Gotta love those technology oxymorons.

Telstra has installed a 150km fibre-optic cable across a new mining site in South Australia that will provide wireless broadband, voice and video calling to on-site staff.

Source Cable = Wireless. Nice. No wonder people get confused about technology.

Thick Database? Intelligent more like it.

Just stumbled onto some excellent papers regarding architectural considerations in today's jumble of technologies. Interesting to see the reference to APEX - Oracle HTML DB in the Thick Database paper. Great that Paul added the examples of relative efforts/time/lines of code there! Nice work.

Dulcian Papers - Thick Database

One thing I'd be keen to see is APEX vs. Thick Database application examples in terms of effort... okay I hear the "but APEX ain't following the guidelines". Nevertheless if a technology works for you, use it!

Also I threw together a table with additional "minutes per line of code" columns just for fun ;-)

		Mins per line of code Database	Mins per line of code Java
Case 1	Conventional development	n/a	1.44
Case 1	Thick database development	4.80	0.80
Case 2	Conventional development	2.40	3.60
Case 2	Thick database development	3.60	3.60
Case 3	Conventional development	2.09	4.43
Case 3	Thick database development	1.23	3.43

Any opinions appreciated.

BI Publisher 5.6.3 is out

Oracle BI Publisher (XML Publisher) 5.6.3 is out. Check out Tim Dexter's Blog. Patch is 5472959 - XDO/ORACLE XML PUBLISHER OA ROLLUP PATCH 5.6.3 A selection of the new features:

• Template Builder Enhancements and Name Change
• Report Migration Utility
• Support for Rotated Text in RTF Templates
• Conditional Formatting Enhancement in RTF Templates
• Data Template Enhancements

I'm particularly interested in the Template Builder and the following:

XML Publisher provides a utility to facilitate the conversion of Oracle Reports (version 9i and later) to XML Publisher Reports

Especially with respect to the conversion from custom Oracle Applications Reports 6i to Report 9i to BI Publisher templates. I'll be looking closely at the handling of user exits, notably FND SRWINIT for profile option initialization, currency formatting, and key flexfield handling.

Is BI Publisher really for End Users?

The more I use BI Publisher (XML Publisher), the more I find that you need to be a techie to use it effectively.

Moreover not only does it rely on your knowledge of underlying data structures, but uses extremely quirky syntax to tie an overall solution together.

So ... I can see a strong need for customers to access BI Publisher expertise to come up with base data sources and templates, especially in the Oracle eBusiness Suite realm.

See a post soon with an example Oracle eBusiness Suite AR Invoice format example.

Windows Vista Content Protection and Digital Rights Management

A tad technical and a bit of a slog to read the whole thing, but a very enlightened and seemingly matter of fact view all the same.
Plus some great perspectives on technical detail vs tech titans control & PR propaganda.
Nice that it's out of New Zealand as well!

Check it out:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

PS. I didn't read the whole thing :-o

PPS. Go the $50 chinese device and muslix64 ;-)

PPPS. My favourite paragraphs:

1. Appeals to my experience and knowledge of encryption:
"In the case of premium content, whether video can play back smoothly when using regular AES with uncompressed video will be a function of the resolution of the uncompressed video and the power of the processor. It is unlikely to work well in 2006 for uncompressed HD premium content" from Microsoft document.

2. Appeals to the real-world implications of this sort of technical idiocy and what consumers will face:
Sure enough, the movie won't play because while the video card supports HDCP content protection, the [24" LCD] monitor doesn't. It plays if I connect an old 14″ VGA CRT using a DVI-to-VGA connector" — Roger Strong.

3. Relates to my musings of current LCD and Plasma vs CRT technologies:
"Use the CRT monitor for awhile, then switch to the LCD monitor for a minute or two. When you go back to the CRT monitor, does it seem faulty? Did you notice this before you looked over at the LCD monitor?"

4. Appeals to how "let's consider this" technical ideas turn into questionable real world scenarios:
"I can not only say that the idea [of tilt bits] is basically insane, but I can also see hardware manufacturers refusing to implement tilt bits, or more likely, faking their functionality" — Dave Walker.

Acronym Alert: XMLP is now BIP - XML Publisher now Business Intelligence Publisher

Oh No! Once again Oracle has decided to give another name to the same product. How confusing.

XML Publisher (XMLP) has now been re-introduced as BI Publisher (BIP).

I guess this will take a while to sink in coz of there is plenty of doco and references to XML Publisher.

Anyone know why they did that? Has someone trademarked "XML Publisher" or something?

