Twitterでタレ込み頂きました。JRMCをインストールしたけど起動しない場合、起動ショートカットのプロパティで、作業フォルダを<jrmc_home>\jre\bin にするとよい、とのことです。実はこれ、僕の環境だと発生したこと無いんですが、念のためお知らせまで。

These tough economic times have especially hit universities as states cut funding. Colleges are trying to find ways to avoid slashing core services that affect students' educations by eliminating as much waste and inefficiency as possible. Some ways they are doing this is by replacing ancient financial systems, consolidating systems and standardizing business practices. For example, Yeshiva University, a prominent research university, decided to replace their 43-year-old legacy system. They deployed Oracle Hyperion Financial Management in just six months, allowing them to centralize their finance and accounting and generate high-quality budget reports.

The University of Minnesota deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) with several PeopleSoft financial and human resource applications to help them consolidate data across their five campuses, reduce software costs and significantly reduce the burden on their IT Dept.

You can read more about how universities, such as California State University, Univ. of Massachusetts, and Georgia Institute of Technology, are seeing value in using Oracle's Hyperion Performance Management applications and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) alongside their PeopleSoft or E-Business Suite solutions.

To read more, see MarketWatch.

Mike Walker has a nice blog post and links regarding the documentation of architecture. He talks about how the IEEE 1471 recommendation is being incorporated into an ISO standard with specific applications into enterprise architecture. I see this as a great step in advancing the craft of enterprise architecture. Related to my previous post on EA notation, the importance of clear EA documentation cannot be understated.

From IEEE 1471 (and Documenting Software Architecture) I have consistently advocated for certain principles in documentation. The first is one diagram is insufficient to fully describe an architecture. One needs to produce multiple views based on their audience and specific business problem being addressed. The CxOs don't care about seeing the detailed SOA call trace over HTTP; they want to see OpEx reduction in their application portfolio. Second, a picture alone is insufficient. Now, when we're presenting to stakeholders we only show the picture (the view). But we should also include supplemental documentation with an "element catalog" that fully describes each box and line in the diagram. It goes a long way to making the document more valuable outside the presentation context.

What techniques do you use to document your enterprise architecture? Do you follow (parts of?) IEEE 1471? Or do you have other approaches that you incorporate? I invite you to chime in here or over at Mike's blog post.

There's a quick way to build up a collection of objects in OWB 11gR2 its worth mentioning. My repository projects are as unorganized as my desktop (its very messy, but I can just about see the Yosemite photo), so using collections is a way I can quickly add some organization for use in a variety of ways; from an organization of content perspective to performing actions on those objects (MDL export, deploy etc.).

So now you can simply multi select the objects you want in the tree and add to a new collection or an existing one, below I am selecting 3 modules and adding into a new collection.

You will then get prompted for the collection name.

Which then creates the collection with the shortcuts to the selected objects.

I can then add in other arbitrary objects into the collection by selecting and adding to the existing named collection.

I can then select the collection in the tree, and use File->Export->Warehouse Builder Metadata and export to file for example.

For me this is much nicer than before (where there was a dialog with a shuttle, go find your stuff, painful), so I like it and thought its worth sharing - besides the fact that the documentation is wrong.

Shenzhen Sangfei Communications, a China-based manufacturer of cell phones and electronic components for mobile communications companies, has implemented Oracle's Agile Product Lifecycle Management solution to increase data accuracy, improve management efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Find out more by reading the full press release.

Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals deployed Oracle CRM On Demand in less than two months. Now, sales reps have up to date data from a single source of truth. Management now has the insight to take action sooner. Watch Alexei Marcilio, Manager of CRM, explain how Oracle delivers:

• The only all-in-one CRM solution


• Full life sciences capabilities plus comprehensive analytics


• All at a reasonable cost

 

I am in the middle of reading two books on EA, including the TOGAF 9 specification.  The other book, the one shown below, is proving to be an interesting and very useful read for anyone who wants to get some ideas about how to map EA and SOA.  I will do a full “book report” in a week or two when I am done.

