The AppsLab

No one likes to admit failure, especially when duplicity is involved. The intertubes is rife with scams and hoaxes, and I’m pretty sure everyone reading has fallen for at least one at some point. Case in point, today, I tried to download the bogus beta version of Chrome OS. Yes, it’s a hoax, so don’t… Read More

So, we’ve got a lot going on lately, what with the move and all. We’ll try to keep the content rolling despite real work. Rich attended Startup School 2009 over the weekend, and although he didn’t find much to blog about, you could try to rally him into a post by commenting or pestering him… Read More

A few weeks ago, I announced that our team was moving to WebCenter development. Since then, several people have asked what our role would be specifically, many of you in person at OpenWorld. Now, I can tell you, since I finally know for sure. We’ve been charged with the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, which,… Read More

The good thing about having a blog without a narrow focus is that I can blog about pretty much anything. And I do. Case in point, auto-tuning. Until a few months ago, I wasn’t familiar with the practice of auto-tuning, which applies effects to people’s voices. I guess it’s usually applied to singer’s voices to… Read More

I’ve been playing foursquare regularly for about a month now, and even though I was teased by several people (you know who you are) at OpenWorld last week, I’ll continue to play. /me thumbs nose If you’re not familiar, foursquare debuted at SXSW this Spring, and it’s currently the latest shiny object of the early adopter… Read More

I need to watch what I say when I’m with Jake, else I’ll be asked to blog… what a chore 🙂 Anyway, just a few thoughts from last week’s craziness known as #oow… Congrats to Raimonds Simanovskis for winning the coveted Oracle Developer of the Year award.  Raimonds’ is known in the Ruby and Rails… Read More

The big show is over for another year, and San Franciscans are happy for the return of that critical block of Howard between 3rd and 4th. As with every year, my show was pretty much over after Tuesday, leaving me with a couple sessions and lots of work to get done. Oh, and our annual… Read More

Wow, so it rained a bunch today, and it was windy. Like a tropical storm or something. Not the best weather for me, being umbrella-phobic and all. I nearly had my eye poked out a dozen times, not a good day to be anti-umbrella. Anyway, here we go. Tuesday, Day 2: Woke up to rain… Read More

Even though many of you are either here in rainy San Francisco or are following OpenWorld via its many virtual channels (#oow09 on Twitter, OpenWorld Live, OraNA (and @orana), etc.), I figured I’d give you a list of what I’ve been doing. Sunday, Day 0: Landed around 11:30 in Oakland. Spent 35 minutes in the… Read More

So, we’ll all be making the trip to OpenWorld in a few days. I’m the only one on the team actually flying, but if you’re familiar with Bay Area traffic, you could argue that we’re all traveling (vs. commuting). Anyway, I’m not sure of my exact itinerary, assuming you care, but due to our recent… Read More

Following Rich again with Google Wave coverage, I figured I should add some of my own impressions of Wave after using it for a bit. First and foremost, Wave is a work in progress, and it may eventually live up to the potential we all saw in it after the demo at Google I/O in… Read More

After several days under the weather, I emerged today to several thousand unread feed items. Normally to get through a lot of content, I scan the titles of the items for interesting stuff before reading further. Today, I think I passed up PhotoSketch (h/t Techmeme, Gizmodo) at least four times before it stuck, but when it… Read More

When I first saw Google Wave, it was like experiencing a messiah. For a web/tech geek, @larsras‘ and @twephanie‘s 80+ min demo was a spiritual affair that I’ll probably remember for the rest of my life [in software].  I even spread the love on this blog. After Google I/O (where Google Wave had it’s coming… Read More

Just testing out a collaborative sudoku gadget from Google Wave. Update: you’ll only see this if you have a Google Wave account. 7 invites left. First 7 to comment gets an invite! Update: All my (Jake’s) invitations are gone, not sure where Rich is with his batch. Also, the Wave script seems to be borked.… Read More

There are few things like predictions to spark some discussion, and I found a set of predictions about what everyday technology we won’t be using in a decade on TechRadar (h/t Digg) that I’m sure will produce some discussion. If nothing else, it’ll get you thinking about the future and you’ll interact with your tech,… Read More

If you read here, you’ll know we got our start as a team focused on innovation within the development organization responsible for Oracle’s enterprise application product families. Well, today we’re moving. We are joining the WebCenter product development team, who have been a busy bunch this year, releasing Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g in July. To… Read More

Lately, I’ve been playing with foursquare, the latest shiny object among early adopter types. Foursquare is another location-based service, but it’s also a game that encourages you to check-in when you go places to earn badges and the coveted mayorship of a location. The geo-geek in me likes the location bits, and the latent gamer… Read More

Jake and I have grown tired over our bland red, black, and white theme.  I finally had a bit of time to carry out a simple redesign.  Here it is.  We wanted something super simple that was easy on eyes and had a nice font.  To spruce it up a bit, I added some drop… Read More

YouTube published (h/t TechCrunch) an interesting graph of its video ratings earlier in the week. YouTube uses a five-star scale for rating videos, and according to them, rating a video one star means you “loathe” it, while rating a video five stars means you love it. The data show that an overwhelming majority of the… Read More

Found out yesterday that I will in fact be making the trip to OpenWorld, which is rapidly approaching, October 11-15. So now, I’m looking to fill my dance card with keynotes, sessions, both unconference and scheduled, and meetups. Any suggestions? Let me know in comments. One thing I never miss is the blogger meetup, which… Read More