Still feeling gravity’s pull lately, and Rich and Anthony gave me access to the Mix database this week. So, rather than review some new service (like Orgoo, for which I just got my beta invite) or wax philosophically about a New Web topic, I figured I’d dust off the SQL and crunch some numbers. Side… Read More
Category: general
Is Your Job Next?
I am not sure why the power (or danger) of the global economy never really hit me before, but I was checking out elance.com as it was mentioned in a recent book I read. If you don’t know, elance is a services marketplace. Anyway, I searched on there for design providers. Guess what, 11,144 companies… Read More
Find AppsLab at Collaborate 08
The IOUC, OAUG and Quest Oracle Applications user groups will be co-hosting their annual conference, Collaborate, April 13-17 in Denver at the Colorado Convention Center. Thanks to Floyd for creating an Upcoming event for Collaborate.Half of the ‘Lab, Paul and I, will be in Denver for the beginning of the conference. Paul is hosting a… Read More
Another Reason Product Development Should Blog
Tim’s blog crossed the one million hits mark recently. This is a great milestone for Tim and his team, congrats. It also reminded me of another reason to add to David’s series on why product development should blog. Blog as support resource. Back in early 2006, I was an applications architect working in E-Business Suite… Read More
Mix Gets a Plug at Google
Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks, who worked with Rich on the initial development of Mix last Fall, gave a tech talk at Google last week on “JRuby: The power of Java and Ruby“. He mentions Mix at about minute 61 and talks briefly about the project, built on the “red stack”, i.e. JRuby running on Oracle… Read More
Do You Know Robert?
It’s funny how micro-focused I can get. I am continually reminded of how much I live in a bubble world, and it’s always nice to have that bubble popped. Working in technology, I tend to assume that other people are geeky like me. They have Tivo, broadband, Macs, iPhones, blogs, hundreds of “friends” on Facebook/Twitter/network… Read More
Why Product Development Should Blog
David has an interesting, multi-post series going over at his blog about his experiences blogging. These are part of an ongoing case study that I hope will become an argument for why all product teams should blog. It’s unlikely that there will ever be an end to this collection, unless he shutters the blog, so… Read More
Perspective, FriendFried and the Scoble Effect
I’m having trouble getting back into the swing of blogging after taking a nice relaxing vacation. When you spend all day eating and breathing technology, it’s always good to step back and realize what else is out there. Here at the ‘Lab, we consume New Web all day long, and spend a whole lot of… Read More
JRuby on Rails: Oracle SSO Integration
Laurent reminded me that I promised a write up of how we accomplished the Oracle SSO integration for Mix. So, I’ve created an Oracle Wiki page that has details on how it works. If you have any experience with Oracle SSO and Rails (or is working on a project that requires this), please add your… Read More
The Wall Comes Down and Other Mix Changes
It’s a busy week for Mix. Monday, Rich and Anthony upgraded to JRuby 1.1RC2 and made a bunch of UI changes. Has anyone else noticed that Mix is faster? Last night, Anthony (Rich took some well-deserved time off) deployed a new set of changes, including one that has been requested quite frequently. We took down… Read More
Is Mix a Beautiful Object?
I guess we’ll see. Steve Jobs joined Mix on Wednesday. No kidding, here’s his profile. Is it the man himself? Or perhaps Dan Lyons in character? Maybe some dude named Steve Jobs who is neither the founder and CEO of Apple nor the editor guy at Forbes who used to be funny and currently is… Read More
Notes and New Blogs
So, I have returned from vacation on Hawai’i, a.k.a. da Big Island. Yes, it ruled, and yes, I’m suffering from post-vacation hangover. If you’re ever there and want an absolute thrill, take a doors-off helicopter ride up to the molten lava flowing at Kilauea. When the helicopter turns to your side, there’s only a shoulder… Read More
Mix President’s Day Release: JRuby 1.1RC2 and a bunch of other stuff!
Since U.S. based Oracle employees don’t get President’s Day off, Anthony and I decided to deploy some new changes while everyone is off enjoying their day off. Actually, that’s not true, we deployed the new Mix changes early Sunday morning. What should have taken 10 minutes lasted 2 hours — it was a big release.… Read More
I Heart TripIt
So, I’m going on vacation tomorrow for a week. Keep reading if you care. Coincidentally, I’ve been messing with two travel-targeted social networks lately, so it’s fitting that my last post before a trip would be about TripIt and Dopplr, less so. These are niche networks, an ever-more common phenomenon; as horizontal social networks like… Read More
My Interwebs is Wireless
I’m fascinated by the ongoing soap opera about the mysteriously severed undersea telecomm cables. If you haven’t been following, here’s a good recap. Maybe we’ve been preoccupied with Super Tuesday, but I haven’t seen too much mainstream coverage. Or maybe it’s another reminder that the Interwebs isn’t as important as we think it is. Nah,… Read More
The Long Tail of Meetings
This tweet from friend of the ‘Lab Michael Krigsman triggered my inner economist. Even though I’m essentially a geek, I studied economics in college and have always been fascinated by supply, demand, utility and especially modeling that stuff with a nice tidy graph. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of Chris Anderson and his… Read More
Because We Care
Here at the ‘Lab, we listen to you. When you wanted more, we gave you more. So, when I got a suggestion from Jim, I listened. Jim wanted us to provide email subscriptions to this blog, like Steven Chan does, so that he could stay informed when new content is available, on his terms. This… Read More
Thoughts on Microsoft-Yahoo
I’ve been thinking about the proposed Yahoo-Microsoft merger since the news broke on Friday. As a closeted economist and enterprise apologist, the offer’s value really jumped off the page. Microsoft is offering $44.5 billion in cash and stock for a business that generated just under $7 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2007. Microsoft’s Office… Read More
Puneet Strikes Again
The final installment in my “cool stuff from last week that I forgot to blog” series comes from our pal Puneet. He used our Google Reader OPML files (published on the About page) and his own to demonstrate three ways to view the subscriptions without a messy import into Reader or another feed reader. Behold… Read More
David’s Excellent Adventure
Another blog-worthy happening from last week was a long chat I had with David. He, and our friends over at TalentedApps and Financials Strategy are a few of the people who have taken the blogging plunge to share the knowledge locked away in their heads. David and I talked about some of the cool side-effects… Read More