Category: Culture

Culture

Oracle and Java – A Good Brew

Scott McNealy, Steve O'Hearn, February 8, 2001, National Press ClubI first met Scott McNealy on Thursday afternoon, February 8, 2001, at about 12:15 in the afternoon.  Not that I was keeping track or anything.  But I was starting to teach a new Java course that night, based on curriculum I’d created, so the timing was particularly striking to me personally.  McNealy was the CEO of Sun Microsystems, creator of Java. McNealy was the featured speaker at the National Press Club’s luncheon that day.  I’d brought a couple of professional colleagues and friends to meet him.

The Java programming language was already important to Oracle systems, which was why my company was launching the new course.  Our company, db-Training, already taught coursework in Oracle development and database administration.  We were very early to recognize the significance Java would have to the Oracle database.  There was a key architectural similarity between the two products that was rare among the various competing products of the time.  I’ll explain.

The Oracle Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) wasn’t – and isn’t – just a database.  It’s an operating platform.  This fact cannot be overstated, especially to those who haven’t worked with Oracle.  The RDBMS stores data and houses software snippets, in a container that can operate on any operating system.  So if you created a database application in the Oracle RDBMS – and I did, quite a few of them – you could do so without a concern for what operating system your application may end up running on.  The trick was that you just moved the application into a version of the RDBMS designed for that new operating system.

But if you created a database application in, for example, traditional COBOL or FORTRAN or something else, you had to concern yourself with the operating system in which you were going to execute the program.  Is it Microsoft Windows?  Which version? Is it Unix?  Or something else – an Apple computer of some sort?  For each new environment, you would have to recompile your FORTRAN or COBOL or whatever program, being aware that the compilation may result in errors, even if it had compiled perfectly well on another operating system already.

With Oracle, you didn’t have to bother with that nonsense.  Create your app in the Oracle database, and you’re done – it’ll work on any operating system, you just have to move the app to the appropriate RDBMS.

However – you couldn’t use FORTRAN (well, ok, you could, but just go with me on this, you Pro*Fortran people).  You had to use an Oracle proprietary language called PL/SQL.

I love PL/SQL.  I love it so much, I wrote a book about it.

Then along came Java, and its Java Virtual Machine.   I think Oracle Corp was quick to realize that the JVM was to Java what the Oracle RDBMS was to database applications – a buffer between the Java program and the operating system, which meant that you could write a single application in Java, and then move it from operating system to operating system by swapping your existing JVM with one that fit the new operating system.  You didn’t have to recompile or rewrite code.  You just had to do a one-time installation of the JVM at the new location, that’s it.

Just like the Oracle RDBMS.

When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, a lot of conspiracy theorists rolled their eyes and figured Oracle would destroy Java somehow.  I was pretty confident Oracle wouldn’t do that.  It made good business sense for them to support Java.

I was there at Oracle Open World when Scott McNealy spoke.  You could tell he was impacted powerfully by the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.  I don’t think it was his preference, but rather an economic necessity.  I’m sure he would’ve kept Sun independent if possible. But since he had to sell, Oracle was the best way to go.

And now – history has shown that Oracle has been very good to Java, according to InfoWorld.

I could’ve told you that years ago.  Oracle needs Java.  It was a good fit, and still is.

 

 

Dumb Movie Lines: The Last Woman On Earth (1960)

Movie Poster: The Last Woman On Earth (1960 film)I just watched The Last Woman On Earth, an old 1960 film by Roger Corman.  Some sort of plague or something wipes out just about everyone in the world, and there’s just a handful of people left.  It’s a good old classic sci-fi movie.

But good old movies are not immune to the occasional dumb line.  I just saw one scene where the only people remaining (that the viewer knows about) is one woman, and two men.  So naturally the two men get in a fight over the woman, and one man kills the other.  It’s a bit involved and the murder wasn’t necessarily intentional, but it was clear that the surviving man hated the dead man and had been fighting him.  So as he, the one remaining man on Earth, leans over the dead guy, along with the one remaining woman left alive on Earth, the surviving man begins to come to his senses, and states what the woman – and the viewer – already know: “I killed him.”

And then he looks at the woman: “when will we ever learn?”

WE?  He actually says “we”.

I was waiting for the woman to say “What’s this WE stuff, YOU killed him, mushbrains.”

But the woman takes it in stride.  I guess women are used to that sort of thinking.

It reminds me of an old joke: the Lone Ranger and his native American sidekick Tonto are watching a horde of Indian braves bear down on them in full battle fury. “Looks like we’re in trouble, Tonto,” says the Lone Ranger to his companion, to which Tonto replies: “What you mean ‘we,’ pale face?”

