This Place is Taken: February 2013

Saturday, February 23, 2013

184 year-old Indian library goes digital, including 444 yr-old book on Alexander

184 year-old Indian library goes digital, including 444 yr-old book on Alexander:
Kerala State Central LibraryOne of the oldest libraries in the country located in Trivandrum, the state capital of south Indian state Kerala, has digitized hundreds of rare documents and many rare books which can be accessed online.
The Kerala State Central Library, established during the days of Swathi Thirunal Maharaja of Travancore province in 1829, contains many rare books which is being digitised in phases.
An update posted on the library’s website said
During the first phase 707 rare documents (644 English and 63 Malayalam books) containing 3,28,268 pages have been digitised and a Digital archive was opened in 2006.
480 English books have been digitised and 1,84,321 pages were added to this Digital Archive during the second phase in 2010.
Some of the rarest books like “An Account of the Trade in India,” by Kockyer Charles published in 1711 and scholarly books on the ancient Vedas and Islam are available in digital form and can be accessed from anywhere.
A book called the “Righte Noble and Pleasant History of Successors of Alexander Surnamed the Great,” published in 1569 is one of the rare ones that got digitized.
If you are a history buff, or simply a curious soul, there is a treasure trove of information out there. We couldn’t wait to write about this ever since we heard about it. This is truly amazing. Not only does it give access to rare books, it gives you an insight into the working of the Travancore province through the documents of the legislative assembly from the early 20th century.
Physical access to these books are highly restricted.
Some two months ago, another rare collection of documents and letters went online. A large collection of documents and letters preserved by the British Library’s India office was digitized and hosted online in December last year. This was the first collection of World War I India office records to appear in the cyber world. According to the British Library blog, it’s got reports of the censor of Indian mails in France, letters from soldiers, treatment of British and Indian prisoners of war in Germany among other details of the first world war.
More and more libraries should do the same to truly democratise access to information.
Recommended read: Indian Sepoy (read cannon fodder) letters from the world war trenches are now online

184 year-old Indian library goes digital, including 444 yr-old book on Alexander

184 year-old Indian library goes digital, including 444 yr-old book on Alexander:
Kerala State Central LibraryOne of the oldest libraries in the country located in Trivandrum, the state capital of south Indian state Kerala, has digitized hundreds of rare documents and many rare books which can be accessed online.
The Kerala State Central Library, established during the days of Swathi Thirunal Maharaja of Travancore province in 1829, contains many rare books which is being digitised in phases.
An update posted on the library’s website said
During the first phase 707 rare documents (644 English and 63 Malayalam books) containing 3,28,268 pages have been digitised and a Digital archive was opened in 2006.
480 English books have been digitised and 1,84,321 pages were added to this Digital Archive during the second phase in 2010.
Some of the rarest books like “An Account of the Trade in India,” by Kockyer Charles published in 1711 and scholarly books on the ancient Vedas and Islam are available in digital form and can be accessed from anywhere.
A book called the “Righte Noble and Pleasant History of Successors of Alexander Surnamed the Great,” published in 1569 is one of the rare ones that got digitized.
If you are a history buff, or simply a curious soul, there is a treasure trove of information out there. We couldn’t wait to write about this ever since we heard about it. This is truly amazing. Not only does it give access to rare books, it gives you an insight into the working of the Travancore province through the documents of the legislative assembly from the early 20th century.
Physical access to these books are highly restricted.
Some two months ago, another rare collection of documents and letters went online. A large collection of documents and letters preserved by the British Library’s India office was digitized and hosted online in December last year. This was the first collection of World War I India office records to appear in the cyber world. According to the British Library blog, it’s got reports of the censor of Indian mails in France, letters from soldiers, treatment of British and Indian prisoners of war in Germany among other details of the first world war.
More and more libraries should do the same to truly democratise access to information.
Recommended read: Indian Sepoy (read cannon fodder) letters from the world war trenches are now online

Flow Charts

Flow Charts:

