Rampaging Robot

I’m extremely impressed with Drupal 5 Themes. I received this book just after finishing coding three custom themes for clients – so Drupal themeing was definitely on my brain!

Larry Ellison talked about the progress of Oracle's Linux program which just started one year ago. Oracle has collected many big name customers, including Cnet, and Abercrombie & Fitch. They have kept Red Hat compatibility. VM and grid computing will be quite complementary.

CipherSoft, blogged about earlier, covered migration into Java. Well, real ease, Forms2net is a tool that migrates Oracle forms to the Microsoft .net platform. Their website offers a free tool to called Forms2net Analyzer to estimate conversion costs. That is an excellent sales tool However, with Oracle dominating the enterprise market, I'm not sure how many companies who already have Oracle databases are going to migrate to a .net platform.

Monday afternoon, Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd presented his keynote. This was one of the more entertaining presentations at Oracle OpenWorld. He answered attendee questions that had been videotaped. Many of his answers talked about breaking old molds of the "IT shop" and figuring out how to meet to use IT's recourses to achieve business goals. Mark Hurd quickly jumped on a golden opportunity to recap much of prepared presentation about IT when an attendee asked "What is the role of IT?" He managed to answer that question by highlighting four points.

For now, I'm going to blog about companies I've had requests to check out from clients and other IT professionals.

Several bloggers have been posting about BlipBack and BlipBomb, some new video widgets. Mashable, the social networking news site, had a nice writeup about these tools. Of course, they concentrated on the Web 2.0 goodies that this widget provides: user rankings, RSS feeds, and cell phone submissions. The feature that Mashable would like to see implemented in the future is a streaming video channel. Rich Young, of AE portal, sees many post production services arising out of such tools. In particular, he thinks that these could be used as "review and approval" tools.