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• This Week In Geek History: The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Compact Discs, and Whirlwind Foreshadows Operating Systems

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Every week we look at fascinating facts and trivia from the history of Geekdom. This week we’re taking a look at The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Compact Discs, and Whirlwind, the first computer to foreshadow modern operating systems. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Make Disposable Sleeves for Your In-Ear Monitors Macs Don’t Make You Creative! So Why Do Artists Really Love Apple? MacX DVD Ripper Pro is Free for How-To Geek Readers (Time Limited!) HTG Explains: What’s a Solid State Drive and What Do I Need to Know? How to Get Amazing Color from Photos in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Learn To Adjust Contrast Like a Pro in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Bring the Grid to Your Desktop with the TRON Legacy Theme for Windows 7 The Dark Knight and Team Fortress 2 Mashup Movie Trailer [Video] Dirt Cheap DSLR Viewfinder Improves Outdoor DSLR LCD Visibility Lakeside Sunset in the Mountains [Wallpaper] Taskbar Meters Turn Your Taskbar into a System Resource Monitor Create Shortcuts for Your Favorite or Most Used Folders in Ubuntu

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• Measuring daemon CPU utilization over a portion of it's wall clock run time

  - by WhirlWind

  I am dealing with a network-related daemon: it takes data in, processes it, and spits it out. I would like to increase the performance of this daemon by profiling it and reducing it's CPU utilization. I can do this easily on Linux with gprof. However, I would also like to use something like "time" to measure it's total CPU utilization over a period of time. If possible, I would like to time it over a period that is less than its total run time: thus, I would like to start the daemon, wait awhile, generate CPU statistics, stop generating them, then stop the daemon at some later time. The "time" command would work well for me, but it seems to require that I start and stop the daemon as a child of time. Is there a way to measure CPU utilization for only a portion of the daemon's wall clock time?

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• Wait, Chrome Dev Tools could do THAT?

  Wait, Chrome Dev Tools could do THAT? Your browser is one of the most and best instrumented development platforms -- you may just not realize it yet. In this episode we'll take a whirlwind tour of how to analyze network performance, rendering and layout pipeline, as well as detecting memory leaks in your Javascript code, and using audits and extensions to build faster and better apps! From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 207 16 ratings Time: 33:40 More in Science & Technology

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• Compressibility Example

  - by user285726

  From my algorithms textbook: The annual county horse race is bringing in three thoroughbreds who have never competed against one another. Excited, you study their past 200 races and summarize these as prob- ability distributions over four outcomes: first (“first place”), second, third, and other. Outcome Aurora Whirlwind Phantasm 0.15 0.30 0.20 first 0.10 0.05 0.30 second 0.70 0.25 0.30 third 0.05 0.40 0.20 other Which horse is the most predictable? One quantitative approach to this question is to look at compressibility. Write down the history of each horse as a string of 200 values (first, second, third, other). The total number of bits needed to encode these track- record strings can then be computed using Huffman’s algorithm. This works out to 290 bits for Aurora, 380 for Whirlwind, and 420 for Phantasm (check it!). Aurora has the shortest encoding and is therefore in a strong sense the most predictable. How did they get 420 for Phantasm? I keep getting 400 bytes, as so: Combine first, other = 0.4, combine second, third = 0.6. End up with 2 bits encoding each position. Is there something I've misunderstood about the Huffman encoding algorithm? Textbook available here: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html (page 156).

