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• Which problem(s) do YOU want to see solved?

  - by buu700

  My team and I are meeting tonight to come up with a business plan and some community input would be amazing. I've been mulling over this issue for the past few months and bouncing ideas off of others, and now I'd finally like some input from the community. I have come up with a fair selection of ideas, but most of those amount to either fun projects which could potentially be profitable, or otherwise solid business models that have one or two major hurdles (usually related to resources or legality). For our team meeting tonight, my idea is to take inventory of our available skills, resources, and compelling problems which interest us. The last is where I would greatly appreciate some community input. Hell, even entire business ideas/plans would be appreciated. No matter how big or small your thoughts, any input would be appreciated. We're a team of computer scientists, so our business will be primarily based around software/technology/Web solutions. Among my relevant available resources (entire Internet aside), I have the following: A pretty reliable connection to an SEO company a large production company. A stash of fairly powerful server hardware. A fast network with static IPs. The backend for Hackswipe, which includes credit card payment processing and a Google Voice-based SMS gateway. This work in progress design for something completely unrelated but which is backed by some fairly decent infrastructure. Direct access to the experts in just about any relevant field (on-campus Carnegie Mellon professors). A sexual relationship with the baron of a small nation. For further down the line, some investor relationships. Not likely to be so relevant, but a decent social media presence (Stack Overflow reputation, modship in some major reddits, various tech forums). The source code for Eugene fucking McCabe. Pooled with the other team members, the list of projects we can build off of would be longer (including an Android app). So, what are your thoughts? Crossposted to reddit

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• Passiionate about Microsoft Technology - Help raise money for Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

  - by Testas

  I need your help! Please sign up to help our team raise $10,000 for Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Simply by becoming a team member (a bit like a fan) and you will be helping our team earn points and advance in the race to rasie the money for charity.   If you can tick any of the boxes below then we need your help: Already Microsoft Certified? Hold a MCP/MCSA/MCSE/MCT/TS/MCITP? Want to help sufferers from the most common genetically inherited disease? Passionate about Microsoft Technology? Like to Blog, Tweet, email, connect! Enjoy the thrill of the race! Follow the Born To Learn Blog? Join our blue team and help us become the leader of the race.so please sign in with your Live ID which is associated with your MCP account and register with us - also take a look at the blue forums - we are building up some cool info! http://bit.ly/blueteam  or  http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/prix/p/index.aspx Please blog and let people know about this! Regards Chris

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• The Middle of Every Project

  - by andrew.sparks

  I read a quote somewhere “The middle of every successful project looks like a mess.” or something to that effect. I suppose the projects where the beginning, middle and end are a mess are the ones you need to watch out for. Right now we are in ramp up of the maintenance/support teams at a big project in the Nordics. We are facing a year of mixed mode operations, where we have production operations and the phased rollout to new locations in parallel. The support team supports, and the deployment team deploys. As usual the assumption right up to about a month or so before initial go-live was that the deployment team would carry the support. Not! Consequently we had a last minute scramble over the Christmas/New Year to fire up a support/maintenance team. While it is a bit messy and not perfect – the quality of the mess (I mean scramble) is not so bad. Weekly operational review with the operational delivery managers, written issue lists and assigned actions, candid discussions getting the problems on the table and documented, issues getting solved and moved off the table. So while the middle of a project might look like a mess (even the start) it is methodical use of project management tools of checklists and scheduled communication points that are helping us navigate out of the mess and bring it all under control.

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• How to hire support people?

  - by Martin

  I manage a tech support team at a mid-sized software company. We are the last line of support, so issues that we can't fix need to be escalated to the development team. When I joined the company, our team wasn't capable of much beyond using a specific set of troubleshooting steps to solve known issues and escalating anything else to the developers. It's always been a goal of mine for our team to shoulder as much of the support burden as possible without ever bothering a developer. Over the past few years, I, along with several new hires I've made, have made pretty good progress in that direction. We've coded our own troubleshooting tools which now ship with several of our products. When users have never-before-seen issues, we analyze stack traces and troubleshoot down to the code level, and if we need to submit a bug, half the time we've already identified in the code where in the code the bug is and offered a patch to fix it. Here's the problem I've always had: finding support people capable of the work I've described above is really difficult. I've hired 3 people in the past 3 years, and I've probably looked at several thousand resumes and conducted several hundred phone screens to do so. I know it's pretty well accepted that hiring good people is tough in the tech industry, but it seems that support is especially difficult -- there are clearly thousands of people walking around calling themselves support analysts, but 99%+ of them seemingly aren't capable of anything beyond reading a script. I'm curious if anyone has experience recruiting the sort of folks I'm talking about, and if you have any suggestions to share. We've tried all sorts of things -- different job titles/descriptions, using headhunters, etc. And while we've managed to hire a few good folks, it's basically taken us a year to find an appropriate candidate for each opening we've had, and I can't help but wonder if there's something we could be doing differently.

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• software architecture (OO design) refresher course

  - by PeterT

  I am lead developer and team lead in a small RAD team. Deadlines are tight and we have to release often, which we do, and this is what keep the business happy. While we (the development team) are trying to maintain the quality of the code (clean and short methods), I can't help but notice that the overall quality of the OO design&architecture is getting worse over the time - the library we are working on is gradually reducing itself to a "bag of functions". Well, we try to use the design patterns, but since we don't really have much time for a design as such we are mostly using the creational ones. I have read Code Complete / Design Patterns (GOF & enterprise) / Progmatic Programmer / and many books from Effective XXX series. Should I re-read them again as I have read them a long time ago and forgotten quite a lot, or there are other / better OO design / software architeture books been published since then which I should definitely read? Any ideas, recommendations on how can I get the situation under control and start improving the architecture. The way I see it - I will start improving the architectural / design quality of software components I am working on and then will start helping other team members once I find what is working for me.

