Richard Naszcyniec's Blog

Well after much debate and delay I started down the path of preparing for my version 2.0 presence on the web.  Lots of things have been going on over the past year and most of it has not made it to my blog.  Part of that is an issue I had tailoring this blog to the content I want to post.  Basically, I was fighting it to be something it is not supposed to be.  All that changes moving forward.  This blog will remain my current main public presence on the web and the means for me to distribute notices about what is going on and new reference content I create.  Some of the notices and reference will only be for internal consumption at Oracle and hosted on corporate resources accessible via the intranet.  However, I still want to post plenty of material available for public consumption.  That material will be posted on a personal server running Oracle Enterprise Linux I have had up and running for a while.  I just need to lock it down a little more on security and then will make it available on-line.  One of the big public features I am looking forward to is a wiki to post thoughts on for discussion and gather other peoples ideas.  I really like Wiki pages for this sort of thing and find them much more useful then a threaded forum.  Finally, with a server under my control accessible over the internet I can finally start serving large multimedia files.  This proved to be difficult if not impossible in the past due to storage requirements.  My broadband provider may slap me down if this is a success but I will deal with this "good problem" when and if it comes up.  I may just after all just have a self inflated opinion that people want to hear what I have to say ;-))

There is an old saying that actions speak louder than words which I agree with more and more as I grow older.  In the spirit of that I have opened up my personal Wiki at http://naszcyniec.selfip.net:8888/yawiki for all to access.  There isn't much there right now but that will change with time as I use it more and more.  I was going to hold off on opening it up until I had more time to brand it and configure some content.  However, I started sliding into the hole of delay for this, that, and many other reasons.  So I threw up my hands and told myself just to open it up and let everyone watch it evolve.

The wiki software is Yawiki which I selected since it the same as used by Oracle WebCenter.  PLUS it has a doc literal based web service interface instead of the silly SOAP-RPC interface that others use.  I like that and also figure it can't hurt to use the same wiki software my employer packages up.  However... I am not running the Yawiki software from the WebCenter companion CD.  (which has finally been released)  I ran into some installation issues that I still need to work out in regards to that so I went with the open source version for now.  Time will tell if I spend more time with WebCenter or get distracted by some of the Rich Internet Application (RIA) software offerings out there.

It has been a long time since I have had a true technology "wow" moment.  I always work with whatever is new and emerging but lets face facts that some things are just cooler than others.  The wow factor I am talking about is Microsoft Surface.  Now before anyone gets going about how Microsoft did not invent this... I say so what!?  I just hope Microsoft can generate a real market for this kind of computing outside of the lab and secret government programs.  This is the kind of computing we all deserve short of VR and someday a holodeck.  When you see the videos from the links below you wonder why we get so excited with about our current user interfaces.

Microsoft Surface: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html

Jeff Han at TEDTalks: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=884017118027634444&hl=en-CA

And finally a link to what may become an often visted site:  www.ted.com