COTD: a Chinatown's Starbucks?!?

In UNIX systems, we have motd tool, which is "message of the day", usually a short announcement or greetings from the system administrator. Sometimes it's also "match of the day" when we are talking about sports. I'll have my version called cotd "cup of the day", probably writing these messages while taking a sip of coffee.

On my way to gym at OneGeorge Street from Chinatown MRT, I usually take this route: Chinatown Point - Hong Lim Complex - Fook Hai Building - Hong Lim Park - OneGeorge Street.

Somewhere at the Hong Lim Complex, something always catch my attention.

I decided to take a picture of it.

 

My blog on domain danielbaktiar.com launches today

Today I have finally made a successful copy of my dbaktiar.wordpress.com. Now that I run wordpress blog on my own domain danielbaktiar.com.

There is some minor glitches, such as the exported than imported Wordpress now produces "&gt"s where it should display ">". Right now I just simply edit them one by one as there's not so much such occurrence. Overall I am highly satisfied with the smooth migration. The Wordpress team had done a great job to make it very easy to migrate and move Wordpress blogs around!

I decided to setup my own domain and hosted site because I need some degree of freedom in customizing my website, CSS, javascript, and also to put AdSense as well, too name a few.

Installation of Hudson in Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10)

We are implementing Hudson continuous integration server heavily. Initially we are running all our Hudson jobs on a Windows box.

Hudson is an open source continuous integration tool. It gains popularity very fast and based on my experience in production, it is one of the most active open source project component I have been using. It is pretty common to get Hudson updates more than once a week.

With support from Debian community which setup the Hudson installer which updates easily through the apt tools, I became enticed to move to Ubuntu. I was following the instructions from the Hudson CI site.

These steps show how easy it is to deploy Hudson in an Ubuntu box.

[sourcecode lang="shell"]<br />$ wget -O - http://hudson-ci.org/debian/hudson-ci.org.key | sudo apt-key add -<br />[/sourcecode]

Add this entry to your /etc/apt/sources.list using your favorite editor.

[sourcecode lang="shell"]<br />$ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list<br />[/sourcecode]

Add this line at the end:

[sourcecode lang="shell"]<br />deb http://hudson-ci.org/debian binary/<br />[/sourcecode]

Then run the apt tool to update your Debian packages.

[sourcecode lang="shell"]<br />$ sudo apt-get update<br />$ sudo apt-get install hudson<br />[/sourcecode]

Upon finishing the whole thing, I popped out a browser and hit the URL: http://localhost:8080/, and YES! it works!

Oracle Announced the Outline Strategy on Integration of Sun

Oracle has announced  the outline strategy and its commitment  on Sun Microsystems integration into Oracle. It was in a Webcast and for those who missed it, could get it from the website.

This is the link from Oracle website.

We already noticed some additions on links in the Oracle Technology Website (http://otn.oracle.com) which includes newly added Sun's technology portfolios.

EU Commission Approval of Sun Microsystems Acquisition by Oracle: Lesson Learned

Yesterday James A. Goosling, the founder of Java platform, put a picture in his blog: "So long, old friend...".
After the EU Commission approved Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) acquisition by Oracle Corp (NASDAQ: ORCL), Oracle expects that Russia and China will also accept it. The main foreseen obstacle to the agreement was the EU Commission approval. Now that it has been approved, the acquisition is expected to go smoothly.

Some people began speculating on the fate of open source projects, which nurtured by Sun, yet they don't believe that Oracle will give enough support for those open source projects. One high profile fear was from Monty Widenius, the founder of MySQL, which after selling the company to Sun left MySQL (the company), and forked a new database project: MariaDB. He campaigned to prevent the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle. Now we see the result, it seems that he lose the campaign. Some voices also speculate about the fate of OpenOffice, Glassfish, etc after the acquisition.

This matter once again prove: "a technology is good, but we also need to make money". Of course Sun Microsystems is not the first to go down, there were a lot of dead carcasses of open source companies ended up acquired by profitable commercial companies that sell their proprietary products.

Sun is highly respectable company, which produced a lot of very good products. All hail respect to the company that bred the Java technology and platform, which took over the world. Yet, after this high profile achievement, the company still need to make money to bring value to the shareholders.

Lesson Learned: Companies Need To Make Money In Order To Sustain the Business

I guess this serves as reminder for those people (including me) who wants to make a company based on sophisticated technology, either open source or closed source; take note, when we start a company, we also need to make money.

Now that Wikipedia site had grown that big, the non-profit model required it to campaign for more money to sustain its operation.

Micro Focus Acquired Borland Software...

While I've been busy preparing for my wedding day this Sunday, one recent acquisition captured my attention. I just received the information that Borland Software now acquired by Micro Focus. If you are developers groomed in the era of 90s, you should know or at least have heard  about this Borland Software. The company has been a major player in the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) software for popular languages at those times, such as TurboC, TurboC++, TurboPascal, TurboProlog, Borland Pascal, Delphi, and JBuilder series. For some time it also acquired the once famous dBase IV's Ashton Tate, and have its own Quattro database. The IDE business was later totally spinned off to a wholly owned subsidiary named CodeGear.

Borland also produced good quality JEE application server series: Borland Enterprise Server, which was used with some of former employer's clients.

Last 3-5 years, Borland Software had shifted its focus into Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), by acquiring companies such as Segue Software, Inc. I was sent by my employer that time for a training on their productsand sales knowledge of these ALM products (Borland SilkTest - automated testing tool, Borland SilkPerformer - load testing tool, Caliber) back to year 2006. These products compete with Mercury (now subsidiary of HP) Load Runner, IBM Rational Robot, etc.

Just recently this year we heard that Borland Software sold off CodeGear to Embarcadero Technologies. So, right now, Borland was left only with its ALM products and application servers/ORB brokers product, now sold to Micro Focus.

Firefox 3.5 has been Released!

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.5/releasenotes/