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• How should I show shared resources during a Shared Resource game in the Galaxy Editor?

  - by Mag Roader

  One of my favorite ways to play the original StarCraft was in a "Team" game. In this game type, multiple players on the same "team" would share control, resources, supply, and even the same starting location. It was like playing as 1 player, only 2 humans were controlling it. It was a lot of fun. I want to do something very similar in StarCraft 2, but I need to create a custom map in the Galaxy Editor to do it. I found the editor can quite easily emulate this behavior. There is a Trigger action "Set Alliance for Player Group" to "...treat each other as Ally With Shared Vision, Control, And Spending." To use this, I create units for only 1 of the players, and then set all players to be allied with each other in this way. All the other players get no units and no resources. This makes it so 1 player is the actual owner of all the units and everyone else is tagging along with full control. This nearly works! The problem is that if I am not the actual owning player, I can't actually see how many minerals/gas/supply the team has. This makes it pretty difficult to build stuff. What would be the best way to display to the other players how many Minerals/Gas/Supply the team has?

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• Finishing an iteration early

  - by f1dave

  I'd like some input on this on those working with agile methodologies... A current project is finding that development on our planned user stories is finishing some time before the end of the iteration, and that the testing effort and business acceptance is what's actually dragging us out longer towards the end. This means that the devs in question have spare time, and they're essentially going out to the iteration+1 backlog and starting work on cards there before our current iteration cards are 'done'. As iteration manager, I want to put a stop to this - I want a more team-orientated approach where the group takes ownership of getting all the cards done, as opposed to "Well, dev's done so what do I dev next?" The problem I face is convincing the team of this. On one hand, I understand why the devs don't want to test the code they've written (there are unit tests they write of course, but the manual testing to be done could be influenced by their bias). The team sees working ahead as making our next iterations easier, because a lot of the work is done before we start. I see this as screwing with the whole system of planning/actuals - but it's difficult to convince the team as to why this matters. What advice can you guys and girls give? How do we stop devs reaching ahead? What should they be doing instead? How much of a problem is this in the scheme of things, if things are still getting done?

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• QA - Developer communication

  - by exiter2000

  I am a developer and have worked at this company 4~5 years by now. We have been practicing scrum for about 2 years. I think, I have been worked well with QAs. I believe QAs/developers/technical writers are all one team. We are also actively hiring new team members. As a legacy member of the team, I have faced to assist new member(including developers and testers) with my business knowledge. We work on 2 weeks base scrum. I usually deliver my user story completely by the first date of second week and do some qa build with partial functionality of my user story so that QA has a good idea about my implementation and flow. Recently, I have met some QAs. In first week, the QAs do not talk... In stand up meeting, they say they are developing test cases regardless I deliver the user story or not. In second week, I do not have a single defect till Thursday afternoon and suddenly I have a major defect with several minor UI defect, which I delivered one week ago. Or I have one or two minor defects on second week however major defects on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. This eventually make the story rolls over to the next sprint. Major defect takes time to fix and more importantly it would trigger the regression test for the story... Even if I worked Thursday evening and fixed it, the testing will not finish. And this happens multiple times with certain QAs. As a same team member, I talked to the QAs if they could test major defect with higher priority... Rejected... Because I do not understand QA process.. So I asked roughly how many major test cases are covered so far in the stand up meeting on 2nd week Wednesday.. The response is I should not ask this to the QA in the stand up meeting... What do I do?

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• Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  As has become customary when the product team releases a new patch, SP or version I like to document the install. This post seams almost redundant as I had no problems, but I think that is as valuable to other thinking of installing the Service Pack as all the problems that we sometimes get. As per Brian's post I am Installing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1 first and indeed as this is a single server local deployment I need to install both. If I only install one it will leave the other product broken. Figure: Hopefully this will be more uneventful It takes a little while for your system to be checked to see what components need updating. On my main computer this was pretty quick, but on the laptop it took some time. Figure: There are a lot of components to update With this update also comes an update to .NET as well as many other components. Figure: I downloaded the full 1.5GB’s, but you could do a web install It depends on how good you internet connection is to how long it would take to download, but as I am now in the US I decided not to trust the internet connection speeds. It took around 30-40 minutes to download the full thing which is a little slow. Figure: I did not need to download, but that would increase the install time So on my main computer again this was fast, but again on my netbook this took a little while. Figure: The actual install took around 30-40 minutes (2 hours on netbook) I was pretty impressed with the speed of the install, and as Team Explore is now out of the box with Visual Studio 2010 I don’t get the problem of the SP being installed before Team Explorer and having a disjointed experience Figure: As I suspected, no problems with the install Figure: Checking in Visual Studio shows that all the servicing points were successful This was an easy experience even if the SP was over 1.5GB’s to download Hopefully I will be discovering things that work better for a good while to come, as well as not seeing holes in the product that I had no encountered yet. What were your experiences of installing Visual Studio 2010 Service pack 1?

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• At what point would you drop some of your principles of software development for the sake of more money?

