Alternative Information Technology

The FCC and the iPhone

Just looking over an Information Week article warning that the mobile spectum will be running out of bandwidth on their data networks in the coming years, due in no small part to the popularity of the iPhone. I was an avowed Blackberry user for the last 5 years and finally ...

CIO’s and Anti-Social Networks

Was puzzled by the findings in a CIO Insight posting this week entitled "More CIO's Block Social Networks". The content presents the statistic that 54% of CIO's have policies at their company that completely prohibit employee use of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Also that 16% of the ...

Echo in the Dark

Echo & The Bunnymen came out of the punk and goth movements in the late 70's & early 80's and have continued to produce great recordings to this day. Last week they presented their seminal 1984 work "Ocean Rain" at the Fox theater in Oakland, CA with live orchestra. This ...

Java in the Cloud

Spoke last month at an Ingres, RedHat, Exadel event focusing on the promise of developing new applications with Java and hosting the results in the cloud. Naturally, my section was focused on Ingres and our part of the technology stack that includes RHEL (OS), JBoss (App Server, Dev Platform), and ...

U2 in the Cloud (practically)

Okay, summer recess is over. Time to reopen my twitter account (maybe), dust off my blog (definitely) and get back to it! Lots of bands out on the concert circuit made the summer enjoyable - I only blogged here about a few of these shows, but also attended concerts by ...

VectorWise Project, in the Cloud

Working today on slogans for our new VectorWise project. Background: The Ingres VectorWise project provides superior database technology that will allow industry developers to fully take advantage of advances in modern processor and storage hardware. Initial results show that the Ingres VectorWise project achieves more than 10x performance gains over existing ...

Coldplay at the Shoreline

Recently went to see Coldplay at the Shoreline Ampetheater with some best friends. Had seen them at the start of this tour and though you could tell they were a bit road-weary, the show was still great and the energy was high. Lead man Chris Martin delivered strong vocals, and ...

Innovation During the Recession – Cleaning House

Recession continues - so do questions in the blogosphere about IT spend levels. How far are they down? What are CIO's doing during this downturn to keep strategic projects moving forward? We focus on two major categories of spend - maintenance costs, and strategic investments, struggling to maximize the latter: 1) ...

Duran Duran Dance Party

[caption id="attachment_382" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Duran Duran"][/caption] Just attended the Duran Duran show at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga California on July 8, 2009. How were they? Still relevant, still fit and fasionable, and still sounding really great, this band put on one of the best shows I’ve been to in this ...

Try Before You Subscribe

Was just thinking this morning about our internal project to improve collaboration within the company. As part of the strategy we have been taking a look at some of the open source solutions on the market for upgrading our intranet along with elements of our extranet, hoping to capture internal ...