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• links for 2010-03-24

  - by Bob Rhubart

  @dhinchcliffe: When online communities go to work "As we see a growing set of examples of successful online communities in the enterprise space (both internally and externally), the broad outlines are emerging of what is turning into a vital new channel for innovation, business agility, customer relationships, and productive output for most organizations: Online communities as one of the most potent new ways to achieve business objectives, both in terms of cost and quality." -- Dion Hinchcliffe (tags: enterprisearchitecture entarch enterprise2.0 socialmedia) Steven Chan: WebCenter 11g (11.1.1.2) Certified with E-Business Suite Release 12 Steven Chan shares information on WebCenter 11g's (11.1.1.2) certification with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, along with a list of certified EBS 12 Platforms (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0 webcenter ebs) @oraclenerd: 1Z0-052 - Exploring the Oracle Database Architecture Oracle ACE Chet "Oraclenerd" Justice shares a list of resources/documentation covering Oracle Database Architecture. (tags: oracle otn oracleace dba certification architecture) @oraclenerd: 1Z0-052 - Books "I don't believe I have ever purchased a book on or about Oracle. The documentation provided, especially for the database, is top notch. There is so much information available out there if you just know how to find it. Reading AskTom for years didn't hurt either." -- Chet "@oraclenerd" Justice. (tags: otn oracle oracleace certification dba) Lucas Jellema: Castle in the clouds – Building the Connexys SaaS application with Fusion Middleware Oracle ACE Director Lucas Jellema shares the slides from the presentation he and colleague Arne van der Ing submitted for OBUG 2010. (tags: otn oracle oracleace cloud saas obug fusionmiddleware connexys) John Burke: Why Your ERP System Isn't Ready for the Next Evolution of the Enterprise "[ERP] has to become a stealthy modern app to help you quickly adapt to business changes while managing vital information. And through modern middleware it will connect to everything. So yes ERP as we've know it is dead, but long live ERP as a connected application member of the modern enterprise." -- John Burke, Group VP, Applications Business Unit, Oracle (tags: oracle otn entarch erp) Darwin-IT: Postfix for handling mail in your integration solution "It took me some time to understand Postfix. I was quite overwhelmed by the options. And it took me some time to figure out how to configure it for this particular usecase...But as with most other things..it turns out to be simple." -- Martien van den Akker (tags: oracle linux soa postfix) TheServerSide.com: Cameron Purdy at TSSJS 2010: If Java beats C++, what's next? ''It turns out that Java performance is much better on modern architecture. That is because of multicore processors and in-lining.'' -- Cameron Purdy, as quoted in an article by Jack Vaughn (tags: oracle java otn c++)

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• My Website (ports) Have Been Hijacked!

  - by ChrisD

  This is one of the scary problems that turns out to have a pretty easy solution. I tried to view one of my websites hosted by IIS on my primary workstation and the site wouldn’t render.   I checked IIS Admin and the site was there, but I couldn’t access it on either port 443 or port 80. In reviewing the event log I found the following entry: The World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW Service) did not register the URL prefix http://x.x.x.x:80/ for site 1. The site has been disabled. The data field contains the error number I disabled the IIS Service (issued Net Stop W3svc from an admin command prompt) and then scanned for anything listening on port 80. C:\Users\cdarrigo>netstat -ano |findstr 80   TCP    0.0.0.0:80             0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       3124 This confirmed that something had hijacked my ports.  I had another process that was listening on port 80 and it was preventing IIS from serving up my site.   A quick phone call to a friend taught me that the last number shown above (3124) is the process id of the process that's listening on the port.  So whatever process had PID 3124 had to be stopped. I scanned my process list, and determined it was, much to my surprise, Skype.  I exited the Skype application and restarted the IIS service, then manually restarted the web site.  This time, browsing to my site resulted in successfully viewing my site. So why was Skype listening on those ports?  A quick Google search revealed the answer: “Skype listens on those ports to increase quality.” really? “you might become a supernode if those ports are open.” No thanks.  I’m not sure how accurate those statements are, but I want to disable this behavior in Skype none the less. Fortunately Skype provides a configuration option to turn off this behavior.   Launch Skype and log in.  From the Tools menu, select Options Select the Advanced options and then Connection Uncheck the box Use Port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections Back to development bliss.

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• Where and how to mention Stackoverflow participation in the résumé?

  - by Sandeepan Nath

  I think I have good enough reputation on SO now - here is my profile - http://stackoverflow.com/users/351903/sandeepan-nath. Well, this may not be that much as compared to so many other users out there but I am happy with mine. So, I was thinking of adding my profile link on my résumé. (Just the profile link and not that "I have this much reputation on SO"). Those who haven't seen, can see this question Would you put your stackoverflow profile link on your CV / Resume?. How would this look like? Forums/Blogs/Miscellaneous others No blogging as yet but active participant in Stackoverflow. My profile link - http://stackoverflow.com/users/351903/sandeepan-nath I think of putting this section after Project Details and Technical Expertise sections. Any tips/advice? Thanks Update MKO has made a very good point - "do you really want a potential employeer to be able to evaluate in detail everything you've ever written on SO". I thought of commenting but it would be too long - In my questions/answers I put a lot of statements like - "AFAIK ...", "following are my assumptions so far ...", "am I correct to conclude that... ?", "I doubt if it is possible to ..." etc. when I am not sure about something and I rarely involve in fights with other users. However I do argue on topics sometimes if I feel it is necessary and if I have a valid point. I do accept my mistakes and apologize for the same. As we all know nobody is perfect. I must have written many things which may be judged as wrong by a potential employer. But what if the same employer notices that I have improved in the quality of content by comparing old content with new one? Isn't that great? I also try to go back to older questions/answers and put corrective comments etc. when I feel I was wrong or if I can improve my post. Of course there are many employers who want you (potential employees) to be correct each and every time. They immediately remove you from consideration when you say a single incorrect thing. I have personally met such an interviewer few months back. He didn't even care to listen to any good thing I had done after he found a single wrong thing. Now the question is do you really care to work with such people? Or do you like those people who give value to the fact that you are striving to improve every day. I personally prefer the latter.

