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  • How to change ownership of a domain name from "missing" web designer

    - by Stuart
    Hi, We had a website produced a few years ago with a .ORG domain name. The site hadn't grown with our needs, so we've now got a new .co.uk site. Our intention was to transfer the .org address to the new site on completion. Our new site is to go live soon, but the original .ORG site has gone offline (hosting expired I believe as the expiry date for the .ORG is in 2012) and we now discover that the .ORG domain name is registered to the web designer and not to anyone in our organisation. The WHOIS information gives us the technical contact as discountasp.net. What are the steps we can take here? Our primary concern is getting the name servers changed (the current .ORG address goes nowhere) and ultimately we need to transfer ownership? The organisation in question is a community, non-profit organisation, so our pockets are not deep. Thanks in advance for any help. Stuart.

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  • IASA Sessions on Social Networking Note Influence of Millennial Generation on Insurance Technology

    - by [email protected]
    Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance is blogging from the 2010 IASA Annual Conference and Business Show this week. Social networking continues to be a buzzword for many in the industry. Erin Esurance, the Geico Gecko and even Nationwide's "The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World" all have a prominent presence in the social media world. Sessions at the 2010 IASA Annual Conference and Business Show this week in Grapevine, Texas, highlighted how the millennial generation's exploding use of social media is spurring more carriers to leverage tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks to engage prospect and customers. While panelists encouraged carriers to leverage social networking tools for marketing and communications, they expressed the need for caution and corporate governance when it comes to using the tools as a part of claims, underwriting, and human resources recruitment business practices, and interactions with producers. (A previous Oracle Insurance blog entry by my colleague Susan Keuer noted that social networking and its impact on the underwriting process was also a hot topic at the recent AHOU conference.) Speaking of the millennial generation, IASA announced a new scholarship program and awarded three scholarships during the association's conference this week. The IASA Insurance Industry Collegiate Scholarship Program awards $2,000 scholarships to students in their second or third year of college who are studying an insurance-related field at a four-year college or university. The IASA scholarship committee is co-chaired by Wendy Gibson, vice president of business development for Oracle Insurance. Gibson, a long time IASA volunteer, is completing her second term on IASA's volunteer management team as vice president of industry relations. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance.

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  • Access Insurance Company Wins 2010 Technology Innovation Award at IASA

    - by [email protected]
    Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, is blogging from the 2010 IASA Annual Conference and Business Show this week. For the second time in two weeks an Oracle Insurance customer has earned recognition at an insurance industry event for its innovative use of technology to transform their business. Access Insurance Company received the 2010 Technology Innovation Award during the 2010 IASA Annual Conference and Business Show this week in Grapevine, Texas. The company earned the recognition for its "Instant Access" application, which executes all the business rules and processes needed to provide a quote, bind, and issue a policy. CIO Andy Dunn and Tim Reynolds stopped by the Oracle Insurance Booth at IASA to visit with the team, show their award, and share how the platform has provided a strategic advantage to the company and helped it increase revenue by penetrating new markets, increasing market share and improving customer retention. Since implementing Instant Access in 2009 - a platform that leverages both Oracle Insurance Insbridge Rating and Underwriting and Oracle Documaker - the carrier has: Increased policies in force by 22%, from 140,185 to more than 270,000 Grown market share by 4.6% Increased 2009 revenue by 26.5% Increased ratio of policyholders per CSR by 30% Increased its appointed independent producers by 43 percent Now that's true innovation! You can learn more about the company's formula for success by reading Access Insurance Holdings CEO and president Michael McMenamin's interview with Insurance & Technology, Data Mastery Drives Access Insurance's 'Instant Access' Business Technology Platform. Congratulations to Michael, Andy, Tim and the entire team at Access Insurance on this well deserved honor - and for your role as a technology leader for the industry. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance.

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  • Innovation, Adaptability and Agility Emerge As Common Themes at ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum