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• Keeping It Real With Microsoft Office: Asking Questions About Solution Design

  I just finished a whirlwind swing through Amsterdam, The Hague, Antwerp, and finally Vienna Austria. I've already blogged about the first three cities, but this last one is the focus of this post. I went to Vienna mainly to meet with some customers in order to provide guidance around Office solutions and also to gather input and feedback. Most of my time on Friday 2 April was spent meeting with Rubicon, one of our Gold Partners based in Vienna. Thomas Kuhta, CEO for Rubicon, and his team including...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Google I/O 2010 - What's hot in Java for App Engine

  Google I/O 2010 - What's hot in Java for App Engine Google I/O 2010 - What's hot in Java for App Engine App Engine 201 Toby Reyelts, Don Schwarz Learn what's new with Java on App Engine. We'll take a whirlwind tour through the changes since last year, walk through a code sample for task queues and the new blobstore service, and demonstrate techniques for improving your application's performance. We'll top it off with a glimpse into some new features that we've planned for the year ahead. For all I/O 2010 sessions, please go to code.google.com From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 8 0 ratings Time: 01:02:10 More in Science & Technology

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• GDD-BR 2010 [1B] What's New in Google App Engine and GAE for Business

  GDD-BR 2010 [1B] What's New in Google App Engine and GAE for Business Speaker: Patrick Chanezon Track: Cloud Computing Time: B[11:15 - 12:00] Room: 1 Level: 151 Learn what's new with Java on App Engine. We'll take a whirlwind tour through the changes since last year, walk through a code sample for task queues and the new blobstore service, and demonstrate techniques for improving your application's performance. We'll top it off with a glimpse into some new features that we've planned for the year ahead. This session will include an overview of Google App Engine for Business. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 0 0 ratings Time: 49:20 More in Science & Technology

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• Global Indian Developer Summit (GIDS), JavaOne Moscow, Java Summit Chennai

  - by arungupta

  My whirlwind tour of Java EE and GlassFish starts next weekend and covers the following cities in the next 6 weeks: JavaOne and Oracle Develop, Moscow Global Indian Developer Summit, Bangalore Java Summit, Chennai JavaOne, Hyderabad OTN Developer Day, Pune OTN Developer Day, Istanbul Geecon, Poznan JEEConf, Kiev OTN Developer Day, Johannesburg Several other members of the team will be speaking at some of these events as well. Please feel free to reach out to any of us, ask a question, and share your passion. Here is the first set of conferences coming up: Date: Apr 17-18 Schedule My Schedule       Deploying your Java EE 6 Applications in Producion hands-on lab       Technical Keynote       Some other technical sessions Venue: Russian Academy of Sciences Register Connect: @OracleRU Date: April 17-20 Schedule (date decided, time slots TBD) My Schedule: NetBeans/Java EE 6 workshop on April 19th, Other sessions (as listed above) on April 20 Venue: J. N. Tata Auditorium, National Science Symposium Complex, Sir C. V. Raman Avenue, Bangalore, India Register Connect: @GreatIndianDev Date: April 21, 2011 Schedule My Schedule: Java EE 7 at 9:30am, JAX-RS 2.0 at 11am Venue: VELS University Register (FREE) Connect: @jug_c Where will I meet or run with you ? Do ask me to record a video session if you are using GlassFish and would like to share your story at blogs.oracle.com/stories.

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• Open World Day 2

  - by Antony Reynolds

  A Day in the Life of an Oracle OpenWorld Attendee Part III My second full day started with me waking up and realising that I was supposed to meet my friend Tejas Joshi (co-author of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Handbook) at the station in 20 minutes!  Needless to say I didn’t make it, but then I felt better later when I found out he had caught the wrong shuttle bus and ended up at the airport instead of the BART! The morning was spent in the Authors Seminar arranged to give authors a whirlwind tour of Oracle Product updates and strategy plans.  It was useful to see what was happening in areas I knew little or nothing about.  In the afternoon I wandered around Java One, a very different show to OpenWorld with much more bleeding edge stuff and just plain blue sky thinking.  Of course who couldn’t love a show with a full size Duke wondering around and available for photographs. Attended a presentation on a highly available Weblogic JMS environment wich did a great job of laying out to architect a highly available solution. Dinner with customers and then collapsed exhausted into bed!