Flow Charts

23 February 2013
Yesterday I was browsing the Computer Science shelf at a university in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The selection was ... classic. Everything from "PC/MS DOS Fundamentals", to "MicroSoft BASIC", to "The Internet Guide". The latter was from 1997 and included information on Gopher, MOOs, and AltaVista.
[Learning COBOL]
The most interesting book was "Computer Programming in COBOL". The first chapter was the usual introductory fluff about what programming is and what it is for. Then the book gets down to business, by teaching how to draw flow charts. You see, before writing 'if' statements and 'while' loops, it is strongly recommended to draw these structures using a flow chart. Like most people of my generation, I was taught the use of flow charts in school. And like all my classmates, I promptly ignored this advice and started coding instead. Drawing a low-level flow chart never made any sense to us.
[Flow chart example]
However, reading the third chapter of the COBOL book suddenly opened my eyes. COBOL code was written on paper, sent to a punch operator, who would type the punch cards, then the stack of cards would be added to the computer's input stack. I'd known about punch cards (don't drop the stack!). But I didn't realise the implications of being a programmer who could not type. This workflow is from the era when typing was a rare skill among high-level professionals. Managers had secretaries who would take dictations. Programmers had punch operators who would transcribe code.
[Worksheet example]
Thus was the rationale for flow charts. Whereas we can trivially cursor up and insert an 'if' statement, a COBOL programmer writing on paper would have to start the page again. Drawing flow charts saved time.
The history of Computer Science will certainly remember the prevalence of flow charts in the 1960s and 1970s, though the reason may become blurry with time. But what will most certainly be forgotten is there was a generation of students in the 1980s and 1990s who were encouraged to use flow charts, long after the reason for using them had disappeared.
Yet another onion in the varnish.
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I Can't Find a Single Productive Use For My Tablet [Opinion]

I Can't Find a Single Productive Use For My Tablet [Opinion]:

First off, I have to say that like most of you reading this, I love technology. I love it. I dream about it so much that I just had to write an article about where technology is going to be in 20 years. I imagine a world where everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses, riding in anti-gravity vehicles that run on renewable energy, and everyone is telecommuting from home via a global high-speed wireless network.
So, it should go without saying that when tablets first came out, I got pretty excited about it. When I saw those first large touch screens sitting next to the smartphones in the cellular store, and realized that they had finally made such larger computing devices capable of accessing the Internet via the cellular data plan – and wi-fi as well – that was really exciting.
That excitement culminated recently when I received my very first tablet – a really nice Asus Transformer Prime. It’s a sleek, fast and powerful device capable of playing games, running awesome productivity apps, and letting you browse the web and do online research from the couch or the bed. It’s convenient, fun, and ultimately completely and utterly pointless.
Weird right? The thing is that no matter how hard I try to do something actually productive and useful with the tablet, I always migrate back to my laptop, and my tablet ends up back in the pocket of my computer bag, uncharged.

I remember when those little Casio personal organizers first came out – you know the text based ones that looked like flip-top calculators with little miniature keyboards? When I first saw them, I had dreams of storing the addresses and birthdays of every member of my family and all of my friends. I figured I’d have my entire schedule completely, digitally organized. My life would be streamlined, efficient and productive.
Eventually, the dreams got the best of me, I bought a Casio organizer – an SF-4700L to be exact. I diligently loaded my life into that little organizer. I’m talking everything; my to-do list, calendar, personal passwords and contact info. I used it to keep assignments for classes, and to remember meetings and important events. This went on for about four of five months, but gradually I realized that if I was going to be completely honest with myself, it was getting a bit annoying.

The truth is that it didn’t make life easier. It made it harder. Instead of quickly handwriting someone’s name and address into a paper address book, I had to use this puny little too-small keyboard with my thick fingers to try and type in names, addresses, phone numbers and birthdays. It took forever. It was painful.
When I wanted to enter a to-do item into my list, it took at least two or three times longer than it would have taken if I’d just written those items down into a paper notebook. After a while, out of frustration that this little nifty gadget just wasn’t making my life any easier, I set it aside one day in a desk drawer, and there it remained ever since.

