Hi all - As you've probably noticed, we've been pretty light on the blog entries recently as we have ramped up for Participate. Now that most of that's behind us, we'll start picking it up again!
Participate went really well this year: the social application was pretty neat, there were some break-out sessions that really stood out, and we had a lot of fun with present and future clients - especially American Diabetes Association and National Academy of Sciences! Thanks again to everyone who met with us and checked out some of the new products we've launched; we'll be in touch :).
What was palpably different this year was the strange energy with the "changing of the guard" to Oracle: much of the upper-management is leaving, and Oracle didn't really go out of its way to assure customers of the road map. In fact, on the main stage, the presenters were talking about all the great features in the upcoming PEP products, but when the slide for "Release Date" came up, it just said "Ask Oracle", accompanied by a comment like "Their booth is over there in the partner pavilion; ask them - they know the road map."
I did. They didn't.
This isn't to say that the entire ALUI suite is in jeopardy; just that the road map is in a bit of flux while the new management teams figure things out. I'm just glad that 6.5 made it out in time.
Two other fun factoids I learned while out there:
- The ridiculous abomination called e-licensing is (soon to be) no more. As a consultant both for BEA and independent, it always disgusted me that it would take weeks to get those damn keys, and that while our customers would trust us completely with administrative access to their servers, our own employer/partner wouldn't trust us to log in and retrieve those keys for them. Of course, it'll be a while before the products have the license keys written out of them again, so we can go back to be trusted (and/or audited) by Oracle. R.I.P. E-licensing.
- 2) We got the iPod Touch to collaborate in this "grand social experiment", and it had video presentations preloaded for a bunch of topics. One of them was "ALUI V7 Features Presentation". Hit the jump to see that one.
See? I told you they were being remarkably coy about the road map...
That is a pretty cool muppet video. keep up the good work. -rg
keep up the good work. cool YouTube video.
You've been Rickroll'd!!!
Rickrolling is a prank and Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up" written and produced by Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman known as Stock Aitken Waterman.
The meme is a classic bait and switch: a person provides a weblink they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking (and thus satisfying their curiosity).
By extension, it can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive.[1] A person who falls for the prank is said to have been "Rickroll'd".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickroll