Month: June 2013

Apostolis Giannakidis, Apache Gora, and Oracle’s NoSQL

I’m so impressed …

Readers of this blog may remember the brilliant and gracious Apostolis Giannakidis, who I wrote about on August 21, 2012.  Apostolis tweeted some kind words about my book when he announced to the world that he nailed the Oracle SQL Expert exam with a 93 percent passing score – far in excess of what is required to establish certification!  I blogged about his tweet here, and he found my post and commented about it here.

So today I looked at his own blog, which is linked from his comment.  And WOW – Apostolis is joining the Google Summer of Code 2013 to help integrate Apache Gora with Oracle NoSQL.  This is huge stuff, folks, Apache is where all the cool cutting edge open source envelope-pushing is happening, and Gora is the project for big data persistence and in-memory data model support.  Gora is related to other cool Apache projects, like Cassandra.  Extremely cool work, and Apostolis is right in the middle of it all.

Congratulations Apostolis!

The 1981 Vision of the Internet and Newspapers

This is a great old 1981 news report from what appears to be a local San Francisco television station, talking about the then-futuristic Internet.  I love the opening line:

Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee and turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper.  It’s not as far-fetched as it may seem …”

I received this video link from two friends at the National Press Club, Rick Dunham and Larry Lipman, both via Facebook.  Rick and Larry are former NPC presidents and this is making the rounds today among my friends in journalism.  Keep that in mind as you observe the focus in this news piece on the impact of the Internet on newspapers in particular.  Very interesting to see this with the hindsight of history.

Insanity Island featured at the Liberty Alliance home page

Insanity Island featured at Liberty Alliance

The momentum behind Doug Hayden‘s Insanity Island is growing!  The latest example:  Liberty Alliance, a large collection of influential organizations and websites advocating traditional values and conservative principles, is featuring Insanity Island’s latest brilliant piece on its home page.  The latest Insanity Island cartoon is currently the number one “featured post” at Liberty Alliance’s home page.

You owe it to yourself to see the video for yourself, here it is:

It’s a full time job just keeping up with our Skere9 Stars, and this one is not exception!

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Replica – For Sale???

I could SO be this guy …

So the British news is reporting today that a man they describe as an “obsessed” fan of the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang spent 12 years building a recreation of the original car used in the movie, and is now putting the car up for auction to help buy a cruise for his parents.  The car has already attracted so much attention to him that it already won him a job working with movies and art direction.

For the full article click here.

Apple Files in Russia to Protect “iWatch”

Interesting news to those of us who are tracking the work of Eric Migicovsky. Business news outlets yesterday reported that Apple, Inc., has filed for trademark protection of the term “iWatch”.

Apple has already announced plans to roll out an iWatch sometime – perhaps next year in 2014 – and presumably this is in response to the outrageous interest in the Pebble, Migicovsky’s invention that broke records last year at Kickstarter.com when Migicovsky was raising money to make the device. The news outlet USDailyVoice.com adds this interesting comment at the end of their news report about Apple’s trademark application in Russia, when they referred to:

… an interview with Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky, where the owner of the smart watch makers said that he doesn’t have any comment regarding a possible Apple buyout.

Interesting. We’ll keep tracking this one.