    - by [email protected]
    Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance is blogging from the show floor of the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Sessions at the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week highlighted the need for insurance companies to think creatively and be innovative with their technology in order to adapt to continuously shifting market dynamics and drive business efficiency and agility.  LOMA President & CEO Robert Kerzner kicked off the day on Tuesday, citing how the recent downtown and recovery has impacted the insurance industry and the ways that companies are doing business.  He encouraged carriers to look for new ways to deliver solutions and offer a better service experience for consumers.  ACORD President & CEO Gregory Maciag reinforced Kerzner's remarks, noting how the industry's approach to technology and development of industry standards has evolved over the association's 40-year history and cited how the continued rise of mobile computing will change the way many carriers are doing business today and in the future. Drawing from his own experiences, popular keynote speaker and Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak continued this theme, delving into ways that insurers can unite business with technology.  "iWoz" encouraged insurers to foster an entrepreneurial mindset in a corporate environment to create a culture of creativity and innovation.  He noted that true innovation in business comes from those who have a passion for what they do.  Innovation was also a common theme in several sessions throughout the day with topics ranging from modernization of core systems, automated underwriting, distribution management, CRM and customer communications management.  It was evident that insurers have begun to move past the "old school" processes and systems that constrain agility, implementing new process models and modern technology to become nimble and more adaptive to the market.   Oracle Insurance executives shared a few examples of how insurers are achieving innovation during our Platinum Sponsor session, "Adaptive System Transformation:  Making Agility More Than a Buzzword." Oracle Insurance Senior Vice President and General Manager Don Russo was joined by Chuck Johnston, vice president, global strategy and alliances, and Srini Venkatasantham, vice president of product strategy.  The three shared how Oracle's adaptive solutions for insurance, with a focus on how the key pillars of an adaptive systems - configurable applications, accessible information, extensible content and flexible process - have helped insurers respond rapidly, perform effectively and win more business. Insurers looking to innovate their business with adaptive insurance solutions including policy administration, business intelligence, enterprise document automation, rating and underwriting, claims, CRM and more stopped by the Oracle Insurance booth on the exhibit floor.  It was a premiere destination for many participating in the exhibit hall tours conducted throughout the day. Finally, red was definitely the color of the evening at the Oracle Insurance "Red Hot" customer celebration at the House of Blues. The event provided a great opportunity for our customers to come together and network with the Oracle Insurance team and their peers in the industry.  We look forward to visiting more with of our customers and making new connections today. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance. 

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  • Bancassurers Seek IT Solutions to Support Distribution Model

    - by [email protected]
    Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, attended the third annual Bancassurance Forum in Vienna last month. He reports that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. Vienna is at the crossroads between mature Western European markets, where bancassurance is now an established best practice, and more recently tapped Eastern European markets that offer the greatest growth potential. Attendance at the Bancassurance Forum was good, with 87 bancassurance attendees, most in very senior positions in the industry. The conference provided the chance for a lively discussion among bancassurers looking to keep abreast of the latest trends in one of Europe's most successful distribution models for insurance. Even under normal business conditions, there is a great demand for best practice sharing within the industry as there is no standard formula for success.  Each company has to chart its own course and choose the strategies for sales, products development and the structure of ownership that make sense for their business, and as soon as they get it right bancassurers need to adapt the mix to keep up with ever changing regulations, completion and economic conditions.  To optimize the overall relationship between banking and insurance for mutual benefit, a balance needs to be struck between potentially conflicting interests. The banking side of the house is looking for greater wallet share from its customers and the ability to increase profitability by bundling insurance products with higher margins - especially in light of the recent economic crisis, where margins for traditional banking products are low and completion high. The insurance side of the house seeks access to new customers through a complementary distribution channel that is efficient and cost effective. To make the relationship work, it is important that both sides of the same house forge strategic and long term relationships - irrespective of whether the underlying business model is supported by a distribution agreement, cross-ownership or other forms of capital structure. However, this third annual conference was not held under normal business conditions. The conference took place in challenging, yet interesting times. ING's forced spinoff of its insurance operations under pressure by the EU Commission and the troubling losses suffered by Allianz as a result of the Dresdner bank sale were fresh in everyone's mind. One year after markets crashed, there is now enough hindsight to better understand the implications for bancassurance and best practices that are emerging to deal with them. The loan-driven business that has been crucial to bancassurance up till now evaporated during the crisis, leaving bancassurers grappling with how to change their overall strategy from a loan-driven to a more diversified model.  Attendees came to the conference to learn what strategies were working - not only to cope with the market shift, but to take advantage of it as markets pick up. Over the course of 14 customer case studies and numerous analyst presentations, topical issues ranging from getting the business model right to the impact on capital structuring of Solvency II were debated openly. Many speakers alluded to the need to specifically design insurance products with the banking distribution channel in mind, which brings with it specific requirements such as a high degree of standardization to achieve efficiency and reduce training costs. Moreover, products must be engineered to suit end consumers who consider banks a one-stop shop. The importance of IT to the successful implementation of bancassurance strategies was a theme that surfaced regularly throughout the conference.  The cross-selling opportunity - that will ultimately determine the success or failure of any bancassurance model - can only be fully realized through a flexible IT architecture that enables banking and insurance processes to be integrated and presented to front-line staff through a common interface. However, the reality is that most bancassurers have legacy IT systems, which constrain the businesses' ability to implement new strategies to maintaining competitiveness in turbulent times. My colleague Glenn Lottering, who chaired the conference, believes that the primary opportunities for bancassurers to extract value from their IT infrastructure investments lie in distribution management, risk management with the advent of Solvency II, and achieving operational excellence. "Oracle is ideally suited to meet the needs of bancassurance," Glenn noted, "supplying market-leading software for both banking and insurance. Oracle provides adaptive systems that let customers easily integrate hybrid business processes from both worlds while leveraging existing IT infrastructure." Overall, the consensus at the conference was that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.    