Smartphones Led To The Tablet

Once smartphones came out and had access to the Internet – that was exciting. Now, something actually useful. Smartphones weren’t just about applications for storing addresses, birthdays and a calendar planner, but now you could actually browser the Internet with this little, mobile, pocket-sized device. I bought a Windows Mobile phone for the sole purpose of researching antique prices while attending auctions. Withing a few short years, these little gadgets quickly took off a life of their own.

Everyone – and I mean everyone – has one of these things. Well, except for Justin, who impressively has resisted the mainstream adoption of this technology. But, why did the smartphone take off where other gadgets eventually fell by the wayside? It’s because they filled a void. Up until that point, people were regularly checking email whenever they were home or at the office, with access to a computer on the Internet. However, with the Internet-enabled Smartphone, you were no longer detached.
You can check your email while waiting at the doctor’s office, you can text your friends while riding the bus, you can reply to your boss just like you’re at the office while you’re hanging out at the bar with friends. Smartphones filled a void and made life easier and more convenient – and that’s why they were successful, but what about tablets?

Tablets As Another Novelty

So, while I found the Windows Phone, and later the Motorola Droid, to be wonderfully useful devices that greatly improved my productivity – devices that I really couldn’t live without today – my experience using a tablet for the first time was not the same. It didn’t fill a void. Instead, it felt just like when I first purchased that Casio organizer years ago.
The idea of a tablet is really cool. The concept of sitting on a beach chair at a beach on the coast of Maine, typing up a blog entry for my site while spending a sunny day with the family – now that’s cool. Certainly better than being stuck at home trying to get work done, right? In theory, it sounds great. In practice it’s a whole different ballgame. You can see this from Christian’s experience when he attempted to use only a laptop for a full week!

Okay, so he wasn’t just about ready to slam his tablet to the floor, but you could tell by the end of the experiment, Christian was outright exhausted. And that’s exactly how I feel whenever I try to use my tablet to get real work done – be it a blog post, or something as simple as taking notes.
As I mentioned in my past articles here at MUO, I thought the SuperNote app for taking notes was very impressive, because it could literally take your hand-scribbled letters or words and piece them into sentences on a note page.

Guess what though – the novelty wears off. It’s cool and everything, but it’s still faster to write notes on a pad with a simple pen. If we’re just counting seconds on a clock and evaluating efficiency – a pen and pad wins out.
Then you’ve got blogging. The WordPress app appears pretty full-featured and functional when you’re on the main dashboard, but once you really start digging into writing posts and trying to format – the awkwardness of selecting segments of text, copying, pasting and moving the cursor around with the touch-based tablet environment can really turn into an exercise in futility.

Sure, you get an on-screen keyboard to give you a hand, but what good is that if you’re always fighting with a cursor that won’t go where you need it to, and won’t stay there once you get it in place. It’s frustrating and too annoying to be really very useful.
Then there’s the problem with doing research. I have to admit, once I went to using dual monitors with my laptop, there was no turning back. I mean, seriously, how can you beat being able to read articles on one screen, and type notes or copy and paste links into the other?

Dual monitors increased my personal productivity tremendously, and losing that second screen to a ridiculously smaller screen of a tablet is just – well, there’s no comparison. Productivity drops exponentially.
So – quite honestly, I feel like tablets are a short-lived fad. I still use it occasionally as a very simple tool in meetings sometimes as a whiteboard for brainstorming ideas with someone. But even then, a real whiteboard is so much better because it’s so big that everyone can see it, unlike that tiny little screen everyone is trying to squint at while you diagram your ideas.
The only thing that may save the tablet is the advent of Windows 8, and the idea of a “hybrid” PC – a computer that’s powerful enough and functional enough to behave like you would expect a good laptop computer to behave, but also with the tremendous benefits that a touch-screen offers. Those are benefits that can’t be understated – a touch screen can significantly improve your productivity if used the right way.
So that’s my take on the world of tablets. What’s your view? Have you found a good, productive use for them, or do you agree that they are really more of a novelty, and that you turn to your laptop when you have real work to accomplish? Weigh in and let us know your take in the comments section below.
Image Credits: Home Office Via Shutterstock, smash digital tablet via Shutterstock, teenagers using phones via Shutterstock, palm pilot via Shutterstock, man using a tablet

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Fusion Applications - Laying It Out

Fusion Applications - Laying It Out: A friend recently made a request for some info on Fusion Applications.  After I finished providing some info and answering some basic questions, the idea came up that I should just lay this stuff out for everybody…so, in the words of Hannibal Lechter: "Okey dokey, here we go."