 

 

Jokes: Overheard at the Olympics

  • Paul Hamm, Gymnast: “I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father.”
  • Boxing Analyst: “Sure there have been injuries, and even some deaths in boxing, but none of them really that serious.”
  • Softball announcer: “If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again.”
  • Basketball analyst: “He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn’t like it. In fact you can see it all over their faces.”

 

Otis Pottery – Bauchspies Concert 2012

This is a unique little video, it’s a series of still shots and a few minutes of audio from a small somewhat impromptu concert by Todd and Cindy Bauchspies for their friends, the owners of a place called the Otis Pottery Barn in Michigan.

Todd and Cindy are friends with the owner of the Otis Pottery Barn and this concert came out of that. And yes, these are the same musical artists who pack the huge Kerr Performing Arts Center many Decembers with their legendary Christmas concerts that are so huge they’ve had to expand to ever larger halls and spread them out across multiple nights, with literally thousands of people planning their holiday schedules around their performances.

Otis Pottery Barn is one lucky place!

I Beat Obama

In a battle between the President of the United States and me, I win.

At issue is the measurement of a given Twitter account’s percentage of “real” Twitter followers, as determined by StatusPeople, a British site that analyzes a Twitter account’s followers, and uses a simple formula for determining how many of those followers are “fake” or “inactive”.  The formula: followers with few to no followers of their own are flagged as “fake”, and followers with no recent tweets are deemed “inactive”.

According to StatusPeople, my list of authentic Twitter followers (@SteveOHearn), as of August 25, 2012, about 10 AM – is 97 percent, of which 88 percent are active, and nine percent are currently inactive.  Only 3 percent were identified by StatusPeople as fake.

I ran the same analysis at the same time on the account of the President of the United States.  He’s showing up as 70 percent “real”, of which StatusPeople says 39 percent are currently inactive, leaving 31 percent authentic and active.  StatusPeoples says POTUS has 30 percent “fake” followers.

I win.

Just sayin’.

Here’s the screenshot for my own metric, see below.

StatusPeople score for @SteveOHearn, August 25, 2012

And here’s the score for POTUS, aka President Barack Obama:

StatusPeople assessment of the Twitter account of Barack Obama, August 25, 2012

There you go.

One note:  there are a lot of news reports going around claiming that the President’s percentage of “fake” followers is much higher.  One national paper puts the “fake” number at 70 percent. Presumably they are lumping together the “fake” with the “inactive”, and calling them all “fake”.  But that’s obviously inaccurate.  “Inactive” might be fake, but also may have been bonafide users who got bored with Twitter.  Maybe this is more of a statement about Twitter’s product life cycle than the authenticity of the President’s Twitter followers.  We don’t really know, I don’t anyway, not yet.  But one thing is for sure, the graphic above is authentic – StatusPeople declared 30 percent of the president’s Twitter followers to be “fake”, not 70 percent.   The “inactive” 39 percent is subject to interpretation and further analysis.  I don’t care what your politics are, but whatever you do, don’t misrepresent data.  Although … we could probably launch an entire new media organization on the subject of statistics that are misused and abused, accidentally or otherwise.

Want to check your own percentage of fake Twitter followers? Click here to use the same Web app I used to create the reports shown above.

 

IS YOU OKAY? Everybody’s Going Cray Cray

This is my new favorite YouTuber – her name is GloZell:

Best lines in this video:

  • ” … with her Laverne and Shirley’s all jiggling out and everything … “
  • “Who else is going cray-cray … Crustina Alligator … “
  • “That reverse sci-ca-la-lee ain’t going to work on me”
  • “You all are trying to send me to my own triple-A meeting, it ain’t going to work”

And her comments about the Royal Wedding and John Stamos are HYSTERICAL.  You definitely have to watch, she cracks me up.  And in case this isn’t making any sense to you, here’s my two bits:

  • She’s got to be acting, and she’s doing a great job
  • “Crustina Alligator” is Christina Aguilera, in case you didn’t get that.
  • And it’s not triple-A, it’s AA, as in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Maybe we should start a website called “Interpreting Glo-Zell For The Masses”.

But in the meantime – I love her work, she’s excellent.

Earn Your Way to Premiere of Atlas Shrugged, Part 2

I received an email this week from the good folks working on the Atlas Shrugged, Part 2 film:

Every day this week, we’ll be announcing a new way in which you can earn your way to the October 2nd Washington D.C. Atlas Shrugged Part II Movie World Premiere. All contests will be announced on the movie’s official website, blog, facebook, and twitter pages.

This first way:  make a video!  For details: http://blog.atlasshruggedmovie.com/2012/08/promote-atlas-shrugged-part-ii-on.html