  - by MeshMan

  I'd like to throw this question out there to interestingly see where the medium is. I'm going to admit that in my last 12 months, I picked up TDD and a lot of the Agile values in software development. I was so overwhelmed with how much better my development of software became that I would never drop them out of principle. Until...I was offered a contracting role that doubled my take home pay for the year. The company I joined didn't follow any specific methodology, the team hadn't heard of anything like code smells, SOLID, etc., and I certainly wasn't going to get away with spending time doing TDD if the team had never even seen unit testing in practice. Am I a sell out? No, not completely... Code will always been written "cleanly" (as per Uncle Bob's teachings) and the principles of SOLID will always be applied to the code that I write as they are needed. Testing was dropped for me though, the company couldn't afford to have such a unknown handed to the team who quite frankly, even I did create test frameworks, they would never use/maintain the test framework correctly. Using that as an example, what point would you say a developer should never drop his craftsmanship principles for the sake of money/other benefits to them personally? I understand that this can be a very personal opinion on how concerned one is to their own needs, business needs, and the sake of craftsmanship etc. But one can consider that for example testing can be dropped if the company decided they would rather have a test team, than rather understand unit testing in programming, would that be something you could forgive yourself for like I did? So given that there is something you would drop, there usually should be an equal cost in the business that makes up for what you drop - hopefully, unless of course you are pretty much out for lining your own pockets and not community/social collaborating ;). Double your money, go back to RAD? Or walk on, and look for someone doing Agile, and never look back...

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• design in agile process

  - by ying

  Recently I had an interview with dev team in a company. The team uses agile + TDD. The code exercise implements a video rental store which generates statement to calc total rental fee for each type of video (new release, children, etc) for a customer. The existing code use object like: Statement to generate statement and calc fee where big switch statement sits to use enum to determine how to calc rental fee customer holds a list of rentals movie base class and derived class for each type of movie (NEW, CHILDREN, ACTION, etc) The code originally doesn't compile as the owner was assumed to be hit by a bus. So here is what I did: outlined the improvement over object model to have better responsibility for each class. use strategy pattern to replace switch statement and weave them in config But the team says it's waste of time because there is no requirement for it and UAT test suite works and is the only guideline goes into architecture decision. The underlying story is just to get pricing feature out and not saying anything about how to do it. So the discussion is focused on why should time be spent on refactor the switch statement. In my understanding, agile methodology doesn't mean zero design upfront and such code smell should be avoided at the beginning. Also any unit/UAT test suite won't detect such code smell, otherwise sonar, findbugs won't exist. Here I want to ask: is there such a thing called agile design in the agile methodology? Just like agile documentation. how to define agile design upfront? how to know enough is enough? In my understanding, ballpark architecture and data contract among components should be defined before/when starting project, not the details. Am I right? anyone can explain what the team is really looking for in this kind of setup? is it design aspect or agile aspect? how to implement minimum viable product concept in the agile process in the real world project? Is it must that you feel embarrassed to be MVP?

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• Herding Cats - That's My Job....

  - by user709270

  Written by Mike Schmitz - Sr. Director, Program Management Oracle JD Edwards  I remember seeing a super bowl commercial several years ago showing some well dressed people on the African savanna herding cats. I remember turning to the people I was watching the game with and telling them, “You just watched my job description”. Releasing software is a multi-facetted undertaking. In addition to making sure the code changes are complete, you also need to make sure the other key parts of a release are ready. For example when you have a question about the software, will the person on the other end of the phone be ready to answer your question? If you need training on that cool new piece of functionality, will there be an online training course ready for you to review? If you want to read about how the software is supposed to function, is there a user manual available? Putting all the release pieces together so they are available at the same time is what the JD Edwards Program Management team does. It is my team’s job to work with all the different functional teams so when a release is made generally available you have all the things you need to be successful. The JD Edwards Program Management team uses an internal planning tool called the Release Process Model (RPM) to ensure all deliverables are accounted for in a release. The RPM makes sure all the release deliverables are ready at the correct time and in the correct format. The RPM really helps all the functional teams in JD Edwards know what release deliverables they are accountable for and when they are to be delivered. It is my team’s job to make sure everyone understands what they need to do and when they need to deliver. We then make sure they are all on track to deliver on-time and in the right format. It is just that some days this feels like herding cats.

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• Make a turn based system like final fantasy in AS3

  - by Kaoru

  i wanted to make a turn based system like final fantasy tactics. I already created the map, which is 5x5 tiles grid and the characters which is each character places in the end of the tiles. I have 2 teams, which are named Red and Yellow. ------Red-------: First character is at 0,0. Second character is at 0,1. Third character is at0.2, fourth character is at0.3, and the last one is at0.4`. -----Yellow------: First character is at 5.0. Second character is at 5.1. Third character is at 5.2, fourth character is at 5.3, and the last one is at 5.4. I wanted Red team are moving first and make a decision (whether it is attack or wait), and after 5 characters of the Red team is already made a decision, the Yellow team is the one that make a decision (Yellow team is an AI) But, i don't know how to move my characters into the next grid (e.g: from 0,0 to 0,1) by clicking the left mouse button and also how do i display a grid (when select a move selection) that shows how many tiles that the character able to move. Anyone know about this? or how should i know more about this? is there any recommendations books or webs? And also, i don't know how to move the characters using mouse click.

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• MySQL documentation writer for MEM and Replication wanted!

  - by stefanhinz

  As MySQL is thriving and growing, we're looking for an experienced technical writer located in the UK or Ireland to join the MySQL documentation team. For this job, we need the best and most dedicated people around. You will be part of a geographically distributed documentation team responsible for the technical documentation of all MySQL products. Team members are expected to work independently, requiring discipline and excellent time-management skills as well as the technical facilities and experience to communicate across the Internet. Candidates should be prepared to work intensively with our engineers and support personnel. The overall team is highly distributed across different geographies and time zones. Our source format is DocBook XML. We're not just writing documentation, but also handling publication. This means you should be familiar with DocBook, and willing to learn our publication infrastructure. Your areas of responsibility would initially be MySQL Enterprise Monitor, and MySQL Replication. This means you should be familiar with MySQL in general, and preferably also with the MySQL Enterprise offerings. A MySQL certification will be considered an advantage. Other qualifications you should have: Native English speaker 5 or more years previous experience in writing software documentation Familiarity with distributed working environments and versioning systems such as SVN Comfortable with working on multiple operating systems, particularly Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux Ability to administer own workstations and test environment Excellent written and oral communication skills Ability to provide (online) samples of your work, e.g. books or articles If you're interested, contact me under [email protected]. For reference, the job offer can be viewed here.

