Sky on Tech

A long time since my last summary, but we were away on vacation for a week, had some deadlines at work... the normal blogger excuses, but here's a summary of interesting URLs from the last few weeks, including stories related to:

• SQL and DB2
• Software development
• AI, Robots, and the Singularity
• Podcasts

And for those of you on Twitter, the stories relate to: @mdirolf @simplecloudapi @dhh

(As always, most of the text is lifted directly from the related websites and isn't my own text.)

Usually I wait until my weekly review to post links to all the interesting podcasts I listen to in the week, but I found this one quite insightful as well as entertaining, so thought I'd find the video and post it here. It is just over an hour long, including questions from the audience, but the speakers have a good rapport and keep each other moving from topic to topic, so it seems shorter than that.

The Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner podcasts are always interesting, and this one is no exception - from their site: "Serial entrepreneur and Zynga founder Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon, longtime Electronic Arts creative mind and investor on behalf of KPCB, provide a very laid-back and desultory conversation. Topics touched upon include successful CEOs, building sustainable companies, mentorship, and the consumer pay-driven Web 3.0."

When I first heard about Google Buzz I was of two minds - "its from Google so it is important", but also "another social network, yawn".

But then I watched this video (via the somewhat ad-overloaded http://www.ilovecolors.com.ar ) from Google describing how Buzz will work with Mobile phones, and it looks a LOT more interesting.

Here's the video, just under 2 minutes:

My summary of interesting URLs from last week, including stories related to:

• SQL and DB2 - just CouchDB this week
• Software development - Simple Cloud API, and David Heineimeier Hansson, of Ruby on Rails 37signals
• User interface and design - I tried to resist the iPad hype, but here are some interface related stories
• Podcasts

My summary of interesting URLs from last week, including stories related to:

• SQL and DB2 - Customer feedback on DB2 LUW v9.7
• Software development - Joomla, Perl tutorials, ProjectZero, Software Carpentry
• Web tools and standards - CSS and SVG
• AI, Robots, and the Singularity - Living with Robots
• Articles I commented on - what our dishwasher knows
• TED talks - lots!

And for those of you on Twitter, the stories relate to: @robintransition @zurb @ProjectZero

I'm a big fan of Perl, but seem to use it for just one reason these days: reading and processing various HTML files out on the web (ie writing a spider). The LWP Perl modules makes this easy, and can honor robots.txt automatically. I've found, though, especially during development, that I don't want to access the live web page again and again as I develop the rest of the script. This is even more relevant for HTML pages that take a long time to return, or when I'm developing the script offline, or without intranet access.

My solution? Adding some HTML cache code in my object that can save a copy of the HTML locally the first time it is accessed, then automatically use that file each subsequent run.

I've found it very useful to use Delicious to keep track of the interesting tech stories I find each week, but I'm worried about overwhelming this blog with these updates. It HAS forced me to add other postings as well, which is good...

For the time being I'll continue posting these summaries, but would love any sort of feedback you might have in the comments! This week includes stories related to:

• SQL and DB2 SQL Tuning and how fast dev hardware could degrade SQL performance
• Software development Dojo Charting
• Collaboration software Lotus' Project Vulcan
• Podcasts

And for those of you on Twitter, the stories relate to: @jeffdavis_co @edbrill and
@zzgavin

I'm a huge fan of TED talks - bite-size videos from the experts on technology, entertainment, and design. I found the following three videos do a wonderful job describing India from three different perspectives - like three blind men describing the same elephant in three very different ways. Hans Rosling provides a compelling analysis of the numbers, Shashi Tharoor describes India's growing "soft power" throughout the world, and Devdutt Pattanaik takes a third perspective altogether.

My summary of interesting URLs from last week, including stories related to:

• SQL and DB2 performance tuning
• Software development jQuery 1.4 released, Google JavaScript tools
• Podcasts

And for those of you on Twitter, the stories relate to: @cdibona @merlyn

A busy week of interesting URLs, including stories related to:

• SQL and DB2 Star Schemas, Data marts, ETL, even MS Access
• Software development Rational Team Concert
• The Singularity
• Podcasts Radio Lab and IBM Research,
• TED talks lots of great talks!

And for those of you on Twitter, the stories relate to: @oracle_ace @JazzDotNet @TEDchris @ShashiTharoor @emmanueljal @pheinberg