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  • Spotlight on Claims: Serving Customers Under Extreme Conditions

    - by [email protected]
    Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, recently attended the CII Spotlight on Claims event in London. Bad weather and its implications for the insurance industry have become very topical as the frequency and diversity of natural disasters - including rains, wind and snow - has surged across Europe this winter. On England's wettest day on record, the county of Cumbria was flooded with 12 inches of rain within 24 hours. Freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on European travel, causing high speed TVG trains to break down and stranding hundreds of passengers under the English Chanel in a tunnel all night long without heat or electricity. A storm named Xynthia thrashed France and surrounding countries with hurricane force, flooding ports and killing 51 people. After the Spring Equinox, insurers may have thought the worst had past. Then came along Eyjafjallajökull, spewing out vast quantities of volcanic ash in what is turning out to be one of most costly natural disasters in history. Such extreme events challenge insurance companies' ability to service their customers just when customers need their help most. When you add economic downturn and competitive pressures to the mix, insurers are further stretched and required to continually learn and innovate to meet high customer expectations with reduced budgets. These and other issues were hot topics of discussion at the recent "Spotlight on Claims" seminar in London, focused on how weather is affecting claims and the insurance industry. The event was organized by the CII (Chartered Insurance Institute), a group with 90,000 members. CII has been at the forefront in setting professional standards for the insurance industry for over a century. Insurers came to the conference to hear how they could better serve their customers under extreme weather conditions, learn from the experience of their peers, and hear about technological breakthroughs in climate modeling, geographic intelligence and IT. Customer case studies at the conference highlighted the importance of effective and constant communication in handling the overflow of catastrophe related claims. First and foremost is the need to rapidly establish initial communication with claimants to build their confidence in a positive outcome. Ongoing communication then needs to be continued throughout the claims cycle to mange expectations and maintain ownership of the process from start to finish. Strong internal communication to support frontline staff was also deemed critical to successful crisis management, as was communication with the broader insurance ecosystem to tap into extended resources and business intelligence. Advances in technology - such web based systems to access policies and enter first notice of loss in the field - as well as customer-focused self-service portals and multichannel alerts, are instrumental in improving customer satisfaction and helping insurers to deal with the claims surge, which often can reach four or more times normal workloads. Dynamic models of the global climate system can now be used to better understand weather-related risks, and as these models mature it is hoped that they will soon become more accurate in predicting the timing of catastrophic events. Geographic intelligence is also being used within a claims environment to better assess loss reserves and detect fraud. Despite these advances in dealing with catastrophes and predicting their occurrence, there will never be a substitute for qualified front line staff to deal with customers. In light of pressures to streamline efficiency, there was debate as to whether outsourcing was the solution, or whether it was better to build on the people you have. In the final analysis, nearly everybody agreed that in the future insurance companies would have to work better and smarter to keep on top. An appeal was also made for greater collaboration amongst industry participants in dealing with the extreme conditions and systematic stress brought on by natural disasters. It was pointed out that the public oftentimes judged the industry as a whole rather than the individual carriers when it comes to freakish events, and that all would benefit at such times from the pooling of limited resources and professional skills rather than competing in silos for competitive advantage - especially the end customer. One case study that stood out was on how The Motorists Insurance Group was able to power through one of the most devastating catastrophes in recent years - Hurricane Ike. The keys to Motorists' success were superior people, processes and technology. They did a lot of upfront planning and invested in their people, creating a healthy team environment that delivered "max service" even when they were experiencing the same level of devastation as the rest of the population. Processes were rapidly adapted to meet the challenge of the catastrophe and continually adapted to Ike's specific conditions as they evolved. Technology was fundamental to the execution of their strategy, enabling them anywhere access, on the fly reassigning of resources and rapid training to augment the work force. You can learn more about the Motorists experience by watching this video. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.

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  • American Modern Insurance Group recognized at 2010 INN VIP Best Practices Awards

    - by [email protected]
    Below: Helen Pitts (right), Oracle Insurance, congratulates Bruce Weisgerber, Munich Re, as he accepts a VIP Best Practices Award on behalf of American Modern Insurance Group.     Oracle Insurance Senior Product Marketing Manager Helen Pitts is attending the 2010 ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, and will be providing updates from the show floor. This is one of my favorite seasons of the year--insurance trade show season. It is a time to reconnect with peers, visit with partners, make new industry connections, and celebrate our customers' achievements. It's especially meaningful when we can share the experience of having one of our Oracle Insurance customers recognized for being an innovator in its business and in the industry. Congratulations to American Modern Insurance Group, part of the Munich Re Group. American Modern earned an Insurance Networking News (INN) 2010 VIP Best Practice Award yesterday evening during the 2010 ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum. The award recognizes an insurer's best practice for use of a specific technology and the role, if feasible, that ACORD data standards played as a part of their business and technology. American Modern received an Honorable Mention for leveraging the Oracle Documaker enterprise document automation solution to: Improve the quality of communications with customers in high value, high-touch lines of business Convert thousands of page elements or "forms" from their previous system, with near pixel-perfect accuracy Increase efficiency and reusability by storing all document elements (fonts, logos, approved wording, etc.) in one place Issue on-demand documents, such as address changes or policy transactions to multiple recipients at once Consolidate all customer communications onto a single platform Gain the ability to send documents to multiple recipients at once, further improving efficiency Empower agents to produce documents in real time via the Web, such as quotes, applications and policy documents, improving carrier-agent relationships Munich Re's Bruce Weisgerber accepted the award on behalf of American Modern from Lloyd Chumbly, vice president of standards at ACORD. In a press release issued after the ceremony Chumbly noted, "This award embodies a philosophy of efficiency--working smarter with standards, these insurers represent the 'best of the best' as chosen by a body of seasoned insurance industry professionals." We couldn't agree with you more, Lloyd. Congratulations again to American Modern on your continued innovation and success. You're definitely a VIP in our book! To learn more about how American Modern is putting its enterprise document automation strategy into practice, click here to read a case study. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance.