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• How to manage Agile developers working with traditional (serial) business persons?

  - by Riggy

  Good afternoon, My work environment has some problems. Our IT team is trying to be more agile, but we're not really getting buy-in from the business. They attend our daily stand-ups and sprint reviews, and they help with sprint planning, but then they turn around and do 4 months of requirements gathering for a project before moving forward with a (mostly) serial development style. The sprint goals are things like "get XX% closer to release". For the IT team, they've turned the Sprints into a sort of death march. We end a Sprint one day and start a new Sprint the very next day. There's no reflection or changes done between sprints, only during. Having never done any of the agile methodologies before, I haven't had a very pleasant introduction to them. So my questions are: 1) Should there be some time (perhaps a week or so) between sprints to do the reflection/introspection/changes/etc.? Or are back-to-back-to-back sprints the norm? 2) Is there any chance for survival for an agile team with no agile business counter-parts? If not, are there some transitional methodologies or even tips for moving the business towards an iterative if not necessarily agile mindset? 3) Should your entire team be on every sprint? We have almost 20 programmers on a single sprint but working on completely different projects (typically teams of 3-5, sometimes larger). Is it normal to have a single sprint or should we be trying to manage multiple independent sprints? Should we be trying to keep the multiple sprints in concurrent lockstep or should their timetables be allowed to overlap and be flexible? Any thoughts or advice is appreciated. This is my first time coming over from SO for a question, so please let me know if there are better ways to phrase these kinds of questions (faq was rather helpful, but still not sure I'm following it perfectly). Thanks!

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• MySQL documentation writer wanted

  - by stefanhinz

  As MySQL is thriving and growing, we're looking for an experienced technical writer located in Europe or North America to join the MySQL documentation team.For this job, we need the best and most dedicated people around. You will be part of a geographically distributed documentation team responsible for the technical documentation of all MySQL products. Team members are expected to work independently, requiring discipline and excellent time-management skills as well as the technical facilities to communicate across the Internet.Candidates should be prepared to work intensively with our engineers and support personnel. The overall team is highly distributed across different geographies and time zones. Our source format is DocBook XML. We're not just writing documentation, but also handling publication. This means you should be familiar with DocBook, and willing to learn our publication infrastructure.Candidates should therefore be interested not just in writing but also in the technical aspects of publishing documentation. Regarding your initial areas of authoring, those would be MySQL Cluster, MySQL Enterprise Monitor and Backup, and various parts of the MySQL server documentation (also known as the MySQL Reference Manual). This means you should be familiar with MySQL in general, and preferably also with MySQL Cluster and the MySQL Enterprise offerings.Other qualifications: Native English speaker 3 or more years previous experience in writing software documentation Excellent written and oral communication skills Ability to provide (online) samples of your work, e.g. books or articles Curiosity to learn new technologies Familiarity with distributed working environments and versioning systems such as SVN Comfortable with working on multiple operating systems, particularly Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux Ability to administer own workstations and test environment If you're interested, contact me under [email protected].

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• Writing better timesheet

  - by gunbuster363

  Recently, my company started to require us to fill out a monthly timesheet, writing down everything you do in office. A timesheet contain 29-31 days, depends on the number of days of the month. I need to write the things I did in every row of the excel file, which represent a day. This timesheet embarrasses me, because something like this can happen: I spent Monday writing a program, and the program was done. Because my boss didn't give me other program to write, basically I am just sitting there and pretending I am busy in the following days before my boss gives me another assignment. Of course I should not write it in the timesheet as it is. I can write it in the timesheet that I write the program using 4 days, but it makes me feel very inefficient. I can separate the process into 1) write the program, 2)deploy the program, 3)test the program, but that can make the process so long like 3 weeks, really. Have you encountered such a situation? How would you deal with this? EDIT: some people said I should be more proactive about asking for more assignments, but here is the situation: the boss of my boss gives some jobs to my boss, then my boss gives the jobs to me, sometimes I can also see my boss being quite less busy. One of my colleagues said that I should not ask for another assignment in a proactive manner, because it would be a headache for my boss to think a job out of nowhere for me. I don't want the things turn out like that, really.

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• Allow email from a particular sender through spam filter