Installation Options


A few thoughts on installation options
  • Unless you have a really, really, really compelling business reason, you won't want to take the "Bring Your Own Hardware" installation approach.  Fusion Applications requires loads of hardware investment.  It's a big footprint.
  • Personally, I would not recommend running a Private Cloud on your own.  In addition to the hardware required, you'll also need a devops team with a wide and varied set of skills.  Oracle, HP, AT&T, and many others will happily set up and maintain a private cloud for you.  Explore the vendor option before you set off down this path.
  • For those requiring integration with 3rd-party or home-grown applications, I like the Hosted option best.  No maintenance headaches with the hosted applications and integration is very easy.  However, I do worry about maintenance response times from Oracle OnDemand and other hosting providers - significant improvement needed here.
  • I like the SaaS option due to lower entry and maintenance costs, especially if your customization and integration demands are very light.  However, SaaS does struggle if you need significant levels of data integration or complex customizations.

Deployment Options


This is a very simple perspective on deployment options.  There are nuances and options within options and all sorts of things to consider, but this simple table has served me well.  Helps me keep things in perspective.  Hope it helps you too.

So, in very simple and brief terms, I've laid it out.  Hope you get something out of this.  Questions? Criticism? Additional thoughts or experiences?  Comments encouraged.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Oracle Fusion CRM – Self Service Application

Oracle Fusion CRM – Self Service Application:
ODE - On Demand Education Ltd Blog - Specializing in CRM & Social CRM Consulting, Education and eLearning
Over at my other “home“, the team have been working very hard to release the new version of their Self Service Portal application now integrated with Oracle Fusion CRM (cloud or no cloud). It previously was released with Oracle CRM On Demand as the back-end, but now the Oracle Fusion CRM platform takes up the role.
The application is completely customizable, so the interface, objects, authentication, process and reporting can all be changed to meet customer requirements. Service Request management and Self Service go hand-in-hand with customer satisfaction and loyalty, and help drive sales and lower costs of retention. This has been a very successful member of our CRM++ application range and I think this new version is very exciting.
It’s nice to work with such a talented bunch of people on such an exciting new platform. It may be new and fresh but Oracle Fusion CRM offers unparalleled opportunities for business process enhancement, and is a pretty cool technical stack as well.
The homepage of the application can be found here and there is a short video module which you can watch by clicking on the picture below.
Oracle Fusion CRM - SSP Application
Oracle Fusion CRM – SSP Application from CRMIT
ODE - On Demand Education Ltd Blog

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Find The Correct Download Link

Find The Correct Download Link:

Valentine's Day and George Ferris' 154th Birthday

Valentine's Day and George Ferris' 154th Birthday:

Valentine's Day and George Ferris' 154th Birthday

Date: Feb. 14, 2013


Romance and amusement parks often go hand in hand. In many places a carnival, fair or circus is a popular destination for a thrilling and action-packed date. Coincidentally, George W.G. Ferris Jr., the creator of the Ferris Wheel was born on Valentine’s Day in 1859. This year seemed like a golden opportunity to combine our celebration of love with the birthday of the engineer whose mechanical invention has filled so many hearts with wonder.

rough concept sketches
Rough concept sketches. At one time a dragon and a piece of bread (toast?) were going to have a great time together.
Early in the process we decided on depicting a scene with two, side-by-side Ferris Wheels among a landscape of other amusement park rides. Then when two Ferris Wheel carts happened to stop across from each other we thought that was the perfect moment for two characters to have a love at first sight moment. We thought this would be the best way to highlight the Ferris Wheel in its natural habitat and provide a clever way to introduce some valentines to each other. Plus, we thought it would be fun to push a big button to generate a whole series of combinations.





an early interactive mock-up
An outtake from the early interactive mock-ups. The characters are featureless blobs but the basic ideas are there.
The greater challenge turned out to be determining who would be riding these Ferris Wheels. What pairs would we create? How silly should we be? Chocolate and peanut butter? An astronaut and an alien? A blog post and a troll? After they see each other, would they jump out of their carts and ride the roller coaster? Or would we show their life story from youth to old age?

