Breaking the Ice 2.0
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Schmoozing can be a trial for the shy, reclusive, and socially challenged. Even those who understand the power of networking sometimes quake at the thought of a roomful of strangers.
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The Obama Express. My latest piece on Huffington.  If you like it, please feel free to pass it on.  "cheesecake"
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The buyout for the ice manufacturer is on the rocks.
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Mother nature is fickle. Just two weeks ago, freezing ice and snow blanketed the region. Last week, she teased us with mild weather. Dare we say it? Spring is just around the corner.
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(InfoWorld) - Open-source database vendor Ingres is hoping that its newly released Icebreaker database and Linux combination will help it win new customers and enter fresh markets. Formerly known asÂ Project Icebreaker, Ingres Icebreaker became generally available Tuesday and is the first new product from Ingres since itsÂ spin-off from CAÂ as an independent company in 2005. Icebreaker is a veryÂ tight coupling of the Ingres 2006 database with rPath's Linux distribution. The software includes only those components of rPath Linux needed to run the database, around 15 percent to 20 percent of the operating system, according to Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering at Ingres. The aim of the offering is to make it easier to install and manage the database and Linux combination as well as substantially cut maintenance and support costs, she said. Ingres will deliver patches and updates for both the database and OS in a single maintenance stream. Icebreaker includes support for virtualization technologies from the likes of VMware and XenSource, McGrattan added. "Icebreaker will take us into new markets and new use of the [Ingres] database," McGrattan said. In its first year as an independent company, Ingres focused on its existing customer base and ensuring their needs were being met, but the vendor's now ready to aggressively go after new business opportunities. Ingres is hoping that third parties will want to build applications on top of Icebreaker. Initially, those efforts will be around business intelligence (BI) and live reporting, McGrattan said, with the vendor in discussions with both open-source and closed-source BI players. As for other areas where Icebreaker might fit, McGrattan sees the combination as useful for companies moving to the SOA (service-oriented architecture) development model as well as in the on-demand market. "We think Icebreaker is also the perfect platform for SaaS [software-as-a-service] vendors," she said. At present, Ingres has no specific partners to name in that area. A natural ally could be Salesforce.comÂ since Ingres uses the vendor's hosted CRM (customer relationship management) internally. Ingres plans to build out a series of other appliances on top of Icebreaker, McGrattan said, with details to come later this year. A previous attempt in the industry to launch a database appliance, Oracle's Raw Iron project, sunk without a trace after a trumpeted November 2000 launch at the Comdex computer show where the database vendor touted a partnership with hardware vendor Compaq. The operating system for Raw Iron was a mixture of Linux and Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unix OS. By contrast, Ingres is positioning Icebreaker as unfettered to any particular hardware, leaving the choice of server up to the user, McGrattan said. Licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2, Icebreaker runs on any x86-compatible Linux server. Over time, it's possible Icebreaker may be offered pre-installed on specific servers, but Ingres isn't currently in talks with any hardware providers, she added. Icebreaker is available free under the GPL or users can purchase a maintenance and support subscription for the combination at the same price as paid maintenance and support for the Ingres 2006 database, McGrattan said. Â
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Scientists try to figure out how far off the next ice age is.
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By Whitesides, George M  Travelogues from Lilliput THE DANCE OF MOLECULES: How Nanotechnology Is Changing Our Lives. Ted Sargent, xx + 234 pp. Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006. $25.  NANO-HYPE: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz. David Berube. Foreword by Mihail C. Roco. 521 pp.
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Paolo hypothesizes a much-needed tool in a post yesterday, and a follow-up today.
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Polishing memorandum of understanding
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It's as easy as ones and zeros Episode 30 â¦
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If you want to spot offbeat and unique innovations in snow sports, don't bother searching at an industry trade show or in the pages of some glossy ski magazine. Anything deemed worthy of being slickly marketed is already too close to mainstream to be considered cutting edge.
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Riding on the coat-tails of an earlier article about emigrating to other countries, I present to you a small summary of my experience rapidly learning French to pass a standardized test for Canadian immigration. Since I live in the middle of the US, far removed from anything resembling a Francophone environment, I had to resort to various online and offline resources to accomplish my goal, managing to learn enough to score as "advanced" in several categories in just 10 months. Even if you don't wish to emigrate, this article may be useful, as I go into full detail describing the techniques and methods I used. Or, at the very least, read and be amused.
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Two years ago this week, over the lull of winter break, Rocco Repetski got bored the way high school juniors who happen to be math geniuses (and who happen to take interest in computer code) get bored. He wondered, why not design an online game?
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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By John Holyoke, Bangor Daily News, Maine  Feb. 6--When you head out onto a frozen lake to compete for hundreds of dollars in prize money, it pays to have a game plan ... and a few tricks up your sleeve.
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Stuart Herbert has posted a new book review of a new offering from Packt Publishing - "Learning PHP Data Objects" (by Dennis Popel).    The folks at Packt Publishing sent me a copy of Dennis Popel's "Learning PHP Data Objects" to review. I'd never heard of Packt before, and was intrigued.   He includes a high-level overview of what the book contains, but notes that he couldn't get a hold of the code examples mentioned in the book (no CD and couldn't find it on their site). Overall, he found it a good book - it's a good primer to PDO in PHP, but you'll need to know SQL beforehand to work with it. He suggests that it's more of a one or two time read, though - not much in the way of a reference to come back to.
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Try these (slightly) more palatable tactics.