Idea: Magic Toilet

The mobile, or mobility, or just a personal technology that lives near us.
We use it almost for everything. Almost?
Yes, almost, and in my personal opinion, we use it too little for our health purpose. If it is so close to our body, so why can't it monitor our health? Or at least integrate the whole house environment, e.g. a fridge, a floor, a bed, a toilet, and to do a very simple task: “to collect statistical data from my life and to send it to the dedicated server for the health analysis”. The most important thing from this visioned yet fully automatic environment is that it could collect data without our interference. You could live your normal life, without visits to the medicine specialist, and to wait for the system's alerts about the upcoming deviation from the level of your health.

For example. Would it be great to have a magic toilet that measures our temperature, weight, etc every morning? Or even better, it runs a simple test for our urine composition. It sounds a little bit too much sophisticated, but why not? We all know that it is better to prevent than to treat. So why don't we hire the mobile technology to do it?

Resume
I spent a long period of my IT career implementing the IT solutions for medicine. Thus, now I just wanted to share my hope about iMedicine, and about the bright future that it has.  
P.S. The image has been taken from here.

Virtual World with Ubuntu and VirtualBox 4.0

I have worked with VMware Player, Microsoft Virtual PC, VMware Workstation so far and I have finally stopped with Oracle VirtualBox 4.0, and it seems that I will stick with this product a little bit longer.
I'm not going to write about something that has already been written somewhere else on the Internet, such as the history of VirtualBox owners, the new features, etc. (BTW: a very good post about new VirtualBox 4 features could be found here).
I'm just going to express my personal opinion about VirtualBox and give you some good URLs that are worth seeing.

OK so let's start with the answer to the question: “Why have I switched from VMware to VirtualBox?”
All answer which written down are correct:
1. It is a free product without any extra charges
2. It allows to run as many virtual machines on your PC/Server as you want ;)
3. It seems to me that it is faster then VMware
4. It has commercial support
5. It is high time I learned the virtualization software option that Oracle supports for his licensing restrictions, or in other words, the virtual machine software where you can set as many CPUs as you want and you will be charged only for VirtualBox set CPU number, e.g. if you have one physical server with 2 CPUs but you have only one Oracle DB licence, you could use VirtualBox and install only this particular Oracle DB licence. Of course, technically you could do this almost with any virtualization software but only VirtualBox is compliant with Oracle terms and conditions ;)

Moreover, I have to say that there is one thing that I don't like about VirtualBox. In order to move/copy your virtual system to another PC/Server you have to perform the export and import task. VMware, for example, allows standard copy and paste function for a selected virtual system transfer.

Some more interesting URLs:
1. If you wanted to download VirtualBox 4.0, just start here.
2. The installation instruction for Ubuntu is available here and here.
3. Some thoughts about “the best desktop virtualization software”

alQis.com beggins

Having been semi-active on the Internet for a very long time being (I'm not even on Facebook), I have finally found my personal, short, and what is most important in this WWW world, a still free Internet domain name that I can use as my unique WWW name for my personal blog.

This may look as an easy task to achieve, because the Internet is huge, and everyone should be able to find his unique place/name for sharing thoughts, etc. Sadly, I have to admit that it doesn't go easy any more, as I remember it was much easier ten years ago, but as I have noticed it has dramatically changed in the past two years. Moreover, what may seem interesting, each day the Internet seems to be more and more 'full' but it has extra space for expanding :).

A few years ago, or more precisely at the beginning of year 2003, I was searching for a free name exactly matching my personal name, e.g. algis, algimantas, algimas, but as you probably may predict, it had already been taken by someone else.

Thus, finally, from now on I will be posting my IT thoughts here at alqis.com and my unique name may appear as 'alQis'.

But, why 'alQis / alqis'? Because it looks like and it sound as my name Algis :) (FYI: the second best option that I was thinking about, but I didn't take, was 'al9is').
The other thing that is good about the 'alQis' is that it sounds like 'hungry' in the Lithuanian pronunciation, so, I hope I will be hungry enough for sharing my thoughts here.

During the registration of alqis.com domain through the blogspot.com, I caught the feeling that it should still be very profitable business for doing this, especially when you have a monopoly. I have paid something about $10 per year, even though, I estimate that it should still be a good profit for this simple service called: 'mapping names with numbers' :)

Besides, after reading this post about Poland's domain registration dynamics, I see that even new EU member countries are capable of reaching two million '.pl' domains (now Poland is the fifth country in Europe that reached it). Moreover, according to its 23% domain registration dynamics, reached in 2010, and expected continuation of the growth level, it will soon be very hard to find a unique domain name even in the '.pl' domain group. So do not wait with your business ;)

iMedicine and “why not me?”