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• Desktop Fun: Happy New Year Wallpaper Collection [Bonus Edition]

  - by Asian Angel

  As this year draws to a close, it is a time to reflect back on what we have done this year and to look forward to the new one. To help commemorate the event we have put together a bonus size edition of Happy New Year wallpapers for your desktops. Extra Note: We made a special effort to find wallpapers for this collection without the year “printed” on them, thus allowing for reuse as desired and/or needed beyond the 2010 – 2011 holiday. Note: Click on the picture to see the full-size image—these wallpapers vary in size so you may need to crop, stretch, or place them on a colored background in order to best match them to your screen’s resolution. For more New Year’s desktop goodness be sure to check out our Happy New Year icon & font packs collection (link at bottom)! Note: This wallpaper will need to be placed on a larger white background in order to increase the height. Note: This wallpaper will need to be placed on a larger background in order to increase the width and height. Note: This wallpaper comes in multiple sizes and will need to be downloaded as a zip file. Note: This wallpaper comes in multiple sizes and will need to be downloaded as a zip file. Note: The download size for the original version of this wallpaper is 15 MB. Note: The download size for the original version of this wallpaper is 15 MB. More Happy New Year Fun Desktop Fun: Happy New Year Icon and Font Packs For more wallpapers be certain to see our great collections in the Desktop Fun section. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? The Outdoor Lights Scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation [Video] The Famous Home Alone Pizza Delivery Scene [Classic Video] Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Theme for Windows 7 Cardinal and Rabbit Sharing a Tree on a Cold Winter Morning Wallpaper An Alternate Star Wars Christmas Special [Video] Sunset in a Tropical Paradise Wallpaper

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• Friday Fun: Snowball

  - by Asian Angel

  It is Christmas Eve and hopefully you are enjoying the start of an early weekend away from work. This week we have a snowball throwing game for you to try out, so bundle up and get ready to let those snowballs fly! Snowball The object of the game is to use your snowball ammo to harass the drunk businessman and send him flying along distance-wise as far as you can. Simply use your mouse to aim and click the left button to throw snowballs. You can monitor your stats on the silver bar towards the top of the window. The sound can also be disabled if the music is bothering you, but keep in mind that all sound will be disabled if you use the option. Time to get those snowballs flying through the air!! Keep hitting the businessman with your snowballs as you chase after him. Make certain that your aim is good or you will quickly run out of snowballs! You can really get him moving along at a good rate and he can even go high enough in the air to disappear off the screen for a few moments. There is a also chance that your aim will be so wicked with the snowballs that you will literally knock the drunk businessman’s head off! Weird but possible… The game ends when one of these two events occur: 1.) you run out of snowballs or 2.) the businessman literally bounces back at and then drops behind you as seen in the screenshot here. The moment either happens your score will pop up and then you have the opportunity to try again. Have fun! Note: The bounce back event can happen when encountering cars. Play Snowball Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? An Alternate Star Wars Christmas Special [Video] Sunset in a Tropical Paradise Wallpaper Natural Wood Grain Icons for Your Desktop and App Launcher Docks My Blackberry Is Not Working! The Apple Too?! [Funny Video] Hidden Tracks Your Stolen Mac; Free Until End of January Why the Other Checkout Line Always Moves Faster

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• SharePoint 2010 Hosting :: Sending SMS Alerts in SharePoint 2010 Over Office Mobile Service Protocol (OMS)

  - by mbridge

  In this post, I want to share the exciting news of SharePoint's 2010 new feature. Finally it's possible to send SMS directly from SharePoint to mobile phones. The advantages of sending SMS instead of Email messages are obvious: SMS alerts or reminders that are received on mobile phones are more preferred than Email messages that can be lost in the mass of spam. The interface is standard as it's very similar to previous versions of the product. Adjustments are easy to do, simply enter the address of the Office Mobile Service (OMS) web-service which you want to use for sending messages, then specify the connection parameters. Further details on Office Mobile Service is available below. The Test Service button checks if OMS web-service is accessible using provided URL (user name and password are not verified). This check is needed because OMS web-service URL depends on the mobile operator and country. It's now possible to select the method of sending alerts in alerts settings. Email option is selected by default. Alerts delivery method is displayed in the list of existing alerts. Office Mobile Service (OMS) SharePoint 2010 uses exterior servers similar to SMTP servers for sending SMS alerts. However, Microsoft started development and promotion of their own protocol instead of using existing ones. That is how Office Mobile Service (OMS) appeared. This open protocol enables clients to send text and multimedia messages (mobile messages) remotely to the server which processes these messages and delivers them to mobile phones.  Typical scenario of utilizing this protocol is data transfer between computer application and mobile phone. The recipient can answer messages and the server in return will deliver the answer by SMTP protocol, i.e. by email.  Key quality of this protocol is that it's built on base of HTPP(S) and SOAP protocols.     This means that in fact SMS gateway must support typified web-service. What do you get from web-service? What you get is the ability to send SMS from any platform you want.  The protocol is being developed at the moment and version 0.2 from 08/28/2009 was available when the article was published.  For promotion of their protocol and simplifying server search, Microsoft represented web-service http://messaging.office.microsoft.com/HostingProviders.aspx that helps to receive the list of providers, which supports OMS protocol and message delivery to your operator.  All you need to do is decide which provider to use, complete the agreement, then adjust the SharePoint connection parameters and start working.  Some providers advertise themselves not only for clients but for mobile operators as well. They offer automatic adding to the list of the Office Mobile Service Providers.  To view the full specifications of OMS, please go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd774103.aspx.