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• DevTeach Montreal 2012

  - by pluginbaby

  Like every time I am extremely pleased to see DevTeach coming back to my city! DevTeach Montreal will take place in Delta Hotel Centre-Ville on December 10-12th 2012. Note: You need to register to attend. Awesome Content 48 sessions in 8 tracks. 3 Post Conference workshops: Azure, Windows Store apps, BI.     Free events But everything is not paid! DevTeach is strongly dedicated to the dev community and you will also find those free activities (meaning you don’t have to be a conference attendee): Keynote On December 10th at 6:30pm DevTeach keynote is free for anyone (but you need to register). The keynote will be done by Howard Dierking who is a Program Manager on the Azure Application Platform and Tools team. > http://www.devteach.com/Keynote.aspx   Windows Server 2012 Hands-On IT Camp On December 11th at 6:30pm IT Camps presented by Pierre Roman. > http://www.devteach.com/community/   A Whirlwind Tour around Windows Phone 8 Development On December 11th at 6:30pm Windows Phone 8 Camp presented by Paul Laberge. > http://www.devteach.com/community/   See you there!

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• Silverlight User Group of Switzerland (SLUGS)

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Last Thursday, the Silverlight Firestarter event took place in Redmond, and was streamed live to a large audience worldwide (around 20’000 people). Approximately 30 if them were in Wallisellen near Zurich, in Microsoft Switzerland’s offices. This was not only a great occasion to learn more about the future of Silverlight and to see great demos, but also it was the very first meeting of the Silverlight User Group of Switzerland (SLUGS). Having 30 people for a first meeting was a great success, especially if we consider that it was REALLY cold that night, that it had snowed 20 cm the night before! We all had a good time, and 3 lucky winners went back home with a prize: One LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone and two copies of Silverlight 4 Unleashed. Congratulations to the winners! After the keynote (which went in a whirlwind, shortest 90 minutes ever!), we all had pizza and beverages generously sponsored by the Swiss DPE team, of which not less than 5 guys came to the event! Thanks to Stefano, Ronnie, Sascha, Big Mike and Ken for attending! We decided to have meetings every month. Stay tuned for announcements on when and where the events will take place. We are also in the process of creating various groups online where the attendees can find more information. For instance, I created a group on Flickr where the pictures taken at events will be published. The group is public, and the pictures of the first event are already online! We also have the already known page at http://www.slugs.ch/, check it out. A national group Even though the first event was in Zurich, and that 3 of the founding members live nearby, we would like to try and be a national group. That means having events sometimes in other parts of Switzerland, collaborating with other local user groups, etc. Stay tuned for more Join! We want you, we need you If you are doing Silverlight, for a living or as a hobby, if you are interested in user experience, XAML, Expression Blend and many more topics, you should consider joining! This is a great occasion to exchange experiences, to learn from Silverlight experts, to hear sessions about various topics related to Silverlight, etc. If you want to talk about a topic that is of interest to you, If you want to propose a topic of discussion Or if you just want to hang out then go to http://www.slugs.ch and register! Cheers, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• XNA Notes 008