EA and SOA are, at this point, inextricably intertwined.  Rick correctly points out that SOA is the only software development approach that, when done correctly, links conceptual (and corresponding physical) artifacts directly to the business vision/strategy.  Thus, SOA is a linked subset architecture of the overarching Enterprise Architecture.

It is a very well written book and the author, Rick Sweeney, makes some very good points.

Here is the byline of his blog (SOA is the way Blog):

This blog is dedicated to the promotion and advancement of the Service Oriented Architecture approach to business systems design. The purpose of the site is to provide a forum where people like myself who believe that SOA is the next baseline of the business application evolution can share and express ideas and help advance the institutionalization of SOA throughout the business domain. Welcome and thank you for helping to advance the cause.

I am far enough in the book to recommend it, even though there are a few small things I would debate about.  None the less, for anyone who wants some information and viewpoints on how SOA and EA work together, this is a book to get.  I am actually reading it on my iPad from Kindle ;-)

This is a subject that I have been working on for quite some time, and the more I have investigated this subject, the moreI have realized that this model is very powerful in today's ever changing business world. This model allows your BPEL processes to be very dynamic, both from a development point of view and from a runtime point of view by adding an additional intangible runtime value. Lets review each of these individually first. Please note that this blog post will not contain any code examples.

Dynamic BPEL PartnerLinks

In a lot of development environments, we sometimes do not know what service we are going to call or for that matter where does this service resides. So its very hard at development time to provide an endpoint to our BPEL process, so the questions to answer are what service do we call, and where does it live?

This is where dynamic partnerlinks come in handy, they resolve both questions, by providing the answers at runtime (magically ;o) ). Well not really magically but these values are passed to the BPEL process at runtime, and using the ws-addressing feature of BPEL PM we can invoke and receive callbacks from these dynamic endpoints, without having to provide these values at design time. The only caveat is that you need to know the data model of your service that you will be calling, so you need to know the XSD or a variant of the XSD. For an example please visit the BPEL Cookbook on OTN. (I have a working example of dynamic partnerlinks for 11G, which I will post at a later date).

Dynamic Routing of BPEL processes

This aspect of the model relates to using some sort of a Business Rules Engine, which will route your workflow based on some business logic/events, all of it dynamic. So the only two things given would be the start and the end, what path was taken to get to the end will not be known at design time, its only at runtime that all will unfold and told. There are no caveats here, but you need to design and develop your business rules, make them available to BPEL to allow for dynamic routing of your workflows.

Combined Model

Now if we take the dynamic partnerlinks and combine it with dynamic routing, you end up with a double whammy, a fully dynamic BPEL process AND workflow!! How many times have you wished for this, well wait no longer, cuz here she is!!

Its a little hard to imagine but the benefits of this model are enormous for e.g.:

- minimum impact on your parent BPEL process, even if you change your endpoints or even the work that the service does, it has no impact on the calling BPEL process

- the only contract between the BPEL process and partnerlinks is the XSD, as long as that stays constant, it does not matter to the BPEL process

- by having all dynamic partnerlinks (or most, or some of them, you may still have to have some static PL), by changing the workflow it does not matter what services are called since they all conform to same XSD contract

- this model allows you to quickly change the partnerlinks and workflow (rules) with no impact on the BPEL process, since these rules and partnerlinks are external to the BPEL process - no redeployment!

-imagine being able to point to another version of your service and only have it called when a certain rule is satisfied, while still having the older service/rule up and running and doing this with NO DOWN TIME!!

Of course with all the benefits come some costs :) and the one cost (not bad odds one cost vs so many benefits) is the contract between services, i.e. the XSD --> for this whole model to work you need to come up with a common XSD for all the dynamic services that will be called, also known as a canonical XSD. Now, this canonical XSD can be a simpler version of a "true" canonical XSD, not as many elements in it, just enough to satisfy the endpoint. But this still means work on your part to come with this legal contract, and it may mean "modifying" services to meet this requirement. Some of the services that you are calling may not owned by you, so it may get tricky unless you can get a confirmation that the XSD's will not change in the near future (and the endpoint/implementation may not change that frequently either).