  - by Greg

  We are running exchange 2010 and are using the built in anti-spam feature. We have set up Content Filtering, IP Block List Providers, Sender ID, Sender Reputation and it filters out most of the junk but it also quarantines all emails from one of our customers. It is being quarantined because of the Content Filter agent (Report Below). How can I add an exception for this email address to the Content Filter. I can see how to setup an exception for a delivery address ("Don't filter messages sent TO the following recipients") but I want to add [email protected] to our safe list. I don't want to add the whole domain as it is a very popular ISP in Australia and we often get junk from them. Filter Report: > Diagnostic information for administrators: > > Generating server: something.com > > [email protected] > #550 5.2.1 Content Filter agent quarantined this message ## > > Original message headers: > > Received: from icp-osb-irony-out4.external.iinet.net.au (203.59.1.220) > by server.local.something.com.au (192.5.0.105) with Microsoft SMTP > Server id > 14.1.218.12; Mon, 5 Nov 2012 02:40:40 +1100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: > AscOALeLllB8qwLw/2dsb2JhbABEKYUFhiigRQOWCwQEgQiBCIIZFAEBTiwCCAIBBwEIFDkBBBoqARoCAQIDAYd4uEuRXGEDiCWFT44UijeDAw > X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.80,710,1344182400"; > d="scan'208,217";a="55137861" Received: from unknown (HELO > asdf83c05c53a3) ([124.171.2.240]) by icp-osb-irony-out4.iinet.net.au > with ESMTP; 04 Nov 2012 23:40:26 +0800 Message-ID: > <E8C866D0299E4BCB8B156723893EB735@asdf83c05c53a3> From: Customer > <[email protected]> To: 'Person' <[email protected]> > Subject: A long sentance Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2011 06:07:57 +1100 > MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; > boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0005_01C5F962.3CD09120" X-Priority: 3 > X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express > 6.00.2900.5931 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.6157 Return-Path: [email protected] Received-SPF: None > (server.local.something.com.au: [email protected] does not > designate permitted sender hosts)

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• Deployment/provisioning tool for commercial applications (not developed in-house)

  - by mfinni

  I help manage a few hosted commercial applications, and we have a lot of manual processes involved when doing new customer-instance deployments into the shared (multitenant) environment. Allow me to describe the most relevant features, and then we can talk about the tools. We have an application on AIX, that requires dozens of changes to config files (some plain text, some XML) as well as a good number of commands to be run on multiple servers - some to start the new instance, some to restart our shared authentication and reporting engines, etc. The config changes follow templates, of course. The servers in question will also depend on the initial conditions specified by the implementer/deployer - we may choose to deploy a given customer to our servers in Europe, or one set of servers may be active-active whereas a different set of servers is active-passive - in short, there's a lot of complications. We have another application that run on IIS 6 and SQL. The DBAs don't want any automation of the SQL components and that's fine with me, but automating the IIS bit would be great. For a new customer instance, we make a filesystem copy of a template Virtual Directory target named after the new customer, make a new AppPool to match, edit a VirDir template .xml file to replace the filepaths and AppPool names with the new ones, and then make a new VirDir from the modified template XML to point to the new filesystem folder and app pool. For the first case, something like ControlTier or Chef might be good. For the second, the new(ish) Web Deploy from MS would probably do a good job. Has anyone used these tools or others to do something similar for applications? More of a nice-to-have, not a fixed requirement - Has anyone used anything that works on both platforms? I'm looking for something free, because the official word is that within a year, we will have whatever HP has renamed the OpsWare suite, which should be able to do stuff like this. Edit - based on someone's suggestion, looking at CFengine for the AIX application, it doesn't seem to address my pain. The problem isn't keeping a given config synced across dozens of servers, we have rsync for that. The problem is that onboarding a new customer instance touches dozens of files, putting pieces of the same or similar information into them - some are new stanzas in existing files, some are new files, and some are new directories. This is a several-hours-long process that is also error-prone because it's mostly done by hand. I guess I'm looking for config-file generation and management. I have built a small Perl script to do something similar for a much smaller case - it binds a CSV file into variables, and then does a copy-and-search-and-replace from a set of template config files. I could probably do the same here.

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• Google analytics and multiple independent subdomains

  - by MTilsted

  I need some help trying to setup google analytics correct. Here is my setup: We host sites for multiple customers, and each customer have their own subdomain on our site. So we have customerA.oursite.com and customerB.oursite.com As we add more customers we get more subdomains. We do want to track all data for each customer independent, but I don't want to to create a new google tracking code for each new customer. So my plan is to track all visits with "oursite.com", and then I will create a filter in google Analytics to get data for each specific customer(All visits for a specific subdomain). Is this(One tracking code, and a subdomain filter) the right way to do it? To create a subdomain filter i add a new profile for each customer, and then add a custom filter saying include "Request URI" and fill in "CustomerDomain.oursite.com". Is this the correct way to do it? And a general question about filters: Is it really impossible to create a new filter by applying it to data in an existing profile? I would really like to just collect all the data in one "main" profile and then create subdomain filters as we need them. But it seems that google only apply filters to new incomming data, not existing data. Is this really true? The following is my tracking code. Is '_setDomainName','none' the right thing to do? <script type="text/javascript"> /* Tracking code for qrtown.com */ var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-11584298-10']); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); </script>

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• Customer wants some data to appear after you later delete rows. System giant / not my creation. Fast

  - by John Sullivan

  This is a fairly common problem, it probably has a name, I just don't know what it is. A.) User sees obscure piece of information in Row B of L_OBSCURE_INFO displayed on some screen at a certain point. It is in table L_Obscure_info. B.) Under certain circumstances we want to correctly delete data in L_OBSCURE_INFO. Unfortunately, nobody accounted for the fact that the user might want to backtrack and see some random piece of information that was most recently in L_OBSCURE_INFO. C.) The system is enormous and L_OBSCURE_INFO is used all the time. You have no idea what the ramifications are of implementing some kind of hack and whatever you do, you don't want to introduce more bugs. I think the best approach would be to create an L_OBSCURE_INFO_HISTORY table and record a record in there every time you change data. But god help your ensuring it's accurate in this system where L_OBSCURE_INFO is being touched everywhere and you don't have time to implement L_OBSCURE_INFO_HISTORY. Is there a particularly easy, clever design solution for this kind of problem -- basically an elegant database hack? If not, is this kind of design problem under a particular class of problems or have a name?

