Canon EOS 400D

A new “toy”. A just purchased a new toy, a new digital camera. A new Canon EOS 400D is the new star. We were already looking for some time now for a new and good camera for a normal price and which can be used by people who are just starting with digital photography on a more than “click-clack” level.

So for someone starting to take digital photography to the next amateur level the Canon EOS 400D is a very good camera, especially when you consider that Canon launched a couple of new products which helps the dropping of the price of the older cameras. I will be posting some photos which we made with the new camera shortly to show you some of the capabilities.

And I am not really admitting it but Canon is still my preferred supplier of Digital SLR cameras not only because they make the best SLR cameras in my opinion but also because I have had splendid time while having Canon Europe as an employee during the Tri-Can project where we implemented Oracle E-Business suite in the main European offices. Tri-Can is/was the biggest Oracle E-Business suite rollout in Europe when I was working on the project.

While talking about Canon Tri.Can project I found very good video on YouTube about the Tri.Can project by Abhishek Banerjee who made a photo video with very nice and true music.. Just watch the video and listen to the lyrics.

Daily web finds 2.0

British Telecom (BT) wants to sell datacenters.
BT announced that they would like to sell datacenters to HP. One of the selling conditions would be that BT would get the data and voice networks of HP to manage. The deal would consider the British datacenters of BT, the voice and data networks BT would like to manage are the worldwide networks of HP.

New 8 Gbps server storage connections.
Today Jasper Bakker announced in a vnunet article that Brocade is launching a new storage switch and host bus adapter for storage networks capable of reaching 8 Gbps. The new equipment will also be downwards compatible with the now common 4 Gbps network equipment from Brocade. Brocade announced that around 40 to 50 percent of their current customers are on a 4 Gbps data network. The new equipment has been developed while keeping close contact with Microsoft and VMware so it will be compatible and adopted by software from those vendors.

New release from nimbuzz.
Today a new release of nimbuzz so the day of light. Nimbuzz is direct competition for Skype, eBuddy and Fring. Nimbuzz released a mobile voice and chat service accompanied with widgets to incorporate in Hyves, Jabber and facebook. It is compatible with Skype, Google Talk, AOL-IM, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo-IM.

VirtualCenter 2.5 Database White Paper.
VMware® VirtualCenter database stores metadata on the state of a VMware Infrastructure environment and is a key component of VirtualCenter performance. VirtualCenter 2.5 features a number of enhancements that are aimed at greatly improving the performance and scalability of the VirtualCenter database. This paper presents the performance results of benchmarks we conducted to validate these performance enhancements and to provide best practices information for configuring a VirtualCenter database. The paper also provides information for sizing the server you use to host the VirtualCenter database based on these performance results. Although the new features in VirtualCenter 2.5 benefit users with any of the supported databases, the examples and performance data presented in this study are specific to Microsoft SQL Server and the paper assumes that you have a working knowledge of SQL Server. Read the paper on the VMware website.

Vulnerability in Debian cryptographic functions.
Debian has warned of a vulnerability in its cryptographic functions that could leave systems open to attack.
The use of a cryptographically flawed pseudo random number generator in Debian's implementation of OpenSSL meant that potentially predictable keys were generated. Versions of Debian's OpenSSL packages starting with 0.9.8c-1 (released in September 2006) are potentially vulnerable. Many types of cryptographic keys (including SSH, SSL session keys, OpenVPN and others) generated on affected systems may be weak, so the impact of the bug is potentially far reaching.

jDeveloper 11G Technology Preview 4

Now available for downloading from the Oracle website is Oracle jDeveloper 11G Technology Preview 4 (Build 4949). jDeveloper is already the leading development environment for many oracle developers for years. I used it to make my first corporate Java developments years ago when I made the switch from VI to a "real" java editor. There is a moment that things become too complex to manage it in VI.

When jDeveloper was launched a couple of years ago it was a non-free product however Oracle allowed developers to download it and use it… in a we are not looking at you when you use it and do not pay kind of way. Sometime after that it became a complete free to use editor officially and I think this is a great way.

jDeveloper is named by some market thought leaders as the number one editor and I have to agree with them… jDeveloper is one of the best and leading development environments there is.

php token_get_all LifeType

We are currently running lifetype, a opensource blog platform on a Gentoo Linux machine with Apache and PHP Version 5.1.2-pl1-gentoo. In this version of PHP the function token_get_all is not included. Lifetype, or to be more precise Smarty which is included in liftype to handle the templates uses this to extract non-cacheable parts out of compiled templates.

If you do not have the token_get_all function available some pages in lifetype will show the following error:

[error] [client xxxxxxxxx] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function token_get_all() in /usr/home/www/xxxxxxxxxx /public_html/class/template/smarty/internals/core.write_compiled_include.php on line 45

One solution is to add the function token_get_all so LifeType will work as intended, this however will require a recompile of php. A more simple hack is to change core.write_compiled_include.php which can generally be found in $lifetype/class/template/smarty/internals/.

On line 39 you will find a statement that makes sure that the function will only work when your php version is higher than version 5.0.

$this_varname = ((double)phpversion() >= 5.0) ? '_smarty' : 'this';

Now we do not want to have this executed so we change the required version from 5.0 to 7.0 which is not the version we are currently running. By making the change we make sure that there is never a call to token_get_all and by this we solve the problem.

$this_varname = ((double)phpversion() >= 7.0) ? '_smarty' : 'this';

This however is a quick and dirty hack, a better way is to recompile PHP with the token_get_all function included.

Blogging as a job

Most people who have a blog which they keep up to date and accurate will most likely enjoy this and as everything you do what you enjoy you might from time to time wonder, “Would it not be nice if this was my job”. Well, I think I have had this thought a couple of times, and now it has become reality…. It is not becoming my job but we have started the first of a couple of corporate weblogs.

The first corporate weblog is about Oracle Supply Chain Management and as I am also a Oracle Supply Chain Consultant I will be writing a lot of articles for this weblog. Please feel free to check out the SmartApps Oracle Supply Chain Weblog.

Before starting the weblog we have given it some thought and I have been reading on about the do’s and don’ts of corporate blogging. Meaning this new SmartApps weblog will have a slight different approach, mainly it will be different on focus. This corporate weblog will be handling Supply Chain Management and related topics while my private weblog is handling various topics.

The plan is to expand the number of weblogs in the upcoming time so that other people who are not directly working with SCM will have a chance to write about the things in their area. Now about the things I will be blogging about,… I will cross-post them on this weblog also or at least make a referring to it so people can track my postings on that site.

Currently I have already posted 4 blogposts.

RFID and Oracle in the Supply Chain:
An article on how RFID tags can help you plan your Supply Chain Management and warehouse management in combination with Oracle.

Oracle and Drop Shipment:
An article on how Oracle E-Business suite can handle drop shipments.

Oracle iStore return orders:
An Article on Oracle iStore and how to handle return orders from customers with some examples of flows.

Oracle demand planning with Demantra:
A quick introduction on demand planning in Oracle E-business suite, I will be posting more on this topic on this weblog and the SmartApps weblog.

20 most profitable tech companies

cnnmoney.com is running an article about the top 20 most profitable tech companies.

01: Microsoft
02: IBM
03: Cisco Systems
04: Hewlett-Packard
05: Intel
06: Oracle
07: Google
08: Apple
09: Qualcomm
10: Dell
11: Texas Instruments
12: Corning
13: Applied Materials
14: EMC
15: Xerox
16: MEMC Electronic Materials
17: Nvidia
18: Adobe Systems
19: Electronic Data Systems
20: Lam Research