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Geeky Project Part 4: Create a WebCenter VM

Published on December 6th, 2009 Comments

While finishing yesterday’s Part 3, I decided to investigate how to add a swap file to my OEL 5 VM to accomodate at least one of 11g’s resource requirements.
I may eventually have to bump up the physical memory allocated to the VM, which will completely cripple the host OS, but I’m bending the rules here [...]

Geeky Project Part 3: Create a WebCenter VM

Published on December 5th, 2009 Comments

Having been out a few days with the flu, I’m feeling a bit behind on my geeky project (see Parts 1 and 2 for background), so last night, I decided to tackle the next big step, installing Oracle 11gR2.
Obviously, WebCenter needs a database, and I haven’t installed Oracle for a few years. So, this should [...]

Join the XFILES Project

Published on December 3rd, 2009 Comments

I know very little, erm nothing really, about APEX, but I do know there’s a robust and tight-knit community of APEX developers out there, including (but not limited to) Chet (@oraclenerd) and Dimitri (@dgielis).
I know this because friend of the ‘Lab Carl Backstrom talked about it a lot, like every chance he got.
Little known fact, [...]

Noel’s Epic Christmas Hack

Published on December 3rd, 2009 Comments

I suppose a guy whose name means Christmas in some languages should be expected to go all out for the Holidays, but wow, color me blown away by friend of the ‘Lab Noel Portugal’s epic Christmas lighting hack.
Check out the video.

Like I said, *epic*.
I’m not going to begin to break down all the pieces of [...]

Why API is a Must-Have

Published on December 2nd, 2009 Comments

It’s been clear for a long time now that a cornerstone of any new service is a good, open API.
Twitter proved this point a long time ago. Now, everyone follows suit.
Before I was felled by the H1N1, I happily reported that foursquare had publicly launched their API. I had hoped someone would use it to [...]

More Productive on a Mac?

Published on December 2nd, 2009 Comments

It’s been quiet here for a while. Not sure anyone really noticed (or cared), what with the Thanksgiving holiday last week and all. Hope you enjoyed it, by the way.
Anyway, I’m emerging from a week-long flu fog courtesy of H1N1. That’s right, yours truly caught swine flu, and let me tell you, it wasn’t very [...]

Raimonds Releases Updates to ruby-plsql gem

Published on November 25th, 2009 Comments

Earlier this week, friend of the ‘Lab Raimonds Simanovskis (@rsim) released ruby-plsql 0.4.0, which includes support for several complex Oracle datatypes and added some basic table and sequence operations for unit testing.
As you know, we’re big fans of Ruby in all its incarnations, and if you’re an Oracle developer, you know PL/SQL. So, the great [...]

Geeky Project Part 2: Create a WebCenter VM

Published on November 24th, 2009 Comments

Right after I posted yesterday’s Part 1, I decided to try out the Oracle public yum server over at public-yum.oracle.com.
I had pinged Justin over the weekend and his contact had pointed me there, and it turns out the same suggestion was also kindly added to comments shortly after I published.
After following the instructions there, I was [...]

Geeky Project Part 1: Create a WebCenter VM

Published on November 23rd, 2009 Comments

I’ve managed to collect a handful of geeky projects lately.
First, my move to Ubuntu 9.10 got fast-tracked. After the rocky move from 8.10 to 9.04, I figured I’d wait a bit on Karmic.
But, last week, my drive filled up due to my backup package erroneously writing backups locally instead of to my backup drive, which [...]

So, What Do You Do?

Published on November 20th, 2009 Comments

Paul, Rich and Chet are big fans of Jason Fried, the founder of 37 Signals.
Although I’ve happily used several of their apps (Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire), until recently, I had never read their company blog, Signal vs. Noise, which frequently has interesting observations from Friend, DHH and others.
Today’s installment by Fried, called “I’m a tailor“, addresses [...]

On Dragons

Published on November 19th, 2009 Comments

Since last week’s post on the interwebs and fear, a couple other un-related posts have come across my reader that have me pondering the future of our beloved intertubes.
First was Chris (#mrhashtag) Messina on “The death of the URL“, followed by Tim “What is Web 2.0″ O’Reilly on “The War For the Web“.
Both are well [...]

Want to Test Drive WebCenter 11g?

Published on November 19th, 2009 Comments

Here’s another installment in the “we’re-a-for-reals-product-team” series.
If you’re interested in WebCenter, but don’t have the time or resources to download, install and configure it on your own to kick the tires, you should sign up for a WebCenter Test Drive.
Basically, the test drive will give you a hosted sandbox environment where you’ll have your own [...]

Foursquare Launches an API

Published on November 18th, 2009 Comments

If you’ve been reading here lately, you’ll know we have a crush on foursquare for a number of reasons: it’s fun and engaging to play, it’s a new shiny object, it applies game mechanics to solve a problem, etc.
On Monday, they officially announced their API.
I had heard around the way that there was a buggy [...]

Is Walk up and Use a Myth?

Published on November 17th, 2009 Comments

Eric Burke published this cartoon back in early 2008, and it’s stuck with me for a long time as something that is simultaneously hilarious, sad and maddening.
I started my career in development building those eye-chart apps with fields and labels all over the place, complete with the obligatory button bar. Enterprise apps are complicated.
Whether or not [...]

The iPhone Game Economy

Published on November 16th, 2009 Comments

I mentioned a while back that I’m using my iPhone more frequently as a game console, and I know I’m not the only one.
The iPhone makes a perfect gaming device for me because it’s portable, to entertain me wherever I go, and it’s already another device, meaning I don’t have to lug extra gear.
I’ve never [...]

WebCenter 11g Patch Set 1 Released

Published on November 12th, 2009 Comments

From the “we’re-a-for-reals-product-team” department, comes an announcement: WebCenter 11g Patch Set 1 has just been released.
Peter Moskovits has a rundown of all the new features over on his blog, and there are plenty, including the introduction of the People Connection service, which adds the social networking layer to WebCenter. This service was at least partly [...]

Web of Fear

Published on November 12th, 2009 Comments

There’s a very scary story floating (h/t Gizmodo) around about a man framed by a virus that compromised his computer, then downloaded child porn and acted as a server, all unbeknownst to him.
Let that sink in for a minute.
The man was eventually able to clear his name, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on his defense. [...]

What’s Your IDE of Choice?

Published on November 11th, 2009 Comments

So, now that we’re really a product team and all, rolling into WebCenter development and working full-time on enhancements to the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to add real content from time to time.
I’m hoping that as we learn more about WebCenter and use it that [...]

Augmented Reality Win

Published on November 10th, 2009 Comments

Augmented Reality (AR) is a phrase you’ve probably heard lately, and you’ll probably get tired of hearing over the next few months.
For the uninitiated, AR apps install to your mobile phone and layer content to views of your, erm, regular reality. Sounds weird, right? There have been several iPhone apps released over the past few months that [...]

Critical Social Mass

Published on November 9th, 2009 Comments

The release of Twitter lists and the new “listed” metric has me thinking about reputation and how its applied to people in consumer web examples.
I had an interesting chat with my pal Kelly (@verso) about the listed metric Friday. She doesn’t see it as immediately useful since there’s no way to determine the impact being [...]

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