Uncle Sam Sues Oracle

The interesting part of this story is not that Oracle is being sued for overcharging for its database product (where do I get in line?)   No, the interesting part is the “False Claims Act” which  seems like a fool-proof way to turn a good-paying job into a great-paying job.

US suing Oracle alleging software contracts fraud – Yahoo! News

Paul Frascella, Oracle’s senior director of contract services, filed the original lawsuit in May 2007 under the False Claims Act, which allows whistleblowers to sue on the government’s behalf and share in any damages recovered.

Oracle Pulls the plug on Sun’s PostgreSQL servers

Sun was at one time trying to make Solaris more attractive by making sure you could use PostgresQL with it as an alternative to the fabulously expensive Oracle database.

Guess what?

Oracle Pulls the Rug Out From Under PostgreSQL | Javalobby

Before the Oracle acquisition, Sun was contributing three servers to the build farm for the PostgreSQL project to test updates and ensure stability on Solaris. Even though PostgreSQL was technically a competitor to Sun’s MySQL, the company still supported development of the project and contributed DTrace support and other features to the platform. This week, Oracle pulled the plug on those servers with no warning, causing a frantic search for new hosts.

Google Apps Government Edition

Big news for the ITAR challenged.

Google Unveils Government Version of Software > News on Websites Internet & Software > Tech2.com India

Google said on Monday it was the first company to offer email, calendaring and other “cloud-based” software products with a special government certification vouching Google’s systems and practices meet hundreds of federally-mandated security controls.

Google testing reading multiple Gmail accounts in single browser

Well this is welcome news.  It can’t come too soon.

Google Tests Multiple Accounts Sign in

Google tests a feature that allows you to sign in to multiple Google accounts in the same browser. Multiple sign-in only works for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Code, but it’s likely that other Google services will be added when this feature will be publicly available.

An Overview of using lambda expressions in JDK7

Here is a quick and intuitive introduction to using lambdas with some practical and simple examples what using functions in Java might be like.  

Strongly Typed, Loosely Coupled: Lambdas in Java Preview – Part 1: The Basics

As announced at Devoxx last year, closures (or better lambda expressions) will (probably) be added to JDK7. The team of project lambda has checked in initial parts of the implementation into the OpenJDK repositories. This is the first part (see part 2) in a series of blog posts giving some practical examples of lambdas, how functional programming in Java could look like and how lambdas could affect some of the well known libraries in Java land.

A Good Primer on NoSQL databases

It looks like Twitter has scaled back its move to Cassandra.   This article contains an excellent chart matching high level use cases to the database engines that best satisfy them, together with the strengths and weakness they bring.  Good stuff for off-the-cuff analysis of proposals that tout NoSQL as the solution to the problem. 

NoSQL Pioneers Are Driving the Web’s Manifest Destiny

Twitter has scaled back its plans to store billions of tweets using Cassandra, a non-relational database project that Facebook created and open sourced. Friday night, Twitter said that it will still use Cassandra in a new real-time analytics project it is building, but the decision to move away from plans to migrate tweets from its current MySQL database to Cassandra is seen by some as a blow to startups and open-source projects that are attempting to move beyond relational databases.

A pretty good SEO Primer

Everything you need to know to get you on Google’s first page of results.  If the competition is not fierce.

Everything You Already Know About SEO

The basics of SEO are stupidly simple; and it seems like everyone knows – or at least pretends to know – those basics. Still I get asked about SEO pretty often. I don’t consider myself an expert, but I’ll share what I know, and hopefully it will help some people.

Google Charts plots Functions

Who knew?  This is why I like the OUseful Blog.   It turns out that this feature was announced at the end of June, but it flew beneath the radar.   So how is it useful?   It turns out that you have a certain limited amount of data points that can be passed to Google Charts via a URL.  An alternative would be to generate a ton of data points, do a least squares fit to a polynomial, and pass the coefficients to Google Charts instead.  For well behaved data, this could produce higher fidelity plots.

Google Charts Now Plot Functions « OUseful.Info, the blog…

I didn’t get round to posting this at the time it was announced, but as I’ve got a few posts on a similar theme already (e.g. RESTful Image Generation – When Text Just Won’t Do) I think it’s worth a quick post for continuity, if nothing else: Google Charts support for TeX images and formula plotting (i.e. provide an equation and it will give you an image back of the formula plotted out); there’s also an interactive Google Charts Playground that I hadn’t seen before…

Windows XP SP2 updates ending

SP3 will continue to be supported through April 2014. 

Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 updates to stop this week – USATODAY.com

SEATTLE — Microsoft this week will stop issuing security fixes for computers running the Windows XP operating system updated with Service Pack 2.

Brocade Acquisition Rumors

From the interesting-if-its-true department.   Brocade merging into Dell or IBM would be a nice counter-balance to Cisco/EMC.

The weekend Brocade rumour • The Register

rumour central has Dell, IBM and Juniper throwing their acquisitive hats into the ring for Brocade, with Brocade preferring to be bought by the big blue