Video comment to David I's blog post

So I was checking out David I's blog post and I saw a comment from Robert Love and figured I would throw together a quick vid, in lieu of typing a bunch into a small comment field. I'm toying with Camtasia these days and did this in one take, so don't anticipate a Hollywood production! Note the IM that pops up as I am recording. Ha!



The video may be a bit clearer here on my Photobucket site. You can get a full size view there as well.

Firexfox mobile: Yummy

By the time I finish typing this, we'll be working on laptops that will be all touch-driven. The Surfaces/UI's being created for iPhones and like mobile devices are making their way into PCs/laptops. This is a glimpse of what is on the very near horizon....


Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Integration at its finest

Sorry for the lack of 'real' posts! It has been a crazy few weeks since announcing the intent to acquire the CodeGear business from Borland. I have spent roughly the last two weeks in Scotts Valley with the CodeGear family which has been eye opening and even more exciting than I had though given the opportunity we have in front of us.


This past week, the 'intelligencia' of the two companies joined together in the first of a series of planning meetings. It was unbelievably impressive. When I panned around the room, it was obvious to me the bench strength we have as a company. Panning left were the key architects for Delphi and JBuilder. Panning right were those that were key architects for Eclipse itself. We had product managers who were responsible for the growth of multi-million dollar product lines and marketers who have run multi-billion dollar organizations. Extremely cool and with all that we had to do in two days, we never skipped a beat! It was clear how pro the people are and how prepared everyone came to this strategy session to relay and integrate knowledge between the teams.

The core of the meeting was information-share to truly get a lens into what we have. So beyond products and their respective strategies, we spoke deeply about sub systems and integrating these stacks. Examples are the unbelievably deep and rich database connectivity/abstraction technology built by CodeGear conjoined with our parsing and 'intelligence' technology we have for database platform specifics. So the talk of how we can glue this critical subsystems together and the excitement involved was super cool to be involved with.

Out of the gate it's clear the Delphi community needs/wants sophisticated data(base) tools to assist them with their development process. So obvious product synergies were discussed and are having packages formed. Eclipse-based products were also demonstrated and it was clear how they too can be integrated for new packages that we now have no competition for. Stay tuned.

Welcome to DBOptimizer!

Greg N (produt manager) and Wassim (program manager) have nailed it! Today they...we...are proud to release our latest tool for database professionals: DBOptimizer. It is now currently available for beta trials. You can pick it up here.

So reflect on the name: Database (DB) Optimizer. Voila. You got it. Optimizing databases as it relates to their performance. Making them run faster and more efficiently. How? Well, by providing the DBA or developer with tools in DBOptimizer to look deeply at two specific causes of ill performance:

• Bad SQL
• Atrocious wait times in the database.

So, to combat those two issues above, DBOptimizer is built on two core pieces of functionality: Sophisticated tuning of SQL and SQL Profiling for analyzing wait times and bottlenecks. It is, as developers in the Java and C++ camps had for time ad infinitum, a true profiler.

More later on this exciting product but wanted to share with you the beta release news. Come have a look!

CodeGear makes the SDTimes Top 100!

CodeGear has been named to the SDTimes Top 100! You can read the full article here but the short of it is that CodeGear was recognized in the IDE award section. Further, the SDTimes awards dove into Web Development as a category and inserted Ruby on Rails as a prolific go-forward platform for enterprise web development. Good news here with CodeGear's 3rd Rail product gaining momentum!

The Eclipse/OMG Summit in Ottawa is gaining momentum!

A unique event is being hosted in Ottawa to cross pollinate technologies between two 'open source' groups, the OMG and Eclipse. It is the Eclipse/OMG Symposium and is being held in Ottawa Canada on June 25th. Participants will be able to shape the open specifications the OMG governs (e.g. UML, BPMN, etc) as well as Eclipse's unique infrastructure and technology which is tuned to effectively instantiate and manage it.

News from my partner Kenn Hussey, Co-Chair of the symposium is that registration is strong and the agenda will ensure deep participation by attendees.

Come join us!

Searching the (corporate) blogosphere....

So, like you all, I am tapped into an array of web 2.0/social networking platforms ranging from Facebook to Plaxo (now Comcast as of last week...interesting move on their part), to LinkedIn to YouTube...well, you name it. Virtually anything you can subscribe freely too that allows publishing and meta-tagging of its content for the world to access.

So here in Boulder, there is a boat load going on. It is the Silicon Valley at Altitude if I could be frank. On this blog and the others I manage in my free time, I've started leveraging a new and fairly sophisticated search engine known as Lijit. It's prolific for me as a blogger and should be for you as a consumer of my content to look for and correlate info through your ad hoc searches across everything I publish to. So, if you're looking for content related to 'data modeling' that I may have published on this blog and may have done some videos on I published on PhotoBucklet or YouTube, this is a way to prowl what I've published and bring it all together. It kinda works like this using my best PowerPoint....

So this gets me to thinking...

We've got TONS going on with respect to managing core technical and business metadata vis-a-vis our model driven products ER/Studio and EA/Studio. Their road maps, ER/Studio's in particular, have some exciting web based publishing of metadata (mainly surrounding databased application content) for IT and business people alike rolling out later this year. The backlog driving this arose from witnessing our own customers string together solutions to source, refine and communicate information on application data and thus the need to help them by simplifying the process and make it an out of box experience versus blowing cyclesto create these ad hoc solutions.

This said, I could envision prolific uses for enterprise-style implementations of Lijit to filter through content within (and possibly external to) the corporate firewall to assist in making better decisions. It's interesting as you can focus the search specifically to certain providers which is cool. So, if our web portal is publishing its content and correlated info may be being published on the company's SharePoint portal, it will be extremely interesting to be able to search through all this content in a dedicated fashion to aggregate the info and ensuring the knowledge-worker has more 'qualified' info at their finger tips.

Hmm. Wheels turning....

What do you think? How do you solve this now?