The good and bad of PLC ethernet... in hotels

I am traveling visiting partner and pleased to see that I have internet access in my room. Unfortunately it is not Wifi access but not that bad, but with PLC (Power line communication)... So I take my PLC Adapator at the concierge. Plug it in my room and start to surf the web. Performance is good... Now I am looking for another electric plug for my MacBook AC... oh maaaan! I cannot find any other free plug.. except in the bathroom. This is really annoying and stupid... Sorry for this little post about a small and annoying experience.. alone in my PLC bedroom.

Free Burma: International Bloggers' Day for Burma on the 4th of October

Come to Oracle Open World and watch Mr Spring and Mr Apache speak

Oracle Open World is getting very close... And I am very excited to go to lot of sessions, two of them looks very interesting in the Oracle Develop track:

• Rod Johnson - Spring Update: What's New and Cool in Spring 2.0 (Monday 10/23/2006, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM in the Hilton Hotel Grand Ballroom A)
• Brian Behlendorf - Bringing Open Source Software Development Practices and Principles Into Your Company (Tuesday 10/24/2006, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM in the Hilton Hotel Grand Ballroom A)

This is quite exciting to have Open Source gurus coming to present to the Oracle conference, and explain how to use the new Spring in their projects or leverage Open Source practices to improve development in house... Take a look to the full program of Oracle Develop.

Start to use the Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder to organize your week in SF, if you have not registered yet for OOW click here.

Google Data APIs

Google has published a new set of API (and format) to update and access data. It looks really interesing. These services are published using the REST paradigm and XML. Based on this protocol Google is now exposing its Calendar. I am currently playing around with it, really fun. A good opportunity for portlets and widgets developments... Note for Oracle JDeveloper 10g (10.1.3) users: I have define the GData and Calendar API as new library inside Oracle JDeveloper. But I had some issue compiling when I start to use any of the class coming from these library with the default configuration on Windows XP. I just switch from Oracle JVM to the standard JDK compiler in my project to avoid this "Error: Internal compilation error, terminated with a fatal exception". To do this it is quite simple. Double click on your project, choose compiler in the left tree, and check the "Use Javac" option to force JDeveloper to use the standard javac command. (I will have to find where this issue come from...)

Oracle 10g: Oracle Open World Top 10 presentations

You can find online the top 10 presentations of Oracle Open World 2005:

1. Optimizing the Optimizer: Essential SQL Tuning Tips and Techniques
2. 10 Things We Like About Oracle Database 10g Release 2
3. PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards, and Oracle E-Business Suite Integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware
4. The Future of Database and Information Technology
5. Understanding Shared Pool Memory Structures: Tips on How to Optimize Usage and Avoid Errors
6. Take the Guesswork Out of Database I/O Tuning
7. Tuning Oracle SQL in the Real World
8. What They Didn't Print in the Doc: High-Availability Best Practices from Oracle Maximum Availability
9. Performance Diagnostics Demystified: Best Practices for Oracle Database 10g
10. Best Practices for Oracle Database 10g Backup and Recovery

Enjoy!

Oracle Developer Day: September/October Sessions

Oracle Developer Day is a free, hands-on workshop that will give you insight into the latest technologies in SOA and Java. You can choose from one of two topics:

• Track 1: Emerging SOA and J2EE technologies: EJB 3.0, JavaServer Faces and BPEL
• Track 2: Rapid J2EE Application Development for Forms and Designer Developers

Here the list of dates and cities:

• New York, NY – Thursday, September 29, 2005 – New York Metro Area Oracle User Group Day
• Pasadena, CA – Tuesday, October 11, 2005
• Toronto, Ontario – Tuesday October 18, 2005
• Montreal, Quebec – Thursday, October 20, 2005
• Columbus, OH – Monday, October 24, 2005
• Minneapolis, MN – Thursday, October 27, 2005
• Calgary, Alberta – Tuesday, November 1, 2005

Oracle Open World: Monday

Another nice day in San Francisco; I have been in booth duty most of the day and I have finished the day with a first presentation, with George Trujillo about J2EE Deployment strategy. This presentation I hope was interested for the quite big audience, the long Q&A session -1h, it is nice to be the last in the room- was very good since I talk with various Oracle customer about J2EE management in perspective of the database management. The benefits of Oracle Grid Control for Database and AppServer administrators... I would invite you if you are not familiar with Oracle Grid Control to take a look to OTN.
Some of the interesting point is the annoucement of the new OracleAS 10g R3, that enhanced the Fusion Middleware to deliver SOA, beside the support of J2EE 1.5, Java 5, EJB 30, JSF, I was very pleased to spend my day demonstrating our new UDDI V3 registry that continue to expend our Web Services stack by giving new services in addition to BPEL and Web Services Manager.

