Amazon Silk

Learn more here : http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing-amazon-silk/

A baby step from Amazon to do what google does ? what stops them from putting a search engine on top of the already cached pages in their cloud....

Links i like

Changed template on my blog , lost my links section.
so compiling all links on a post Shall keep updating this post instead :

Ask Tom

 

Tom Kytes blog

 

Mark Rittmans Blog

 

Jonathan Lewis

 

Steve Adams

 

Chris Foot's 10g blog

 

Dave Linthicum -Real World SOA

 

Database Debunkings

 

TDAN

 

Ralph Kimball

 

David Aldridge

 

Niall Litchfield

 

Sue Harper

 

Claudia Imhoff

 

Dan Linstedt

 

Tom Peters

 

Manager Tools

 

Malt Madness--Single Malt Whiskey

 

Waiter Rant

 

Rashmi Bansal

 

Project Gutenberg

 

800-ceo read

 

CIO magazine

 

Seth-Godin All-Marketers-are-liars

 

HBR Blog network

 

Great Bong

Structured Date

Richard Foote

architectural eye-sores

Everyday as i drive on University Road a major shopping complex that for some reason has been painted red !  irritates my eyes.

What is with the architects in India that we are aping the Western style of construction in terms of aluminum-clad-glass window - sound-proofed buildings.
In a country like ours the cooling cost for such a building will be extremely high my guess is the cooling cost will be a large percentage of their annual maintenance budget .
Contrast this with some of the PWD guest-houses we have in small-towns or even near RSI-Pune they dont need air-conditioning even in summers the colors are soothing to look at , the building is alive with bird-nests in nooks .

Why can't the newly trained architects consider those things instead of just being commercial about this , a typical structure will just be a RCC frame which is then clad in aluminium and all openings covered with double-panel think glass sheets. The construction time is less so you can start selling the space but the running cost is high leave alone the fact that these are eye-sores.

President Obama and PM Manmohan Singh

what do they both have in common : both have let go of the reins , don't appear to be in the driving seat. are not Acting.

This is a dangerous situation for anyone in a leadership position you got to be decisive , ACT , Communicate action plans . Rally people around.

Sadly i think both continue to hold on to their jobs because there is no quality opposition.

What can the PM do at this juncture

In face of the growing support for Anna , what can the Indian PM do.

In my opinion he needs to address the nation and say Why Anna's proposals are naive in nature , Must refer to Shekhar Gupta's edit page of about 2-3 weeks back for a reference.

Would definitely like the PM to act decisively on a few things , history will judge him by the actions that he takes on the corrupt netas , babus. Just pick up like the top-5 cases starting with Bofors and act decisively be it against the party he represents the message that will go out to the masses with that single-act alone can take the steam out of the mass agitations.

The question though is : Can the Indian PM act this way , or even say considering that he is just a puppet in the hands of the old guard at the party . Does he have the guts to act. The time for keeping mum and letting Mr Sibal and PC do the talking is long gone , we want to see if the PM can ACT.

Isha Kriya

A video-guide to the Isha Kriya from the master himself : http://www.ishafoundation.org/Ishakriya

Nokia launches N9

Am Still a Nokia fan at heart ( although i hate their choice of going to the MS platform )
http://swipe.nokia.com/design/ --> They make to so simple and usable.

Microsoft buys Skype !

Nothing is sacred.
First MS got Nokia to move to Windows platform and now they buy MS. MS is after all i like :)
What is next they buy Google !!!!
Mind you it is not that i dont like MS but once they "microsoftize" the product it somehow looses its charm.. I recall i had a hotmail account for a long time..but the gave up after MS complicated the UI.

Limits

Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.
--Mark Twain

disappointed that nokia did'nt go the android way

I love Nokia phones , have been using them for close to 10 years
http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/02/11/open-letter-from-ceo-stephen-elop-nokia-and-ceo-steve-ballmer-microsoft/

However was disappointed that nokia is going the windows way ..nothing against it ..just a personal preference and i was hoping that nokia would adopt android

my next phone may not be nokia...