  - by George Clingerman

  This week has been a rough one. I’ve been sick and then in some kind of slump for my afternoon coding sessions. It could be from the cold, could be I’m still tired from writing that Windows Phone 7 game development book (which is out now!) or it could just be I’m tired of winter and want some sunshine. All I know is that even while I’m stick, the XNA world keeps going along at it’s whirlwind pace. Below are the things I caught in between my coughing fits.. Time Critical XNA News: The 2011 MVP summit is almost here so pass along your feelings and thoughts so the MVPs can take them and share them with the team in person http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/76317/464136.aspx#464136 Dream Build Play - there’s no new announcement yet, but you can’t get much more to the end of February than this! http://www.dreambuildplay.com/Main/Home.aspx XNA Team: Dean Johnson from the XNA team shares an excellent way of handling Guide.IsTrialMode on WP7 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dejohn/archive/2011/02/21/calling-guide-istrialmode-on-windows-phone-7.aspx Nick Gravelyn tries a new tactic in deciding if there’s enough interest to develop a sequel or not. Don’t YOU want Pixel Man 2 to come out? http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn finally shares what he’s been secretly working on these past 4 months http://twitter.com/#!/The_Zman/status/40590269392887808 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg8Z0ZdYbvg&feature=youtu.be Joel Martinez lets developers around NYC know they should by signing up for Game Hack Day http://twitter.com/joelmartinez/statuses/41118590862102528 http://gamehackday.org/71fdk XNA Developers: Michael McLaughlin shares an XNA RenderTarget2D Sample http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/18/xna-rendertarget2d-sample.aspx Martin Caine starts a new series on Deferred Rendering in XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/#!/MartinCaine/status/39735221339291648 http://martincaine.com/xna/deferred_rendering_in_xna_4_introduction ElemenyCy posts about his fun time with the IntermediateSerializer http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/xna/holy-bloated-xml-batman/ Ben Kane releases a narrated dev diary video for Project Splice. Let him know if you’d like to see more! (I know I do!) http://twitter.com/#!/benkane/status/39846959498002432 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EmziXZUo08&feature=youtu.be Jason Swearingen (of Novaleaf) posts his part 1 of Spatial Partitioning solutions http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/02/21/spatial-partitioning-part-1-survey-of-spatial-partitioning-solutions/ Brian Lawson of Dark Flow Studios shares what his been up to lately with lots of pretty screenshots and hints of announcements from Microsoft... http://www.darkflowstudios.com/entry/short-and-sweet-part-1 Luke Avery starts a new blog where he plans on making XNA tutorials for beginners (and he’s got a few started already!) http://programmingwithovery.wordpress.com/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): GameMarx Episode 10 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/24/ep-10-february-18-2010.aspx Minecraft clone FortressCraft coming to XBLIG http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-23-minecraft-clone-fortresscraft-hits-xblig ezMuze+ starts an IndieGoGo fundraiser campaign to help fund their second game and get it onto even more devices! http://www.indiegogo.com/ezmuze Gamergeddon XBLIG round up http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/20/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-20th/?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter JForce Games loses their Ego http://jforcegames.com/blog/index.php?itemid=121&catid=4 XNA Game Development: @BallerIndustry reminds all XNA developers that the Maths are important ;) http://twitter.com/#!/BallerIndustry/status/39317618280243200 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjV3XDFsjP4&feature=player_embedded#at=106 @suhinini stumbles on an older but extremely useful post on XNA Content Pipeline debugging http://twitter.com/#!/suhinini/status/39270189476352000 http://badcorporatelogo.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/xna-content-pipeline-debugging-4-0/ XNA Game Development Workshops at Singapore Universities http://innovativesingapore.com/2011/02/xna-game-development-workshops-at-singapore-universities/ Indiefreaks announces that IGF v0.3 is out with Xbox 360 support, SunBurn 2.0.12 and it’s now Open Source! http://twitter.com/#!/indiefreaks/status/39391953971982336 @liotral announces a new series on properly designing a game http://twitter.com/#!/liortal53/status/39466905081217024 http://liortalblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/hello-cosmos/ Indies and XNA at CodeStock 2011 http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/20/indies-and-xna-at-codestock-2011.aspx Train Frontier Express posts about XNA Content Hotloading http://trainfrontierexpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/xna-content-hotloading-overview.html Slyprid announces a new character editor in Transmute http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/40146992818696192 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKhFAc78LDs&feature=youtu.be The XNA 2D from the ground up tutorial series http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/23/recap-the-xna-2d-from-the-ground-up-tutorial-series.aspx Sgt.Conker posts a “Clingerman” (hey that’s me!) to stay relevant http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/posting-a-clingerman-to-stay-relevant/

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• List of Upcoming Appearances

