of function wrappers written in source R language that pass data and parameters from the R environment to the Oracle RDBMS enterprise edition as standard user PL/SQL queries via an ODBC interface. The R-ODM interface code is a thin layer of logic and SQL that calls through an ODBC interface. R-ODM does not use or expose any Oracle product code as it is completely an external interface and not part of any Oracle product. R-ODM is similar to the example scripts (e.g., the PL/SQL demo code) that illustrates the use of Oracle Data Mining, for example, how to create Data Mining models, pass arguments, retrieve results etc. R-ODM is packaged as a standard R source package and is distributed freely as part of the R environment's Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). For information about the R environment, R packages and CRAN, see www.r-project.org. R-ODM is particularly intended for data analysts and statisticians familiar with R but not necessarily familiar with the Oracle database environment or PL/SQL. It is a convenient environment to rapidly experiment and prototype Data Mining models and applications. Data Mining models prototyped in the R environment can easily be deployed in their final form in the database environment, just like any other standard Oracle Data Mining model. What is R? R is a system for statistical computation and graphics. It consists of a language plus a run-time environment with graphics, a debugger, access to certain system functions, and the ability to run programs stored in script files. The design of R has been heavily influenced by two existing languages: Becker, Chambers & Wilks' S and Sussman's Scheme. Whereas the resulting language is very similar in appearance to S, the underlying implementation and semantics are derived from Scheme. R was initially written by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. Since mid-1997 there has been a core group (the "R Core Team") who can modify the R source code archive. Besides this core group many R users have contributed application code as represented in the near 1,500 publicly-available packages in the CRAN archive (which has shown exponential growth since 2001; R News Volume 8/2, October 2008). Today the R community is a vibrant and growing group of dozens of thousands of users worldwide. It is free software distributed under a GNU-style copyleft, and an official part of the GNU project ("GNU S"). Resources: R website / CRAN R-ODM

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• JPedal Action for Converting PDF to JavaFX

  - by Geertjan

  The question of the day comes from Mark Stephens, from JPedal (JPedal is the leading 100% Java PDF library, providing a Java PDF viewer, PDF to image conversion, PDF printing or adding PDF search and PDF extraction features), in the form of a screenshot: The question is clear. By looking at the annotations above, you can see that Mark has an ActionListener that has been bound to the right-click popup menu on PDF files. Now he needs to get hold of the file to which the Action has been bound. How, oh  how, can one get hold of that file? Well, it's simple. Leave everything you see above exactly as it is but change the Java code section to this: public final class PDF2JavaFXContext implements ActionListener {     private final DataObject context;     public PDF2JavaFXContext(DataObject context) {         this.context = context;     }     public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ev) {         FileObject fo = context.getPrimaryFile();         File theFile = FileUtil.toFile(fo);         //do something with your file...     } } The point is that the annotations at the top of the class bind the Action to either Actions.alwaysEnabled, which is a factory method for creating always-enabled Actions, or Actions.context, which is a factory method for creating context-sensitive Actions. How does the Action get bound to the factory method? The annotations are converted, when the module is compiled, into XML registration entries in the "generated-layer.xml", which you can find in your "build" folder, in the Files window, after building the module. In Mark's case, since the Action should be context-sensitive to PDF files, he needs to bind his PDF2JavaFXContext ActionListener (which should probably be named "PDF2JavaFXActionListener", since the class is an ActionListener) to Actions.context. All he needs to do that is pass in the object he wants to work with into the constructor of the ActionListener. Now, when the module is built, the annotation processor is going to take the annotations and convert them to XML registration entries, but the constructor will also be checked to see whether it is empty or not. In this case, the constructor isn't empty, hence the Action should be context-sensitive and so the ActionListener is bound to Actions.context. The Actions.context will do all the enablement work for Mark, so that he will not need to provide any code for enabling/disabling the Action. The Action will be enabled whenever a DataObject is selected. Since his Action is bound to Nodes in the Projects window that represent PDF files, the Action will always be enabled whenever Mark right-clicks on a PDF Node, since the Node exposes its own DataObject. Once Mark has access to the DataObject, he can get the underlying FileObject via getPrimaryFile and he can then convert the FileObject to a java.io.File via FileUtil.getConfigFile. Once he's got the java.io.File, he can do with it whatever he needs. Further reading: http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/

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• Session and Pop Up Window

  - by imran_ku07

   Introduction :        Session is the secure state management. It allows the user to store their information in one page and access in another page. Also it is so much powerful that store any type of object. Every user's session is identified by their cookie, which client presents to server. But unfortunately when you open a new pop up window, this cookie is not post to server with request, due to which server is unable to identify the session data for current user.         In this Article i will show you how to handle this situation,  Description :         During working in a application, i was getting an Exception saying that Session is null, when a pop window opens. After seeing the problem more closely i found that ASP.NET_SessionId cookie for parent page is not post in cookie header of child (popup) window.         Therefore for making session present in both parent and child (popup) window, you have to present same cookie. For cookie sharing i passed parent SessionID in query string,   window.open('http://abc.com/s.aspx?SASID=" & Session.SessionID &','V');           and in Application_PostMapRequestHandler application Event, check if the current request has no ASP.NET_SessionId cookie and SASID query string is not null then add this cookie to Request before Session is acquired, so that Session data remain same for both parent and popup window.    Private Sub Application_PostMapRequestHandler(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)           If (Request.Cookies("ASP.NET_SessionId") Is Nothing) AndAlso (Request.QueryString("SASID") IsNot Nothing) Then               Request.Cookies.Add(New HttpCookie("ASP.NET_SessionId", Request.QueryString("SASID")))           End If       End Sub           Now access Session in your parent and child window without any problem. How this works :          ASP.NET (both Web Form or MVC) uses a cookie (ASP.NET_SessionId) to identify the user who is requesting. Cookies are may be persistent (saved permanently in user cookies ) or non-persistent (saved temporary in browser memory). ASP.NET_SessionId cookie saved as non-persistent. This means that if the user closes the browser, the cookie is immediately removed. This is a sensible step that ensures security. That's why ASP.NET unable to identify that the request is coming from the same user. Therefore every browser instance get it's own ASP.NET_SessionId. To resolve this you need to present the same parent ASP.NET_SessionId cookie to the server when open a popup window.           You can confirm this situation by using some tools like Firebug, Fiddler,  Summary :          Hopefully you will enjoy after reading this article, by seeing that how to workaround the problem of sharing Session between different browser instances by sharing their Session identifier Cookie.

