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In a 2nd post on the value of planning, Cary Milsap argues that "there's a time when the incremental value of planning drops beneath the value of actually doing something. "
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Trond-Arne Undheim describes the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's recently announced "Technology Reference Model (TRM) for the Procurement of Information Systems" as a "milestone in the work to make IT procurement fair and...the software market more sustainable."
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Dain Hansen offers his top-5 list of year-end lists of coverage of the data Integration space. Dain describes his post as "a review of other year-in-reviews."
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Jeff Ercikson's viudeo interview with Steve Lemme of the IOUG.
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"A new Web site has been launched dedicated to the on-going development of SOA patterns and the expansion of the master SOA pattern catalog. SOAPatterns.org publishes summarized descriptions of all 85 patterns from the recently released book "SOA Design Patterns" along with 20 candidate patterns that are currently under review and in development."
In the holiday spirit I hope readers will forgive a wildly off-topic post.
Tomorrow I'll participate in the pot-luck lunch that has become a holiday tradition at what is now Oracle's downtown Cleveland office, which used to be the BEA office, and before that the Flashline office. Over the years my contribution to these pot-lucks has been a double batch of homemade spinach balls, accompanied by what I've dubbed HazMat Mustard Sauce. Every year I get asked for the recipe, so this year I thought I'd be proactive and publish it here.
In the interest of full disclosure I must point out that this is not an original recipe. It was clipped from a magazine or newspaper years ago, and my wife, who is the serious foodie and recipe clipper in the family, can't remember where we first saw it, or even if she was the original clipper. But hats off to the originator of this recipe, whoever you are, it's good eatin'. And now it's time to put it out in the cloud for all to enjoy.
BTW: this is holiday food - nutrition be damned!
Spinach Balls
Ingredients
- 2 packages frozen chopped spinach (thawed, of course, and well drained)
- 2 cups herb-flavored bread crumbs
- 1 stick butter or margarine (melted)
- 1 cup parmesan cheese (grated)
- 3 eggs
- 4 small scallions (chopped)
Preparation
- Combine all ingredients.
- Form into balls, about one heaping tablespoon each.
- Bake at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes or until golden brown
HazMat Mustard
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup vinegar
- 1/2 cup dry mustard
- 1/4 cup sugar (Splenda works well as a substitute)
- 1 egg yolk
Preparation
- Combine vinegar and mustard in a sauce pan.
- Add sugar and egg yolk.
- Stir over low heat until the mixture thickens.
- Refrigerate until serving time.
It has been my observation that the longer the sauce sits, the more potent it becomes. I make it the night before serving. Be advised: the flavor is wonderful, but this stuff could easily be weaponized and used for riot control. Start out with a dime-sized dab on one of the spinach balls, then increase the dosage as your tolerance allows.
So, to everyone in the Oracle community, Happy Holidays! Enjoy!
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Mark Rittman offers his perspective on the recent release of Oracle Data Integrator 10.1.3.5.
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Bex Huff says, "It is completely illogical to state that technology eliminates jobs. If that were true, then 10,000 years of innovation would mean no jobs left on the planet... The relationship between technology and jobs is much more complex than that."
Writing in his Financial Page column in The New Yorker, James Surowiecki offers this bit on the problems that have landed like a cataclysm-inducing comet on the newspaper industry:
In a famous 1960 article called Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.
How many other industries/businesses are in the deep end of the doo-doo pool because they haven't figured out -- or don't care to figure out -- exactly what it is they do? Here's a note to all those of a similar mindset: Stop hitting the snooze button.
Read the article - it's good stuff: News You Can Lose: Financial Page: The New Yorker
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The SearchOracle blog is offering a free download of a chapter from Billy Cripe's book "Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0."
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David Linthicum's last post for 2008 -- or so he says -- asks the inevitable question. To paraphrase Col. Kurtz: The whimsy...the whimsy...
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According to Allen Stern, "Twitter can make babies, make you rich, make the world safe, increase company sales and so much more. I am looking forward to the day Twitter cures the diseases that have plagued our planet for decades. It's just too bad that with all of this greatness, the company still can't figure out how to generate revenue."
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The noted business author discusses business jargon and three of his least-loved bizspeak terms.
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A panel of Oracle experts discusses the connection and synergy between SOA and BPM, and their impact on efficiency and agility.
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Leo Schuster, VP and General Manager of Enterprise Services at National City Bank, backs up his argument that "EA and SOA investment is critical to the companies’ success – it will enable them to stay competitive, achieve significant efficiencies, and potentially even gain market share."
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David Linthicum says, "If you're doing SOA properly, you're driving it from the architecture to the technology." He adds, "With cloud computing, the need for a well-thought-out architecture does not go out the window; indeed, it's even more important, considering that you're extending the architecture out of the firewall."
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Venkatesh Rao's list of significant books covering Enterprise 2.0, a list that he suggests, "might make for some good Cliff Notes level material to help you fake it."
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Speaking of cloud-based systems, Nicholas Carr tells Computerworld: "Eventually, if not already, they're going to be more reliable than the average company's systems are. "
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Billy Cripe discusses how the "huge influx of unstructured information generated in no small part by the mass adoption of web 2.0 technology has made semantic web tagging/formatting/searching/aggregating/parsing a necessity."
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Sandeep Phukan on the use and benefits of a Distributed BTree in achieving cloud-based memory .
Early in October, SOA blogger Jeff Davies published the first of two posts in his Architect's Dictionary series in an effort to deal with what he described as "a hazard of specialization in any field."
That hazard, According to Jeff, is that "you assume that everyone you speak with not only recognizes your particular jargon, but also that they have the same definition for those terms that you do."
Joining in the effort to improve communication between IT professionals, Oracle ACE Eddie Awad has posted his list of Top 50 SOA-Related Acronyms, in part a reaction to the plethora of TLAs he encountered in the recent early stages of his work to migrate his organization to Service-Oriented Architecture. As Eddie puts it, "If you want to dive into SOA, you will be swimming in a sea of acronyms."
With help from Jeff and Eddie, you just might be able to keep your head above water.
Now, if somebody can just settle the "So-Ah" versus "Ess-Oh-Ay" argument we can all get on with our lives.
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David Dorf reviews several iPhone shopping applications.
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As reported on BBSpot: "Hackers from the LinuxOnAnything.nl Web site successfully installed Linux on a potato. It's the first time the operating system has been successfully installed on a root vegetable."
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Former BEA certification program manager Lisa Iacono-Chiola Lisa discusses the migration to Oracle certification, the target audiences, the exam content, and how the exams were built.
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Mike Pietch, Senior Director of Product Marketing, wraps up his conversation about Oracle Application Grid with a look at how organizations are using underlying technologies, scenarios that indicate a need for Application Grid, and what it all means for WebLogic users