  - by Chris Gardner

  Greetings. I know I have been in work sponsored hiding lately. We are working furiously on a beta project to secure a contract, and I can't really talk about it yet. Hopefully, the contracts will be soon signed. Not only will we then have money, but I can talk about all this really cool tech with which I have been playing. However, since the contract is not signed, I need to bring you people up to date with where I will be during the summer. Let's face it, you can't be a speaker / blogger without pandering to shameless self-promotion. First, I will, once again, be staffing the Hands-on-Labs at TechEd North America. Unfortunately, TechEd North America is already sold out for this year. However, if you're already going, drop by the labs and say Hi. Also, keep an eye on Twitter to track me throughout the event. Also, look for a post in a few hours with my specific picks for what content I'm looking forward to seeing this year. Immediately following TechEd North America, I will be flying into Knoxville to speak at CodeStock. I will be presenting my introduction and intermediate Xbox 360 development talks. There are a TON of great content at CodeStock this year, but there are only about 50 tickets left. After that whirlwind of work, things settle for awhile. That means I'm available to speak at your User Group, luncheon, bowling league, birthday party, anniversary, or bat mitzvah. Mid August brings us to That Conference. This one is going to be a blast. If you haven't heard of That Conference yet, you should really check it out. This will also be my introduction and intermediate Xbox 360 development talks. This is a new conference, and it looks like it will be a great one. Finally, we will turn our attention to DevLink. DevLink has the distinction of picking up my newest talk, Creating Stereoscopic 3D Graphics in XNA. On top of that, I'm giving an general Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 talk. DevLink has added an new "XNA and Kinect" track, so there will me a ton of great game content. That should bring us through the summer. As I solidify the Stereoscopic talk, look for some content on that to creep up on here. I will say it's the first topic I've played around with that is easier in 3D than 2D. Also, the organizers of Alabama Code Camp are still trying to reschedule the event. When that happens, I'll get that information out. Also, we are looking to expand our development team. If you are interested in working for / with me, keep an eye on the T & W Operations website. I know we're immediately looking for a junior level developer, but I think a few higher level position may come up soon. You MUST apply through the website, but drop me a personal line if you do apply. I'll keep an eye out for the application.

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• Reflections on Life

  - by MOSSLover

  I haven’t written a blog post in a while.  I understand there is blog neglect going on, but there is a lot going on in my life.  I am trying really hard to embrace the change and roll with everything thrown my way.  I had a really hard year it was not my best and it was not my worst.  I cannot say it was entirely hard, because January 1st I received the MVP Award.  If you know me you know the three things that happened starting in August, but if you really know me it was miserable for a substantial period of time prior to August.  There was some personal life issues I neglected to deal with that came into a headway.  Anyway I’d like to think that as of today I am doing much better.  I finally went to Paris and London.  I found out I love Paris and Nottingham.  I think that London is something I need to visit a few more times.  I would love to go back to the UK and France.  I think I’d love to live overseas someday, but not anytime soon. The past few weeks were like a whirlwind experience.  I felt like I had been sitting around for months just waiting for this trip and the big move.  Maybe it was something I was waiting to do for several years.  I needed a big change.  I needed to get unstuck.  I feel like August, however horrible it was, helped me get to the point where I am somewhere happy.  For at least two years I have been miserable outside of my work (community and otherwise).  I was just downright unhappy.  One of my coworkers said that my tweets were just horrible this past year.  Depressing might I add.  I agree they were incredibly depressing for the past several years.  But things are on an upturn.  I decided a month or so ago that I was going to do all the things I have wanted to do without looking back.  So I dove into this trip and into this move to NYC head first.  I was scared for a bit and I didn’t think it would come through.  Everyone friend-wise and coworker-wise has helped me accomplish this great feat.  I am now a New Yorker and as of January 1st 100% living in the city. Thank you for those who have checked up on me.  Thank you for those who listened to all my problems and continue to do so.  Thank you to everyone who has helped me through this really terrible time.  You guys mean the world to me.  You are my friends.  Some of you I have not met and some of you I barely know.  I have been to a lot of events where people just walked up to me and asked me if I was doing ok.  I will continue to keep moving forward one foot in front of the other.  If I ever get so down again please remind me about this year.  I hope to see you all in the upcoming year as I attend more events.  Have a good night or a good morning or a good afternoon.  I will catch you all later. Technorati Tags: Life,2011,Disaster Year,Happinness

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• InSync12 and Australia Visits: UX is Global, Regional, Everywhere!