The thing to note here, this model works best for use cases where you are expecting a lot of change, for example in the legal industry, or policy driven industries (insurance, banks), due to the very dynamic nature of these businesses, they may need to change their process very frequently. If however, your business needs are static and do not except much change, this model may prove to "hectic", though it will not hurt, - if you are looking to implement this approach it would be prudent to do a feasibility exercise first.

Another benefit of this approach, and in my view one of the most important, is for all your long-running BPEL processes - my definition of a long running BPEL process (aka "active durable processes") is a process that cannot survive a rolling upgrade (usually 2 days), i.e. it has to finish where it started.

Processes can run for months/years - the problem with active durable processes is that if you have to change their implementation or if you have to migrate, you need to wait while they finish. Well, with this model, you can make all your active durable processes, into multiple short-running dynamic BPEL processes(a small design change), so any change to their implementation will have no impact at all on the BPEL processes.

So here ya go, a powerhouse at your disposal. As always comments and feedback welcome!

Deepak

In a lot of my performance gigs the one question that keeps coming up a lot is what are you trying to achieve i.e. what is the end goal:

• Throughput (# of messages or # completed transactions, TPS)
• Response Time
• Reliability
• Data Resiliency (also known no loss of Data)
• Any combination of the above
• All of the above?

Once the objective has been highlighted the next question is the diagnostics, what are the logs/data that need to be gathered while doing a performance run to do your performance tuning. This topic was also the subject of my presentation at OOW 2008 which to my surprise fostered a lot of post presentation conversations, so I thought that I should put it up on my blog.

Metrics can be broken down in these main sections:

• Box/OS
• BPEL/ESB
• JVM
• DB

Box/OS

Machine where SOA Suite is running

• CPU
• vmstat
• prstat
• iostat
• VisualGC
• top

DB

• CPU
• AWR Reports
• Redo Logs
• iostat

BPEL

• Collect Performance metrics from the Metrics page --> they can show you bottlenecks and help you troubleshoot.
• You can rely on the response time on the BPEL console for Synchronous processes only!
• For asynchoronous processes use the CUBE_INSTANCE table in the orabpel schema.
  • Use the start time of the first asynch BPEL process and end time of all last BPEL process in a given time (completed processes only) --> will give you the time taken to complete
  • Count the amount of completed BPEL instances
  • Divide the difference in time/amount of instances to calculate TPS
  • For better variance calculate the median time difference
• Thread dumps if required

Example of BPEL SQL Script for asynchronous processes:

select PROCESS_ID, COUNT, BEGIN_TIME, END_TIME, DURATION_IN_SECOND, (COUNT/DURATION_IN_SECOND) TPS , MEDIAN from (

select count(*) COUNT, process_id PROCESS_ID, max(modify_date) END_TIME , min(creation_date) BEGIN_TIME,(extract(day from max(modify_date) - min(creation_date))*86400+ extract(hour from max(modify_date) - min(creation_date))*3600+ extract(minute from max(modify_date) - min(creation_date))*60+ extract(second from max(modify_date) - min(creation_date))) duration_in_second,median(extract(day from modify_date - creation_date)*86400+ extract(hour from modify_date - creation_date)*3600+ extract(minute from modify_date - creation_date)*60+ extract(second from modify_date - creation_date)) MEDIAN from cube_instance where state = 5 and process_id like <process_name> group by process_id

);

Results of the SQL Script:

 

Process name	Count	Begin Time	End Time	Duration in seconds	TPS	Median
Process1
Process2

I have not shown the data here, but you can run the above scripts after every performance run to get the TPS for your asynchronous BPEL processes and chart out the above table as graphs (TPS, Median - on Y and Process on the X axis). The graphs will show how your system is behaving after each tuning exercise.

ESB

• Metrics from the ESB Console.
• Metrics gathered from log.xml - not intuitive but you can get a lot of information from this log for e.g. Time taken for the ESB to complete a transaction.
• Monitor the iostat for the ESB process, sometimes based on OS you may get different results on iostat (AIX being the most IO intensive)

Visual GC

VisualGC helps in monitoring how your JVM is behaving and helps in capturing any thread deadlocks. If you see a flat line in your Eden Space while the test is running its usually a sign of a deadlock and its a good time to gather thread dumps at regular intervals to see what is going on in the JVM.

