The ‘Lab is quickly approaching its one-year anniversary. I plan to blog something more formal closer to the date, but this post about Salesforce.com integrating with Google Apps reminded me of why I am on the team at all. Back in late 2006, I had just moved into Jesper’s strategy organization from development, and I… Read More
Twitter as Customer Support
I’ve blogged in the past about the good new web marketing, i.e. how many startups follow mentions of their companies on blogs, respond in those blogs and engage the bloggers. I really like the personal touch, even if I don’t care much for the application or don’t even use it. Twitter has added a new… Read More
JRuby Meetup!
For those of you who are live in the Bay Area (East Bay in particular), I’ll be speaking at the East Bay Ruby Meetup next Tuesday. Here’s the talk abstract: JRuby is fast becoming a solid (and possibly preferred choice) for deploying Rails apps. Rich Manalang from Oracle will talk about how he and a… Read More
Polishing Mix Groups
Rich and Anthony deployed a boat load of fixes and enhancements to Mix on Friday night. I might have mentioned before the Mix is going to be used more by internal teams, so we addressed groups with this deployment for the most part. Some of these are bug fixes that have been needed for a… Read More
Does Spam Still Work?
I got a 419 email today in my work inbox. This is pretty rare, since I guess Global IT does a great job catching spam, especially compared to my webmail accounts. Normally, in my webmail, I’d just delete an move on, but since this is so rare in my work inbox, I read the mail,… Read More
DIY Development
The WSJ Business Technology blog has a post about “Where the Next Generation of Techies Won’t Come from“. Aside from offending my grammatical sensibilities, you know, ending a sentence with a preposition, the post interests me for a couple reasons. The crux of the post refers to statistics published by the Computer Research Association that… Read More
Fun with Numbers, Mix Edition
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
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
JRuby RC2 Released; What’s Next?
If you're curious about RC2's performance, log onto https://mix.oracle.com. As of this morning, Mix is running on RC2!