  - by ultan o'broin

  I attended the Australian Oracle User Group (AUSOUG) and Quest International User Group's InSync12 event in Melbourne, Australia: the user group conference for Oracle products in the ANZ region. I demoed Oracle Fusion Applications and then presented how Oracle crafted the world class Fusion Apps user experience (UX). I explained about the Oracle user experience design pattern strategy of uptake for all apps, not just Fusion, and what our UX pattern externalization strategy means for customers, partners, and ADF developers. A great conference, lots of energy, the InSync12 highlights for me were Oracle's Senior Vice President Cliff Godwin’s fast-moving Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) roadshow with the killer Oracle Endeca user experience uptake, and Oracle ADF product outreachmeister Chris Muir’s (@chriscmuir) session on Oracle ADF Mobile solution and his hands-on mobile app development showing how existing ADF/JDev skills can build a secure, code once-deploy-to-many-device hybrid app solution in minutes. Cliff Godwin shows off the Oracle Endeca integration with Oracle E-Business Suite. Chris Muir talked the talk and then walked the walked with Oracle ADF Mobile. Applications UX was mixing it up with the crowd at InSync12 too, showing off cool mobile UX solutions, gathering data for future innovations, and engaging with EBS, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft apps customers and partners. User conferences such as InSync12 are an important part of our Oracle Applications UX user-centered design process, giving real apps users the opportunity to make real inputs and a way for us to watch and to listen to their needs and wants and get views on current and emerging UX too. Eric Stilan (@icondaddy) of Applications UX uses an iPad to gather feedback on the latest UX designs from conference attendees. While in Melbourne, I also visited impressive Oracle partner, Callista for a major ADF and UX pow-wow, and was the er, star of a very proactive event hosted by another partner Park Lane Information Technology (coordinated by Bambi Price (@bambiprice) of ODTUG) where I explained what UX is about, and how partner and customers can engage, participate and deploy that Applications UX scientific insight to advantage for their entire business. I also paired up with Oracle Australia in Sydney to visit key customers while there, and back at Oracle in Melbourne I spoke with sales consultants and account managers about regional opportunities and UX strategy, and came away with an understanding of what makes the Oracle market tick in Australia. Mobile worker solution development and user experience is hot news in Australia, and this was a great opportunity to team up with Chris Muir and show how the alignment of the twin stars of UX design patterns and ADF technology enables developers to make great-looking, usable apps that really sparkle. Our UX design patterns--or functional (UI) patterns, to use the developer world language--means that developers now have not only a great tool set to build apps on Oracle ADF/FMW but proven, tested usability solutions to solve common problems they can apply in the IDE too. In all, a whirlwind UX visit, packed with events and delivery opportunities, and all too short a time in the wonderful city of Melbourne. I need to get back there soon! For those who need a reminder, there's a website explaining how to get involved with, and participate in, Applications User Experience (including the Oracle Usability Advisory Board) events and programs. Thank you to AUSOUG, Quest, InSync, Callista, Park Lane IT, everyone at Oracle Australia, Chris Muir, and all the other people who came together to make this a productive visit. Stay tuned for more UX developments and engagements in the region on the Oracle VoX blog and Usable Apps website too!