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• Removing Barriers to Create Effective Data Models

  After years of creating and maintaining data models, I have started to notice common barriers that decrease the accuracy and usefulness of models. In my opinion, the main causes of these barriers are the lack of knowledge and communication from within a company. The lack of knowledge in regards to data models or data modeling can take many forms. Company Culture Knowledge Whether documented or undocumented, existing business rules of a company can affect how data is modeled. For example, if a company only allows 1 assigned person per customer to be able to manipulate a customer’s record then then a data model that includes an associated table that joins customers and employee’s would be unneeded because that would allow for the possibility of multiple employees to handle a customer because of the potential for a many to many relationship between Customers and Employees. Technical Knowledge Depending on the data modeler’s proficiency in modeling data they can inadvertently cause issues and/or complications with a design without even noticing. It is important that companies share data modeling responsibilities so that the models are developed from multiple perspectives of a system, company and the original problem.  In addition, the tools that a company selects to create data models can also affect the accuracy of the model if designer are not familiar with the tools or the tools are too complex to use for the designer. Existing System Knowledge In order for a data modeler to model data for an existing system so that new changes can be applied to a system then they need to at least know the basic concepts of a system so that they can work within it. This will promote reusability of data and prevent the chance of duplicating data. Project Knowledge This should be pretty obvious, but it is very hard to create an accurate data model without knowing what data needs to be modeled. I have always found it strange that I have been asked to start modeling data prior to a client formalizing any requirements. Usually when this happens I have to make several iterations to a model, and the client still does not know exactly what they want.  In addition additional issues can arise when certain stakeholders of a project are not consulted prior to the design or after the project is over because it can cause miss understandings and confusion by the end user as well as possibly not solving the original problem for which a project is intended to solve. One common thread between each type of knowledge is that they can all be avoided through the use of good communication. For example, if a modeler is new to a company then they should ask older employees about any business specific rules that may be documented or undocumented that must be applied to projects in general. Furthermore, if a modeler is not really familiar with a specific data modeling software then they need to speak up and ask for help form other employees or their manager. This will not only help the modeler in the project, but also help them in future projects that they do for the company. Additionally, if a project is not clearly defined prior to a data modeler being assigned the modeling project then it is their responsibility to communicate with the other stakeholders to clarify any part of a project that is unclear so that the data model that is created is accurately aligned with a project.

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• Wisdom Lies in Collaborative Power and Intelligence

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  By Alakh Verma, Director, Platform Technology Solutions   In my recent blog posts, I shared insights on Predictive Analytics (Will Predictive Analytics at 'Speed of Thoughts' Help Businesses?), Real Time Decisions (How critical are Real Time decisions in business today?) and their significance in our lives in general and in businesses today. In the current business paradigm shift- with evolutionary social business, it is paramount that businesses look for wisdom in collaborative power and intelligence and equip their employees with the tools to engage with one another. There is an old time saying that 5 sticks tied together are stronger and unable to break as opposed to an individual stick. We have recently witnessed the power of ordinary people uniting together and fought collaboratively using Facebook and Twitter to topple down dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya—and are threatening absolute rule in Syria. And an India one man’s (Anna Hazare) campaign against corruption went viral, bringing thousands to the streets in support. As anyone who has worked in a sizeable organization knows, there is no guarantee that the organization as a whole will perform efficiently and achieve its goals, even if each employee is individually efficient and every team has a high level of productivity. To achieve enterprise productivity, it is necessary not only for individuals and groups to “do things right” by working productively but also for the enterprise as a whole to “do the right things” - form the right teams, make the right decisions, allocate resources correctly, and effectively coordinate activities across the entire organization. Most organizations fall short of the optimal level of enterprise productivity because of one or more of these reasons, all at a great cost to the business.  They are disconnected from themselves with various parts of the organization unintentionally working at cross-purposes with each other.  Information that exists is not getting shared or reused.  Human talent is not being applied where it is most needed.  The same problems are being solved repeatedly by multiple groups. Intelligent collaboration through automated business processes has the ability to alter the course of any important business activity, with a potentially dramatic impact on the financial performance of the business. Whether it is a simple email exchange, a physical or virtual meeting, a task force, or a large-scale project, the activity is inherently collaborative.  In fact, collaboration can be defined as the work that takes place among people when a business process is not pre-determining how the work should take place. Collaboration is many things: information sharing, brainstorming, problem solving, best practice negotiation, innovation, coordination of activity, alignment of purpose, and so forth.  Collaboration is the “white space” between the business processes; it is the glue that holds an organization together, and the lubricant that allows the machinery to keep running.  Real time search and collaborative capabilities of the right people with the right content supported by defined processes will provide unparallel wisdom in the organization in the most competitive business environment today. Interestingly, technologies such as Oracle WebCenter offer these capabilities in our Web based business transactions and compliment in the overall collaborative intelligence and power to truly transform organizations to social businesses. Looking to learn more about engaging your employees to collaborate together and providing a complete user experience for your customers? You won't want to miss our webcast today! Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

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• Clever memory usage through the years

  - by Ben Emmett

  A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

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• How can I make sound work without starting X?