We ultimately decided that our cast of characters should all be animals and the result of their initial encounter should be a date. At first we assigned circus jobs to all the animal characters. For example, the monkey was a clown, the bear was a trapeze artist, the frog was a sword swallower, and so on. But why would they be riding the Ferris Wheel? Shouldn’t they all be performing? And would people understand that the turtle was wearing a helmet and goggles because he was in the cannonball act? In the end, we simplified the characters and focused on making the animals as engaging, colorful and personable as possible without worrying about their day jobs.

animal character sketches
Sketches for the animal characters.
animal character final art
Final animal character illustrations.
For the resulting dates, we used newspaper comic strips and their 3-panel composition as inspiration for style and narrative structure. The comic strip format gave us room to tell a wide variety of stories and the horizontal format worked nicely in our layout. Once we decided on comics, the date scenarios really just starting writing themselves. As always, we had more ideas than time to illustrate and animate.


octopus and bear napkin sketch
The napkin sketch for the octopus and bear date. 
octopus and bear draft sketch
The draft sketch.
octopus and bear final art
The final comic.
We hope you enjoyed the final interactive doodle and perhaps learned a little bit about love, life and Ferris Wheels.


- Brian Kaas, Doodler










Location:


Canada,

Turkey,

Qatar,

Italy,

Czech Republic,

Kenya,

Indonesia,

Kuwait,

Hungary,

Lithuania,

France,

Congo [DRC],

Rwanda,

Slovakia,

Ireland,

Argentina,

Norway,

Nigeria,

Ecuador,

Macedonia [FYROM],

Ghana,

Brunei,

Australia,

Algeria,

Singapore,

Austria,

Slovenia,

Guatemala,

Germany,

Bosnia and Herzegovina,

Chile,

Puerto Rico,

Jordan,

Iraq,

Kazakhstan,

Poland,

Spain,

Ukraine,

India,

Netherlands,

Colombia,

Libya,

Greece,

Oman,

Tanzania,

Finland,

United States,

Philippines,

Serbia,

Vietnam,

Croatia,

South Korea,

China,

Thailand,

Switzerland,

New Zealand,

Russia,

Denmark,

Bulgaria,

Greenland,

Palestinian Territories,

Estonia,

Portugal,

Morocco,

Tunisia,

Hong Kong,

Mexico,

Lebanon,

Sweden,

South Africa,

United Kingdom,

Malaysia,

Senegal,

Latvia,

Mozambique,

Uganda,

United Arab Emirates,

Burundi,

Japan,

Taiwan,

Cyprus



Tags:

Horse,

Dolphin,

Monkey,

Fox,

Frog,

Romance,

Elevator Drop,

Stars,

Elephant,

Dating,

Bird,

Go-Cart,

Holiday,

Squirrel,

Chameleon,

Bear,

George Ferris,

Tiger,

Birthday,

Rabbit,

Animals,

Roller Coaster,

Carnival,

Night,

Octopus,

Interactive,

Turtle,

Love,

Carousel,

Circus,

Goose,

Amusement Park,

Ferris Wheel,

Hippopotamus

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)

Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011):

Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Super-Productive Programmer

Posted by Cameron Laird on Mon, Mar 21, 2011 @ 03:28 AM


Hollywood portrayals of computing superstars are more rooted in comic-book super-heroics than the realities of software development. Except that in programming, superpowers do exist. Fabrice Bellard has them.
Computing in the movies is hard to recognize: Typographical errors are non-existent, crackers break through tested defenses in seconds, and practitioners create twenty-function-point programs in fewer keystrokes than the count of bullets whizzing by their heads. Hollywood portrayals are more rooted in comic-book superheroics than the realities of software development.
Except that in programming, superpowers do exist. Fabrice Bellard has them.