Analysis of Thread Dump

Once you have gathered the thread dumps you can analyse them using a free tool called Samurai.

The red colours are signs of potential deadlocks, by clicking on them you can see where the deadlock is:

Another great tool that has been added in SOA Suite 10.1.3.4  for BPEL is the new statistics page which provides information about the amount of threads that BPEL is using , adapter threads and various other statistics that can help provide a better picture.

All of the above metrics should be gathered regardless of the performance objectives. The OS and DB level metrics can be automated so that they are gathered by scripts. The thread dumps would depend entirely on whether VisualGC is showing any flat lines, while BPEL/ESB stats page. and the BPEL script can provide first hand view of what is happening in your system.

The next question is how do you tune your system - well that ties into the first question of what are you trying to achieve, throughput or response time, since both are inversely related there is always a price to pay, so there is always a choice to be made.

Happy gathering!

DA

In this post we see a usecase that displays total number of records seen on tree with 2 levels (first->second)

example :

case 1
---------
 first
 - firstchild
+second

record count is 3 for above case1

case 2
---------

+first
+second

record count is 2 for above case2

case 3
---------
-first
   - firstchild
-second
   - secondchild
 
record count is 4 for above case3




drop a depart->employee collections as tree table as shown below


1) bind the tree table and call getRowCountOfTreeTable function in get method of bind tree table.
2) Add outputText Component in pannelCollection surrounding tree table and set PPR to table.
   
//getTotalrows is the get method

public int getTotalrows() {
        totalrows = this.getRowCountOfTreeTable();    
        return totalrows;
    }

    private int getRowCountOfTreeTable(){
            RichTreeTable tt = this.getTreeTable();       
            tt.setRowKey(null);
            int rows = countRows(tt,this.getTreeTable().getDisclosedRowKeys());           
            return rows;
    }
    
    private int countRows(RichTreeTable tt, RowKeySet rk) {
            int totalRC = 0;
            int childRC = 0;
            int maxRow = tt.getRowCount();
      
            if (maxRow == 0) return totalRC;
            totalRC += maxRow;
            for (int i= 0; i < maxRow; i++){
                    tt.setRowIndex(i);
                    if(tt.isContainer() && rk.contains(tt.getRowKey())){
                            tt.enterContainer();
                            childRC+=countRows(tt,rk);
                            tt.exitContainer();
                    }
            }
           
            totalRC+=childRC;      
            return totalRC;
    }

As the Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition gets even better and more complete, you may want more information. There is a lot out there already, but it may be hard to figure out where to begin and which sequence to follow.

The Training and Support Center has what you need. There you will find a whole list of resources in the suggested order. To get there:

1. Click the Training and Support link in Oracle CRM On Demand.


2. Click Browse Training.


3. Click Training Resources by Topic.


4. Click Life Sciences.

Specifically, the Learn More About Life Sciences solution contains links to demonstrations, administration-specific resources, and new release training. Start at the top and work your way down the list if you're an administrator. If you just want a little information from a user perspective, the demonstrations may be all you need.

The UPK topic has been the center of all things in the User Productivity Kit for much of the product's history. They are of course, the document type that allows you to capture your organization's system processes through the UPK recorder, enhance them in the topic editor and deploy them in the player. UPK further allows you to deploy these topics in a number of ways including interactive simulations, documentation and presentations.

When topics are deployed through the UPK Player, they can be delivered in a context sensitive manner such that the user is shown only those topics that apply to their current location in the application. In the Player, these topics are displayed when the Applicable check box is marked. The Player also offers users the ability to filter the content based on their role within the organization or search based on keywords within the content.

For topics you create in UPK, context sensitivity is provided automatically (1) and allows you to quickly start your performance support initiatives. This works fantastic for any UPK topics you create but what about those "piles" of existing documents, pages on web sites and wikis, and existing training assets? Imagine if you could bring all of the UPK power to these assets?

User Productivity Kit 3.5 and later add powerful features that allow you to extend context sensitivity, role based filtering and keyword searching to all sections in an outline. This allows you to leverage these capabilities on anything that you can put in a section concept: web pages, links to files in packages, or any URL. This was part of a concerted effort during the UPK 3.5 project to make sections (non-topics) first-class citizens within the product.