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• Why I Love Microsoft Development

  - by Brian Lanham

  I've been writing software for a while and recently had an opportunity to broaden my horizons and start developing for iOS. We decided to leverage, as much as possible, our existing skills and use MonoTouch and MonoDevelop by Novell.    For those of you who do not know, Mono is a .NET port originally designed for Linux but adapted for other platforms as well. MonoTouch is a port specifically for building iOS applications using the .NET framework. MonoDroid is a port (in CTP-esque release) for Android.   A MISSING COMPONENT - VISUAL DESIGNER   MonoDevelop lacks one very significant component compared with other tools I am using: NO VISUAL DESIGNER. Instead of using an integrated visual designer, MonoDevelop shells to the Mac OS "Interface Builder".  Since MonoDevelop lets me have a "Visual Studio-esque" feel *and* I get to use C#, AND it's FREE, I am gladly willing to overlook this.  In fact, it's not even a question.  Free?  Sure, I'll take it with no Visual Designer.   In my experiences I've grown from UNIX and DOS to .NET development through many steps. Java/JSP/Servlets; Windows; Web; etc. I've been doing .NET for quite a few years and I guess I just got "comfortable" with the tools.   WHY AM I NOT GETTING IT?   Interface Builder (IB) is amazingly confusing for me. I had the opportunity to speak at the Northern VA Code Camp on 12/11/2010. My presentation was "Getting Started with iOS Development using MonoTouch and C#".    At the visual design part of the presentation, I asked one of the 3 or 4 Mac developers in the room about my confusion with the IB. I don't understand why the "Classes" list includes objects. I don't understand what "File's Owner" is. And, most importantly, WHAT THE HECK IS AN OUTLET AND WHY IS IT NECESSARY?!?!?"   His response to these question (especially Outlets): "They did it wrong."   I'm accustom to a visual designer that creates variables for graphical widgets for me. Not IB. Instead, I have to create "Outlets" manually. I still do not understand why and, the explanation from a seasoned Mac developer is that it's wrong. (He received nods of confirmation from the other Mac devs in the room.)   I LOVE MS DEV   I love development for Microsoft platforms using Microsoft development tools. I love Windows 7. I love Visual Studio 2010. I love SQL Server. Azure, Entity Framework, Active Directory, Office, WCF/WF/WPF, etc. are all designed with integration in mind. They are also all designed with developers in mind.   Steve Ballmer recently ranted "It's the developers!" That's why it is relatively quick to build apps using MS tools. Clearly, MS knows that while we usually enjoy building technology solutions, we are here to make money. And we need tools that accelerate our time to market without compromising the power and quality of our solutions.   So, yeah, I am sucking up I guess. But I love Microsoft Development. Thank you, Microsoft, for providing the plethora of great development tools.    P.S. (but please slow down a bit…I'm having trouble keeping up!)

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• Wireless acting weird ubuntu 12.04 LTS

  - by Philip Yeldhos

  I'm kinda new here, so please bear with me. My wireless driver is acting very weird. It shows my router's name, but when it is connecting (after entering the correct password), the icon on the tray is like, refreshing every once in a second, while showing the animation that it is connecting. And after a few seconds, error message come up saying that wireless network is disconnected. I installed the drive through "additional drivers". What info do you need? Somebody please help. philip@philip-HP-Mini-110-3100:~$ sudo iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. eth1 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.472 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated Bit Rate:72 Mb/s Tx-Power:24 dBm Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=5/5 Signal level=0 dBm Noise level=-96 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:11 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 eth0 no wireless extensions. here's what lspci -v gave me: 02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 1483 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17 Memory at 52000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [58] Vendor Specific Information: Len=78 <?> Capabilities: [48] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+ Capabilities: [d0] Express Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting Capabilities: [13c] Virtual Channel Capabilities: [160] Device Serial Number 00-00-82-ff-ff-3f-e0-2a Capabilities: [16c] Power Budgeting <?> Kernel driver in use: wl Kernel modules: wl, bcma, brcmsmac okay, i removed the driver additional drivers gave me. now, this is what has happened: lsmod gave me: philip@philip-HP-Mini-110-3100:~$ lsmod | grep brc brcmsmac 540875 0 mac80211 436455 1 brcmsmac brcmutil 14675 1 brcmsmac cfg80211 178679 2 brcmsmac,mac80211 crc8 12781 1 brcmsmac cordic 12487 1 brcmsmac and iwconfig gave me: philip@philip-HP-Mini-110-3100:~$ iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=19 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off eth0 no wireless extensions. and lspci -v gave me: 02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 1483 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17 Memory at 52000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: brcmsmac Kernel modules: bcma, brcmsmac

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• Business Strategy - Google Case Study

  Business strategy defined by SMBTN.com is a term used in business planning that implies a careful selection and application of resources to obtain a competitive advantage in anticipation of future events or trends. In more general terms business strategy is positioning a company so that it has the greatest competitive advantage over others in the markets and industries that they participate in. This process involves making corporate decisions regarding which markets to provide goods and services, pricing, acceptable quality levels, and how to interact with others in the marketplace. The primary objective of business strategy is to create and increase value for all of its shareholders and stakeholders through the creation of customer value. According to InformationWeek.com, Google has a distinctive technology advantage over its competitors like Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo. Google utilizes custom high-performance systems which are cost efficient because they can scale to extreme workloads. This hardware allows for a huge cost advantage over its competitors. In addition, InformationWeek.com interviewed Stephen Arnold who stated that Google’s programmers are 50%-100% more productive compared to programmers working for their competitors.  He based this theory on Google’s competitors having to spend up to four times as much just to keep up. In addition to Google’s technological advantage, they also have developed a decentralized management schema where employees report directly to multiple managers and team project leaders. This allows for the responsibility of the technology department to be shared amongst multiple senior level engineers and removes the need for a singular department head to oversee the activities of the department.  This is a unique approach from the standard management style. Typically a department head like a CIO or CTO would oversee the department’s global initiatives and business functionality.  This would then be passed down and administered through middle management and implemented by programmers, business analyst, network administrators and Database administrators. It goes without saying that an IT professional’s responsibilities would be directed by Google’s technological advantage and management strategy.  Simply because they work within the department, and would have to design, develop, and support the high-performance systems and would have to report multiple managers and project leaders on a regular basis. Since Google was established and driven by new and immerging technology, all other departments would be directly impacted by the technology department.  In fact, they would have to cater to the technology department since it is a huge driving for in the success of Google. Reference: http://www.smbtn.com/smallbusinessdictionary/#b http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/linux/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192300292&pgno=1&queryText=&isPrev=

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• Where and how to mention Stackoverflow participation in the résumé?