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• Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition Recap and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  If you’ve noticed my blogging activity has reduced in frequency and technical content lately it’s primarily due to all of the conferences I’ve been attending, speaking at, or planning in the past few months.  This past Friday myself and six other dedicated individuals put on Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition as the culmination of a few months of hard work.  For those unfamiliar, Stir Trek is a web developer conference that was founded last year as an event to showcase content from Microsoft’s MIX conference and end the day with a private showing of the then just-released Star Trek movie.  This year’s conference expanded from 2 to 4 content tracks and upped the number of tickets from 350 to 600.  Even more amazing was the fact that we had 592 people show up day of the event for the lowest drop-off percentage of any conference I’ve been to before.   Nerd Dinner and Swag Bags     The night before Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition we hosted a nerd dinner at the Polaris Shopping mall food court with about 30 in attendance.  Nerd dinners are a great time to meet others passionate about technology and socialize before the whirlwind of the conference hits.  After the nerd dinner 20+ volunteers headed to the conference location and helped us stuff swag bags.  This in and of itself was a monumental task of putting together 600 swag bags with numerous leaflets, sponsor items, and t-shirts.  A big thanks goes out to all who assisted us that night so that we could finish in just under 2 hours instead of taking all night.  My sleep schedule also thanks you. Morning of Stir Trek     After getting a decent amount of sleep I arrived at Marcus Crosswoods theater at 6am to begin setting up for the day.  Myself and Jody Morgan were in charge of registration so we got tables set up, laid out swag bags, and organized our volunteer crew to assist with checking-in attendees.  Despite having 600+ people registration went fairly smoothly and got the day off to a great start.  I especially appreciated the 3+ cups of coffee from Crimson Cup, a local coffee shop.  For any of you that know me you’ll know that I rarely drink coffee except a few times a year when I really need the energy, so that says a lot about how good their coffee is.   Conference Starts     Once registration was completed the day kicked off with Molly Holzschlag keynoting.  Unfortunately Molly suffered from an ear infection and wasn’t able to fly so she had a virtual keynote and a session later in the day.  I was working behind the scenes on various tasks so I was only able to drop in very briefly on the keynote and rest of the morning sessions.  Throughout the day I tried to grab at least 1 or 2 pics of each presenter.  See my album below for the full set of pics.      For lunch we ordered around 150 pizzas from Mellow Mushroom, a local pizza place (notice the theme of supporting local businesses.)  Early on we were concerned about Mellow Mushroom being able to supply that many pizzas and get them delivered (still hot) to the theater, but they did an excellent job day of the event.  I wish I had gotten some pictures of the old school VW van they delivered the pizza in, but I was just a bit busy running around trying to get theaters ready for lunch.  We had attendees from last year who specifically requested that we have Mellow Mushroom supply lunch this year and I’m glad everything worked out being able to use them again.     During the afternoon I was able to attend a few sessions and hear some great content from various speakers.  It was also nice to just sit down and get off my feet for a bit.  After the last sessions the day concluded with a raffle.  There were a few logistical and technical issues that hampered our ability to smoothly conduct the raffle.  To those of you that agree the raffle wasn’t the smoothest experience I would like to say that the Stir Trek planning committee has already begun meeting to discuss ways of improving the conference for next year.  We are also accepting feedback (both positive and negative) at the following link: click here.  If you don’t wish to use the Joind In site you can also email me directly and I’ll be sure to pass along the feedback.   Iron Man 2 Movie     Last but not least, what Stir Trek event would be complete without the feature movie.  This year’s movie was Iron Man 2.  The theater had some really cool props and promotions (see pic below) for the movie.  I really enjoyed Iron Man 2, but I would recommend brushing up on the Iron Man comics and Marvel’s plans for future movies to understand some of the plot elements that come up.  Also make sure you stay through to the end of the movie credits to see a sneak peak of something special, that’s all I’ll say. Conclusion     Again a big thanks goes out to all of the speakers, sponsors, attendees, movie theater staff, volunteers, and everyone else involved in making this event great.  Also big thanks to my fellow Stir Trek planning committee members: Jeff Blankenburg, Matt Casto, Carey Payette, Jody Morgan, Rick Kierner, and Sarah Dutkiewitcz.  I am grateful for everything I learned while helping plan this event and look forward to being involved again next year.  For those interested we are currently targeting Thor as our movie theme for 2011 and then The Avengers for 2012.  These are tentative based on release dates that could shift as we get closer, but for now look solid.   Photos Pics on Facebook (includes tagging)     Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition photos on Facebook Pics on Live site (higher res)      View Full Album         -Frog Out