Adding roles and keywords to sections is done in exactly the same manner as you would do it for a topic. Select the section for which you want to add the role or keyword and press F4 to display the properties pane. In the properties pane you will see properties for Roles and Keywords.

Their use is identical to topics. If the section is linked to a web page, the contents of the web page will automatically be added to search. If the section links to a file in a package or a URL, you must add keywords for it to appear in the search results.

The ability to extend context sensitivity to sections is completely new. The target of a section's concept can be a web page, file in a package or URL. None of these assets inherently know what page or screen of an application to which they are relevant. You, the author need to create this connection. UPK provide two different methods for creating the connection. Both allow you to leverage UPK's powerful context recording technology. To start the process, select the section to which you want to add context and display the properties pane. Within the properties pane, you'll find the Context property.

Clicking the browse button (...) for this property displays the Context dialog which provides two methods for establishing the section's context. Either approach allows you to define the circumstances under which a section will appear in the Player's applicable topics list.

This first way to add context to a section is record its context. This can be useful when you have some information that you want to return in the Player's applicable list but you do not have any UPK Topics for that particular area of the application. To add the contexts to the section, click the second tab, Context Names and then click the Create new context button. This starts the UPK recorder in a special mode in which it will only capture context information and screen shots. Use the the recorder to move through each screen in the application for which you want the section to appear. Once completed, you'll see each context appear in the list and you can view a screen shot for that context.

The second way to establish context for a section is to link it to a UPK topic. Sometimes you may want to have a page on your intranet, document, spreadsheet or other asset appear whenever a topic is returned in the Player's Applicable items list. Or in other words, the section is applicable to the same contexts as the topic. UPK offers a quick way to link the section to the topic. On the Topic Contexts tab of the dialog, you can add a link to the topic by clicking the Add topic contexts button. This establishes a link such that whenever the user is on a page or screen in that topic they will see both the topic and section returned in the applicable list.

Even if your outline doesn't contain topics, this second method can be useful to create what I like to call a "context container". Say you have several web pages you want displayed to a user on a certain page in an application. If you use the first method to add context you'll need to record context for each of the sections. Another approach is to create a new topic and record that page in the application. Then link each of the sections Topic Contexts property to that topic. The topic does not have to appear in the outline but rather serves as a container for the contexts that the sections share.

Start to look around your organization for assets that you can context enable. Documents, intranet web sites and wikis, blog posts, forum posts, support knowledge base articles are now all content that can be re-purposed as context enabled, role filtered, searchable UPK content. In your application deployments there is great justification for delivering these assets at the point of need in addition to topics. If you've already leveraged this capability in your content or discover new ways, please let us know through the comments at the bottom of this post.

In closing, I'd also like to provide some links to other blog posts that have appeared here on the UPK blog. In this post, I've mixed together a few different UPK concepts and I think these articles do a great job of describing context sensitive help, Smarthelp context sensitivity and use of packages.

Context-Sensitive Help with UPK
In-Application Support Made Easier
User Productivity Kit - Powerful Packages
Smart Help with UPK

Thanks again!

John Robert Zaums
Senior Director, Product Development
Oracle User Productivity Kit

(1) See User Productivity Kit Technical Specifications for detailed information regarding context sensitivity.

"On any given day, 75 percent of our orders are from repeat customers, so we're not as dependent on marketing and trying to get new customers," says Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. "Our whole philosophy is to take most of what we would have spent on paid advertising or paid marketing and invest it instead in customer service. Then, we let our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth."

Click here to read Profit Online's exclusive interview with Tony Hsieh on his new book Delivering Happiness. Find out what he has to say about customer service, his views on social media, and much more.

It is not uncommon for stream processing applications to make use of aggregation. Typical examples of this include calculating the average price of an equity over the last N milliseconds, counting the number of calls that a call center processes each minute, or summing up the revenue being generated by an online ad campaign in real-time.  Writing a CQL query to handle these types of use cases may seem straightforward, however, most applications need to do more than compute a simple aggregate value and this can cause the query complexity to increase. In this blog post I take a look at some of the finer points of CQL aggregation that arise when one writes a real world application.