  - by Sandeepan Nath

  I think I have good enough reputation on SO now - here is my profile - http://stackoverflow.com/users/351903/sandeepan-nath. Well, this may not be that much as compared to so many other users out there but I am happy with mine. So, I was thinking of adding my profile link on my résumé. (Just the profile link and not that "I have this much reputation on SO"). Those who haven't seen, can see this question Would you put your stackoverflow profile link on your CV / Resume?. How would this look like? Forums/Blogs/Miscellaneous others No blogging as yet but active participant in Stackoverflow. My profile link - http://stackoverflow.com/users/351903/sandeepan-nath I think of putting this section after Project Details and Technical Expertise sections. Any tips/advice? Thanks Update MKO has made a very good point - "do you really want a potential employeer to be able to evaluate in detail everything you've ever written on SO". I thought of commenting but it would be too long - In my questions/answers I put a lot of statements like - "AFAIK ...", "following are my assumptions so far ...", "am I correct to conclude that... ?", "I doubt if it is possible to ..." etc. when I am not sure about something and I rarely involve in fights with other users. However I do argue on topics sometimes if I feel it is necessary and if I have a valid point. I do accept my mistakes and apologize for the same. As we all know nobody is perfect. I must have written many things which may be judged as wrong by a potential employer. But what if the same employer notices that I have improved in the quality of content by comparing old content with new one? Isn't that great? I also try to go back to older questions/answers and put corrective comments etc. when I feel I was wrong or if I can improve my post. Of course there are many employers who want you (potential employees) to be correct each and every time. They immediately remove you from consideration when you say a single incorrect thing. I have personally met such an interviewer few months back. He didn't even care to listen to any good thing I had done after he found a single wrong thing. Now the question is do you really care to work with such people? Or do you like those people who give value to the fact that you are striving to improve every day. I personally prefer the latter.

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• Evaluating Scrum - is it okay to have people with multiple roles in a Scrum team?

  - by Wayne M

  I'm evaluating some Agile-style methodologies for possible introduction to my team. With Scrum, is it allowable to have the same person perform multiple roles? We have a small team of four developers and a web designer; we don't really have a lead (I fulfill this role), QA testers or business analysts, and all of our development tasks come from the CIO. Automated testing is seen as a total waste of time, and everything focuses on speed and not quality. What will happen is the CIO will come up with a development task (whether a feature or a bug) and give it to a developer (not to the whole team, to an individual, often in private or out of the blue) who is then expected to get it completed. The CIO doesn't gather requirements beyond the initial idea (and this has bitten us before as we'll implement something only to find out that none of the end users can use the feature, because they weren't consulted or even informed about it before we developed it, and in a panic we'll be told to revert the change) but requires say in/approval of everything that we do. First things first, is a Scrum style something to consider to introduce some standards and practices? From reading, Scrum seems to rely on a bit more trust and communication and focuses more on project management than on development, which is something we are completely devoid of as we don't have any semblance of project management at present. Second, if it can work is it unreasonable for someone, let's say myself, to act as both ScrumMaster and a developer? Or for a developer to also be the Product Owner (although chances are this will be the CIO, who isn't a developer)? I realize the Scrum Master and the Product Owner should be different people but at the same time I don't think we have anyone who has the qualities of a Product Owner (chances are it would turn into a "I need all these stories, I don't care how but get it done" type of deal and/or any freeze would be unfrozen on a whim). It seems to me that I might need to pick and choose pieces of Scrum/XP/Lean to compensate for how things are done currently, as it's highly unlikely that the mentality can be changed; for instance Pair Programming would never fly (seen as a waste, you get half the tasks done if you need two people for everything), TDD would be a hard sell, but short cycles would be welcomed.

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• BI&EPM in Focus April 2012

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  General News Oracle OpenWorld call for papers now open, now through April 9 (link) Oracle Announces Availability of Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine (link) Oracle EPM and BI Support Newsletter Current Edition - Volume 3 : March 2012 (link) Customers Asiana Airlines Improves Passenger Management with Near-Real-Time Reservation and Ticketing Information  Centraal Boekhuis Delivers Faster with Oracle BI 11g Essatto Software Speeds Data Aggregation Tenfold; Integrates BI, Performance Management, and Data Warehousing for Midsize Businesses Grupo WTorre Supports Management's Decision-Making with OBIEE, Ensuring Uniform, Reliable, and Consistent Data Indian Overseas Bank Cuts Planning Schedule by 45 Worker Days per Year, Assesses Market Risk Instantly with Business Intelligence System Kentucky Community and Technical College System Enables Data-Driven Decision-Making Using Integrated System with Management Dashboards National Australia Bank Achieves 200% ROI, Improves Data Quality and Reporting Integrity with Oracle Hyperion DRM R.L. Polk & Co. Enhances Business Intelligence Capabilities, Optimizes System Performance with Extreme Analytics Machine Test ResCare, Inc. Transforms Reporting to Improve Healthcare Service Performance with Oracle Business Analytics  Rochester City School District Uses OBIEE to Track Student Achievement, Identify Areas for Improvement, Accelerate Reporting  Société Générale Standardizes, Accelerates, and Improves Budget Planning Accuracy across Global Enterprise The State Accounting Office of Georgia Integrates Financial Information, Shortens Financial Closings and Streamlines Reporting across 175 Organizations   Events 4-day Oracle Real-Time Decisions Hands-on Technical Workshop for Partners (PTS, Free) May 14-17, 2012: Colombes, Paris, France Nordic events : “Latest Release of Oracle Hyperion EPM and BI Suites Helps Organizations Plan through Uncertainty, Improve Decision-Making and Meet Regulatory Requirements” (April 17, Sweden | April 18, Norway | April 19, Denmark | April 24, Finland) Webcast Replay from Balaji Yelamanchili and Paul Rodwick: “Analytics Without Limits - The Latest on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Business Intelligence”  (link)  Wednesday, April 04, 2012: Business Analytics launch webcast: Invite your customers to register (link) Big Data Online Forum now available on Demand (link)  Enterprise Performance Management Webcast Replay: Accurate Forecasting within the Business Planning Cycle (link) Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) Master Support Note (link) Business  Intelligence Whitepaper: Driving Innovation Through Analytics (link) Gartner: CIOs Identify BI as the No. 1 Technology Priority for 2012 (link) Webcast Replay: Exalytics in Action: Airlines, US Census and Federal Spending Demo Applications  (link) NEWLY RELEASED Walk-in Video for Exalytics - Use This to Start Customer/Partner Meetings! (link) IDC Insight Paper: “Oracle's All-Out Assault on the Big Data Market: Offering Hadoop, R, Cubes, and Scalable IMDB in Familiar Packages” (link) System Requirements and Supported Platforms for Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 11gR1 Certification Matrix now published to include OBIEE 11.1.1.6.0 (link) Maintenance Release Guide (List of Bugs Fixed) for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11.1.1.6.0  (link) OBIEE 11.1.1.6: Is OBIEE 11.1.1.6 Certified With OBI Apps 7.9.6.3?  (link) Information Center: Troubleshooting Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (support login req'd)  (link)      