Time to change? XMLP, Release 12 and Oracle Reports

I recently blogged about XML Publisher (XMLP) and it's comparison with Oracle Reports. With Oracle eBusiness Suite Release 12 now up and running, I have seen the following:

• ~875 templates across 63 eBusiness products
• A Oracle internal migration project is in progress to convert Oracle Reports based concurrent programs to XMLP
• Slated for release later this year, this will mean 2000 templates available
• In Release 12 - XMLP 5.6.3 there is a set of libraries to help move your custom Oracle Reports to data and layout templates
• Hint of a Template Bank on Metalink to download delivered templates

So where does that leave you? As I mentioned in my prior post, new reports should be developed using XMLP - however consider the limitations of your installed XMLP version, or consider upgrading to 5.6.3, either of which may mean sticking with Oracle Reports now. Given the conversion libraries changing to XMLP in the future should be trivial. In the meantime, get on the template swapping bus and email some of you funky examples!

Firefox vs Internet Explorer, eBusiness and Key Shortcuts

Some time late last year I took the plunge and "upgraded" from Internet Explorer to Firefox as my primary browser. I guess it took me longer than many because for so long Oracle eBusiness Suite was inherently tied to Internet Explorer. However, that happy union has been consigned to history, and now things have taken a major turn for the better.

A couple of the components I find absolutely essential are Firebug, Adblock with Adblock Filters and the built in RSS reader.

I've also been using a bunch of the key shortcuts in Firefox and I thought I'd note them down here for easy reference. Very handy whether I'm in surfing mode - left thumb on left alt, right hand on arrow keys or developer mode - home row position.

Ctrl + T Opens a new tab, and places focus in the location bar.

Ctrl + W Close the current tab.

Alt + D or Ctrl + L or F6 Go to the location bar, highlight the current address for overwrite.

Ctrl + K Go to the search bar, highlight the current search for overwrite.

Ctrl + Tab / Ctrl + Shift + Tab or Ctrl PgUp / Ctrl PgDn Cycles through the open tabs forward or backward.

Ctrl + plus / Ctrl + minus Scales text size up and down.

Ctrl + Numpad 0 "zero" Resets text size back to default.

Ctrl + Shift + C Opens/closes Firebug – gotta have for debugging CSS etc.

Ctrl + U View source.

Alt + LeftArrow Alternative to the Back button

Ctrl + Enter In address bar adds "http://www." To front and ".com" to end of what you entered.

Ctrl + Tab / Ctrl + Shift + Tab or Ctrl PgUp / Ctrl PgDn Cycles through the open tabs forward or backward

Ctrl + plus / Ctrl + minus Scales text size up and down.

Ctrl + Numpad 0 "zero" Resets text size back to default.

Ctrl + Shift + C Opens/closes Firebug – gotta have for debugging CSS etc.

Ctrl + U View source.

Alt + Left Arrow Alternative to the Back button.

Ctrl + Enter In address bar adds "http://www." To front and ".com" to end of what you entered.

Apparently there is a KeyConfig Extension that allows you to customize your keystrokes.

Also see Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.

Open Source vs Free: SugarCRM

I found a nice diagram on this page yesterday at SugarCRM. In summary it suggested:

• 1st generation CRM = Proprietary On Premise, Client/Server, ~ to 2001
• 2nd generation CRM = Proprietary On Demand, Hosted, ~ 2002 - 2006
• 3rd generation CRM = Open Source, On Demand / On Premise Appliance ~2007 +

I like this concept. It means for those of us at the lower end of the food chain we can take a look inside the big fish and learn something. And we get to use some cool stuff with a minimum of outlay.

However, the "open source" bit does not equal "free". In the IT world "free" does not exist. You gotta pay your ticket to get to the "free" bit.

Moreover, big business is not in the market for free software - they aren't buying the software, they're buying process, support, and someone to sue if the toys end up on the floor by the cot.

Nice if your supplying the big business... not so nice if you're funding it.

Bring on the Information Age!

I've recently been dabbling with a variety of concepts and IT ideals - Web 2.0, Web Standards, XML, SaaS etc. and today while reading an Patrick Wolf's APEX blog I found my way to the Yahoo Pipes site. From a very quick glance, this site embodies the real sort of power some of the advances in web technologies provide. The featured pipe at the time was Apartment Near Something, attractive given my kiwi-driven occasional interest in property investment although unusable given my New Zealand location! From my perspective this sort of thing is getting closer to my real world expectation of the "Information Age".  I remember reading an opinion recently that after the stockmarket tech bubble and crash we have moved from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, but I don't think we're quite there yet ... getting closer though especially if when enabling technologies such as these become common.