From the monthly archives:

April 2009

Oracle Acquisition of Sun: Everyone just Chillax

by Michael Krupa on April 27, 2009

Obviously I am taking the same chillax approach to updating my blog (sorry everyone) but I had a couple of minutes to spare this morning and while I eat my cereal and stare out the window at snow lightly falling wondering if my Mini Cooper with no snow tires will get into work without incident I thought I would share my thoughts.

As we have seen from prior acquisitions, Oracle does a lot of posturing at the beginning of a takeover (especially if it is a hostile takeover) then mostly settles down and behaves. Those of us who were PeopleSoft customers during the nasty and brutal battle Oracle waged to acquire PeopleSoft remember the public vows by Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison to shut down PeopleSoft and discontinue its products.

Here we are a couple of years and many acquisitions later and Oracle has mostly kept the acquired products up and running. Has Oracle innovated with the PeopleSoft product line? Not so much especially with HCM but they continue to fix bugs, provide regulatory updates and deliver incremental functionality.

I say, let’s wait a bit and see exactly what Oracle has to say about the future of Sun. Chillax everyone.

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My Cat and Mouse game with Twitter Access

by Michael Krupa on April 9, 2009

My employer (like many others) does not allow access to social networking and personal email sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and now…wait for it…Twitter. Sigh.

Several months ago, the proxy servers had not yet been updated to block Twitter so I was free to access Twitter from the web (twitter.com) or via any of the desktop tools such as TweetDeck or Twhirl.

Eventually the proxy servers started getting wise to Twitter and began blocking access to Twitter. Thus started my cat and mouse game to stay one step ahead of the proxy filters and find a new Twitter application every time the existing application became blocked. Here is my progression of Twitter applications as each one became blocked:

It has been fun discovering which Twitter applications are blocked and which ones are still allowed. I think I am running out of Twitter front-end applications and may soon be forced to use Tweetie on my iPhone.

Of course this exposes the whole silliness of blocking access to Twitter since I can still tweet via my iPhone anytime I want.

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When Life Hands You Filing Cabinets…

by Michael Krupa on April 8, 2009

…make a ping pong table.

Let me explain. My team recently moved to a new building that was formerly occupied by a loan processing subsidiary of Lehman Brothers. Here is a picture before we moved in:


My guess is the center filing cabinet island was paper and printer central for the operations in each pod of cubes.

Given that my team is from IT, we really did not have any use for all the filing cabinets. After a week working in the new building someone on the team got the harebrained idea to use the filing cabinet island as a ping-pong table. After about 5 minutes of rearranging the island we created a nearly perfect ping-pong table:


Great fun was had by all and not a penny was spent to turn our lemons filing cabinets into a ping-ping table.

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