The AppsLab

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… Read More

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,… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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.… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

Also titled: “What I learned from FourSquare.” A few years back when we started exploring new technology, one of the ideas that seemed to stick with me was around gaming.   The processes that made something enjoyable seemed to be an essential, yet elusive ingredient in business software. In truth, I felt there was something magical… Read More

Right, wrong or indifferent, we all use the following and followers metrics to make quick judgements about a person’s reputation, and now, Twitter has provided another dimension, the listed metric. This added dimension provides a much needed, albeit flawed, way to determine a user’s mojo. I use mojo here loosely to represent a user’s authority,… Read More

There’s been a fair amount of debate among the early adopter crowd lately about the place of syndicated content in relation to Twitter. The debate has been renewed in light of the general release of Twitter lists, which allow people to create and follow bunches of Twitter users en masse. Since many people use Twitter… Read More

I’m finally getting around to penning that post on Brizzly I’ve been threatening for a week. Not that anyone noticed. It’s been eerily quiet in the comments lately. Anyway, at OpenWorld, Rich turned me on to Brizzly and provided an invite. I’d heard about it over the Summer, but for whatever reason, it didn’t stick.… Read More

Rich provided a sweet tip this evening that I wanted to share. PuSH Bot, the weekend project of Mihai Parparita, combines the PubSubHubbub protocol with XMPP to create an easy way to subscribe to any feed served by PuSH via IM, meaning you’ll receive updates in your favorite IM client. Sweet! Oh, and there are… Read More

So, finally, Twitter has finally dropped a grouping feature, called Lists, at least to some users, including @oraclemix and @theappslab. Rich (@rmanlan) had them earlier in the week, too. Guess who’s out in the cold? Yours truly (@jkuramot), or at least I was when I started this post. Now, I’m in the club too. I,… Read More