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• Ajax Control Toolkit and Superexpert

  - by Stephen Walther

  Microsoft has asked my company, Superexpert Consulting, to take ownership of the development and maintenance of the Ajax Control Toolkit moving forward. In this blog entry, I discuss our strategy for improving the Ajax Control Toolkit. Why the Ajax Control Toolkit? The Ajax Control Toolkit is one of the most popular projects on CodePlex. In fact, some have argued that it is among the most successful open-source projects of all time. It consistently receives over 3,500 downloads a day (not weekends -- workdays). A mind-boggling number of developers use the Ajax Control Toolkit in their ASP.NET Web Forms applications. Why does the Ajax Control Toolkit continue to be such a popular project? The Ajax Control Toolkit fills a strong need in the ASP.NET Web Forms world. The Toolkit enables Web Forms developers to build richly interactive JavaScript applications without writing any JavaScript. For example, by taking advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit, a Web Forms developer can add modal dialogs, popup calendars, and client tabs to a web application simply by dragging web controls onto a page. The Ajax Control Toolkit is not for everyone. If you are comfortable writing JavaScript then I recommend that you investigate using jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit. However, if you are a Web Forms developer and you don’t want to get your hands dirty writing JavaScript, then the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great solution. The Ajax Control Toolkit is Vast The Ajax Control Toolkit consists of 40 controls. That’s a lot of controls (For the sake of comparison, jQuery UI consists of only 8 controls – those slackers J). Furthermore, developers expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on browsers both old and new. For example, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 9 and every version of Internet Explorer in between. People also expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. And, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with different operating systems. Yikes, that is a lot of combinations. The biggest challenge which my company faces in supporting the Ajax Control Toolkit is ensuring that the Ajax Control Toolkit works across all of these different browsers and operating systems. Testing, Testing, Testing Because we wanted to ensure that we could easily test the Ajax Control Toolkit with different browsers, the very first thing that we did was to set up a dedicated testing server. The dedicated server -- named Schizo -- hosts 4 virtual machines so that we can run Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Internet Explorer 9 at the same time (We also use the virtual machines to host the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari). The five developers on our team (plus me) can each publish to a separate FTP website on the testing server. That way, we can quickly test how changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit affect different browsers. QUnit Tests for the Ajax Control Toolkit Introducing regressions – introducing new bugs when trying to fix existing bugs – is the concern which prevents me from sleeping well at night. There are so many people using the Ajax Control Toolkit in so many unique scenarios, that it is difficult to make improvements to the Ajax Control Toolkit without introducing regressions. In order to avoid regressions, we decided early on that it was extremely important to build good test coverage for the 40 controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. We’ve been focusing a lot of energy on building automated JavaScript unit tests which we can use to help us discover regressions. We decided to write the unit tests with the QUnit test framework. We picked QUnit because it is quickly becoming the standard unit testing framework in the JavaScript world. For example, it is the unit testing framework used by the jQuery team, the jQuery UI team, and many jQuery UI plugin developers. We had to make several enhancements to the QUnit framework in order to test the Ajax Control Toolkit. For example, QUnit does not support tests which include postbacks. We modified the QUnit framework so that it works with IFrames so we could perform postbacks in our automated tests. At this point, we have written hundreds of QUnit tests. For example, we have written 135 QUnit tests for the Accordion control. The QUnit tests are included with the Ajax Control Toolkit source code in a project named AjaxControlToolkit.Tests. You can run all of the QUnit tests contained in the project by opening the Default.aspx page. Automating the QUnit Tests across Multiple Browsers Automated tests are useless if no one ever runs them. In order for the QUnit tests to be useful, we needed an easy way to run the tests automatically against a matrix of browsers. We wanted to run the unit tests against Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari automatically. Expecting a developer to run QUnit tests against every browser after every check-in is just too much to expect. It takes 20 seconds to run the Accordion QUnit tests. We are testing against 8 browsers. That would require the developer to open 8 browsers and wait for the results after each change in code. Too much work. Therefore, we built a JavaScript Test Server. Our JavaScript Test Server project was inspired by John Resig’s TestSwarm project. The JavaScript Test Server runs our QUnit tests in a swarm of browsers (running on different operating systems) automatically. Here’s how the JavaScript Test Server works: 1. We created an ASP.NET page named RunTest.aspx that constantly polls the JavaScript Test Server for a new set of QUnit tests to run. After the RunTest.aspx page runs the QUnit tests, the RunTest.aspx records the test results back to the JavaScript Test Server. 2. We opened the RunTest.aspx page on instances of Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Google, and Safari. Now that we have the JavaScript Test Server setup, we can run all of our QUnit tests against all of the browsers which we need to support with a single click of a button. A New Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit Each Month The Ajax Control Toolkit Issue Tracker contains over one thousand five hundred open issues and feature requests. So we have plenty of work on our plates J At CodePlex, anyone can vote for an issue to be fixed. Originally, we planned to fix issues in order of their votes. However, we quickly discovered that this approach was inefficient. Constantly switching back and forth between different controls was too time-consuming. It takes time to re-familiarize yourself with a control. Instead, we decided to focus on two or three controls each month and really focus on fixing the issues with those controls. This way, we can fix sets of related issues and avoid the randomization caused by context switching. Our team works in monthly sprints. We plan to do another release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each and every month. So far, we have competed one release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which was released on April 1, 2011. We plan to release a new version in early May. Conclusion Fortunately, I work with a team of smart developers. We currently have 5 developers working on the Ajax Control Toolkit (not full-time, they are also building two very cool ASP.NET MVC applications). All the developers who work on our team are required to have strong JavaScript, jQuery, and ASP.NET MVC skills. In the interest of being as transparent as possible about our work on the Ajax Control Toolkit, I plan to blog frequently about our team’s ongoing work. In my next blog entry, I plan to write about the two Ajax Control Toolkit controls which are the focus of our work for next release.