Serial achiever

What other description can there be when one man successively produces a dozen important and widely-used software applications? Look at the (partial) record:




















Every one of these would be a proud accomplishment in any programming career. To produce so many, and so consistently, is very, very rare.
A bit of background provides the context to understand this record clearly. It’s common in programming folklore to talk about how a particular program was pulled together in one intense weekend, or during a vacation interval. Many of these tales are true, as far as they go; several of the best-known programs were first launched with a specific effort of just a few days. This leads some to expect that those few days define the life cycle of program development: A sufficiently clever programmer can create the Linux kernel this holiday season, take the next weekend off to invent the Ruby programming language, build an award-winning iPad game the following month, and so on.
It’s not so. Just because top sprinters finish a hundred meters in under ten seconds doesn’t mean they sustain that pace for the duration of a marathon. When Bellard wrote LZEXE, for example, he created a program that performed the data compression he needed at one particular time (it was the first widely-used executable file compressor for MS-DOS).
What’s notable is that he also invested the follow-up effort to ensure the software was engineered well-enough to work on other computers and on multiple operating systems, could be understood and maintained by others, was adequately documented, licensed to be useful, and so on. All those apparently secondary activities typically  take orders of magnitude more time than the original coding at the heart of a successful program.
Bellard isn’t unique as much for being a smart guy who has clever ideas about programs—although he certainly is and does—but for his achievement in refining and crafting those ideas into programs that make sense to others. He consistently creates applications that other programmers want to use and enhance.
Think about QEMU, for example. Like all Bellard’s best-known programs, it’s freely-available under the GNU Public License (GPL) or a close relative, originally developed under Linux, broadly portable, and now mostly maintained by others. Several programs preceded QEMU and roughly fit its description as “a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer;” QEMU, though, like many of Bellard’s creations, combines performance, robustness, portability, and flexibility in a way that none of its ancestors or rivals matched. Bellard’s contribution wasn’t to create the idea of a machine emulator, but to envision how to engineer one well enough to move it from the classroom or laboratory to “working-class” developers’ and testers’ toolboxes. It’s now indispensable to many testing teams, who can leverage QEMU to manage hundreds of distinct computing environments from a single underlying physical computer.

Finding a balance

Bellard seems to balance nicely between extremes that threaten productivity. His techniques are modern without being faddish, and careful, yet not neurotic. While he moves every few years into new and fertile unconquered territory, he exercises  patterns that have served him well over and over: cleanly-styled C, data compression, numerical methods, signal processing, pertinent abstractions, media formats, open-source licensing, and “by-hand parsing.”
Bellard doesn’t appear to promote himself—he politely declined to be interviewed for this profile, for example—but others enthusiastically adopt his creations. Among the 654 Copyright notices QEMU 0.13.0 source code embeds, 216 are his. To put that another way: He was successful enough with QEMU during its first few years to entice others to put in over twice as much work (by this crude measure) as he has!

Fabrice Bellard (left) with Miguel de IcazaBellard, born in 1972, began practicing his own coding techniques first on a TI-59 scientific calculator, at the beginning of the ‘80s. Many of the projects listed above, along with others in his portfolio, originated as student assignments at l'École Polytechnique, where he matriculated in 1990. TinyGL, for example, derives from the VReng Virtual Reality Engine distributed 3D application he began in 1998. Based on this experience, he eventually created and released in 2002 TinyGL as a very fast, very compact re-implementation of a substantial subset of OpenGL.
Similarly, his recent and relatively well-publicized calculation of several trillion (!) digits of pi was performed on a single desktop computer. Previous record-setting calculations of this class were done on million-dollar supercomputers. Bellard made it seem natural to pull together his mathematical insight, broad experience at instruction-level coding, and careful engineering to advance the field this way. The roots of the achievement reflect back to his experiments on a hand-held programmable calculator at the age of nine .
To describe fully even one of the projects already mentioned is beyond the scope of an article such as this; it would take several books to capture all that Bellard has already contributed, and at least another to explain how he works. A few broad conclusions are possible, though:

  • As has often been observed before, the very best programmers are far, far more productive than the average, able to produce multiples of the usable output of others;

  • While it’s unrealistic to predict how programming would look without Fabrice Bellard or open-source licensing, there can be no doubt that such programs as QEMU, LZEXE, and FFmpeg are in pervasive use thousands of times each day around the world now; and

  • If there’s a secret to this superhero-level productivity, it appears to have less to do with comic-book mutation and radioactivity, and far more with discipline, confidence, rigor, and many years of practice.
Mass media make it easy, especially in the United States, to believe that only “clashes of the Titans” matter. That is, the mindset is that progress with computers has to do with million-dollar budgets, celebrity announcements, and courtroom jousting. That’s a dangerously narrow view, dangerous because it neglects the creativity and insight of sufficiently dedicated individuals. While Fabrice Bellard seems unlikely ever to hire a publicist or otherwise elevate his profile in the public eye, he shapes our use of computers more indelibly than corporate executives and industry analysts.
How do you use FFmpeg or QEMU or his other productions?  Tell me about it in the comments.  Even more important: What great program will you write next?  What obstacles to superproductivity do you face?
See also:

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Friday, February 8, 2013

Siebel – Useful Business Services


BS NAME METHOD DESCRIPTION WHERE TO USE
FS Holiday API Service GetElapsedBusinessTime Returns business time taken to accomplish task. It is used when you want to work on some date or date related information
GetResponseTime Returns commited time based on service calander and exception calander
IsHoliday Returns TRUE or FALSE if given day is holiday and return next working day
Workflow Process Manager RunProcess Used to run a workflow Used either explicitly or internally to run a workflow
SLM Save List Service LoadPopupApplet Used for displaying a pop applet at run time. Details-The Applet Used should have type standard and contain the class as  CSSSWEFrameListPopup. If you are facing any problem creating the applet then just copy the vanilla applet - FINS Service Request Order ID Popup Applet and then customize it according  to the requirement To show a pop applet at run time
ISS Add Attachment Service AddAttachment AttachmentFieldName (Lit)( AccntFileName)BusinessComponent(Lit)( Account Attachment)BusinessObject(Lit)(Account)File(Lit)(Path of the attch)HeaderBusinessComponent(Lit)(Account)ObjectIdHere – Lit – means – Literal – OR – hard coded value.AttachmentFieldName – is the name of the field on which we want to add the attachment. In our case it is AccntFileNameBusinessComponent – Name of the Business Component to which the field belongs. In our case we have chosen - Account Attachment – as the Business Component.BusinessObject - Name of the Business Object to which the chosen Business Component belongs. In our case we have chosen - Account Attachment – as the Business Component. In this case Business Object is Account.Object Id – Row id of the record.All these are input arguements to the method and there is NO Output arguement from the method. Used to add the attachment when required to any of the business component
SIS OM PMT Service Set Profile Attribute Used to set and get the Profile Attribute Profile Attributes are used For Global purpose
Get Profile Attribute
FINS Goto View Service GotoView Used to navigate to different view When you want to navigate to different view
FINS Teller UI Navigation RefreshCurrentApplet Used to refresh the current applet Used when we want to refresh the current applet without breaking the sequence
GotoView Used to go to a view you want Nevigate to a view you want
FS Verify Entitlement GetBestResponseTime If you want to get the response time from entitlement matrix by passing  the priority and the entitlement id  and entitlement name as input but it will not take calendar into consideration. It will give calendar id as an output. Used in service request to get the committed time based on the entitlement matrix. It is one of the block in the Vanila  workflow FS – Verify Entitlement SR.
Data Validation Manager Validate Used to Validate a rule set  present in Administration-Data Validation.This returns the result code and result message which means the message in the validation messages - associated with the rule set and can work by passing the rule set name only.It can be called from either from workflow or from the run time event Scenario- In an insurance company, claim adjusters are required to enter a closed date whenever they close a claim. If the adjuster tries to close a claim without a closed date, an error message appears and the claim record is not committed to the database.
SiebelUserProfileService GetProfileAttribute Used to set the profile attribute and get the profile attribute To set and get profile attribute