  - by Magnus Hoff

  I have a headless machine connected to my sound system, and I am using it to run a music playing daemon that I control over the network. (Among other things) However, I can't seem to be able to have sound come out of my speakers without running X. I am running pulse audio in a system wide instance and my daemon is not running within X. Nevertheless, when my daemon is playing music without me hearing it, I can fix it by running startx in an unrelated session. After X starts, I can hear the sound. The sound disappears again if I kill the X server. Interestingly/annoyingly, the sound also stops after X has been running for a few minutes. This could possibly be because of a screen saver of some sort, but I haven't been able to verify or falsify this theory. So my current workaround is to ssh into the box whenever I want music and startx, and restart it every fifteen minutes or so. I'd like to do better. I have been able to verify the following: Adjustments in alsamixer have no effect on this problem. The relevant output channel is never muted In alsamixer, I can see no difference between when the sound is working and when it isn't Nothing is muted in pactl list There is no difference in the output from pactl list between before starting X and after it's started. (Except the identifier of the pactl instance connected to pulse, which is different each time you run pactl) The user running the music daemon is a member of the groups audio, pulse and pulse-access The music daemon program does not report any error messages and acts as if it is playing the music like it should Some form of dbus daemon is running. ps aux|grep dbus reports dbus-daemon --system --fork --activation=upstart before and after I have started X Some details about my hardware: Motherboard: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AT5IONTI_DELUXE/ Sound chip: Nvidia GPU 0b HDMI/DP (from alsamixer) Using HDMI for output (Machine also has an Intel Realtek ALC887 that I am not using) Output of lsmod: Module Size Used by deflate 12617 0 zlib_deflate 27139 1 deflate ctr 13201 0 twofish_generic 16635 0 twofish_x86_64_3way 25287 0 twofish_x86_64 12907 1 twofish_x86_64_3way twofish_common 20919 3 twofish_generic,twofish_x86_64_3way,twofish_x86_64 camellia 29348 0 serpent 29125 0 blowfish_generic 12530 0 blowfish_x86_64 21466 0 blowfish_common 16739 2 blowfish_generic,blowfish_x86_64 cast5 25112 0 des_generic 21415 0 xcbc 12815 0 rmd160 16744 0 bnep 18281 2 rfcomm 47604 12 sha512_generic 12796 0 crypto_null 12918 0 parport_pc 32866 0 af_key 36389 0 ppdev 17113 0 binfmt_misc 17540 1 nfsd 281980 2 ext2 73795 1 nfs 436929 1 lockd 90326 2 nfsd,nfs fscache 61529 1 nfs auth_rpcgss 53380 2 nfsd,nfs nfs_acl 12883 2 nfsd,nfs sunrpc 255224 16 nfsd,nfs,lockd,auth_rpcgss,nfs_acl btusb 18332 2 vesafb 13844 2 pl2303 17957 1 ath3k 12961 0 bluetooth 180153 24 bnep,rfcomm,btusb,ath3k snd_hda_codec_hdmi 32474 4 nvidia 11308613 0 ftdi_sio 40679 1 usbserial 47113 6 pl2303,ftdi_sio psmouse 97485 0 snd_hda_codec_realtek 224173 1 snd_hda_intel 33719 5 snd_hda_codec 127706 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel serio_raw 13211 0 snd_seq_midi 13324 0 snd_hwdep 17764 1 snd_hda_codec snd_pcm 97275 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_rawmidi 30748 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event 14899 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 61929 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event snd_timer 29990 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14540 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq snd 79041 20 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device asus_atk0110 18078 0 mac_hid 13253 0 jc42 13948 0 soundcore 15091 1 snd snd_page_alloc 18529 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm coretemp 13554 0 i2c_i801 17570 0 lp 17799 0 parport 46562 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp r8169 62154 0 Any ideas? What does X do that's so important?

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• Handling "related" work within a single agile work item

  - by Tesserex

  I'm on a project team of 4 devs, myself included. We've been having a long discussion on how to handle extra work that comes up in the course of a single work item. This extra work is usually things that are slightly related to the task, but not always necessary to accomplish the goal of the item (that may be an opinion). Examples include but are not limited to: refactoring of the code changed by the work item refactoring code neighboring the code changed by the item re-architecting the larger code area around the ticket. For example if an item has you changing a single function, you realize the entire class now could be redone to better accommodate this change. improving the UI on a form you just modified When this extra work is small we don't mind. The problem is when this extra work causes a substantial extension of the item beyond the original feature point estimation. Sometimes a 5 point item will actually take 13 points of time. In one case we had a 13 point item that in retrospect could have been 80 points or more. There are two options going around in our discussion for how to handle this. We can accept the extra work in the same work item, and write it off as a mis-estimation. Arguments for this have included: We plan for "padding" at the end of the sprint to account for this sort of thing. Always leave the code in better shape than you found it. Don't check in half-assed work. If we leave refactoring for later, it's hard to schedule and may never get done. You are in the best mental "context" to handle this work now, since you're waist deep in the code already. Better to get it out of the way now and be more efficient than to lose that context when you come back later. We draw a line for the current work item, and say that the extra work goes into a separate ticket. Arguments include: Having a separate ticket allows for a new estimation, so we aren't lying to ourselves about how many points things really are, or having to admit that all of our estimations are terrible. The sprint "padding" is meant for unexpected technical challenges that are direct barriers to completing the ticket requirements. It is not intended for side items that are just "nice-to-haves". If you want to schedule refactoring, just put it at the top of the backlog. There is no way for us to properly account for this stuff in an estimation, since it seems somewhat arbitrary when it comes up. A code reviewer might say "those UI controls (which you actually didn't modify in this work item) are a bit confusing, can you fix that too?" which is like an hour, but they might say "Well if this control now inherits from the same base class as the others, why don't you move all of this (hundreds of lines of) code into the base and rewire all this stuff, the cascading changes, etc.?" And that takes a week. It "contaminates the crime scene" by adding unrelated work into the ticket, making our original feature point estimates meaningless. In some cases, the extra work postpones a check-in, causing blocking between devs. Some of us are now saying that we should decide some cut off, like if the additional stuff is less than 2 FP, it goes in the same ticket, if it's more, make it a new ticket. Since we're only a few months into using Agile, what's the opinion of all the more seasoned Agile veterans around here on how to handle this?

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• The inevitable Hello World post!

  - by brendonpage

  Greetings to anyone reading this! This is my first of hopefully many posts. I would like to use this post to introduce myself and to let you know what to expect from this blog in future. Okay so a bit about myself. In case you missed the name of this blog, my name is Brendon Page! I am a Software Developer from South Africa and work for a small company who’s main focus is producing software for the kitchen cupboard industry, although from time to time we do produce custom solutions for other industries. I work in a small team of 3, including myself, and am fortunate enough to work from home! I have been involved in IT since 1996, which is when I got my first PC, and started working as a junior programmer in 2003. Outside of work I enjoy playing squash, PC Games and of course LANing with my friends. If I get any free time between all of that I will usually dedicate some of it to a personal project, these are mainly prototypes for an idea I have had or for something that could be useful at work. I was in 2 minds on whether to include a photo of myself. The reason for this was because while I was looking for a suitable photo to use, it dawned on me how much time I dedicate to pulling funny faces in photos! I also realized how little I shave, which I blame completely on working form home. So after much debate here I am, funny face, beard and all!   Now that you know a bit about me lets move onto what expect from this blog. I work predominantly with Microsoft technologies so most if not all of my posts will be related to something Microsoft. Since most of my job entails Software Development you can expect a lot of posts which will deal with the .NET Framework. I am currently working on a large Silverlight project, so my first few posts will be targeted at in that direction. I will be striving to make the content of my posts as useful as possible from both an explanation and code perspective, I aim to include a working solution for every post, which I will put up on my skydrive for download. Here is what I have planned for my next few posts: Where did my session variables go?  Here I will take you through the lessons I learnt the hard way about the ASP.NET session. I am not going to go into to much depth in this post, as there is already a lot of information available on it. I mainly want to cover it in an effort to keep the scope creep of my posts to a minimum, some the solutions I upload will use it and I would like to have a post that I can reference to explain why I am doing something a certain way. Uploading files through SIlverlight Again there is a lot of existing information on this topic, so I wont be going into to much depth, but I will be using the solution from this as a base for my next post. Generating and Displaying DeepZoom images dynamically in Silverlight Well the title pretty much speaks for it’s self on this one. As I mentioned I will be building off the solution that I create in my ‘Uploading files through Silverlight’ post. Securing DeepZoom images using a custom implementation of the MultiScaleTileSource In this post I will look at the privacy issue surrounding the default usage of DeepZoom images in Silverlight and how to overcome it. This makes the use of DeepZoom in privacy conscious applications more viable. Thanks to anyone who actually read this post! I look forward to producing more which will hopefully be helpful to you.

