With all the attention being paid to the US economy and the US election I thought I’d pipe up that Canada is facing a federal election in the coming weeks.
Rick Mercer did a wonderful job of capturing the essence of all of our candidates in a simple 1 minute ‘advert’ - enjoy
To put names to faces the character are (in order of appearance):
1) Stephen Harper (Conservative)
2) Jack Layton (NDP)
3) Stephane Dion (Liberal)
4) Elizabeth May (Green)
5) Gilles Duceppe (Bloq Quebecois). Not appearing in this clip because for the most part he is quite irrelevant.
You can read considerably more about the candidates over at the CBC election page.
So I often have a need to mix up some colours that are complementary for either some graphic I’m creating (usually explaining some geek computer stuff) or for content for our wiki (atlassians confluence). I’ve used visibone’s website before but keep forgetting it’s address so I’ll post it here. An elegantly simply tool you click colours you think you like and keep on clicking others and it shows you what they look like side by side. (You have to try it to understand).
I’ve just now stumbled upon another site that looks like it does a reasonably good job (better than I could) of picking colours that complement one of your choice! Eliminating any sort of brain work required by visibone. Check it out over at easyrgb.com
A very nice and (relatively) everyday explanation as to how the Large Hadron Collider works can be found over at todaysbigthing. I can honestly say that I almost understood it all
In a bid to solve the bandwidth problem inherent between storage and server Oracle has teamed with HP on it’s first bit of hardware - storage with an imbedded database.
The basic premise is that any oracle query retrieves disk blocks from the storage and then sorts through those blocks to give the user what they want. By moving the database TO the storage and then delivering only query results to your database (not the one on the storage I presume) the amount of data flying about between the storage and the end database is dramitcally reduced.
I’m curious as to how they get this to work but it looks interesting - especially to those who are seeing this ‘bottleneck’ - which we are not.
To make it even more compelling Oracle and HP are also announcing a ‘DB in a box’ server. This includes the storage and an X node RAC installation. Mike R was sitting beside me and says that on a $ per GB the storage is pretty reasonably priced.
I’m curious as to why they went with HP instead of Dell seeing as all the hardware is commodity?
See the flickr photostream - I’ve only been able to upload a couple so far. We had a great time with the gang from Itec (Mike R, Erik, Jeff, Kelly and myself) and our new friends Lore and Jan - thanks to Paula Russell for introducing us
So I’m getting my rear in gear for Oracle Openworld (and thanking the stars that I can go).
My presentations are shaping up - Oracle has suggested a few tweaks to the 2 I’ll be co-presenting with them and Dell has some mods too but nothing insane.
Since I’ll be enjoying a nice flight I was pondering what videos to put on my ipod. Feeling rather academically inclined I’ve opted to NOT put any hollywood content on and instead am loading up on TedTalks video podcasts and am looking forward to some quality time with tiny yet inspiring videos !
And when I get tired of that I’ve got Slideology to read and then when my brain is tired of learning I’m still working on the final installment of the Golden Compass trilogy.
And when I finally get tired of being tired of all that - I’ve been able to secure myself a window seat
I’ve promissed Sydnie that I’ll send her a post card this time so I’ll be searching for something appealing to her little brain ;P
Owing to the number of presentations I’ve done lately I was thrilled to find a glorious book titled Slide:ology which I am devouring as quickly as time permits. I’m hoping to benefit from Nancy Duartes work - she’s giving up 20 years of professional content development experience in this book and I can tell that even though I’m just a few pages in that I’m going to love it and benefit from it.
The REALLY good news is for the poor souls that I’ve been killing with my presentations - my content should start to suck less in the very near future
A very nice and (relatively) everyday explanation as to how the Large Hadron Collider works can be found over at 
In a bid to solve the bandwidth problem inherent between storage and server Oracle has teamed with HP on it’s first bit of hardware - storage with an imbedded database.