Oracle Open World: Sunday

The first Oracle World Day for me has started with finishing the various demonstrations of the J2EE Core OC4J and Web Services demonstration Pods. Tomorrow Monday, we will be showing some very cool stuff around Web Services development and management, with some good news around Web Services Registry. Also on the J2EE Core, nice demonstrations of the different services but some of the new features of the OracleAS 10.1.3 such as the new clustering framework and the usage of scripting technologies, especially Groovy, to administer and monitor OracleAS, thanks to JMX!

What about the rest of the day, I was invited to the Web Services Special Interest Group, WS-SIG, - no.. this is not a new acronym in the WS-* world-. This new SIG has been created in the beginning of the year and on the behalf of IOUG, please take a look to the WSSIG web site. . One of the very interesting things of this SIG is, like the J2EE SIG (Organized by OTUG, IOUG, OAUG and Oracle), developers, architects, and administrators of Fusion Middleware, the Database and Oracle Fusion applications are talking together. This reunion of people is good since we all from development to operations have a different view of systems. So during this panel we have introduced quickly the concepts, and then the audience jumped in for the Q&A session, as you can guess, we add the classical questions around Web Services for the enterprise such as what about security? Management? Life Cycle ?... and so on. We answered obviously, but I would say if you are lucky enough to be at San Francisco this week, please come to the Demo Ground especially Web Services, Web Services Manager and BPEL where you will see the Oracle products in action and you will be able to find experts to help you to answer your questions.

The main auditorium was packed to see the first keynote/show of Oracle Open World 2005, where Oracle presented some of the numerous charity efforts that it does, and offer some fun to the attendees with a nice show from Dana Carvey

What about Oracle Blog dinner?

Mark Rittman is organizing a dinner for the different Oracle bloggers, it will be at the Paragon Restaurant at Second Street on Townsend at 8.00pm on Tuesday 20th. ( I will be there for sure...)

YAIM (Yet Another Instant Messenging): Google Talk

I have been playing around with Google Talk It is quite nice, once again I like the look... But I do not see 'revolutionnary' features... Like Skype I was able to use it at work IM and Voice chat... I like the fact that they document how to work around their lack of platform support... I would like to have a mac version... I am surprised that Mac users in Google did not yet implement it! Fo developer perspective it is interesting to know that they use standard based protocol such as Jabber/XMPP, and they invite people to use the API (since open standard) and server... Take a look to the developer section of their documentation.

Thanks to MozBackup...

My Windows laptop has been infected by some viruses and adware -why I am not only using my Mac and Linux computers?-, so I just reinstalled the full OS..... I just want to use my blog to thanks the small utility MozBackup that allowed to quickly backup and recover my Firefox and Thunderbird configuration and data! Thanks again...

JSR 198 Early Draft Open For Review

The JSR-198:A Standard Extension API for Integrated Development Environment expert group has made the early draft available for review. I really love this JSR and I am very happy that is now making progress because I played around in the past with Oracle JDeveloper Plugin APIs and I was disappointed that my work could not be used in other IDE... Oracle JDeveloper 10g (10.1.3) API will be based on the JSR 198. Take a look the Oracle JDeveloper Extension page. On my side I have to dig out the old extensions that I wrote for 9.0.3 and migrate them to 10.1.3, I will start with the small Lejos extension, if I can find it... It has been so long since I did not play with my legos...

Leaving for India...

Tomorrow, I am leaving for India where I will present Oracle Application Server 10g and SOA to some of our partners. (J2EE, Web Services, BPEL and all put together!) I will be in Bangalore and Calcutta, for 2 weeks, so if you have good place to go in this cities let me know tugdual[at]grallandco[dot]com !

Which kind of developer are you? A software terrorist?

Allen Holub just published on SDTime an editorial named "The Terror of Code in the Wrong Hands". I like the description of the "software terrorist": the guy who stays up all night, unwittingly but systematically destroying the entire team’s last month’s work while “improving” the code. He doesn’t tell anybody what he’s done, and he never tests. He’s created a ticking time bomb that won’t be discovered for six months. I am sure we all have a small list of co-worker that we put in this category... Hoping that I am not in yours :-)

A very good HTML Editor... and open source

I have started to use on my Mac and PC the free HTML editor NVU, it is really a great product! Key Features:

• Multi Plaform: MacOS X, Linux, Windows... the project has been started by LinSpire... so not a big surprise
• FTP Site manager
• Good CSS Editor and Integration to the HTML Editor
• Form Editing
• Based on Gecko

Nothing revolutionnary compare with DreamWeaver or FrontPage.. except that it is still very powerfull and free... I hope that some Open Source developers will take time to develop Dav Site management, Source Control integration, JSP Development (at least same as the PHP stuff it currently has...)