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• Microsoft Virtual Academy

  Carpe Diem It's been since a while that I could write an article for this blog but alas, I was (and still am) very busy with customer's work. Which is actually good. So, what is this article going to tell you? Well, in general, just what I already tweeted, that life is constant process of learning - especially as software craftsman. Due to an upcoming new customer project in ASP.NET I had to seize the opportunity to get my head deeper into latest available technologies, like Windows Azure and SQL Azure. I know... cloud computing and so on is not a recent development and already available since quite a while but I never any means to get myself into this since roughly two weeks ago. Microsoft Virtual Academy I can't remember exactly what guided me towards the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA), oh wait... Yes, it was a posting on Facebook from an old CLIP community friend. He posted a shortened URL with #MVA tag that caught my attention. Thanks for that Thomas Kuberek. After the usual sign in or registration via Live ID I was a little bit surprised that Mauritius is not an available country option... Quick mail exchange with the MVA Decan, and yeah, apologies for the missing entry. So, currently I'm learning about Microsoft products and services, and collecting points under "Not Listed Country" until Mauritius is going to be added. Hopefully soon, as MVA honors your effort with different knowledge ranks that are compared to other students with public profiles. I think it's a nice move to add some game and competition factor into the learning game. The tracks and their different modules are mainly references to publicly available material online, namely on either MSDN, TechNet, Channel9, or other Microsoft based sites. The course material therefore also varies in different media and formats, ranging from simple online articles over downloadable documents (.docx or .pdf) to Silverlight / Windows Media streams with download options. Self-assessment and students ranking Each module in a track can be finished by taking part in a self-assessment. Up to now, the assessment I did (and passed) were limited to 10 minutes available time, and consisted of six to seven questions on the module training material. Nothing too serious but it gives you a glimpse idea how Microsoft certification exams are structured. Conclusion Nothing really new but nicely gathered, assembled and presented to the MVA students. At the moment, I wouldn't dare to compare the richness and quality of those courses with professional training offers, like Pluralsight .NET Training, LearnDevNow, VTC, etc. at all, but I think that MVA has potential. Give it a try, and let me know about your opinions.

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• Book review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

  - by DigiMortal

     Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is golden classic book that can be considered as mandatory reading for software project managers, team leads, higher level management and board members of software companies. If you make decisions about people then you cannot miss this book. If you are already good on managing developers then this book can make you even better – you will learn new stuff about successful development teams for sure. Why peopleware? Peopleware gives you very good hints about how to build up working environment for project teams where people can really do their work. Book also covers team building topics that are also important reading. As software developer I found practically all points in this book to be accurate and valid. Many times I have found my self thinking about same things and Peopleware made me more confident about my opinions. Peopleware covers also time management and planning topics that help you do way better job on using developers time effectively by minimizing the amount of interruptions by phone calls, pointless meetings and i-want-to-know-what-are-you-doing-right-now questions by managers who doesn’t write code anyway. I think if you follow suggestions given by Peopleware your developers are very happy. I suggest you to also read another great book – Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March describes you effectively what happens when good advices given by Peopleware are totally ignored or worse yet – people are treated exactly opposite way. I consider also Death March as golden classics and I strongly recommend you to read this book too. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Part 1: Managing the Human Resource Chapter 1: Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing Chapter 2: Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger Chapter 3: Vienna Waits for You Chapter 4: Quality-If Time Permits Chapter 5: Parkinson's Law Revisited Chapter 6: Laetrile Part II: The Office Environment Chapter 7: The Furniture Police Chapter 8: "You Never Get Anything Done Around Here Between 9 and 5" Chapter 9: Saving Money on Space Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects Chapter 10: Brain Time Versus Body Time Chapter 11: The Telephone Chapter 12: Bring Back the Door Chapter 13: Taking Umbrella Steps Part III: The Right People Chapter 14: The Hornblower Factor Chapter 15: Hiring a Juggler Chapter 16: Happy to Be Here Chapter 17: The Self-Healing System Part IV: Growing Productive Teams Chapter 18: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts Chapter 19: The Black Team Chapter 20: Teamicide Chapter 21: A Spaghetti Dinner Chapter 22: Open Kimono Chapter 23: Chemistry for Team Formation Part V: It't Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here Chapter 24: Chaos and Order Chapter 25: Free Electrons Chapter 26: Holgar Dansk Part VI: Son of Peopleware Chapter 27: Teamicide, Revisited Chapter 28: Competition Chapter 29: Process Improvement Programs Chapter 30: Making Change Possible Chapter 31: Human Capital Chapter 32:Organizational Learning Chapter 33: The Ultimate Management Sin Is Chapter 34: The Making of Community Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors

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• Oracle's Integrated Systems Management and Support Experience