Let's begin with a simple example. Consider the query below.

istream(
SELECT sum(severity) as totalseverity

FROM alerts [rows 3])

The idea is that this query processes a stream of alert events and calculates a stream of derived events that aggregate the last three alerts into a single "complex" event.  The output events are output as a stream, hence the need for the istream operator. The example is simplified for ease of explanation, but aggregating several low-level alerts into a higher level alert that a system administrator is interested in seeing is a common scenario in system monitoring CEP applications.  Given a stream of input events with the following severities

alerts: 2, 7, 1, 4, 10, 1, 8, …

This query will output the stream

0, 2, 9, 10, 12, 15, 19, …

So far, so good.  But, you may be wondering why the initial 0 event is output. This has to do with the CQL's SQL heritage.  In order for CQL to be SQL compliant, it must generate this event. Also notice that no event was output when the second input event of 1 was received. This is because the output value did not change in this instance (the previous output value was 1+4+10=15 as well). Our query only generates an output event when the query result changes.

Now, suppose that the system administrator only wants to see an aggregated event that is the composition of 3 low-level events. In other words,  the system administrator shouldn't be bothered with the initial 0, 2 and 9 events that are output before the input window is full. What does this query look like?

istream(
SELECT sum(severity) as totalseverity
FROM alerts[rows 3]
HAVING COUNT (*) = 3) 

As the query above shows, this requirement can be met by using the HAVING clause. The having clause ensures that an output event will only be generated when there are three events in the input window. Here is the output stream for this query

10, 12, 15, 19, …

Next, suppose that the system administrators only want to see the aggregated alert for each consecutive sequence of low-level alerts. In other words, the administrators don't want to see multiple aggregated events that contain the same low-level event. Here is a query that accomplishes this:

istream(
SELECT sum(severity) as totalseverity
FROM alerts[rows 3 slide 3]
HAVING COUNT (*) = 3) 

 

Notice the addition of the slide clause in the window definition. Specifying a slide of 3 means that the query will only be evaluated once for every three events, instead of being evaluated for every event. Here is the new sequence of output events

 

10, 15,...

10 (2+7+1) is the first value output, followed by 15 (4+10+1), etc.  We have cleaned up the output stream and reduced the number of events that are seen by system administrators quite a bit -- from seven down to two. These examples have illustrated the capabilities that CQL has when it comes to controlling the output of aggregation queries.  Every CQL developer should understand these techniques.

BT has announced that it will be helping the UK in the roll out of next generation energy meters. The proposal launched by BT, is in response to the government's target to install 28 million smart energy meters across homes and businesses over the next decade.

The long-term goal of the project is to create a smart grid where electricity demand can be closely monitored, and ultimately lower carbon emissions. The bid is being hotly contested by others including Vodafone and Telefonica and the competition will be fierce.

"Whilst the focus is currently on the tender process, we can't lose sight of the long term project goals," said Julien Groues, Vice President of Sales, EMEA, Oracle Utilities. "The implementation of smart meters in homes and businesses will enable users to keep a closer eye on their energy use and ultimately control how much they spend. Additionally, the introduction of smart meters will help utilities identify inefficiencies in the current system, using this real-time information to tackle any problems. In the long term, the benefits delivered for utilities and consumers will be significant."

However, the sustainability of the technology is the message that needs to be championed. The adoption of the technology will be one of the first significant steps made in the country towards a lower carbon economy. The investment in smart meters and smart grids will enable the integration of new renewable forms of energy - such as wind or solar sources. It is refreshing to see that positive and proactive steps are being taken by governments and technology providers to embrace sustainable energy solutions, though much headway still needs to be made. Nevertheless, after the initial contract battle is fought, the UK as a whole will emerge as the winner.

In a previous blog post, I mentioned that the SEC was voting on the topic to allow smaller companies with less than $75m market cap to ignore complying with Section 404 (b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

This is now officially the law. Last week, on July 21, 2010, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was signed into law. Smaller companies (non-accelerated filers with less than $75m in market cap) are permanently exempted from the provisions of Section 404(b). And in the future, accelerated filers with market caps between $75m-$250m may also benefit. This should come as great news for these smaller, mid-market companies who struggle with high compliance costs.

