Read and monitor Oracle related blogs and news sources, all in one place.
Great, now even if you invest a fortune in extremely esoteric quantum crypto equipment to guard your data transmissions....you're still vulnerable. So far the system used by the ancients--training a trustworthy courier to keep secrets and sending him to the place the data is needed--seems to still be the best technique available: Hardware hackers defeat quantum crypto • The Register
BPEL
Over at the Online Apps DBA blog there is a handy posting on Troubleshooting BPEL worklist integration with Oracle Single Sign-on.
OWB
The Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) Weblog has a recommendation for those upgrading to OWB 11.2.0.1: Recommended OWB Patch before Repository Upgrade or Migration: 9802120
Blog of Note: Rittman Mead Consulting
You'll find a lot of postings here linked from the Rittman Mead Consulting blog. It's one of the best out there, with consistently high quality technical content. A couple of samples over the last week or two:
Oracle BI EE 11g – Authentication & Authorization – Weblogic Security
and
Oracle BI EE 11g – New BI Server Functions
Hyperion
Speaking of great blogs, In 2 Hyperion has a posting on Long Live The Essbase Add-In!
EPM
New EPM Documentation Portal Available on Oracle.com
The EPM Documentation Portal provides a single entry point to locate documentation, training and other useful information that assists with the implementation process and enhances a customer’s experience with our products.
The tool is available on oracle.com from this link: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/index.html.
· On the right hand side of the page, click on Technical Information
· then Enterprise Performance Management Documentation Portal
which takes you to this page: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/technical-information-147174.html
Burnout
Over at Lifehacker, always one of my favorite general technology and office life blogs, is an article on the addictive nature of technology and how to keep it from consuming your life:
Why Technology Is So Addictive, and How You Can Avoid Tech Burnout
WiFi
Wifi has become an increasingly important part of day to day life. Windows' wifi builtin is crude at best. Several of these programs look interesting, but I haven't tried them yet, so I can't give you a review. I plan to get the one that measures signal strength of Wi-Fi servers in your home area, though, since it would be nice to know that you are on a channel not getting interference from a neighbor:
6 useful Wi-Fi tools for Windows - Computerworld
I absolutely love reading about brain hacks like this one.
The Ugly Carpets of Vegas are Hideously Clever Social Engineering at Work
Although I didn’t read any obvious psychological reasoning behind using gaudy carpets, you have to assume there’s a real hack there.
Personally, I think the surreal carpeting adds to the simultaneous sensory depravation and overload of the casino. No natural light or clocks, uncomfortably cold, lots of booze, loud noises, flashing lights and mad carpeting.
Interesting stuff.
Update: Steven Chan emailed me with an explanation about casino carpets. A friend of his who teaches at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration says the carpet is deliberately designed to camouflage chips that commonly fall on it. Apparently, casinos sweep up a large number of chips daily.
Casinos are fascinating business.Possibly Related Posts:
William Gibson (yes, that William Gibson) penned a fascinating op-ed piece for the New York Times this week.
Op-Ed Contributor – Google’s Earth – NYTimes.com
This bit hooked me (h/t Geekosystem)
If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.
The whole piece is fascinating and frightening all at once, especially his observation that legislation is constantly playing catch up with technology, something that is potentially destructive to society as a whole.
What will the future hold for Google or technology in general?
Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:
Oracle Retail provides a full suite of applications that can cover the requirements of the modern retailer. If you visit the Oracle Retail homepage you will be amazed by the variety of the applications that are available.
When a retailer decides to go ahead with Oracle Retail they have to decide which applications they need and what the order of installation will be. The decision for the first question the is entirely up to the retailer. For the second question can be a little bit more complicated. The order in which the various applications will be installed can determine the success or failure of the entire project. There are dependencies between projects and they need to be defined in advance. There are always constraints from the customer side that affect the order of the installation.