  - by Scott McNeil

  With its recent launch, Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g introduced a new approach to integrated systems management and support. What this means is taking both areas of IT management and vendor support and combining them into one integrated comprehensive and centralized platform. Traditional Ways Under the traditional method, IT operational teams would often focus on running their systems using management tools that weren’t connected to their vendor’s support systems. If you needed support with a product, administrators would often contact the vendor by phone or visit the vendor website for support and then log a service request in order to fix the issues. This method was also very time consuming, as administrators would have to collect their software configurations, operating systems and hardware settings, then manually enter them into an online form or recite them to a support analyst on the phone. For the vendor, they had to analyze all the configuration data to recreate the problem in order to solve it. This approach was very manual, uncoordinated and error-prone where duplication between the customer and vendor frequently occurred. A Better Support Experience By removing the boundaries between support, IT management tools and the customer’s IT infrastructure, Oracle paved the way for a better support experience. This was achieved through integration between Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and My Oracle Support. Administrators can not only manage their IT infrastructure and applications through Oracle Enterprise Manager’s centralized console but can also receive proactive alerts and patch recommendations right within the console they use day-in-day-out. Having one single source of information saves time and potentially prevents unforeseen problems down the road. All for One, and One for All The first step for you is to allow Oracle Enterprise Manager to upload configuration data into Oracle’s secure configuration repository, where it can be analyzed for potential issues or conflicts for all customers. A fix to a problem encountered by one customer may actually be relevant to many more. The integration between My Oracle Support and Oracle Enterprise Manager allows all customers who may be impacted by the problem to receive a notification about the fix. Once the alert appears in Oracle Enterprise Manager’s console, the administrator can take his/her time to do further investigations using automated workflows provided in Oracle Enterprise Manager to analyze potential conflicts. Finally, administrators can schedule a time to test and automatically apply the fix to all the systems that need it. In the end, this helps customers maintain their service levels without compromise and avoid experiencing unplanned downtime that may result from potential issues or conflicts. This new paradigm of integrated systems management and support helps customers keep their systems secure, compliant, and up-to-date, while eliminating the traditional silos between IT management and vendor support. Oracle’s next generation platform also works hand-in-hand to provide higher quality of service to business users while at the same time making life for administrators less complicated. For more information on Oracle’s integrated systems management and support experience, be sure to visit our Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Resource Center for the latest customer videos, webcast, and white papers.

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• How To Deal With Terrible Design Decisions

  - by splatto

  I'm a consultant at one company. There is another consultant who is a year older than me and has been here 3 months longer than I have, and a full time developer. The full-time developer is great. My concern is that I see the consultant making absolutely terrible design decisions. For example, M:M relationships are being stored in the database as a comma-delimited string rather than using a conjunction table to hold the relationships. For example, consider two tables, Car and Property: Car records: Camry Volvo Mercedes Property records: Spare Tire Satellite Radio Ipod Support Standard Rather than making a table CarProperties to represent this, he has made a "Property" attribute on the Car table whose data looks like "1,3,7,13,19,25," I hate how this decision and others are affecting the quality of my code. We have butted heads over this design three times in the past two months since I've been here. He asked me why my suggestion was better, and I responded that our database would be eliminating redundant data by converting to a higher normal form. I explained that this design flaw in particular is discussed and discouraged in entry level college programs, and he responded with a shot at me saying that these comma-separated-value database properties are taught when you do your masters (which neither of us have). Needless to say, he became very upset and demanded I apologize for criticizing his work, which I did in the interest of not wanting to be the consultant to create office drama. Our project manager is focused on delivering a product ASAP and is a very strong personality - Suggesting to him at this point that we spend some time to do this right will set him off. There is a strong likelihood that both of our contracts will be extended to work on a second project coming up. How will I be able to exert dominant influence over the design of the system and the data model to ensure that such terrible mistakes are not repeated in the next project? A glimpse at the dynamics: I can be a strong personality if I don't measure myself. The other consultant is not a strong personality, is a poor communicator, is quite stubborn and thinks he is better than everyone else. The project manager is an extremely strong personality who is focused on releasing tomorrow's product yesterday. The full-time developer is very laid back and easy going, a very effective communicator, but is someone who will accept bad design if it means not rocking the boat. Code reviews or anything else that takes "time" will be out of the question - there is no way our PM will be sold on such a thing by anybody.

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• how to convert avi (xvid) to mkv or mp4 (h264)

  - by bcsteeve

  Very noob when it comes to video. I'm trying to make sense of what I"m finding via Google... but its mostly Greek to me. I have a bunch of Avi files that won't play in my WD TV Play box. Mediainfo tells me they are xvid. Specs for the box show that should be fine... but digging through forums says its hit-and-miss. So I'd like to try converting them to h264 encoded MKV or mp4 files. I gather avconv is the tool, but reading the manual just has me really really confused. I tried the very basic example of: avconv -i file.avi -c copy file.mp4 it took less than 4 seconds. And it worked... sort of. It "played" in that something came up on the screen... but there was horrible artifacting and scenes would just sort of melt into each other. I want to preserve quality if possible. I'm not concerned about file size. I'm not terribly concerned with the time it takes either, provided I can do them in a batch. Can someone familiar with the process please give me a command with the options? Thank you for your help. I'm posting the mediainfo in case it helps: General Complete name : \\SERVER\Video\Public\test.avi Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave File size : 189 MiB Duration : 11mn 18s Overall bit rate : 2 335 Kbps Writing application : Lavf52.32.0 Video ID : 0 Format : MPEG-4 Visual Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5 Format settings, BVOP : 2 Format settings, QPel : No Format settings, GMC : No warppoints Format settings, Matrix : Default (H.263) Muxing mode : Packed bitstream Codec ID : XVID Codec ID/Hint : XviD Duration : 11mn 18s Bit rate : 2 129 Kbps Width : 720 pixels Height : 480 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate : 29.970 fps Standard : NTSC Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Compression mode : Lossy Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.206 Stream size : 172 MiB (91%) Writing library : XviD 1.2.1 (UTC 2008-12-04) Audio ID : 1 Format : MPEG Audio Format version : Version 1 Format profile : Layer 3 Mode : Joint stereo Mode extension : MS Stereo Codec ID : 55 Codec ID/Hint : MP3 Duration : 11mn 18s Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 192 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Compression mode : Lossy Stream size : 15.5 MiB (8%) Alignment : Aligned on interleaves Interleave, duration : 24 ms (0.72 video frame)