The act is jam-packed with many regulations. Here are some of the highlights:

• A new watchdog inside the Federal Reserve called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will enforce regulations in the Dodd-Frank Act.
• Every 3 years, shareholders will get a "say-on-pay" to control the purse strings on executive compensation. Shareholders can vote on the total compensation package for executives--everything from salary, bonus, stock or equity compensation, severance benefits, golden parachute payments, etc.
• Public companies will have to disclose more information in annual reports. For example, they need to disclose the total compensation of the CEO including the ratio of the CEO's pay against the median total employee compensation.

GetJar has announced results for their 2010 Getties Awards and the winners circle includes two Java applications.  The first application, WaveSecure,enables you to backup and restore data from your Java ME based device.  The second application, Kayak Hotel and Flight Search, is designed for use on Blackberry devices and is a personal favorite of this writer.

GetJar is one of the largest independent applications stores and recently celebrated their first billion downloads.  GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs will also be speaking at JavaOne this year on a topic entitled, "Mobile Apps: Where Do We Go from Here?"  If you are going to be at JavaOne this year I highly recommend you check it out.  They have a wealth of data around successful mobile business models, distribution strategies and platform strategies that can help you successful monetize your Java ME applications.

And on that note, early bird registration for JavaOne ends on July 30th, so why don't you register now and save $400!

Awhile back...I was accepted as a guest blogger on Michael Stelzner's, www.whitepapersource.com.  Although I wanted to stand out among Michael's impressive following of over 20,000 subscribers, I chose to post the tongue-in-cheek,  5 Reasons to Stop Writing List-Based White Papers.

Yet "list-based" is exactly the proven format I chose for my recent whitepaper--"5 Proven Strategies for Replacing Legacy IT Systems with Tier 1 ERP"--because you simply have to go with what works.  The content of this paper reflects dozens of conversations with Oracle partners and midsize customer executives spanning our global markets. 

In my research, I didn't expect to find the one "silver-bullet" deployment strategy--passed verbally from one generation to the next within a secretive sect of consultants.  In the end, I was somewhat surprised by the commonality of successful implementation strategies across global geographies and industries. 

On Wednesday, we'll feature Mark Johnson, VP of Oracle Accelerate, in the 6th installment of the Oracle Accelerate Thought Leadership Webcast Series.  Mark will cover two topics--"Why Midsize Companies Need Top Tier ERP"; and, "5 Strategies for Replacing Legacy IT Systems with Tier 1 ERP."

Joining Mark will be Howard Werth, CFO at Leupold & Stevens, America's premier manufacturer of precision sport optics.  Howard and the Leupold executive team chose to reengineer their operations from the ground up, implementing Oracle's top tier ERP as an enabler of business transformation.  Oracle Business Accelerators--rapid implementation tools based on industry best practice business flows--played a key role in the project.

At first blush, the five strategies Mark presents may appear to be common sense statements.  However, many midsize companies believe their needs to be so unique that only a highly-specialized, one-off deployment strategy will work.  In reality, I learned that the best approach is to not overlook a few basic principles that have been repeatedly proven successful. 

The way you implement Tier 1 ERP won't make your company unique--the way you employ its capabilities to support your competitive differentiators will.

That's it for now.  I have to get back to my next whitepaper.  I'm thinking of going with an even-numbered list in the title.  Now that's pushing the edge of the envelope.  

Register for this webcast and view archived webcasts at:

 www.oracle.com/goto/midsize/thoughtleadership  

 

There's this feature people sometime ask for with Sun Rays to support 1) multiple desktops and 2) portrait mode mixed with that.

This means the following : people want the ability to use 2 monitors when they log in, but have each of the monitors act as a separate desktop rather than one big screen where you just move left to right with everything. so you basically run 2 window managers and manage each of the screens separately and you can of course move your mouse pointer over from one to the other.

The latter works out of the box on a 2 FS or 3+, it's the default method. you plug in 2 monitors and your X display is the size of both monitors combined.