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  • ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

    - by [email protected]
    Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, attended and is blogging from the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Above: Paul Vancheri, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company. Vancheri gave a presentation during the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum about the key elements of modern policy administration systems and how insurers can mitigate risk during legacy system migrations to safely introduce new technologies. When I had a few particularly challenging honors courses in college my father, a long-time technology industry veteran, used to say, "If you don't know how to do something go ask the experts. Find someone who has been there and done that, don't be afraid to ask the tough questions, and apply and build upon what you learn." (Actually he still offers this same advice today.) That's probably why my favorite sessions at industry events, like the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week, are those that include insight on industry trends and case studies from carriers who share their experiences and offer best practices based upon their own lessons learned. I had the opportunity to attend a particularly insightful session Wednesday as Craig Weber, senior vice president of Celent's Insurance practice, and Paul Vancheri, CIO of Fidelity Life Investments, presented, "Managing the Dynamic Insurance Landscape: Enabling Growth and Profitability with a Modern Policy Administration System." Policy Administration Trends Growing the business is the top issue when it comes to IT among both life and annuity and property and casualty carriers according to Weber. To drive growth and capture market share from competitors, carriers are looking to modernize their core insurance systems, with 65 percent of those CIOs participating in recent Celent research citing plans to replace their policy administration systems. Weber noted that there has been continued focus and investment, particularly in the last three years, by software and technology vendors to offer modern, rules-based, configurable policy administration solutions. He added that these solutions are continuing to evolve with the ongoing aim of helping carriers rapidly meet shifting business needs--whether it is to launch new products to market faster than the competition, adapt existing products to meet shifting consumer and /or regulatory demands, or to exit unprofitable markets. He closed by noting the top four trends for policy administration either in the process of being adopted today or on the not-so-distant horizon for the future: Underwriting and service desktops New business automation Convergence of ultra-configurable and domain content-rich systems Better usability and screen design Mitigating the Risk When Making the Decision to Modernize Third-party analyst research from advisory firms like Celent was a key part of the due diligence process for Fidelity as it sought a replacement for its legacy policy administration system back in 2005, according to Vancheri. The company's business opportunities were outrunning system capability. Its legacy system had not been upgraded in several years and was deficient from a functionality and currency standpoint. This was constraining the carrier's ability to rapidly configure and bring new and complex products to market. The company sought a new, modern policy administration system, one that would enable it to keep pace with rapid and often unexpected industry changes and ahead of the competition. A cross-functional team that included representatives from finance, actuarial, operations, client services and IT conducted an extensive selection process. This process included deep documentation review, pilot evaluations, demonstrations of required functionality and complex problem-solving, infrastructure integration capability, and the ability to meet the company's desired cost model. The company ultimately selected an adaptive policy administration system that met its requirements to: Deliver ease of use - eliminating paper and rework, while easing the burden on representatives to sell and service annuities Provide customer parity - offering Web-based capabilities in alignment with the company's focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across its business Deliver scalability, efficiency - enabling automation, while simplifying and standardizing systems across its technology stack Offer desired functionality - supporting Fidelity's product configuration / rules management philosophy, focus on customer service and technology upgrade requirements Meet cost requirements - including implementation, professional services and licenses fees and ongoing maintenance Deliver upon business requirements - enabling the ability to drive time to market for new products and flexibility to make changes Best Practices for Addressing Implementation Challenges Based upon lessons learned during the company's implementation, Vancheri advised carriers to evaluate staffing capabilities and cultural impacts, review business requirements to avoid rebuilding legacy processes, factor in dependent systems, and review policies and practices to secure customer data. His formula for success: upfront planning + clear requirements = precision execution. Achieving a Return on Investment Vancheri said the decision to replace their legacy policy administration system and deploy a modern, rules-based system--before the economic downturn occurred--has been integral in helping the company adapt to shifting market conditions, while enabling growth in its direct channel sales of variable annuities. Since deploying its new policy admin system, the company has reduced its average time to market for new products from 12-15 months to 4.5 months. The company has since migrated its other products to the new system and retired its legacy system, significantly decreasing its overall product development cycle. From a processing standpoint Vancheri noted the company has achieved gains in automation, information, and ease of use, resulting in improved real-time data edits, controls for better quality, and tax handling capability. Plus, with by having only one platform to manage, the company has simplified its IT environment and is well positioned to deliver system enhancements for greater efficiencies. Commitment to Continuing the Investment In the short and longer term future Vancheri said the company plans to enhance business functionality to support money movement, wire automation, divorce processing on payout contracts and cost-based tracking improvements. It also plans to continue system upgrades to remain current as well as focus on further reducing cycle time, driving down maintenance costs, and integrating with other products. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance focused on life/annuities and enterprise document automation.