Free Subversion Online Book

You can find a online version of the book Version Control with Subversion. Thanks to the authors Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick,C. Michael Pilato, and their publisher O'Reilly.

Infoworld about OracleAS 10gR2: Write once, run everywhere -- no kidding

As you can guess, when you work on a product it is always a pleasure to see good feedback, from end users, or from the media... Tom Yager, from InfoWorld has published an article about Oracle Application Server 10g R2.

Infoworld ©

Here some of the comments:

“I’m extremely impressed with AS 10g Release 2 as a commercial product. Oracle has designed a valuable feature set built on top of J2EE 1.3, optimizing it for SOAs (service-oriented architectures), BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), BPM, pervasive support of XML, and real-time business intelligence, among many, many other things.”

“But I’m just as impressed with the clear emphasis Oracle has placed on complying not only with the letter of Java server standards, but with their “write once, run anywhere” spirit. You get to choose whether you want to bind yourself to Oracle’s extras. AS 10g Release 2 permits, and even automates, deployment to and management of non-Oracle Java app servers that adhere to the J2EE 1.3 standard. And if you do this, there are no subtle glitches meant to prod you toward paying for Oracle’s server.”

“After several weeks of living with AS 10g Release 2, I found that Oracle’s added value is nothing short of spectacular for enterprise applications and well worth paying for.”

“The myth of “write once, run anywhere” has been turned on its head. With AS 10g Release 2, Oracle has delivered on that age-old promise as well as a software giant can.”

Feel free to drop me comments about your experience with OracleAS 10g...

yagoohoogle : the best of both world.. in a simple way

A friend of mine send me this funny and useful link http://www.yagoohoogle.com/... Just simple and neat.

New Oracle Products on OTN

Oracle BPEL Process Manager 10.1.2 Beta-3 Preview
BPEL PM 10.1.2 Beta 3 is now available on OTN. One of the biggest new, is the fact that the BPEL Designer is now based on Oracle JDeveloper and provide much more functionnalities than previous release.

Oracle Drive Preview Release
Oracle Drive Preview Release is a powerful WebDAV client that allows Portal content management and publishing directly from your Windows Desktop; Key Highlights:

• Mount the Portal Repository as a Windows Drive
• Get Portal specific menu options to set properties, ACL information, preview content and pages, etc
• Access the Portal repository with a command line utility
• Search from your Windows Explorer
• Perform Virus check on the Portal Repository
• Work with offline content and synchronize when online
• Edit content with any available Editor

You can see a demonstration of Oracle Drive on OTN.

Blog Beginner: check out w.bloggar and other desktop tools

A friend a mine just ask me:

What blog software do you recommend if somebody is starting newly, should have the ability to create categories, easy image uploading?

I did not understand immediately his question, but he wanted to know if some Desktop application exists to easily publish on a blog...

I am sure that you can find a lot on the Web, I personnaly use w.bloggar. As you may know most of the Blog (server) provides XML-RPC, it is how this tools communicate with your server

I will have to test these tools on my Mac: BlogApp and iBlog. If you are Linux user take a look at: BlogniX

Here the list of the supported online services and blog supported by w.bloggar:

Blog Services Blogger TypePad BigBlogTool Blogalia TheBlog Blog-City EraBlog.NET Upsaid UBlog SquareSpace BlogWare DearDiary.Net

Blog Tools MovableType Nucleus b2 WordPress b2 evolution Blog:CMS .Text BlogWorks XML Drupal LiveJournal pMachine Xoops E-Xoops PostNuke blojsom Roller Weblogger Domino YACS Xaraya

uConnect, my best Blue Tooth experience.. so far...

A friend a mine just bought the top of the line of the Dodge Grand Caravan... Really over-loaded... My favorite feature is uConnect, that provide hand-free voice system based on Bluetooth... I just turned on blue tooth on my phone, and five minutes later I was able to talk to my friends and family and share that with all people in the car. I have several bluetooth stuff (Macs, PDA, Phone) and this is the first time that using uConnect that I find a really cool usage of it... The missing feature: I would like to see an integration between my address book on the PDA to the GPS system allowing the system to direclty set the destination from an address....