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• Issue 15: The Benefits of Oracle Exastack

  - by rituchhibber

       SOLUTIONS FOCUS The Benefits of Oracle Exastack Paul ThompsonDirector, Alliances and Solutions Partner ProgramsOracle EMEA Alliances & Channels RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Ready Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Exastack Labs Video Tour SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Exastack is a revolutionary programme supporting Oracle independent software vendor partners across the entire Oracle technology stack. Oracle's core strategy is to engineer software and hardware together, and our ISV strategy is the same. At Oracle we design engineered systems that are pre-integrated to reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructures while increasing productivity and performance. Oracle innovates and optimises performance at every layer of the stack to simplify business operations, drive down costs and accelerate business innovation. Our engineered systems are optimised to achieve enterprise performance levels that are unmatched in the industry. Faster time to production is achieved by implementing pre-engineered and pre-assembled hardware and software bundles. Our strategy of delivering a single-vendor stack simplifies and reduces costs associated with purchasing, deploying, and supporting IT environments for our customers and partners. In parallel to this core engineered systems strategy, the Oracle Exastack Program enables our Oracle ISV partners to leverage a scalable, integrated infrastructure that delivers their applications tuned, tested and optimised for high-performance. Specifically, the Oracle Exastack Program helps ISVs run their solutions on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 - integrated systems products in which the software and hardware are engineered to work together. These products provide OPN members with a lower cost and high performance infrastructure for database and application workloads across on-premise and cloud based environments. Ready and Optimized Oracle Partners can now leverage our new Oracle Exastack Program to become Oracle Exastack Ready and Oracle Exastack Optimized. Partners can achieve Oracle Exastack Ready status through their support for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. By doing this, partners can demonstrate to their customers that their applications are available on the latest major releases of these products. The Oracle Exastack Ready programme helps customers readily differentiate Oracle partners from lesser software developers, and identify applications that support Oracle engineered systems. Achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status demonstrates that an OPN member has proven itself against goals for performance and scalability on Oracle integrated systems. This status enables end customers to readily identify Oracle partners that have tested and tuned their solutions for optimum performance on an Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. These ISVs can display the Oracle Exadata Optimized, Oracle Exalogic Optimized or Oracle SPARC SuperCluster Optimized logos on websites and on all their collateral to show that they have tested and tuned their application for optimum performance. Deliver higher value to customers Oracle's investment in engineered systems enables ISV partners to deliver higher value to customer business processes. New innovations are enabled through extreme performance unachievable through traditional best-of-breed multi-vendor server/software approaches. Core product requirements can be launched faster, enabling ISVs to focus research and development investment on core competencies in order to bring value to market as quickly as possible. Through Exastack, partners no longer have to worry about the underlying product stack, which allows greater focus on the development of intellectual property above the stack. Partners are not burdened by platform issues and can concentrate simply on furthering their applications. The advantage to end customers is that partners can focus all efforts on business functionality, rather than bullet-proofing underlying technologies, and so will inevitably deliver application updates faster. Exastack provides ISVs with a number of flexible deployment options, such as on-premise or Cloud, while maintaining one single code base for applications regardless of customer deployment preference. Customers buying their solutions from Exastack ISVs can therefore be confident in deploying on their own networks, on private clouds or into a public cloud. The underlying platform will support all conceivable deployments, enabling a focus on the ISV's application itself that wouldn't be possible with other vendor partners. It stands to reason that Exastack accelerates time to value as well as lowering implementation costs all round. There is a big competitive advantage in partners being able to offer customers an optimised, pre-configured solution rather than an assortment of components and a suggested fit. Once a customer has decided to buy an Oracle Exastack Ready or Optimized partner solution, it will be up and running without any need for the customer to conduct testing of its own. Operational costs and complexity are also reduced, thanks to streamlined customer support through standardised configurations and pro-active monitoring. 'Engineered to Work Together' is a significant statement of Oracle strategy. It guarantees smoother deployment of a single vendor solution, clear ownership with no finger-pointing and the peace of mind of the Oracle Support Centre underpinning the entire product stack. Next steps Every OPN member with packaged applications must seriously consider taking steps to become Exastack Ready, or Exastack Optimized at the first opportunity. That first step down the track is to talk to an expert on the OPN Portal, at the Oracle Partner Business Center or to discuss the next steps with the closest Oracle account manager. Oracle Exastack lab environments and other technical enablement resources are available for OPN members wishing to further their knowledge of Oracle Exastack and qualify their applications for Oracle Exastack Optimized. New Boot Camps and Guided Learning Paths (GLPs), tailored specifically for ISVs, are available for Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, and Oracle WebLogic Server. More information about these GLPs and Boot Camps (including delivery dates and locations) are posted on the OPN Competency Center and corresponding OPN Knowledge Zones. Learn more about Oracle Exastack labs and ISV specific enablement resources. "Oracle Specialized partners are of course front-and-centre, with potential customers clearly directed to those partners and to Exadata Ready partners as a matter of priority." --More OpenWorld 2011 highlights for Oracle partners and customers Oracle Application Testing Suite 9.3 application testing solution for Web, SOA and Oracle Applications Oracle Application Express Release 4.1 improving the development of database-centric Web 2.0 applications and reports Oracle Unified Directory 11g helping customers manage the critical identity information that drives their business applications Oracle SOA Suite for healthcare integration Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g demonstrating continued commitment to the developer and open source communities Oracle Coherence 3.7.1, the latest release of the industry's leading distributed in-memory data grid Oracle Process Accelerators helping to simplify and accelerate time-to-value for customers' business process management initiatives Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on the iPad meeting the increasingly mobile demands of today's workforces Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19 Innovation Pack introducing industry-leading hosted call centre and enterprise-marketing capabilities designed to drive further revenue and productivity while reducing costs and improving the customer experience Oracle's Primavera Portfolio Management 9 for businesses delivering on project portfolio goals with increased versatility, transparency and accuracy Oracle's PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) 9.1 On Demand Standard Edition helping customers manage their long-term investment in enterprise-wide business applications New versions of Oracle FLEXCUBE Universal Banking and Oracle FLEXCUBE Investor Servicing for Financial Institutions, as well as Oracle Financial Services Enterprise Case Management, Oracle Financial Services Pricing Management, Oracle Financial Management Analytics and Oracle Tax Analytics Oracle Utilities Network Management System 1.11 offering new modelling and analysis features to improve distribution-grid management for electric utilities Oracle Communications Network Charging and Control 4.4 helping communications service providers (CSPs) offer their customers more flexible charging options Plus many, many more technology announcements, enhancements, momentum news and community updates -- Oracle OpenWorld 2012 A date has already been set for Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Held once again in San Francisco, exhibitors, partners, customers and Oracle people will gather from 30 September until 4 November to meet, network and learn together with the rest of the global Oracle community. Register now for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and save $$$! We'll reward your early planning for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 with reduced rates. Super Saver deals are now available! -- Back to the welcome page