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  • ACORD LOMA 2010: Building Insurance Companies in the Clouds

    - by [email protected]
    Chuck Johnston, vice president of global strategy and alliances for Oracle Insurance, participated in a featured speaking session at ACORD LOMA 2010. He provides an update on his discussions with insurers at the show and after his presentation. Every year I always make a point of walking the show floor at the ACORD LOMA technology conference to visit with colleagues and competitors, and try to get a feel for which way the industry will move over the next 12 months. Insurers are looking for substance in cloud (computing), trying to mix business with pleasure (monetizing social networks), and expect differentiation through commodity (Software as a Service). The disconnect at this show is that most vendors are still struggling with creating a clear path from Facebook to customer intimacy, SaaS to core cost savings and clouds to ubiquitous presence. Vendors need to find new ways to help insurers find the real value in these potentially disruptive technologies by understanding the changes coming to the insurance business and how these new technologies impact the new insurance business. Oracle's approach to understanding the evolving insurance industry comes from a discussion with our customers in our Insurance CIO Council, where one of our customers suggested we buy an insurance company to really understand our customers. We have decided to do the next best thing and build our own model of an insurance company, Alamere Insurance, that uses the latest technologies to transform its own business. Alamere will never issue an actual policy, but it does give us a framework to consider the impacts of changes in the insurance landscape and how Oracle technology meets the challenge or needs to evolve to help our customers be successful. In preparing for my talk at the conference using Alamere as my organizing theme, I found myself reading actuarial memoranda on CSO table changes and articles on underwriting theory that really made me think about my customer's problems first and foremost, and then how Oracle technology can provide answers. As much as I prefer techno-thrillers and sci-fi novels to actuarial papers for plane reading, I got very excited about the idea of putting myself back in the customer shoes I haven't worn in a decade, and really looking at how Oracle can power the Adaptive Insurance Enterprise. Talking to customers and industry people after the session, the idea of Alamere seemed to excite people and I got a lot of suggestions as to what lines of business we should model and where we should focus first on technology uptake. One customer said to a colleague that Oracle's attempt to "share their pain" was unique among vendors. More about Alamere, and the Adaptive Insurance Enterprise next time. Chuck Johnston is vice president of global strategy and alliances for Oracle Insurance.

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  • Compte-rendu Android LiveCode #5 : créer un jeu Android en 1 h avec Project Anarchy

    Bonjour,J'ai eu l'occasion d'assister à la LiveCode Android #5 à Paris, dans l'école d'art digital Isart, pour laquelle Stuart Johnson, développeur chez Havok, avait été invité. Au cours de celle-ci, il a utilisé Project Anarchy pour réaliser un prototype de jeu 3D Android en une heure.Voici donc le compte-rendu de la séance et la page vidéo associée.Durant cette séance, Stuart Johnson nous explique ce qu'est Project Anarchy et nous montre étape par étape comment créer un prototype de jeu en une...

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  • MSTSC RDP over the public internet

    - by stuart Brand
    My first question so please be gentle :) I have a client who is insisting that they have to let their third party vendor support access to there server directly from the internet via RDP. Our policy does not allow direct access to the infrastructure from outside of the data centre for administration except from an approved VPN connection and then virtual desktop there on to the servers. I am now in the situation where I must give good reasons why it is dangerous to use RDP over the public internet. any help would be appreciated Thanks in advance Stuart

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  • KVM switching on the cheap

    - by Stuart Hemming
    I have a machine at home for my personal use. I also have a machine for work. I have a pair of DVI monitors. An ideal set up for a KVM switch. Sadly the cheapest switch I can find that will switch 2 DVI monitors is nearly £300. However, I can get, for just £40, a switch for a single monitor. Is there any reason why I couldn't employ 2 of these much cheaper switches? My thought was to have the keyboard, mouse and one of the monitors in one switch and just the 2nd monitor in the 2nd switch. Logically, I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't work, but I have no real background to be able to say, definatively, whether or not it would. It it makes any difference, both machines are running Win7. Appreciate any thoughts. -- Stuart

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  • Software Diagnostics Tool recommendations for Debugging a Windows 8 freeze

    - by Stuart
    I've had my HP Pavillion dv6 laptop since last November - and it has had 8GB RAM and a 256GB Crucial M4 SSD installed since the start. I use it for software development and it's had a Windows 8 RTM installation since early September. Yesterday I had to give a presentation at a customer site - so used Powerpoint for the first time since installing Win8... since that point my machine has 'frozen' every 2 hours or so after startup. There doesn't seem to be any easy to see reason behind the freeze - the system just freezes, even if I have left it idle with just a desktop there. My immediate suspicion is that the SSD is the mostly likely cause of the problem. I've looked at some of the questions on here - e.g. How do I troubleshoot hardware issues related to a computer freeze/crash? - but don't really want to start taking my laptop apart. Another suspicion is that this might be related to the WiFi adapter (Broadcom 802.11n) since I have noticed that this doesn't seem to play perfectly with things like Hyper-V in Win8. Can anyone recommend any software diagnostic tools that I can run in order to evaluate the health of the SSD or of other parts of the system? Thanks Stuart P.S. I doubt Powerpoint is the cause of this, but I may use it as an excuse never to use it again... More realistically perhaps something got damaged during travel to the customer site?

