Better Ways to Play and Try

Fact 1: Dazzling animated displays (sprites, shaders, parallax, 3D) are more plentiful and easier to make than ever before. Fact 2: More natural and expressive forms of input (swiping, pinching, gesturing, talking) are being implemented and enhanced every day. Fact 3: Put these two together and the possible new forms of human computer interaction are… Read More

FriendFeed Crosses the Streams

Recently, I blogged about FriendFeed, a new app that aggregates all your friend’s 2.0 activity into a single river of goodness, a la the Connect Activity Log or the Facebook News Feed. In typical new web fashion, FriendFeed is in invite only beta now, and earlier in the week, I got my beta invite. The… Read More

Eddie’s MetaLink Search Plus

We probably have a pretty high overlap percentage with Eddie so many of you have already seen this. Still, I want to point out a sweet Greasemonkey script he published yesterday. The script expands your keyword search on MetaLink to a host of other engines: Oracle documentation, blogs, public forums and mailing lists, AskTom, search.oracle.com… Read More

All Your (Oracle) Blogs are Belong to Us

So, about a month ago when I released the Oracle Blogs search engine plugins, Carl asked a very valid question. Why can’t I search all the blogs listed at blogs.oracle.com, regardless of whether they are hosted by Oracle or not? I thought about this, contemplating creating a Custom Google Search Engine and a plugin against… Read More

11g Doc Gets a New Web Makeover

Yesterday, I blogged about 11g updates to documentation tools that Eddie and I have written. I just noticed that Justin has a post about the 11g documentation as well. Apparently, each page now features comments at the bottom. I had to check this out for myself, and sure enough, here it is. Don’t believe it?… Read More

Search Tools Updated for 11g

Eddie Awad has a post today that some of you will find useful. His Oracle Bookmarklets and search plugins now support the brand new 11g R1 documentation. The Oracle Documentation search plugin I posted also includes 11g R1 now, too. For those uninitiated, bookmarklets allow you to do some pretty sweet productivity tweaks using Javascript… Read More

New Tools for Lucky Oracle Users

Yesterday, OTN released the Oracle DBA Toolbar (screenshot) for Firefox and IE. A great little tool for any Oracle DBA. Kudos to Justin and his OTN crew for delivering innovative, useful tools for our customers. Readers of this space may be sick of hearing about OpenSearch plugins, but like it or not, people find them… Read More

Plugins for Employees

The reaction to the MetaLink plugin has been overwhelmingly positive. Thanks to all who have linked, commented or downloaded. It seems we’ve tapped a reservoir of productivity tools that have existed for a while, but haven’t been shared. I’m interested to know if you have browser plugins or add-ons that make you more productive. Let… Read More