Magic Wand tools

Can tools really automate everything you do in the BI development space.
Reminds me of the Chaplin move Modern Times .. you feed in requirements and the tool will automagically spit out a solution.
Recently attended a looooooooooong presentation by a Vendor who suggested just that.. A great sales pitch that can cause management to be blind sided but i dont believe we can getaway from the ground reality that there is no magic you still have to do the hardwork that is needed for requirements elicitation , modelling , integration , build..

Be Connected to anyone all the time ..?

Everywhere one reads about devices be it smartphones or e-book readers etc etc that allow or will allow one to "Be connected to anyone/friends/acquaintences all the time.." and i wonder do i really want to be that connected all the time ...?
Sometimes human beings do need to be alone and not have to tweet/post/text/call to any and all conversation/action happening around me.

One doesn't speak to oneself .. i speak or converse when there is a need to converse be it in your professional life or personal--Communication happens when there is a need it could be just for companionship like with your spouse or colleagues .

the networking application do have a purpose in enhancing communication or getting thoughts across to people who you may barely know like through a blog but that does not mean i want to sit in front of my screen all the time or respond to every beep on my phone...

Business Analyst role in IT projects

Is it the role of the analyst to run test-cases, should the Analyst manage user-expectations or is the role just intended to document business-processes and user-requirements.

In my opinion the Analyst is the cog in t wheel of the IT project he is the star of the team he gets to be the Customer Advocate and also help the Developer better the code..

There is a lot a good analyst can give a project provided his role is defined and is not just restricted to running test cases...........

Manage user requirements

How does one manage user requirements in the UAT phase of a project when the "bugs" that the users "identify" are new feature requests............

And the wheel turns....

As "recession" kicks companies go back to monitor churn and employ the customer insight funnel .....when will everyone make it a natural way of doing business instead of just something that you do when in trouble...

I admit that there are companies that do this very nicely employing BI effectively but others just never learn.....

Six degrees of separation

Could'nt agree more with Lou Agosta's hypotheses that "Any valid data point is separated from a business problem by a number of degrees of separation" and "....we might call ETL a "degree separator undo-er.""

My experience being that enterprises still have a long way to go before they recognize that ETL is not just about technology and the "back-office" of a warehouse.Most of the investments are made in data-visualization arena , I do recognize that the "front-room" has to be very user friendly and intuitive but that does not mean that we compromise on the investment, technology , infrastructure , quality.
The acquisition of BO by SAP has thrown such a situation for companies who are looking at the BO "end-to-end" solution in my opinion the data integration tool in that stack has a long way to go before they can compete with products from Informatica or IBM.At the same time the BO visualization and dissemination capabilites are well known.

Enterprises who commit to "end-to-end" solution being offered should also concentrate on the ETL piece of the stack and put it through tests before committing to any one solution. because the data integration piece is the backbone of the system and it could adversely impact the future plans if wrong choices are made.

New generation Developers and Google

Why re-invent the wheel "Google" it seems to be the mantra of developers these days,while i acknowledge the benefits of search-engines but when it comes to people doing "copy-paste" development i am all for stopping these searches.

Developers these days have stopped reading Manuals and good books and "Googling" cannot be a substitute to reading manuals .

Feature request on sqldeveloper

My feature request on sqldeveloper seems to be getting some votes http://htmldb.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=42626:39:3668166922413636::NO::P39_ID:461

although i later found out how to convert case via accelerators let's see if the request gets accepted the one request that has been accepted of creating connection groups is going to be real useful

Jonathan Lewis explains...

..what can happen if one starts using scripts from the internet w/o enough qulaity check.
Read his article :http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/kiddy_scripts.html

I got RTFM'ed

I got RTFM'ed when today i requested for select access on V$ objects in the development enviroment.

Tried all means to convince my dba but he would'nt budge and asked me to read documentation on v$sql .

I have given up for now......no point in banging my head on the ancient mind-block wall.....