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  • FireBug not working with ASP.NET MVC

    - by Stuart
    Hi All I have started a new ASP.NET MVC project and have included the ExtJS library files. This all works fine when built from Visual Studio and i can display various ExtJS objects. The problem however is that FireBug has stopped showing errors in the Console, even when i type nonsense into the code block. Setup is: VS 2008 SP1 FireBug 1.4.2 FireFox 3.5.2 Firebug is working with other public web sites and when viewing other PHP based sites I'm developing. Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this? Thanks for any suggestions Stuart

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  • Using LINQ to SQL with multiple databases

    - by Stuart Ferguson
    I am working on a new project and hoping to use LINQ to SQL for the data access but have come across the following issue. I need to have my application access 3 databases with similar but not the same table structure, for example Database1 and Database 2 has a table called tblCustomer with 2 columns CustomerKey and CustomerName Database2 has a table called tblCustomer with 3 columns CustomerKey, CustomerName and CustomerPostCode I am looking for a solution that will allow me a query all three databases without the need for 3 GetCustomerList functions as Database1 and Database2 could use the same function as are the same structure, with an override function for database 3 to bring back the additional field. Is there a way i can declare a base datacontext class to handle Database 1 and 2 with an inherited version for Database 3. Thanks In Advance Stuart Ferguson

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  • MYSQL Fast Insert dependent on flag from a seperate table

    - by Stuart P
    Hi all. For work I'm dealing with a large database (160 million + rows a year, 10 years of data) and have a quandary; A large percentage of the data we upload is null data and I'd like to stop it from being uploaded. The data in question is spatial in nature, so I have one table like so: idLocations (Auto-increment int, PK) X (float) Y (foat) Alwaysignore (Bool) Which is used as a reference in a second table like so: idLocations (Int, PK, "FK") idDates (Int, PK, "FK") DATA1 (float) DATA2 (float) ... DATA7 (float) So, Ideally I'd like to find a method where I can do something like: INSERT INTO tblData(idLocations, idDates, DATA1, ..., DATA7) VALUES (...), ..., (...) WHERE VALUES(idLocations) NOT LIKE (SELECT FROM tblLocation WHERE alwaysignore=TRUE ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE DATA1=VALUES(DATA1) So, for my large batch of input data (250 values in a block), ignore the inserts where the idLocations matches an idLocations values flagged with alwaysignore. Anyone have any suggestions? Cheers. -Stuart Other details: Running MySQL on a semi-dedicated machine, MyISAM engine for the tables.

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  • Best methods for Lazy Initialization with properties

    - by Stuart Pegg
    I'm currently altering a widely used class to move as much of the expensive initialization from the class constructor into Lazy Initialized properties. Below is an example (in c#): Before: public class ClassA { public readonly ClassB B; public void ClassA() { B = new ClassB(); } } After: public class ClassA { private ClassB _b; public ClassB B { get { if (_b == null) { _b = new ClassB(); } return _b; } } } There are a fair few more of these properties in the class I'm altering, and some are not used in certain contexts (hence the Laziness), but if they are used they're likely to be called repeatedly. Unfortunately, the properties are often also used inside the class. This means there is a potential for the private variable (_b) to be used directly by a method without it being initialized. Is there a way to make only the public property (B) available inside the class, or even an alternative method with the same initialized-when-needed?

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  • Iterative Conversion

    - by stuart ramage
    Question Received: I am toying with the idea of migrating the current information first and the remainder of the history at a later date. I have heard that the conversion tool copes with this, but haven't found any information on how it does. Answer: The Toolkit will support iterative conversions as long as the original master data key tables (the CK_* tables) are not cleared down from Staging (the already converted Transactional Data would need to be cleared down) and the Production instance being migrated into is actually Production (we have migrated into a pre-prod instance in the past and then unloaded this and loaded it into the real PROD instance, but this will not work for your situation. You need to be migrating directly into your intended environment). In this case the migration tool will still know all about the original keys and the generated keys for the primary objects (Account, SA, etc.) and as such it will be able to link the data converted as part of a second pass onto these entities. It should be noted that this may result in the original opening balances potentially being displayed with an incorrect value (if we are talking about Financial Transactions) and also that care will have to be taken to ensure that all related objects are aligned (eg. A Bill must have a set to bill segments, meter reads and a financial transactions, and these entities cannot exist independantly). It should also be noted that subsequent runs of the conversion tool would need to be 'trimmed' to ensure that they are only doing work on the objects affected. You would not want to revalidate and migrate all Person, Account, SA, SA/SP, SP and Premise details since this information has already been processed, but you would definitely want to run the affected transactional record validation and keygen processes. There is no real "hard-and-fast" rule around this processing since is it specific to each implmentations needs, but the majority of the effort required should be detailed in the Conversion Tool section of the online help (under Adminstration/ The Conversion Tool). The major rule is to ensure that you only run the steps and validation/keygen steps that you need and do not do a complete rerun for your subsequent conversion.

