The project that must not be named

Well, that got your attention!! My blogging brain appears to be on extended leave but I didn't want you all to think I had abandoned you so I thought I would give a shout out to Meg Bear over at Talented Apps for her great post last week:

http://talentedapps.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/shock-and-awww/

For those of you waiting for the Oracle Fusion Apps, this is a must read since Meg finally acknowledges the elephant in the room:

“I totally understand too, why wouldn’t people get excited about a project that is entirely secret and vague.”

We anxiously await Fusion becoming a public reality and wish Meg continued success on the project.

I'm at the Portland Open Source Bridge Conference

While some of you are toiling away in the corporate dungeons, I am hopefully filling up my brain with lots and lots of good open source information.

Portland's amazing tech community is putting on an incredibly low cost conference at the Oregon Convention Center:

Open Source Bridge is a new conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way. It’s not a typical technical conference. Here’s what makes it different:

• It’s entirely volunteer-run, by developers, for developers. This is the conference you’ve always wanted to attend.
• Session tracks are technology agnostic, based instead around shared community experiences and focused on similarities between projects, not differences.
• The geekery doesn’t end when the sessions do. There will also be a 24-hour hacker lounge for code sprints, bug bashes, session deep dives, bouncing ideas, starting new projects or just mingling and taking in the vibe.

Amazing, you say…how come you didn’t tell me about it before, you say…I can’t get off work to attend, now what do I do, you say…

Fear not, many of the sessions are being lived streamed. Just head on over to:

http://opensourcebridge.org/

HR Happy Hour 2

The second HR Happy Hour was last Friday evening and a good time was had by all. Steve Boese and his lovely co-host Shauna Moerke lead the call. with special guests Lisa Rosendahl and Deidre Honner.

Participating on the call or via write in questions (from Twitter) were @JubileeHR, @frankroche, @beckyallen, @slcmyers, @adowling, @ljbooth, @StephanieALloyd, @Mittons, and @beneubanks.

We talked about Twitter, how to get started in blogging and many other topics. Be sure to listen using the widget below.

Episode II: Attack of the HR Happy Hour

Hopefully most of you got my little joke up there in the title of the post. If not, here is a hint. Anyhoo. Last week I participated in a nearly spur of the moment HR Happy Hour on Blog Talk Radio that was organized by Steve Boese and Mark Stelzner. An awesome group of people participated. If you missed it you can listen here.

Since we had so much fun, Steve organized a second HR Happy Hour this Friday June 5th at 6:00 PM EDT (that's 3pm Pacific Time for those of you west coast time challenged individuals). In addition to the usual suspects, Steve strong armed Lisa Rosendahl and Deidre Honner to also join the call. If you listen carefully you might even hear the HR Minion's dog try to join the conversation.

When Life Hands You Filing Cabinets (part 2)

...make a bowling alley.

I wrote a blog post recently about reconfiguring our unused filing cabinets into a ping pong table. Well, the filing cabinet elves were busy again and added a bowling alley to another set of cabinets. I'm not clear however if you have to take out the color printer in order to get a strike:



...and we added a proper net to the the ping pong table:

Oracle Acquisition of Sun: Everyone just Chillax

Obviously I am taking the same chillax approach to updating my blog (sorry everyone) but I had a couple of minutes to spare this morning and while I eat my cereal and stare out the window at snow lightly falling wondering if my Mini Cooper with no snow tires will get into work without incident I thought I would share my thoughts.

As we have seen from prior acquisitions, Oracle does a lot of posturing at the beginning of a takeover (especially if it is a hostile takeover) then mostly settles down and behaves. Those of us who were PeopleSoft customers during the nasty and brutal battle Oracle waged to acquire PeopleSoft remember the public vows by Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison to shut down PeopleSoft and discontinue its products.

Here we are a couple of years and many acquisitions later and Oracle has mostly kept the acquired products up and running. Has Oracle innovated with the PeopleSoft product line? Not so much especially with HCM but they continue to fix bugs, provide regulatory updates and deliver incremental functionality.

I say, let's wait a bit and see exactly what Oracle has to say about the future of Sun. Chillax everyone.

My Cat and Mouse game with Twitter Access

My employer (like many others) does not allow access to social networking and personal email sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and now...wait for it...Twitter. Sigh.

Several months ago, the proxy servers had not yet been updated to block Twitter so I was free to access Twitter from the web (twitter.com) or via any of the desktop tools such as TweetDeck or Twhirl.

Eventually the proxy servers started getting wise to Twitter and began blocking access to Twitter. Thus started my cat and mouse game to stay one step ahead of the proxy filters and find a new Twitter application every time the existing application became blocked. Here is my progression of Twitter applications as each one became blocked:

It has been fun discovering which Twitter applications are blocked and which ones are still allowed. I think I am running out of Twitter front-end applications and may soon be forced to use Tweetie on my iPhone.

Of course this exposes the whole silliness of blocking access to Twitter since I can still tweet via my iPhone anytime I want.