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• How to display a hierarchical skill tree in php

  - by user3587554

  If I have skill data set up in a tree format (where earlier skills are prerequisites for later ones), how would I display it as a tree, using php? The parent would be on top and have 3 children. Each of these children can then have one more child so its parent would be directly above it. I'm having trouble figuring out how to add the root element in the middle of the top div, and the child of the children below each child of the root. I'm not looking for code, but an explanation of how to do it. My data in array form is this: Data: Array ( [1] => Array ( [id] => 1 [title] => Jutsu [description] => Skill that makes you awesomer at using ninjutsu [tiers] => 1 [prereq] => [image] => images/skills/jutsu.png [children] => Array ( [2] => Array ( [id] => 2 [title] => fireball [description] => Increase your damage with fire jutsu and weapons [tiers] => 5 [prereq] => 1 [image] => images/skills/fireball.png [children] => Array ( [5] => Array ( [id] => 5 [title] => pin point [description] => Increases jutsu accuracy [tiers] => 5 [prereq] => 2 [image] => images/skills/pinpoint.png ) ) ) [3] => Array ( [id] => 3 [title] => synergy [description] => Reduce the amount of chakra needed to use ninjutsu [tiers] => 1 [prereq] => 1 [image] => images/skills/synergy.png ) [4] => Array ( [id] => 4 [title] => ebb & flow [description] => Increase the damage of water jutsu, water weapons, and reduce the damage of jutsu and weapons that use water element [tiers] => 5 [prereq] => 1 [image] => images/skills/ebbandflow.png [children] => Array ( [6] => Array ( [id] => 6 [title] => IQ [description] => Decrease the time it takes to learn a jutsu [tiers] => 5 [prereq] => 4 [image] => images/skills/iq.png ) ) ) ) ) ) An example would be this demo image minus the hover stuff.

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• How to use correctly the comments in C/++

  - by Lucio

  I'm learning to program in C and in my stage, the best form to use correctly the comments is writing good comments from the beginning. As the comments are not just for that one understands better the code but others too, I want to know the views of all of you to reach a consensus. So what I want is that the most experienced users edit the following code as you please. (If it's unnecessary, delete it; If it's wrong, correct it; If needed, add more) Thus there'll be multiple answers with different syntax and the responses with the most votes will be taken as referring when commenting. The code to copy, paste and edit to your pleasure is: (And I remark again, just import the comments, not the code) /* This programs find 1 number in 1 file. The file is binary type and has integers in series. The number is integer type and it's entered from the keyboard. When finished the program, a poster will show the results: Saying if the number is in the file or not. */ #include <stdio.h> //FUNCTION 1 //Open file 'path' and closes it. void openf(char path[]) { int num; //Read from Keyboard a Number and it save it into 'num' var printf("Ready for read number.\n\nNumber --> "); fflush(stdin); scanf("%d",&num); //Open file 'path' in READ mode FILE *fvar; fvar=fopen(path,"rb"); //IF error happens when open file, exit of function if (fvar==NULL) { printf("ERROR while open file %s in read mode.",path); exit(1); } /*Verify the result of 'funct' function IF TRUE, 'num' it's in the file*/ if (funct(path,fvar,num)) printf("The number %d it is in the file %s.",num,path); else printf("The number %d it is not in the file %s.",num,path); fclose(fvar); } /*FUNCTION 2 It is a recursive function. Reads number by number until the file is empty or the number is found. Parameters received: 'path' -> Directory file 'fvar' -> Pointer file 'num' -> Number to compare */ int funct(char path[],FILE *fvar,int num) { int compare; //FALSE condition when the pointer reaches the end if (fread(&compare,sizeof(int),1,fvar)>0) /*TRUE condition when the number readed is iqual that 'num' ELSE will go to the function itself*/ if (compare!=num) funct(path,fvar,num); else return 1; else return 0; } int main(int argc, char **argv) { char path[30]="file.bin"; //Direction of the file to process openf(path); //Function with algorithm return 0; }

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• Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service

