Monday, April 20, 2009

Oracle to buy Sun

Oracle announced today that they will be buying Sun Microsystems. Their plan is to produce 'pre-integrated' systems where everything from the bare metal, silicon and spinning rust up to the application front end is from themselves. The idea is that customers will save money on systems integration costs but reliability will go up.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Ada Lovelace Day

Apparently today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace (aka Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace) is widely recognised as the first computer programmer. The daughter of Lord Byron, she was encouraged away from her father's dissolute lifestyle by her mother, who encouraged her interest in mathematics. Ada excelled at mathematics and became a friend for Charles Babbage.

When Babbage created his Difference Engine, the first programmable computer, Ada wrote out the method to configure it to calculate Bernoulli numbers. Hence her appellation as the first computer programmer.

Ada Lovelace day was created by Suw Charman-Anderson as a way to promote women in IT.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

New Blog - Stephen's SAP Blog

As I'm now beginning to work on SAP I've started a blog about it, mostly just somewhere to make notes about interesting/useful things I come across. If it also helps anyone else then great but if it doesn't then no worries.

One of the things I have noticed, comparing Oracle with SAP, is that whilst for Oracle you can find online free resources at pretty much any level (both official Oracle sites and individual sites and blogs) in SAP there seems to be loads of 'salesy' type sites telling you how wonderful SAP is and how it will revolutionise the way you do business (presumably for the better) and some very in depth technical sites (mostly forums), where you're sunk if you can't get in an manually edit the data and code, there's nothing anywhere in between. There certainly don't seem to be any how-tos, any pages that seem to be telling you howto when they come up in Google searches are actually saying "If you want to find out how to sign up for our course and pay us a lot of money." Of community there seems to be little, aside from the aforementioned bit twiddler forums.

http://stephenssapblog.blogspot.com/

I admit I'm a bit Leonard of Quirm when it comes to blog names.