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• Sanity check on this idea for an Image Viewer in a web app

  - by Charlie Flowers

  I have an approach in mind for an image viewer in a web app, and want to get a sanity check and any thoughts you stackoverflowers might have. Here's the whirlwind nutshell summary: I'm working on an ASP.NET MVC application that will run in my company's retail stores. Even though it is a web application, we own the store machines and have control over them. We have a "windows agent" running on the store machine which we can talk to via http post (it is a WCF service, and our web app has permission to talk to it from the browser). One of the web pages needs to be an "image viewer" page with some common things like Rotate & Zoom. Now, there are some WebForms controls that offer Rotate and Zoom. However, they take up server resources and generate a good bit of traffic between the server and the browser. For example, the Rotate function would cause an ajax call to the server, which would then generate a new image written to a .NET Canvas object, which would then be written to a file on the server, which would then be returned from the ajax call and refreshed inside the browser. Normally, that's a pretty good way of doing things. But in our case, we have code running on the store machine that we can communicate with. This leads me to consider the following approach: When the user asks to view an image, we tell our "windows agent" to download it from our image server to the store machine. We then redirect our browser to our image viewer page, which will pull the image from the local file we just wrote to the store machine. When the user clicks "Rotate", we cause JavaScript code in the browser to call our "windows agent" software, asking it to perform the "Rotate" function. The "windows agent" does the rotation using the same kind of imaging control that would formerly have been used on the server, but it does so now on the store machine. Javascript in the browser then refreshes the image on the page to show the newly rotated image. Zoom and similar features would be implemented the same way. This seems to be much more efficient, scalable, and responsive for the end-users. However, I've never heard of anything like it being done, mostly because it's rare to have this combination of a web app plus a "windows agent" on the client machine. What do you think? Feasible? Reasonable? Any pitfalls I overlooked or improvements / suggestions you can see? Has anyone done anything like this who would like to offer the wisdom of experience? Thanks!

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• Question about Architecture for Viewing Images in ASP.NET MVC App

  - by Charlie Flowers

  I have an approach in mind for an image viewer in a web app, and want to get a sanity check and any thoughts you stackoverflowers might have. Here's the whirlwind nutshell summary: I'm working on an ASP.NET MVC application that will run in my company's retail stores. Even though it is a web application, we own the store machines and have control over them. We have a "windows agent" running on the store machine which we can talk to from the browser via javascript (it is a WCF service, and our web app has permission to talk to it from the browser). One of the web pages needs to be an "image viewer" page with some common things like Rotate & Zoom. Now, there are some WebForms controls that offer Rotate and Zoom. However, they take up server resources and generate a good bit of traffic between the server and the browser. For example, the Rotate function would cause an ajax call to the server, which would then generate a new image written to a .NET Canvas object, which would then be written to a file on the server, which would then be returned from the ajax call and refreshed inside the browser. Normally, that's a pretty good way of doing things. But in our case, we have code running on the store machine that we can communicate with. This leads me to consider the following approach: When the user asks to view an image, we tell our "windows agent" to download it from our image server to the store machine. We then redirect our browser to our image viewer page, which will pull the image from the local file we just wrote to the store machine. When the user clicks "Rotate", we cause JavaScript code in the browser to call our "windows agent" software, asking it to perform the "Rotate" function. The "windows agent" does the rotation using the same kind of imaging control that would formerly have been used on the server, but it does so now on the store machine. Javascript in the browser then refreshes the image on the page to show the newly rotated image. Zoom and similar features would be implemented the same way. This seems to be much more efficient, scalable, and responsive for the end-users. However, I've never heard of anything like it being done, mostly because it's rare to have this combination of a web app plus a "windows agent" on the client machine. What do you think? Feasible? Reasonable? Any pitfalls I overlooked or improvements / suggestions you can see? Has anyone done anything like this who would like to offer the wisdom of experience? Thanks!

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