  - by David Dorf

  When most people discuss mobile in retail, they immediately go to shopping applications.  While I agree the consumer side of mobile is huge, I believe its also important to arm store associates with mobile tools.  There are around a dozen major roll-outs of mobile POS to chain retailers, and all have been successful.  This does not, however, signal the demise of traditional registers.  Retailers will adopt mobile POS slowly and reduce the number of fixed registers over time, but there's likely to be a combination of both for the foreseeable future.  Even Apple retains at least one fixed register in every store, you just have to know where to look. The business benefits for mobile POS are pretty straightforward: 1. Faster checkout.  Walmart's CFO recently reported that for every second they shave off the average transaction time, they can potentially save $12M a year in labor.  I think its more likely that labor will be redeployed to enhance the customer experience. 2. Smarter associates.  The sales associates on the floor need the same access to information that consumers have, if not more.  They need ready access to product details, reviews, inventory, etc. to meet consumer expectations.  In a recent study, 40% of consumers said a savvy store associate can impact their final product selection more than a website. 3. Lower costs.  Mobile POS hardware (iPod touch + sled) costs about a fifth of fixed registers, not to mention the reclaimed space that can be used for product displays. But almost all Mobile POS solutions can claim those benefits equally.  Where there's differentiation is on the technical side.  Oracle recently announced availability of the Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service, and it has three big technology advantages in the market: 1. Portable. We used a popular open-source component called PhoneGap that abstracts the app from the underlying OS and hardware so that iOS, Android, and other platforms could be supported.  Further, we used Web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript, which are commonly known by many programmers, as opposed to ObjectiveC which is more difficult to find.  The screen can adjust to different form-factors and sizes, just like you see with browsers.  In the future when a new, zippy device gets released, retailers will have the option to move to that device more easily than if they used a native app. 2. Flexible.  Our Mobile POS is free with the Oracle Retail Point-of-Service product.  Retailers can use any combination of fixed and mobile registers, and those ratios can change as required.  Perhaps start with 1 mobile and 4 fixed per store, then transition over time to 4 mobile and 1 fixed without any additional software licenses.  Our scalable solution supports lots of combinations. 3. Consistent.  Because our Mobile POS is fully integrated to our traditional POS, the same business logic is reused.  Third-party Mobile POS solutions often handle pricing, promotions, and tax calculations separately leading to possible inconsistencies within the store.  That won't happen with Oracle's solution. For many retailers, Mobile POS can lower costs, increase customer service, and generally enhance a consumer's in-store experience.  Apple led the way, but lots of other retailers are discovering the many benefits of adding mobile capabilities in their stores.  Just be sure to examine both the business and technology benefits so you get the most value from your solution for the longest period of time.

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• Why is there no service-oriented language?

  - by Wolfgang

  Edit: To avoid further confusion: I am not talking about web services and such. I am talking about structuring applications internally, it's not about how computers communicate. It's about programming languages, compilers and how the imperative programming paradigm is extended. Original: In the imperative programming field, we saw two paradigms in the past 20 years (or more): object-oriented (OO), and service-oriented (SO) aka. component-based (CB). Both paradigms extend the imperative programming paradigm by introducing their own notion of modules. OO calls them objects (and classes) and lets them encapsulates both data (fields) and procedures (methods) together. SO, in contrast, separates data (records, beans, ...) from code (components, services). However, only OO has programming languages which natively support its paradigm: Smalltalk, C++, Java and all other JVM-compatibles, C# and all other .NET-compatibles, Python etc. SO has no such native language. It only comes into existence on top of procedural languages or OO languages: COM/DCOM (binary, C, C++), CORBA, EJB, Spring, Guice (all Java), ... These SO frameworks clearly suffer from the missing native language support of their concepts. They start using OO classes to represent services and records. This leads to designs where there is a clear distinction between classes that have methods only (services) and those that have fields only (records). Inheritance between services or records is then simulated by inheritance of classes. Technically, its not kept so strictly but in general programmers are adviced to make classes to play only one of the two roles. They use additional, external languages to represent the missing parts: IDL's, XML configurations, Annotations in Java code, or even embedded DSL like in Guice. This is especially needed, but not limited to, since the composition of services is not part of the service code itself. In OO, objects create other objects so there is no need for such facilities but for SO there is because services don't instantiate or configure other services. They establish an inner-platform effect on top of OO (early EJB, CORBA) where the programmer has to write all the code that is needed to "drive" SO. Classes represent only a part of the nature of a service and lots of classes have to be written to form a service together. All that boiler plate is necessary because there is no SO compiler which would do it for the programmer. This is just like some people did it in C for OO when there was no C++. You just pass the record which holds the data of the object as a first parameter to the procedure which is the method. In a OO language this parameter is implicit and the compiler produces all the code that we need for virtual functions etc. For SO, this is clearly missing. Especially the newer frameworks extensively use AOP or introspection to add the missing parts to a OO language. This doesn't bring the necessary language expressiveness but avoids the boiler platform code described in the previous point. Some frameworks use code generation to produce the boiler plate code. Configuration files in XML or annotations in OO code is the source of information for this. Not all of the phenomena that I mentioned above can be attributed to SO but I hope it clearly shows that there is a need for a SO language. Since this paradigm is so popular: why isn't there one? Or maybe there are some academic ones but at least the industry doesn't use one.

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• Working and Studying in Oracle, how I balance my time....

  - by anca.rosu

  Hi, my name is Laura. I am working as an Intern within Executive Administration at Oracle Denmark, whilst studying Information Management at Copenhagen Business school. I have recently handeding a paper on Information Systems which gave me exposure to Oracle. Once completing this paper I came across a job posting on my University’s intranet site and I applied directly online. When I submitted my application for the job offer, I wondered about what language I should use for the application form, as the job posting was in Danish, but the contact person and number looked Irish. I therefore chose English. Later that same day, Fiona, one of Oracle’s Graduates Recruitment Consultants based in Ireland, contacted me. This shows how global Oracle truly is. I went for my face-to-face interview in Oracle Denmark with Charlotte, one of the team managers. I spent 5 minutes waiting in the lobby, just looking around, thinking to myself, I really want to work here. The atmosphere seemed so pleasant with a relaxed approach between colleagues, employees and guests. The interview took about an hour, but we touched on a lot of different subjects. The profile I got of Oraclewas that this is a place where you are encouraged to think for yourself, and you are given the freedom to use your ideas. Later that evening, Fiona called and offered me the job. I was very happy. At Oracle Denmark we have 4 different zones: a Quiet Zone, a Project Zone, a Dialogue Zone and a Call Zone. Everyday when you arrive you consider what will be the most productive for the day’s task, and you take your toolbox and go find a desk in the zone you have decided on. It is therefore very unusual to be next to the same person two days in a row. At Oracle, people are located all over the world, and everybody has team members, colleagues or leaders in other countries, or even other time zones. Initially,I was worried about how I would adapt to this approach but I soon realized I had nothing to worry about and now I appreciate working this way. My colleagues have been very supportive and they have openly welcomed me into my new role. I typically work two days a week and have three days at University. During exam periods, I have the flexibility to work less hours and focus on the exams, in return for putting in more hours at work when needed. The first time I had to ask for time off before handing in a paper, my boss looked at me and said, ”Of course! Your education is the most important!” I hope that by sharing my experiences with you, I can inspire or encourage you to consider Oracle as a potential employer, where you can grow both professionally and personally. If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com Technorati Tags: Intern,Oracle Denmark,Information Systems,Business school,Copenhagen,Graduates Recruitment,Ireland,Quiet Zone,Project Zone,Dialogue Zone,Call Zone,University,flexibility

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• Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise – Part 2