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• One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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• One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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• Get to Know a Candidate (11 of 25): Roseanne Barr&ndash;Peace &amp; Freedom Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Barr is an American actress, comedienne, writer, television producer, and director.  Barr began her career in stand-up comedy at clubs before gaining fame for her role in the sitcom Roseanne. The show was a hit and lasted nine seasons, from 1988 to 1997. She won both an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her work on the show. Barr had crafted a "fierce working-class domestic goddess" persona in the eight years preceding her sitcom and wanted to do a realistic show about a strong mother who was not a victim of patriarchal consumerism. The granddaughter of immigrants from Europe and Russia, Barr was the oldest of four children in a working-class Jewish Salt Lake City family; she was also active in the LDS Church. In 1974 she married Bill Pentland, with whom she had three children, before divorcing in 1990 and marrying comedian Tom Arnold for four years. Controversy arose when she sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" off-key at a 1990 nationally aired baseball game, followed by grabbing her crotch and spitting. After her sitcom ended, she launched her own talk show, The Roseanne Show, which aired from 1998 to 2000. In 2005, she returned to stand-up comedy with a world tour. In 2011, she starred in an unscripted TV show, Roseanne's Nuts that lasted from July to September of that year, about her life on a Hawaiian farm. The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) is a nationally-organized political party with affiliates in more than a dozen states, including California, Florida, Colorado and Hawaii. Its first candidates appeared on the ballot in 1966, but the Peace and Freedom Party of California was founded on June 23, 1967, after the LAPD riot in the wealthy Century City section of Los Angeles, and qualified for the ballot in January 1968.  The Peace and Freedom Party went national in 1968 as a left-wing organization opposed to the Vietnam War. From its inception, Peace and Freedom Party has been a left-wing political organization. It is a strong advocate of protecting the environment from pollution and nuclear waste. It advocates personal liberties and universal, high quality and free access to education and health care. Its understanding of socialism includes a socialist economy, where industries, financial institutions, and natural resources are owned by the people as a whole and democratically managed by the people who work in them and use them. Barr is on the Ballot in: CA, CO, FL Learn more about Roseanne Barr and Peace and Freedom Party on Wikipedia.

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• How to get tens of millions of pages indexed by Google bot?

  - by Chris Adragna

  We are currently developing a site that currently has 8 million unique pages that will grow to about 20 million right away, and eventually to about 50 million or more. Before you criticize... Yes, it provides unique, useful content. We continually process raw data from public records and by doing some data scrubbing, entity rollups, and relationship mapping, we've been able to generate quality content, developing a site that's quite useful and also unique, in part due to the breadth of the data. It's PR is 0 (new domain, no links), and we're getting spidered at a rate of about 500 pages per day, putting us at about 30,000 pages indexed thus far. At this rate, it would take over 400 years to index all of our data. I have two questions: Is the rate of the indexing directly correlated to PR, and by that I mean is it correlated enough that by purchasing an old domain with good PR will get us to a workable indexing rate (in the neighborhood of 100,000 pages per day). Are there any SEO consultants who specialize in aiding the indexing process itself. We're otherwise doing very well with SEO, on-page especially, besides, the competition for our "long-tail" keyword phrases is pretty low, so our success hinges mostly on the number of pages indexed. Our main competitor has achieved approx 20MM pages indexed in just over one year's time, along with an Alexa 2000-ish ranking. Noteworthy qualities we have in place: page download speed is pretty good (250-500 ms) no errors (no 404 or 500 errors when getting spidered) we use Google webmaster tools and login daily friendly URLs in place I'm afraid to submit sitemaps. Some SEO community postings suggest a new site with millions of pages and no PR is suspicious. There is a Google video of Matt Cutts speaking of a staged on-boarding of large sites, too, in order to avoid increased scrutiny (at approx 2:30 in the video). Clickable site links deliver all pages, no more than four pages deep and typically no more than 250(-ish) internal links on a page. Anchor text for internal links is logical and adds relevance hierarchically to the data on the detail pages. We had previously set the crawl rate to the highest on webmaster tools (only about a page every two seconds, max). I recently turned it back to "let Google decide" which is what is advised.

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• Difference between the terms Material & Effect

  - by codey

  I'm making an effect system right now (I think, because it may be a material system... or both!). The effects system follows the common (e.g. COLLADA, DirectX) effect framework abstraction of Effects have Techniques, Techniques have Passes, Passes have States & Shader Programs. An effect, according to COLLADA, defines the equations necessary for the visual appearance of geometry and screen-space image processing. Keeping with the abstraction, effects contain techniques. Each effect can contain one or many techniques (i.e. ways to generate the effect), each of which describes a different method for rendering that effect. The technique could be relate to quality (e.g. high precision, high LOD, etc.), or in-game-situation (e.g. night/day, power-up-mode, etc.). Techniques hold a description of the textures, samplers, shaders, parameters, & passes necessary for rendering this effect using one method. Some algorithms require several passes to render the effect. Pipeline descriptions are broken into an ordered collection of Pass objects. A pass provides a static declaration of all the render states, shaders, & settings for "one rendering pipeline" (i.e. one pass). Meshes usually contain a series of materials that define the model. According to the COLLADA spec (again), a material instantiates an effect, fills its parameters with values, & selects a technique. But I see material defined differently in other places, such as just the Lambert, Blinn, Phong "material types/shaded surfaces", or as Metal, Plastic, Wood, etc. In game dev forums, people often talk about implementing a "material/effect system". Is the material not an instance of an effect? Ergo, if I had effect objects, stored in a collection, & each effect instance object with there own parameter setting, then there is no need for the concept of a material... Or am I interpreting it wrong? Please help by contributing your interpretations as I want to be clear on a distinction (if any), & don't want to miss out on the concept of a material if it should be implemented to follow the abstraction of the DirectX FX framework & COLLADA definitions closely.

