Holiday Season

It's been a while since I posted here. Partly because I've been busy, partly because it's the holiday season, and I value outdoor life over sitting behind a desk when the weather is nice. Enjoying the barb (just purchased a new, larger model), dogs, whine, sun, etc. Which reminds me...

Things I still want to write about:

• BPEL. IDC wrote a favorable report on BPEL and the use my employer made in local governmental solutions, unfortunately not a public report, but you can have it for $4,000 US. Or contact me, of course.
  The solution even brought us the Oracle 2005 Innovation Award. As I have been involved in the architecture, and was also involved in Web+ (before being knocked down and went out-of-business for a year) in the beginning, this is something I'm proud of.
  The Message Bus and Operational Data Store stuff comes right out of a presentation I gave to the Arnhem civil servants on Data Integration (part of the BRIN project), back in early 2003. The idea is a spin off of the VIAG project, back in 2001.
  
  
• The dogs we have, two Epagneul Français. They give my wife and I a lot of comfort and joy. And they're cute in a sort of way a 35 kg dog can be cute. Very ancient race, goes back to the 12th(!) century.
  
  
• RMAN. Started a booklet, an adventure with RMAN some time ago. Should be finished and published.
  
  
• HTMLDB. Been working with HTMLDB for the last couple of weeks, and I'm impressed. If you haven't done so, take a look at it. There's a playground with Oracle itself, so go ahead and request a workspace. The site just updated to V2.0, which cannot be downloaded yet. Haven't seen in V2.0 much to be impressed by, yet.
  No, I wasn't impressed by the graphics/dropdown stuff. It's implementation I find clumsy, with Javascript, where it could have been XML/DHTML. For some good examples, take a look at Stu Nicholls CSS Playground. All the pictures and stuff could be replaced by Snazzy Bordered Menus. Take a big byte out of your traffic - not a page on the project I do now, exceeds 7kB - yes, that's seven KiloByte!
  
  
• Belgium. Forgot to congratulate our Southern neighbours with their 175th anniversary. Nou, awel, alsnog dan bij deze, eh mannekes? Ik vat er nog wel een pintken op! Of twee.
  
  
• Enterprise Security part X - wrap up. Yes, I know... TDE works though.