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President, Oracle  On September 13, 2012, I sat down with Altimeter Analyst Jeremiah Owyang to talk about how enterprise businesses are approaching the management of both their social media strategies and internal structures. There’s no longer any question as to whether companies are adopting social full throttle. That’s exactly the way it should be, because it’s a top online behavior across all age groups. For your consumers, it’s an ingrained, normal form of communication. And beyond connecting with friends, social users are reaching out for information and service from brands. Jeremiah tells us 29% of Twitter followers follow a brand and 58% of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand. Even on the B2B side, people act on reviews and recommendations. Just as in the early 90’s we saw companies move from static to dynamic web sites, businesses of all sizes are moving from just establishing a social presence to determining effective and efficient ways to use it. I like to say we’re in the 2nd or 3rd inning of a 9-inning game. Corporate social started out as a Facebook page, it’s multiple channels servicing customers wherever they are. Social is also moving from merely moderating to analyzing so that the signal can be separated from the noise, so that impactful influencers can be separated from other users. Organizationally, social started with the marketers. Now we’re getting into social selling, commerce, service, HR, recruiting, and collaboration. That’s Oracle’s concept of enterprise social relationship management, a framework to extend social across the entire organization real-time in as holistic a way as possible. Social requires more corporate coordination than ever before. One of my favorite statistics is that the average corporation at enterprise has 178 social accounts, according to Altimeter. Not all of them active, not all of them necessary, but 178 of them. That kind of fragmentation creates risk, so the smarter companies will look for solutions (as opposed to tools) that can organize, scale and defragment, as well as quickly integrate other networks and technologies that will come along. Our conversation goes deep into the various corporate social structures we’re seeing, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. There are also a couple of great examples of how known brands used an integrated, holistic approach to achieve stated social goals. What’s especially exciting to me is the Oracle SRM framework for the enterprise provides companywide integration into one seamless system. This is not a dream. This is going to have substantial business impact in the next several years.

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 6

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Discuss the physical characteristics of magnetic disks Describe how data is organized and accessed on a magnetic disk Discuss the parameters that play a role in the performance of magnetic disks Describe different optical memory devices Magnetic Disk The way data is stored on and retried from magnetic disks Data is recorded on and later retrieved form the disk via a conducting coil named the head (in many systems there are two heads) The writ mechanism exploits the fact that electricity flowing through a coil produces a magnetic field. Electric pulses are sent to the write head, and the resulting magnetic patterns are recorded on the surface below with different patterns for positive and negative currents The physical characteristics of a magnetic disk   Summarize from book   The factors that play a role in the performance of a disk Seek time – the time it takes to position the head at the track Rotational delay / latency – the time it takes for the beginning of the sector to reach the head Access time – the sum of the seek time and rotational delay Transfer time – the time it takes to transfer data RAID The rate of improvement in secondary storage performance has been considerably less than the rate for processors and main memory. Thus secondary storage has become a bit of a bottleneck. RAID works on the concept that if one disk can be pushed so far, additional gains in performance are to be had by using multiple parallel components. Points to note about RAID… RAID is a set of physical disk drives viewed by the operating system as a single logical drive Data is distributed across the physical drives of an array in a scheme known as striping Redundant disk capacity is used to store parity information, which guarantees data recoverability in case of a disk failure (not supported by RAID 0 or RAID 1) Interesting to note that the increase in the number of drives, increases the probability of failure. To compensate for this decreased reliability RAID makes use of stored parity information that enables the recovery of data lost due to a disk failure.   The RAID scheme consists of 7 levels…   Category Level Description Disks Required Data Availability Large I/O Data Transfer Capacity Small I/O Request Rate Striping 0 Non Redundant N Lower than single disk Very high Very high for both read and write Mirroring 1 Mirrored 2N Higher than RAID 2 – 5 but lower than RAID 6 Higher than single disk Up to twice that of a signle disk for read Parallel Access 2 Redundant via Hamming Code N + m Much higher than single disk Highest of all listed alternatives Approximately twice that of a single disk Parallel Access 3 Bit interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Highest of all listed alternatives Approximately twice that of a single disk Independent Access 4 Block interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than single disk for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than single disk for write Independent Access 5 Block interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Similar to RAID 0 for read, lower than single disk for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, generally  lower than single disk for write Independent Access 6 Block interleaved parity N + 2 Highest of all listed alternatives Similar to RAID 0 for read; lower than RAID 5 for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than RAID 5  for write   Read page 215 – 221 for detailed explanation on RAID levels Optical Memory There are a variety of optical-disk systems available. Read through the table on page 222 – 223 Some of the devices include… CD CD-ROM CD-R CD-RW DVD DVD-R DVD-RW Blue-Ray DVD Magnetic Tape Most modern systems use serial recording – data is lade out as a sequence of bits along each track. The typical recording used in serial is referred to as serpentine recording. In this technique when data is being recorded, the first set of bits is recorded along the whole length of the tape. When the end of the tape is reached the heads are repostioned to record a new track, and the tape is again recorded on its whole length, this time in the opposite direction. That process continued back and forth until the tape is full. To increase speed, the read-write head is capable of reading and writing a number of adjacent tracks simultaneously. Data is still recorded serially along individual tracks, but blocks in sequence are stored on adjacent tracks as suggested. A tape drive is a sequential access device. Magnetic tape was the first kind of secondary memory. It is still widely used as the lowest-cost, slowest speed member of the memory hierarchy.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for November 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Every day ArchBeat searches the web for content created by and for community members, and then shares that content via social media. Here's the list of the Top 10 most popular items posted on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for November 2012. One-Stop Shop for Oracle Webcasts Webcasts can be a great way to get information about Oracle products without having to go cross-eyed reading yet another document off your computer screen. Oracle's new Webcast Center offers selectable filtering to make it easy to get to the information you want. Yes, you have to register to gain access, but that process is quick, and with over 200 webcasts to choose from you know you'll find useful content. OAM/OVD JVM Tuning Vinay from the Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture Group (otherwise known as the A-Team) shares a process for analyzing and improving performance in Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Access Manager. White Paper: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud: Advanced I/O Virtualization Architecture for Consolidating High-Performance Workloads This new white paper by Adam Hawley (with contributions from Yoav Eilat) describes in great detail the incorporation into Oracle Exalogic of virtualized InfiniBand I/O interconnects using Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology. Architected Systems: "If you don't develop an architecture, you will get one anyway..." "Can you build a system without taking care of architecture?," asks Manuel Ricca. "You certainly can. But inevitably the system will be unbalanced, neglecting the interests of key stakeholders, and problems will soon emerge." Backup and Recovery of an Exalogic vServer via rsync "On Exalogic a vServer will consist of a number of resources from the underlying machine," says the man known only as Donald. "These resources include compute power, networking and storage. In order to recover a vServer from a failure in the underlying rack all of these components have to be thoughts about. This article only discusses the backup and recovery strategies that apply to the storage system of a vServer." This Week on the OTN Architect Community Home Page Make time to check out this week's features on the OTN Solution Architect Homepage, including: SOA Practitioner Guide: Identifying and Discovering Services Technical article by Yuli Vasiliev on Setting Up, Configuring, and Using an Oracle WebLogic Server Cluster Podcast: Are You Future Proof? Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic – when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. OIM 11g : Multi-thread approach for writing custom scheduled job | Saravanan V S Saravanan shares insight and expertise relevant to "designing and developing an OIM schedule job that uses multi threaded approach for updating data in OIM using APIs." How to Create Virtual Directory in Weblogic Server | Zeeshan Baig Oracle ACE Zeeshan Baig shows you how in six easy steps. SOA Galore: New Books for Technical Eyes Only Shake up up your technical skills with this trio of new technical books from community members covering SOA and BPM. Thought for the Day "Humans are the best value in computers -- where else can you get a non-linear computer weighing only about 160lbs, having a billion binary decision elements, that can be mass-produced by unskilled labour?" — Anonymous Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• How to Draw Lines on the Screen