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• Business Choices and Evony

  - by Robert May

  Recently, I’ve been playing a game called Evony, and I finally decided to quit the game and thought I should warn others who might be tempted.  I also find a lot of insight with this game as an example.  A few of the companies that I’ve worked with or worked for have been like this and they are NOT good places to be. Evony is a joke designed to milk as much money out of people as possible.  As a professional software developer who mentors teams on how to build better software, here's what I see: They obviously offshore all development and have little oversight over that offshore development, and they probably have a small team at that.  Evidenced by the poor grammar throughout the game. They're seeking to maximize revenue and pushing to do as little development as possible, which would mean a small team. They're horribly understaffed in the customer support department as evidenced by never replying to this forum and never responding to bug reports or help requests (I've had one open with no response AT ALL for over a month . . .) They have way inadequate testing, no CI, and probably no automated unit tests.  You can see this by the poor grammar throughout the game and the type of bugs that show up. They aren't following a formal development process (no Agile, Waterfall, or anything else) as evidenced by their lack of predictable release cycle and lack of visibility. I'm guessing that the internal code base is terrible, otherwise, there wouldn't be an "Age II" that had nothing more than a new visual interface and a few rule tweaks.  This is also evidenced by the itty bitty scope of bug fixes and their inability to really fix bugs. Their Architect sucks.  Really, 42k user is all you can handle on a single server?  Could you REALLY not come up with a better way to scale to handle users?  They've built isolated worlds, instead of a single continuous world. Back to milking people for money--to really progress, you have to spend money. All of this adds up to knowing, deliberate actions on the part of management.  They CHOOSE to do this (like AOL choosing to send more discs instead of improve quality). So, what can we learn? This game will never really improve, since the bosses don't care, they're only in it for the money. The game will never have good support.  Again, the owners don't care. Giving them money only perpetuates this scam (and yes, I've given them money, way too much money. :() They don't care if you quit.  There's a new sucker born every day. Don't EVER go to work for them.  I've worked both with and for people like this and the culture is NEVER good. Ah well. Technorati Tags: Evony

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• Where Are You on the Visualization Maturity Curve?

  - by Celine Beck

  The old phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” is as true now as ever. Providing the right users with access to the right product data, at the right time, can provide significant benefits to a business. This is especially evident with increasing technical and product complexities, elongated supply chains, and growing pressure to bring innovative products to market faster. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why visualization is an integral part of any successful product lifecycle management (PLM) strategy. At a bare minimum, knowledge workers use multiple individual documents of different formats and structure, and leverage visualization solutions to access information; but the real value of visualization can be fully reaped when it is connected to enterprise applications like PLM and tied to the appropriate business context. The picture below illustrates this visualization maturity curve, as we presented during the last Oracle Open World and the transformational effect that visualization can have on PLM processes and performance (check out the post about AutoVue Key Highlights from Oracle Open World 2012 for more information). Organizations are likely to see greater positive impact on business performance when visualization is connected to enterprise systems, allowing access to information coming from multiple sources, such as PLM, supply chain management (SCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). This allows organizations to reach higher levels of collaboration and optimize decision-making capacity as users can benefit from in-context access to visual information. For instance, within a PLM system, a design engineer can access a product assembly and review digital annotations added by other users specific to the engineering change request he is reviewing rather than all historical annotations. The last stage on the curve is what we call augmented business visualization (ABV).  ABV is an innovative framework which lets structured data (from Oracle’s Agile PLM for instance) interact with unstructured data (documents, design, 3D models, etc). With this new level of integration, information coming from multiple sources can be presented in a highly visual fashion; color displays can be used in order to identify parts with specific characteristics (for example pending quality issues) and you can take actions directly from within the context of documents and designs, maximizing user productivity. Those who had the chance to attend our PLM session during Oracle Open World already got a sneak peek of our latest augmented business visualization for Oracle’s Agile PLM. The solution generated a lot of wows. Stephen Porter, CEO at Zero Wait State, indicated in a post entitled “The PLM State: the Manhattan Project-Oracle’s Next Big Secret Weapon” that “this kind of synergy between visualization and PLM could qualify as a powerful weapon differentiating Agile PLM from other solutions.” If you are interested in learning more about ABV for Oracle’s Agile PLM and hear about real examples of usage of visualization at all stages of the visualization maturity curve, don’t miss our Visual Decision Making to Optimize New Product Development and Introduction session during the Oracle Value Chain Summit (Feb. 4-6, 2013, San Francisco). We look forward to seeing you there!

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• CAM v2.0 ships – all new foundation version

  - by drrwebber

  The latest release of the CAM editor toolset is now available on Sourceforge.net – search NIEM. In this all new version the support from Oracle has enabled a transformation of the editor underpinning Java framework and results in 3x performance improvement and 50% better memory utilization. The result of nearly six months of improvements are catalogued in the release notes. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor/files/CAM%20Editor/Releases/2.0/CAM_Editor_2-0_Release_Notes.pdf/download However here I’d like to talk about the strategic vision and highlight specific new go to features that make a difference for exchange schema designers and with a focus on the NIEM community. So why is this a foundation version? Basically the new drag and drop designer tool allows you to tailor your own dictionary collection of components and then simply select and position those into your resulting exchange structure. This is true global reuse enabled from a canonical domain dictionary collection. So instead of grappling with XSD Schema syntax, or UML model nuances – this is straightforward direct WYSIWYG visual engineering – using familiar sets of business components. Then the toolkit writes the complex XSD Schema for you, along with test samples, documentation, XMI/UML models, Mindmaps and more. So how do you get a set of business components? The toolkit allows you to harvest these from existing schema collections or enterprise data models, or as in the case of NIEM, existing domain dictionary collections. I’ve been using this for the latest IEEE/OASIS/NIST initiative on a Common Data Format (CDF) for elections management systems. So you can download those from OASIS and see how this can transform how you build actual business exchanges – improving the quality, consistency and usability – and dramatically allowing automated generation of artifacts you only dreamed of before – such as a model of your entire major exchange collection components. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=election So what we have here is a foundation version – setting the scene and the basis for changing how people can generate and manage information exchanges. A foundation built using the OASIS CAM standard combined with aspects of the NIEM Naming and Design Rules and the UN/CEFACT Core Components specifications and emerging work on OASIS CIQ name and address and ANSI/ISO code list schema. We still have a raft of work to do to integrate this into SOA best practices and extend the dictionary capabilities to assist true community development. Answering questions such as: - How good is my canonical component collection? - How much reuse is really occurring? - What inconsistencies and extensions are there in the dictionary components? Expect us to begin tackling these areas now that the foundation is in place. The immediate need is to develop training and self-start materials – so we will be focusing there for the next couple of months and especially leading up to the IJIS industry event in July in New Jersey, and the NIEM NTE event in August in Philadelphia. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor

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