According to Oracle Retail the ideal order of installation of the entire Oracle Retail application suite is the following:
1. Oracle Retail Merchandising System (RMS), Oracle Retail Trade Management (RTM), Oracle Retail Sales Audit (ReSA)
2. Oracle Retail Service Layer (RSL)
3. Oracle Retail Extract, Transform, Load (RETL)
4. Oracle Retail Active Retail Intelligence (ARI)
5. Oracle Retail Warehouse Management System (RWMS)
6. Oracle Retail Allocation
7. Oracle Retail Invoice Matching (ReIM)
8. Oracle Retail Price Management (RPM)
9. Oracle Retail Central Office (ORCO)
10. Oracle Retail Back Office (ORBO)
11. Oracle Retail Store Inventory Management (SIM)
12. Oracle Retail Integration Bus (RIB)
13. Oracle Retail Point-of-Service (ORPOS)
14. Oracle Retail Analytics Applications
15. Oracle Retail Advanced Inventory Planning (AIP)
16. Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server (RPAS)
17. Oracle Retail Data Warehouse (RDW)
18. Oracle Retail Workspace (ORW)
Photo by good friend Eddie Awad from Flickr used under Creative Commons
A couple items of note heading into OpenWorld.
Current students can get into JavaOne and Oracle Develop for free. There are a few qualifications:
You must be enrolled in an accredited nonprofit institutions of learning during the Fall semester/quarter of 2010, taking a minimum of six (6) units, and you must be at least 18 years old.
The free pass gets you:
Admission to any session in the Java Frontier track for students, JavaOne, Oracle Develop and OpenWorld keynotes, three Exhibition Halls and the Mason street tent (more info below). Space permitting, you can also attend any JavaOne and Oracle Develop technical sessions, Birds-of-a-Feather sessions (BOFs), and Hands-on-Lab (HOL) sessions.
Also noteworthy, the location of the OTN Lounge is moving from its place in Moscone West in previous years to the Mason Street tent. Yes, that’s inside the huge tent built *on the street* between Moscone South and Moscone North. Check the photo if you haven’t see it in prior years.
This is likely to be relevant for other reasons (free swag, and ahem, refreshments), but in years past, our little team has hunkered down in the OTN Lounge and used it as a base of operations.
I don’t expect this to change in 2010. So, if you’re looking for us during business hours and it’s not Tuesday the 22nd at 5 PM, a good bet would be to try the OTN Lounge. Or, if you just so happen to be there already, look for us and come say hello.
See you in San Francisco.Possibly Related Posts:
The upcoming JavaOne conference — part of Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco — looks to be shaping up quite differently than Oracle planned.
When James Gosling left Oracle back in April, he said he was “pretty encouraged about the way things would work out” for Java. But now the father of Java is leading a campaign to protest Oracle’s strategy for the open source programming language, including the software giant’s recent lawsuit against Google.
On Friday, Gosling revealed on his blog “free Java” t-shirts (and mugs and pins) that he designed himself and asked JavaOne and OpenWorld attendees to wear one to “let Larry know you care.” The shirts feature the slogan “Java - Just Free It. Hold Oracle to their Pledge,” referring to Oracle’s promise in 2007 to create an independent Java foundation.
Oracle’s lawsuit against Google last month claims that Google is violating Oracle’s intellectual property through its use of Java on its Android smartphone. And though he claimed to be “pretty encouraged,” maybe Gosling actually had an inkling that something like this would happen when he left Oracle:
“During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle,” he wrote in an Aug. 12 blog post.
But Gosling isn’t the only one to stage a protest at JavaOne - Google is showing a major one of its own by pulling out of the conference altogether. Google was supposed to play a significant role in the JavaOne, with employees scheduled to present a variety of sessions on topics including Java in the cloud and GUI animation. Google’s Joshua Bloch called his company’s absence at the show a “painful realization”:
“We wish that we could [present at the show], but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally,” he said.
Google has also called the lawsuit “baseless” - but is this completely true? And could something like Gosling’s t-shirts really prove this? JavaWorld blogger Josh Fruhlinger certainly doesn’t think so. He writes that “the idea that (the t-shirts will) somehow change Oracle’s trajectory strikes me as ludicrous,” adding that while an independent Java foundation once made sense for Oracle, it’s no longer in Oracle’s best interests (and Gosling and others may be having a hard time separating emotion from business).
Ellison and executive vice president Thomas Kurian plan to discuss the future of Java in the opening keynote at JavaOne. It should be interesting to see how many Gosling t-shirts we notice in the crowd- will you be wearing one?
This is a fascinating piece, albeit speculative, about Google’s recent foray into VoIP with GMail Voice.