  - by Geertjan

  I've seen occasional questions on mailing lists about how to use the NetBeans Visual Library to draw lines, e.g., to make graphs or diagrams of various kinds by drawing on the screen. So, rather than drag/drop causing widgets to be added, you'd want widgets to be added on mouse clicks, and you'd want to be able to connect those widgets together somehow. Via the code below, you'll be able to click on the screen, which causes a dot to appear. When you have multiple dots, you can hold down the Ctrl key and connect them together. A guiding line appears to help you position the dots exactly in line with each other. When you go to File | Print, you'll be able to preview and print the diagram you've created. A picture that speaks 1000 words: Here's the code: public final class PlotterTopComponent extends TopComponent { private final Scene scene; private final LayerWidget baseLayer; private final LayerWidget connectionLayer; private final LayerWidget interactionLayer; public PlotterTopComponent() { initComponents(); setName(Bundle.CTL_PlotterTopComponent()); setToolTipText(Bundle.HINT_PlotterTopComponent()); setLayout(new BorderLayout()); this.scene = new Scene(); this.baseLayer = new LayerWidget(scene); this.interactionLayer = new LayerWidget(scene); this.connectionLayer = new LayerWidget(scene); scene.getActions().addAction(new SceneCreateAction()); scene.addChild(baseLayer); scene.addChild(interactionLayer); scene.addChild(connectionLayer); add(scene.createView(), BorderLayout.CENTER); putClientProperty("print.printable", true); } private class SceneCreateAction extends WidgetAction.Adapter { @Override public WidgetAction.State mousePressed(Widget widget, WidgetAction.WidgetMouseEvent event) { if (event.getClickCount() == 1) { if (event.getButton() == MouseEvent.BUTTON1 || event.getButton() == MouseEvent.BUTTON2) { baseLayer.addChild(new BlackDotWidget(scene, widget, event)); repaint(); return WidgetAction.State.CONSUMED; } } return WidgetAction.State.REJECTED; } } private class BlackDotWidget extends ImageWidget { public BlackDotWidget(Scene scene, Widget widget, WidgetAction.WidgetMouseEvent event) { super(scene); setImage(ImageUtilities.loadImage("org/netbeans/plotter/blackdot.gif")); setPreferredLocation(widget.convertLocalToScene(event.getPoint())); getActions().addAction( ActionFactory.createExtendedConnectAction( connectionLayer, new BlackDotConnectProvider())); getActions().addAction( ActionFactory.createAlignWithMoveAction( baseLayer, interactionLayer, ActionFactory.createDefaultAlignWithMoveDecorator())); } } private class BlackDotConnectProvider implements ConnectProvider { @Override public boolean isSourceWidget(Widget source) { return source instanceof BlackDotWidget && source != null ? true : false; } @Override public ConnectorState isTargetWidget(Widget src, Widget trg) { return src != trg && trg instanceof BlackDotWidget ? ConnectorState.ACCEPT : ConnectorState.REJECT; } @Override public boolean hasCustomTargetWidgetResolver(Scene arg0) { return false; } @Override public Widget resolveTargetWidget(Scene arg0, Point arg1) { return null; } @Override public void createConnection(Widget source, Widget target) { ConnectionWidget conn = new ConnectionWidget(scene); conn.setTargetAnchor(AnchorFactory.createCircularAnchor(target, 10)); conn.setSourceAnchor(AnchorFactory.createCircularAnchor(source, 10)); connectionLayer.addChild(conn); } } ... ... ... Note: The code above was written based on the Visual Library tutorials on the NetBeans Platform Learning Trail, in particular via the "ConnectScene" sample in the "test.connect" package, which is part of the very long list of Visual Library samples referred to in the Visual Library tutorials on the NetBeans Platform Learning Trail. The next steps are to add a reconnect action and an action to delete a dot by double-clicking on it. Would be interesting to change the connecting line so that the length of the line were to be shown, i.e., as you draw a line from one dot to another, you'd see a constantly changing number representing the current distance of the connecting line. Also, once lines are connected to form a rectangle, would be cool to be able to write something within that rectangle. Then one could really create diagrams, which would be pretty cool.