Now, regarding portrait view. There are users that want portrait mode in some cases on one monitor only and regular on the other or just in general do portrait mode.

Since the 2fs or 3+ dual monitor basically has one big framebuffer, this is really difficult to do, but there is an alternative. why not just use 2 sunrays 2's (or so). I did this and here's the result, I used a sunray 2fs with just one monitor hooked up and a sunray 270. Started utmhconfig (as root) and added the 2 sunrays into a multihead group. then I got :display:0 and :display:1. the left monitor in my case is a monitor that supports rotating so I rotated the big 24" left, and for :display:0 (this one) just do xrandr -o left.

since the other display has a smaller resolution (1280x1024) - I just run xrandr -s 4 to set in my case the screen size of :display.1 to 1280x1024. So, 1 session login, 1 keyboard/mouse/1 smartcard. 2 monitors, one in portrait, one regular, different screen sizes. If I had used 2 sun ray 2s, I would ve put one on the desk, the other under the desk.

great stuff.

Picture of my setup

As of the evening of Tuesday July 27, the Website merger, which was originally described in late June via the FAQ below, will have come to pass. We are re-publishing and updating the FAQ accordingly.

We are not oblivious to the impact of these changes on regular users. A massive amount of work has gone into making the changes as smooth as possible, but we won't get it 100% right immediately. As we receive your feedback, we will make adjustments on an ongoing basis. (For example, we have already rolled back the Java API redirects that caused so much consternation in the community and are working on a more acceptable permanent solution there.)

So, without further ado...

What's happened?

On July 27, we completed the migration of all non-obsolete content from developers.sun.com, java.sun.com, and BigAdmin to a completely re-architected, re-designed Oracle Technology Network site. This site - which offers different entry points for Java Developers, Database Admins and Developers, System Admins and Developers, and Architects - reflects the full diversity of this huge technical end-user community.

Whenever possible, we have preserved the familiar information architecture of Sun's sites, so that if you were a user of those sites, you will find what you're looking for.

Will all my bookmarks break?

No. We have implemented 1:1 redirects for the most popular and important content (such as Java APIs) that has moved. For other content, folder-level redirects are available, so instances of 404s should be uncommon. Furthermore, domain-level URLs (e.g., java.sun.com) will continue to work.

I'm only interested in what I'm interested in. Will I be able to ignore everything else?

Yes. As explained previously, we have created new entry points that will allow Java developers, for example, to browse to the Java APIs with a minimal number of clicks.

Will oracle.com/technetwork/java focus exclusively on Java Technology, just as java.sun.com does?

Yes. There is no change in the content strategy for supporting Java developers in a Technology-focused manner. For Oracle-specific development and deployment options, product pages are also be available for those interested in them.

What will happen to docs.sun.com?

There is no imminent migration planned at the current time and you can continue to use this URL for the foreseeable future.

What about forums, blogs, and wikis?

The integration of forums, blogs, and wikis are separate projects on a different timeline, and we will report on their status as soon as appropriate.

How do I report problems?

The Community Feedback Discussion Forum (registration required) is the best channel for reporting problems. Yes, there may be some rough edges for a while, but we are committed to an ongoing process of continuing improvement.

Will I automatically become an Oracle Technology Network Member?

No, to become an Oracle Technology Network member you will have to specifically opt-in. Membership is free and entitles you to free software downloads under the Oracle Technology Network Developer license, read/write access to Oracle Discussion Forums, and your choice of several monthly developer newsletters. If you currently have a Sun.com identity, please stand by for communications from us about this process.

How can I stay up to date, as well as provide feedback about the integration of these communities to Oracle?

First of all, we welcome (and need!) your feedback about this process via this blog. Second, you can follow and participate in our Twitterstream (@oracletechnet), where all major announcements will be made. Regardless of the channel you use, we will answer your questions as quickly as possible.

Also, if you are a Java developer, consider subscribing to Oracle's Java Developer Newsletter, which is a great source of technical and community information pertaining to Java development as well as Oracle's Java-based middleware and IDEs. We will also communicate important admin/Solaris-related news through a new Solaris Community Newsletter. (Subscribe to all of Oracle's Developer and Admin newsletters here.)

And, we're off...