Gmail Voice Is About Future Search, Not Free Calls
It seems very likely to be true, considering Google’s similar use of reCAPTCHA for digitizing print.
If true, do you care? Should Google’s T&C for GMail Voice make their intentions clear?
Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:
Quiet time often produces the best thinking because it helps thoughts bubble up to the top of your mind.
You know the places, in the shower, on the can, lying in bed. Don’t act all surprised.
I often get these moments when I’m alone in the car, especially if I’m driving on a highway. Even if the radio is playing, my mind will wander, and I frequently want to capture the thoughts.
There’s a huge, obvious problem though; I’m busy driving a car.
I used to dial up my work number and leave a voicemail, which worked really well because it could happen hands-free. Our universal inboxes deliver voicemail as an audio file, so my epiphanies would be waiting for me when I got back to my desk.
Lately though, voicemail has been cranky. It stops recording when I pause and asks me if I’m done. This means I either have to call back or rerecord, which means using the keypad. Not very hands-free anymore.
I found an Android app that can record and send audio, but again, it’s not as hands free as I’d like.
Do any of you have this problem? I can’t be the only one who thinks in the car.
I’m interested in a solution and also to know where you do your best thinking. Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:
Photo by koalazymonkey on Flickr used under Creative Commons
Saw an interesting quote attributed to Mark Zuckerberg yesterday:
But guess what? Nobody wants to make lists.
A bit out of context, but Zuckerberg was expanding on the best way to share things with a network of people. He’s absolutely right about lists.
They are simultaneously the right way to share and too cumbersome to manage. Lists are a lot like email filters and folders and other methods for controlling information: easy to configure, tough to maintain.
Setting up lists isn’t terribly difficult, but as your network grows, they become a chore to manage, e.g. a new connection may not fit nicely into an existing list. Does the new person warrant a new list, or should s/he be crammed into an existing list? If the latter, are their other connections that should also be changed?
Curation is work. This is exactly my problem with organizing email.
Clayton (@cdonley) makes this very point about enterprises. LDAP stores are perfect for creating these lists, and IT manages them, making this a better solution. Inside the firewall, your relationships are known (and protected), and LDAP can use backoffice systems to create smart lists based on this information.
But what if you don’t have these benefits?
Paul (@ppedrazzi) and I had an ad hoc brainstorming session at SXSW about this. As with most software problems, the answer is an algorithm. In this case, the data source for the algorithm is your inbox.
Email is the standard for sharing things. You have to tell it with whom to share and at what level, e.g. to vs. cc vs. bcc. And email already has lists.
Indexing an inbox could tell an algorithm a lot about the relationship between the sender and recipient, which in turn, would help build smart lists.
Facebook already offers email and is rumored to be moving toward offering web mail, e.g. @facebook.com addresses. Google already indexes GMail and could easily add a smart list capability to their rumored Google Me network.
The major downside is the freaky factor, as with most algorithms. Mining someone’s inbox to create smart lists could easily feel like an invasion of privacy.
Anyway, there’s a lot of useful information locked away in an inbox that could be used to create lists, among other things. Once created, the network could maintain the lists in a relatively hands-off manner, or leave it to the user.
What do you think? Do you mind curating lists? How would you automate list creation and management?
Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:
Oracle introduced two new Sun Netra servers today, one a blade and the other rack-based.
Both servers are based on the latest Intel Xeon processor nicknamed Nehalem, and follow up on earlier Sparc-based Netra products that Oracle-Sun announced in May. Mark Butler, the director of product management for Netra Systems, said the new servers mean a doubling of the processing cores and threads compared to previous models.
Butler said end users can expect more Netra rack and blade servers from Oracle in the next year, but he gave no further details. The first server is the Sun Netra CP3270 ATCA blade, which includes quad-core Intel Xeon chips and up to 32GB of memory. The other is the Sun Netra x4270, which includes quad-core Xeon chips and up to 144GB of memory. Both are compliant with Network Equipment Building System (NEBS), which is the standard for telecommunications IT.
The telecommunications industry was always a big one for Sun Microsystems, along with financial companies and academia. Oracle is working to make the Netra line as close as it can architecturally to its enterprise line, presumably in an effort to streamline design and manufacturing costs. Butler said that Oracle is trying to minimize any differences between the Netra and enterprise lines.
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