OTN in China and the importance of aggregators
Justin reported the stunning success of the OTN lounge at OpenWorld Shanghai 2007. Although I never made it to the lounge, the buzz in the halls and corridors was great testament to the enthusiasm of the Oracle community in this part of the world.
My trip up to Shanghai also provided a pointed reminder of China's on-again-off-again dance with blogspot (currently "off-again") when I tried to update my blog.
Now I'm not going to argue that China needs to cease its attempts to censor the net since I respect it's authority to exercise such control, just as we do in the west but with different values. However I must admit I had never thought of the collateral damage inflicted on the Oracle community of users in China, since it seems quite a large number of bloggers on Oracle topics are using one of the blocked platforms.
Fortunately it seems that the various Oracle-topic aggregators have not been hit by any of the blocks (and presumably won't be because of the generally non-political content).
So I'd encourage the aggregators to note the importance of aggregating full-text feeds with attachments ... it may be the only chance that some people may have of reading the content (also works better for anyone with an offline reader anyway).
For Oracle, I'd suggest this is another reason why it would be great to open up to hosting non-employee blogs.
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Death by Risk Aversion
/unfortunately, this is so true of much in life, love and business.
From the late, great Creating Passionate Users site
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Innovation on show at OpenWorld Shanghai
I've just spent the past few days at Oracle OpenWorld Asia Pacific in Shanghai. Although of course a smaller scale to the one coming up in San Francisco in November, I think there were 8000 or so attendees and in true OOW style, each session slot presented the challenge "which of these 10 concurrent sessions do I want to attend?!"
I also got to present a session myself, which was great fun (thanks to those who filled up my session on the last afternoon of the last day!) More of that in future posts maybe ...
Innovation was one of the key themes of the conference and Charles Phillips' keynote. And I think there was no better illustration of this than the demo that the OARDC team were showing in the demogrounds. It got my "best in show" vote!
Their Second Life "Innovation+ Village" show-cased a solution concept bridging the real and the virtual worlds, and they brought some interesting ideas into play.
The scenario was a Second Life wine store. In the room you can examine the products and get some gratuitous live-video. But then you can make purchases (using Linden$), which are captured in iStore for delivery in "real life" (I hope .. still waiting for my case of Bollinger;-) BI dashboards track order volumes and status. Then back in Second Life, you provide feedback on the wine purchased. The feedback is not only collated in Oracle Database for analysis (more dashboards), but also fed into a blog of comments on the particular wine (WebCenter).
Overall, a great example of an "Enterprise Mashup". I don't think the team created any new technology pieces, just a novel solution using a combination of available components and APIs, and provided the content.
While you may doubt the financial viability of doing business in Second Life, it does emphasise the fact that creating Enterprise 2.0 value for your organisation does not necessarily involve a huge development investment. Just as a great artist can produce a masterpiece with a child's paintbox, real solutions are possible today if you have the imagination and creativity to combine the youthful "Web 2.0" component palette with your existing IT infrastructure.
Congrats to the crew from OARDC that put the solution concept together - Lennard Low, Teo Kian Hui, Wang Rong Rong, Zhang Rong (I believe this is a group photo below) and thanks Rong Rong for the demo;) Hope you get to show this in San Francisco too ... make sure you get a more prominent space in the DemoGrounds though, and don't have the screen facing away from the entrance!
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Playing with CAPTCHAs
Security Now! #101 with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte covered the deceptively 
simple challenge of differentiating human from non-human automated clients (great podcast as always .. check it out). Commonly this is done with distorted text like the sample on the right.
The Official CAPTCHA Site has a wealth of information about this field, including discussion of the relay attack that has the potential to defeat any "are you a human?" test (because it enrolls unwitting human accomplices to do the work).
The coolest piece of work though is the reCAPTCHA project. This is a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and it provides a public service for plugging-in a CAPTCHA to your site. But unlike other systems that are just wasting 10 seconds of your time, this system is actually digitizing public domain archives at the same time (getting you to fix the translation of words that have defied the best OCR software)!
Perl is one language that you can easily use reCAPTCHA with, using Andy Armstrong's Captcha::reCAPTCHA module.
After installing the module, it just takes a few minutes to register your site and setup a test page. I built a quick reCAPTCHA cgi in perl .. you can try it out here (sorry, currently may find it offline but get the script source here: myReCaptcha.pl. I think I spent 10 minutes setting this up, and then an hour playing with it;) All in the name of digitizing historical works...
But I'm afraid the humour archive has the best captcha ever ..
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