I don't want to say that I am a super clever or a super dump person (I hope that I am something like an average Central European intellectual :) ) but sometimes I feel that I “kill my ideas before they come true”, or in other words, I miss opportunities to implement something important, yet achievable for me. If I resample this situation correctly, I think that it may happen to me at least ten times per decade. OK, this is not a huge number but sometimes one good idea is enough :).
Even now, having seen the “ECG Device for iPhone” presentation, I scream to myself with a silent dissatisfaction: “This is my idea!”. OK, as I said, I am not a genius or something like that :) and probably at least 1000 people, during the last two years, were inspired by this (or analogical) “silent / individual, yet unique idea”, and, I assume, they were even in the production process, or, at least, they were thinking about possibilities of its realization, or etc. So, the question: “But why, why was not it me who has the final product?” should be asked by me in a silent mode :).

Thus, it is nothing new that one day “Telemedicine” will become something usual and natural for us as mobile phones these days. Everyone will be able to have some dedicated application that will monitor his health condition on-line and will assure the illness prevention. The potential sickness will be detected before it attacks with a full power.

But for now, I hope that maybe next time, after deep “intellectual” thoughts, I will go for its realization as fast as possible, and, then I hope I will be the one who offers the powerful and useful  telemedical innovation product. Moreover, the more important, I hope it would be something more clever than this “Stool Scanner” or “Lick Game” that iPhone user will use in this listed order ;).

Happy New Year, and I wish you as many impressive IT thoughts as it is possible to realize.

Ubuntu plus SQL Developer

I'm not going to initiate endless, historical discussion about the superiority of the operating systems; I'm just stating the fact that my personal number one here is Ubuntu and the rest of its family, e.g. Mint.

I can make an analogical statement about databases. My personal number one here is Oracle DB and no matter how tolerant I am, I will always interpret DB solutions through the Oracle DB perspective.

So, after such a short introduction here, I have my final, personal, yet simple operational environment of the system: Ubuntu + Oracle DB.

Before going inside the Oracle DB, I recommend expanding standard DB user interface with a more powerful command-line tool called: “GQLPlus”. The difference between GQLPlus and SQL*Plus is command-line editing and history, plus table-name and column-name completion. But before installing GQLPlus, a piece of information. It crashes quite often in my environment so, before you get angry with me for this tool recommendation, you could try a free of charge Oracle Sql Developer tool. According to its java-based engine, the tool is not the performance leader but according to its economical efficiency, it is still worth using.

The SQL Developer installation may be a little bit tricky (java home etc.) so for more instructions about smooth installation on Ubuntu see here: "Oracle SQL Developer on Ubuntu".

Autumn and Winter

Autumn and Winter – probably the best seasons for change or for doing something meaningful with our thoughts.
So, short look at myself, and what can we see apart from big eyes and cheap poker face? :)
We see the doubt: "To write or not to write?"
An alternative answer is: Maybe this is the time called: "share your brain".
The next question: Would it be painful?
An alternative answer is: What about procedure called: "once per week"?
Okay. Let it be the truth.
At first I will start from some "snapshot from my past".
The story began from the name "the3time.com" and then, after a nice start, it stopped, and I think it will not go on.
Shortly speaking, I did that small Oracle Apex service for one of my colleagues and we had some hope that this small business would go life and we would be able to create something profitable on our own.
The start was good, clients were interested, they even liked the Apex system, but the most important was that they did not like to make orders, or, in other words, they did not vote with their money, they did not order any service.
Maybe it is good for wild animals but it was not good for our small business :)

As always we can find many excuses to feel better about our failures. This, however does not matter. The final result does not change at all: "the project has not succeeded, we failed". The good thing for Apex technology was that the business had failed but not the technology ;)

My private short resume from the3time, or in other words, the lesson learned from this project: it is very hard to have regular work (to work five days for 8 hours) and having returned home to do powerful new business project with the same power.
You can create the system during your free evening time but this time is to short to create the trust of your clients.

Book recommendation: “CSS. The Missing Manual”

I have enjoyed this book: “CSS. The Missing Manual” and would recommend it to those looking for learning CSS.
There are a lot of hands-on exercises that go along with the instruction.
Have a nice reading.