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  • BizTalk 2009 - The Community ODBC Adapter: Installation

    - by Stuart Brierley
    I have previsouly detailed the installation of MySQL, the configuration of MySQL and the installation of the ODBC Data Connector for MySQL.  The reason I needed to install and configure these servers was to provide a test environment for a BizTalk Server 2009 solution I am working on where BizTalk will be querying and populating a MySQL database. To do this I then needed to install and add the Community ODBC adapter from Two Connect: "The Community BizTalk Adapter for ODBC is based on the code that was first made available on GotDotNet a few years ago. TwoConnect has refreshed this code, added an installer, and tested it against the latest BizTalk editions. We are releasing the updates back to the BizTalk developer, user and partner community as part of our ongoing community intitiatives. This is the second adapter package that TwoConnect makes available to the community after the very succesful release of the BizTalk WSE 3 adapter a couple of years ago. This adapter is useful in all ODBC based integration scenarios. The following are the new features added and fixes made to the old code base on GotDotNet." Detailed below are the installation instructions for this adapter.  Downloading and running the installer will load up the splash screen. Next you need to select the installation location for the adapter. You then need to confirm the installation following which you will be shown the installation progress. Assuming all has gone well you should see the installation complete screen. Once the installation has completed successfully you will then need to add the adapter to your BizTalk Server.  To do this open the BizTalk Administration console, expand the Platform Settings and right click on Adapters then select New\Adapter. You should then be able to select the ODBC adapter and choose the display name for the adapter. This adapter will then be shown in the BizTalk Administration console. Next I will be looking at using the ODBC Adapter when: Generating schemas Creating a receive port Creating a send port

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  • What's the best way of marketing to programmers?

    - by Stuart
    Disclaimer up front - I'm definitely not going to include any links in here - this question isn't part of my marketing! I've had a few projects recently where the end product is something that developers will use. In the past I've been on the receiving end of all sorts of marketing - as a developer I've gotten no end of junk - 1000s of pens, tee-shirts and mouse pads; enough CDs to keep my desk tea-free; some very useful USB keys with some logos I no longer recognise; a small forest's worth of leaflets; a bulging spam folder full of ignored emails, etc... So that's my question - What are good ways to market to developers? And as an aside - are developers the wrong people to target? - since we so often don't have a purchasing budget anyways!

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  • Algorithm to Find the Aggregate Mass of "Granola Bar"-Like Structures?

    - by Stuart Robbins
    I'm a planetary science researcher and one project I'm working on is N-body simulations of Saturn's rings. The goal of this particular study is to watch as particles clump together under their own self-gravity and measure the aggregate mass of the clumps versus the mean velocity of all particles in the cell. We're trying to figure out if this can explain some observations made by the Cassini spacecraft during the Saturnian summer solstice when large structures were seen casting shadows on the nearly edge-on rings. Below is a screenshot of what any given timestep looks like. (Each particle is 2 m in diameter and the simulation cell itself is around 700 m across.) The code I'm using already spits out the mean velocity at every timestep. What I need to do is figure out a way to determine the mass of particles in the clumps and NOT the stray particles between them. I know every particle's position, mass, size, etc., but I don't know easily that, say, particles 30,000-40,000 along with 102,000-105,000 make up one strand that to the human eye is obvious. So, the algorithm I need to write would need to be a code with as few user-entered parameters as possible (for replicability and objectivity) that would go through all the particle positions, figure out what particles belong to clumps, and then calculate the mass. It would be great if it could do it for "each" clump/strand as opposed to everything over the cell, but I don't think I actually need it to separate them out. The only thing I was thinking of was doing some sort of N2 distance calculation where I'd calculate the distance between every particle and if, say, the closest 100 particles were within a certain distance, then that particle would be considered part of a cluster. But that seems pretty sloppy and I was hoping that you CS folks and programmers might know of a more elegant solution? Edited with My Solution: What I did was to take a sort of nearest-neighbor / cluster approach and do the quick-n-dirty N2 implementation first. So, take every particle, calculate distance to all other particles, and the threshold for in a cluster or not was whether there were N particles within d distance (two parameters that have to be set a priori, unfortunately, but as was said by some responses/comments, I wasn't going to get away with not having some of those). I then sped it up by not sorting distances but simply doing an order N search and increment a counter for the particles within d, and that sped stuff up by a factor of 6. Then I added a "stupid programmer's tree" (because I know next to nothing about tree codes). I divide up the simulation cell into a set number of grids (best results when grid size ˜7 d) where the main grid lines up with the cell, one grid is offset by half in x and y, and the other two are offset by 1/4 in ±x and ±y. The code then divides particles into the grids, then each particle N only has to have distances calculated to the other particles in that cell. Theoretically, if this were a real tree, I should get order N*log(N) as opposed to N2 speeds. I got somewhere between the two, where for a 50,000-particle sub-set I got a 17x increase in speed, and for a 150,000-particle cell, I got a 38x increase in speed. 12 seconds for the first, 53 seconds for the second, 460 seconds for a 500,000-particle cell. Those are comparable speeds to how long the code takes to run the simulation 1 timestep forward, so that's reasonable at this point. Oh -- and it's fully threaded, so it'll take as many processors as I can throw at it.