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• Azure Web Sites FTP credentials

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  A quick tip for all you new enthusiastic users of the amazing new Azure. I struggled for a few minutes finding this, so I thought I’d share. The Azure dashboard doesn’t seem to give easy access to your FTP credentials, and they are not the login and password you use everywhere else. What Azure does give you though is a Publish Profile that you can download: This is a plain XML file that should look something like this: <publishData> <publishProfile profileName="nameofyoursite - Web Deploy" publishMethod="MSDeploy" publishUrl="waws-prod-blu-001.publish.azurewebsites.windows.net:443" msdeploySite="nameofyoursite" userName="$NameOfYourSite" userPWD="sOmeCrYPTicL00kIngStr1nG" destinationAppUrl="http://nameofyoursite.azurewebsites.net" SQLServerDBConnectionString="" mySQLDBConnectionString="" hostingProviderForumLink="" controlPanelLink="http://windows.azure.com"> <databases/> </publishProfile> <publishProfile profileName="nameofyoursite - FTP" publishMethod="FTP" publishUrl="ftp://waws-prod-blu-001.ftp.azurewebsites.windows.net/site/wwwroot" ftpPassiveMode="True" userName="nameofyoursite\$nameofyoursite" userPWD="sOmeCrYPTicL00kIngStr1nG" destinationAppUrl="http://nameofyoursite.azurewebsites.net" SQLServerDBConnectionString="" mySQLDBConnectionString="" hostingProviderForumLink="" controlPanelLink="http://windows.azure.com"> <databases/> </publishProfile> </publishData> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } I’ve highlighted the FTP server name, user name and password. This is what you need to use in Filezilla or whatever you use to access your site remotely. Notice how the password looks encrypted. Well, it’s not really encrypted in fact. This is your password in clear text. It’s just crypto-random gibberish, which is the best kind of password. UPDATE: About 2 minutes after I posted that, David Ebbo mentioned to me on Twitter that if you've configured publishing credentials (for Git typically) those will work too. Don't forget to include the full user name though, which should be of the form nameofthesite\username. The password is the one you defined. That’s it. Enjoy.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for October 2012. OAM/OVD JVM Tuning | @FusionSecExpert Vinay from the Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture Group (known as the A-Team) shares a process for analyzing and improving performance in Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Access Manager. SOA Galore: New Books for Technical Eyes Only Shake up up your technical skills with this trio of new technical books from community members covering SOA and BPM. Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic – when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. Solving Big Problems in Our 21st Century Information Society | Irving Wladawsky-Berger "I believe that the kind of extensive collaboration between the private sector, academia and government represented by the Internet revolution will be the way we will generally tackle big problems in the 21st century. Just as with the Internet, governments have a major role to play as the catalyst for many of the big projects that the private sector will then take forward and exploit. The need for high bandwidth, robust national broadband infrastructures is but one such example." -- Irving Wladawsky-Berger Eventually, 90% of tech budgets will be outside IT departments | ZDNet Another interesting post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick about changing roles in IT. ADF Mobile - Login Functionality | Andrejus Baranovskis "The new ADF Mobile approach with native deployment is cool when you want to access phone functionality (camera, email, sms and etc.), also when you want to build mobile applications with advanced UI," reports Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis. Podcast: Are You Future Proof? - Part 2 In Part 2, practicing architects and Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra (AT&T), Basheer Khan (Innowave Technology), and Ronald van Luttikhuizen (Vennster) discuss re-tooling one’s skill set to reflect changes in enterprise IT, including the knowledge to steer stakeholders around the hype to what's truly valuable. ADF Mobile Custom Javascript — iFrame Injection | John Brunswick The ADF Mobile Framework provides a range of out of the box components to add within your AMX pages, according to John Brunswick. But what happens when "an out of the box component does not directly fulfill your development need? What options are available to extend your application interface?" John has an answer. Oracle Solaris 11.1 update focuses on database integration, cloud | Mark Fontecchio TechTarget editor Mark Fontecchio reports on the recent Oracle Solaris 11.1 release, with comments from IDC's Al Gillen. Architects Matter: Making sense of the people who make sense of enterprise IT Why do architects matter? Oracle Enterprise Architect Eric Stephens suggests that you ask yourself this question the next time you take the elevator to the Oracle offices on the 45th floor of the Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois (or any other skyscraper, for that matter). If you had to take the stairs to get to those offices, who would you blame? "You get the picture," he says. "Architecture is essential for any necessarily complex structure, be it a building or an enterprise." (Read the article) Thought for the Day "I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas." — Frederick P. Brooks Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way

  - by Daniel Moth

  This is one of the sayings (attributed to Thomas Paine) that totally resonated with me from the first time I heard it, which was only 3 years ago during some training course at work: "Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way" You'll find many books with this title and you'll find it quoted by politicians and other leaders in various countries at various times... the quote is open to interpretation and works on many levels. To set the tone of what this means to me, I'll use a simple micro example: In any given conversation, you are either leading it or following it, at different times/snapshots of the conversation. If you are not willing or able to lead it, and you are not willing or able to follow it, then you should depart. The bad alternative which this guidance encourages you NOT to do is to stick around and obstruct progress by not following, not leading, and simply complaining or trying to derail the discussion in no particular direction. The same pattern applies at your position/role at work. Either follow your management/leadership team, or try to lead them to what you think is a better place, or change jobs. Don't stick around complaining about the direction things are going, while not actively trying to either change things or make peace with it. In the previous paragraph you can replace the word "your management" with "the people reporting to you" and the guidance still holds. Either lead your direct reports to where you think they should go, or follow their lead, or change jobs. Complaining about folks not taking direction while doing nothing is not a maintainable state. To me this quote is not about a permanent state, it is not about some people always leading and some always following: It is about a role/hat that anybody can play/wear at any given moment. One minute I am leading you, the next I am following you, and the next we are both following someone else and so on... When there is disagreement, debate the different directions for as long as it takes for you to be comfortable that you can either follow or lead. If you don't become comfortable with either of those, get out of the way. Something to remember is that it is impossible to learn how to lead well, without learning how to follow well (probably deserves its own blog entry)... Things go wrong when someone thinks that they must always be leading, or when everybody wants to follow and nobody steps up to lead... Things go wrong when more than one person wants to lead and they don't try to reach agreement on a shared direction, stubbornly sticking to their guns pulling the rest of the team in multiple directions... Things go wrong when more than one person wants to lead and after numerous and lengthy discussions, none of them decides to follow or get out of the way... Things go wrong when people don't want to lead, don't want to follow, and insist on sticking around... While there are a few ways things that can go wrong as enumerated in the previous paragraph, the most common one in my experience is the last one I mentioned. You'll recognize these folks as the ones that always complain about everything that is wrong with their company/product but do nothing about it. Every time you hear someone giving feedback on how something is wrong or suboptimal, ask them "So now that you identified the problem, what do you think the solution is and what are you doing to drive us to that solution?" The next time things start going wrong, step up and remind everyone: Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way. For more perspectives, and for input to help you form your own interpretation, search the web for this phrase to see in what contexts it is being used (bing, google). Finally, regardless of your political views, I hope you can appreciate if only as an example this perspective of someone leading by actually getting out of the way. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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