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• SQL SERVER – Introduction to Adaptive ETL Tool – How adaptive is your ETL?

  - by pinaldave

  I am often reminded by the fact that BI/data warehousing infrastructure is very brittle and not very adaptive to change. There are lots of basic use cases where data needs to be frequently loaded into SQL Server or another database. What I have found is that as long as the sources and targets stay the same, SSIS or any other ETL tool for that matter does a pretty good job handling these types of scenarios. But what happens when you are faced with more challenging scenarios, where the data formats and possibly the data types of the source data are changing from customer to customer?  Let’s examine a real life situation where a health management company receives claims data from their customers in various source formats. Even though this company supplied all their customers with the same claims forms, they ended up building one-off ETL applications to process the claims for each customer. Why, you ask? Well, it turned out that the claims data from various regional hospitals they needed to process had slightly different data formats, e.g. “integer” versus “string” data field definitions.  Moreover the data itself was represented with slight nuances, e.g. “0001124” or “1124” or “0000001124” to represent a particular account number, which forced them, as I eluded above, to build new ETL processes for each customer in order to overcome the inconsistencies in the various claims forms.  As a result, they experienced a lot of redundancy in these ETL processes and recognized quickly that their system would become more difficult to maintain over time. So imagine for a moment that you could use an ETL tool that helps you abstract the data formats so that your ETL transformation process becomes more reusable. Imagine that one claims form represents a data item as a string – acc_no(varchar) – while a second claims form represents the same data item as an integer – account_no(integer). This would break your traditional ETL process as the data mappings are hard-wired.  But in a world of abstracted definitions, all you need to do is create parallel data mappings to a common data representation used within your ETL application; that is, map both external data fields to a common attribute whose name and type remain unchanged within the application. acc_no(varchar) is mapped to account_number(integer) expressor Studio first claim form schema mapping account_no(integer) is also mapped to account_number(integer) expressor Studio second claim form schema mapping All the data processing logic that follows manipulates the data as an integer value named account_number. Well, these are the kind of problems that that the expressor data integration solution automates for you.  I’ve been following them since last year and encourage you to check them out by downloading their free expressor Studio ETL software. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Business Intelligence, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: ETL, SSIS

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• Now It’s Personal (Although It Should Always Be): Campus Recruitment

  - by user769227

  One of the things that I think is important and I want our Campus Recruitment Team here at Oracle to be known for is outstanding customer service. When I say customer service, I mean both students and hiring managers should feel they have had a great experience in our campus hiring process. I think one of the keys to providing outstanding customer service is being able to provide as best as we can a personalised experience where the students who are interviewing with us feel like individuals in our process and not just part a ‘campus drive’. In the campus world this can be challenging at times especially in countries where there is high volume hiring. It can be tricky to create a personal experience when you are hiring for a large number of open graduate roles at one time. I think Campus Recruitment is one of the areas in the recruitment industry that is just waiting for a change. We have all seen the proliferation of Social Media in Recruitment over the past 4-6 years. Every Recruiter has a LinkedIn account or uses Twitter or G+ or FB, etc… and some individuals and organisations do it really well. Even in Campus Hiring there is great Social Media initiatives where companies reach out to students and talk to them. However one thing that has not really changed (and this is a generalisation) is the campus hiring interview process. Do these words inspire enthusiasm to you: “Group Interview, Assessment Centre, On-Campus Drive, Off-Campus Drive, etc...” I don’t know about you but to me these words don’t really sound very personal or individual to students. It almost conjures up images of a factory production line or those long queues you see where the person behind the counter says ‘take a number’. Campus Recruitment has come a long way don’t get me wrong – companies can share data with and talk to students in so many different ways now it really has become a much more transparent and open process. There are some times such as at IIT’s in India where it really is a bit old school in terms of interviewing with students running from company to company interviewing on campus over the course of a few days but I want students talking to Oracle to have as great an experience as possible (the outcome of getting a job or not is separate to the customer experience). As students, what are your thoughts? Do you feel like ‘just a number’ when you are interviewing or is there ways that companies can make the process more personalised. Let us know your thoughts. If you are interviewing with Oracle and have questions, want to talk to us or want to know what it is like working here – email us and we will help where we can. If you can’t reach your local Recruiter in your region email me at [email protected] and I will put you in touch with the appropriate person.

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