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  • BizTalk - Removing BAM Activities and Views using bm.exe

    - by Stuart Brierley
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/StuartBrierley/archive/2013/10/16/biztalk---removing-bam-activities-and-views-using-bm.exe.aspxOn the project I am currently working on, we are making quite extensive use of BAM within our growing number of BizTalk applications, all of which are being deployed and undeployed using the excellent Deployment Framework for BizTalk 5.0.Recently I had an issue where problems on the build server had left the target development servers in a state where the BAM activities and views for a particular application were not being removed by the undeploy process and unfortunately the definition in the solution had changed meaning that I could not easily recreate the file from source control.  To get around this I used the bm.exe application from the command line to manually remove the problem BAM artifacts - bm.exe can be found at the following path:C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010\TrackingC:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010\TrackingStep1 :Get the BAM Definition FileRun the following command to get the BAm definition file, containing the details of all the activities, views and alerts:bm.exe get-defxml -FileName:{Path and File Name Here}.xmlStep 2: Remove the BAM ArtifactsAt this stage I chose to manually remove each of my problem BAM activities and views using seperate command line calls.  By looking in the definition file I could see the names of the activities and views that I wanted to remove and then use the following commands to remove first the views and then the activities:bm.exe remove-view -name:{viewname}bm.exe remove-activity -name:{activityname}

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  • MySQL - Installation

    - by Stuart Brierley
    In order to create a development environment for a project I am working on, I recently needed to install MySQL Server.  The first step was to download the msi. Running this presents you with the installer splash screen, detailing the version of MySQL that you are about to install - in this case MySQL Server 5.1. Next you can choose whether to install a Typical, Complete or Custom installation.  Although this is the first time I have installed MySQL and the Custom option states "Recommended for advanced users" I opted to carry out a Custom installation, specifically so that I could be sure of what features and components were installed. On the Custom Setup screen you can choose which components to install.  By default the Developer Components are not included, but I opted to include some of these elements. Next up is the ready to install screen and then the intsallation progress.   Following the completion of the installation you are shown a few screens with details of the MySQL Enterprise subscription option. Finally the installation is complete and you are offered the chance to configure and register MySQL. Next I will be looking at the configuration of MySQL Server 5.1.

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  • BizTalk Pipeline Component Error: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object"

    - by Stuart Brierley
    Yesterday I posted about my BizTalk Archiving Pipeline Component, which can be found on Codeplex if anyone is interested in taking a look. During testing of this component I began to encounter an error whereby the component would throw an "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error when processing as a part of a Custom Pipeline. This was occurring when the component was reading a ReadOnlySeekableStream so that the data can be archived to file, but the actual code throwing the error was somewhere in the depths of the Microsoft.BizTalk.Streaming stack. It turns out that there is a known issue where this exception can be thrown because the garbage collector has disposed of of the stream before execution of the custom pipeline has completed. To get around this you need to add the streams in your code to the pipeline context resource tracker.   So a block of my code goes from:                         originalStrm = bodyPart.GetOriginalDataStream();                         if (!originalStrm.CanSeek)                         {                             ReadOnlySeekableStream seekableStream = new ReadOnlySeekableStream(originalStrm);                             inmsg.BodyPart.Data = seekableStream;                             originalStrm = inmsg.BodyPart.Data;                         }                         fileArchive = new FileStream(FullPath, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write);                         binWriter = new BinaryWriter(fileArchive);                         byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize];                         int sizeRead = 0;                         while ((sizeRead = originalStrm.Read(buffer, 0, bufferSize)) != 0)                         {                             binWriter.Write(buffer, 0, sizeRead);                         } to                         originalStrm = bodyPart.GetOriginalDataStream();                         if (!originalStrm.CanSeek)                         {                             ReadOnlySeekableStream seekableStream = new ReadOnlySeekableStream(originalStrm);                             inmsg.BodyPart.Data = seekableStream;                             originalStrm = inmsg.BodyPart.Data;                         }                         pc.ResourceTracker.AddResource(originalStrm);                         fileArchive = new FileStream(FullPath, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write);                         binWriter = new BinaryWriter(fileArchive);                         byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize];                         int sizeRead = 0;                         while ((sizeRead = originalStrm.Read(buffer, 0, bufferSize)) != 0)                         {                             binWriter.Write(buffer, 0, sizeRead);                         } So far this seems to have solved the issue, the error is no more, and my archive component is continuing its way through testing.

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