Posts

Interesting presentation from MySQL Conf 09 on open source adoption and the use of open source Business Intelligence tools.

BI is about getting stuff out. Everything else is about getting stuff in. Transaction processing is a commodity, analysis is not. And really, the problem with most organizations (including my own current one) is being able to use their information, not capture it.

The problem is that DW and BI tools, at least commercially, are really expensive. My last company spent about $250k just getting their reporting and OLAP suite sorted (pricey BOBJE in case you were wondering). So, the business case upside for open source BI is huge.

Devs hate dealing with infrastructure. They’d much rather code solutions than worry about whether the servers have been updated, a piece of software is there or the environment differs from what they have on their development boxes.

Amazon EC2 started it (though really you still need to manage the hardware), Google app engine (if you like python) followed, and Heroku made it seemingly effortless to deploy and run Rails apps. It’s now following with pricing plans, both Shared and Dedicated that can handle production deployments (I love the pricing tier names : Blossom, Koi, Crane, Ronin, Fugu and Zilla… ;-) ). IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is now becoming the increasingly accepted standard for devs in both startup staging and business production.

Loved this post from Seth Godin on “pick anything” moments .

In that moment, “do nothing” was not an option.

Do nothing is the choice of people who are afraid. Do nothing is what you do if too many people have to agree. Do nothing is what happens if one person with no upside has to accept downside responsibility for a change. What’s in it for them to do anything? So they do nothing.

The boat voices have been whispering to me again. Perhaps because I was too close to the sea the entire time I was in Turkey, or they sense I’m on the cusp of making some big decisions, but the fact is they’re reminding me of how happy I was when I lived aboard the Neilali.

Suspiciously, this weekend’s edition of the Instructables Weekend Builder , caught my attention with an entire mini-feature on How to Get a Free Yacht (and its maiden voyage).

I have to admit to being a little bit jealous of people who are only working twenty hours a week and pulling down amazing salaries or writing productivity “work smarter, not harder” pr0n. I mean, it’s true. There is very little correlation between hours worked and what most people define as success. And that’s before you even get into the whole argument about what success is to some people versus others. I know I feel a lot more successful having taken a huge paycut and doing what I’m doing now than when I was being paid a lot more (I still remember the look on the face of the CFO when they said they’d counter-offer me leaving and I said I was taking a huge pay cut. ;-) )

Just in time to give me some more ammo on why I continue to travel, won’t “grow up and settle down”. and keep raving the planet and living and working in different places like some modern day Flying Dutchman, comes this great little essay on why we travel .

It’s giving me idears again.

And I hope it gives you some, especially if you haven’t done much traveling and have been looking for an excuse to take the plunge and go somewhere.

Way overdue for a nation as digitally savvy and connected as my own, but Canada has finally put Member of Parliament’s voting records online just like other less-developed and less advanced nations, such as the United Kingdom and United States.

The records are now available on the Parliamentary website . The cool thing would be them providing an API to access this data from the intertubes to lead the way to some interesting political mashups.

Slate has a really excellent map of vanishing jobs over time since January 2007 the in the US. The story starts off with blue net job growth and red losses and proceeds like one of those zombie outbreak movies where the red starts breaking out all over.

A bit scary ass for all my friends in the United States, but very interesting. I would have done this a bit more smoothly (and possibly in flash), but it’s a nice visualization of a very scary trend as well as letting you examine point in time data a bit better.

Leading on from the Gary V. post on doing great stuff and not being a simple “me too” social mediarati (and something I meant to blog a lot earlier), let’s face it, it’s not that it’s easy to do. A lot of organizations and companies are finding themselves in the position of building communities from scratch, or possibly harder, having to try and wrangle existing communities of users (some of them passionate, some of them aware but ambivalent, some of them pissed off) and engaging them. Tricky.

Great animation on the “we know that we don’t know” dangers of global warming. Really well done.

You can hear more about this campaign from Leo Murray on the site.