One Decade: it is Ages for Dot-Com World

Quiz question No1: When has NASDAQ reached its peak?
The answer: On March 10, 2000
Quiz question No2: When will be the next peak moment?
The answer: Hmm, it looks as if sooner than we expect?

I still remember, or, I still 'hear' the last dot-com bubble explosion. It was so unusual to read in the newspapers about Internet companies disappearing every day.
One year before that I was a freshly-baked student, and I felt that this is the moment to start new life as an IT specialist. I had a dream. I felt that each new dot-com company can appear on the Internet as a rainbow after the rain and start a new challenging e-business.
Sadly that rainbow disappeared as quickly as it appeared, the same was true for many companies as well.
At that time I was a PL/SQL programmer who had one-year experience and was working for Clinika.pl (BTW: now I see that its WWW address is still active but the content is really different from that in year 2000) and Internet had 'only' 400 million unique users (now Facebook brags about 600 million).
Nowadays I read many posts about 'e-*', and for the last two months I have noticed that sentences about millions or even billions of dollar investments are flowing into the Internet market as fresh meat, e.g.:
1. 'Facebook Exploring Permitting a Tender Offer for $1 Billion of Employee Shares at $60 Billion Valuation'
2. Grupon Reached $15 Billion Valuation
3. Twitter Reached $10 Billion Valuation
4. Zynga the fast-growing social gaming company is close to completing a funding round of $500 million, valuing the company at $10 billion
5. LinkedIn's plan to go public this year ushers in a new era of Internet and social media companies floating on the stock market.
6. E-* company Reached $x Billion Valuation.
7. ?
8. ?
9. Dot-Com Bubble Exploded Again?
10. Have we learned our lesson?
11. Will we learn our lesson?

It may seem a little bit strange but we are probably in a boom phase again. The success of social media (Facebook in particular) and more recently social commerce (Groupon) has reminded people of how quickly large, profitable, valuable franchises can be built. As a result, there is once again a rush to invest. This will probably lead to many disappointments and the 'rainbow' will again disappear as fast as an decade ago.
OK, now it is a little bit different than a decade ago. The companies have the real business models, significant revenues, valuations are growing up and up, etc.

Maybe I'm too much pessimistic, but in my private opinion, that 'young bubble' finds the investors from the 'e-new school' hoping that a rainbow will be shining more than one short 'e-day' this time.
It even seems to me that I hear a sentence in their minds:
'Find a new promising dot-com business and invest as fast as possible' :) .

Oracle Apex Asks: “Where is Tomcat?”

A few days ago I had to check one particular Apex plug-in for simple PDF printing. As you remember from my previous post, my newly installed laptop didn't have any Oracle DB sandbox, so I was 'forced' to make a quick decision: 'to do a full installation or to find some pre-installed Oracle virtual image'. I did some google search and the answer came sooner then I expected. The Oracle has a fully prepared DB environment and what is more interesting this DB image had 'Application Express 4.0.0.00.46' so I was really surprised.

To give more details, the following products are pre-installed and ready to go:

• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition
• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Cache
• Oracle XML DB
• Oracle SQL Developer
• Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler
• Oracle Application Express 4.0
• Oracle JDeveloper
• Hands-On-Labs (accessed via the Toolbar Menu in Firefox)

Thus, I started a very quick download (in fact it wasn't so quick because all packed files were up to 6 GB). Having completed all standard procedures (i.e. downloading, unpacking, running VB) I made two simple VirtualBox corrections. And only then had I a fully working Oracle DB sandbox.

Uf :). Where are these days when the preparation of Oracle sandbox took me long hours?

Having checked the Apex PDF plug-in, I went through the whole Oracle sandbox and I have found an interesting Apex 'add-on' called Tomcat. OK, this is not the add-on in a common sense but an additional option that Apex could run with, or, in other words, could be used for a web tier.
You may ask why I was so surprised? The answer is 'Oracle does not support this installation option', what is more, it suggests installing: GlassFish, WebLogic, OC4J instead. Moreover, as I remember, there were many discussions on Oracle forums about that unsupported issue. So, the questions stay open: 'Why does Oracle state that it is an unsupported option and meanwhile using it in its demo example?'.

Nevertheless, if you would like to see how 'originally' Apex works with Tomcat, you could run this VirtualBox and check Oracle's sandbox, a well-done package.

Liberty Stands Still

This post is not about the revolution ongoing in Egypt, or a film with Wesley Snipes. It is just about LibreOffice on a very new Ubuntu installation and a few thoughts about my silent dream called 'software solution independence'.

Having been thinking for a long time 'to buy or to upgrade my personal hardware', I have finally made a decision and I have bought a new Dell Vostro 3700 laptop, uff. There were many questions regarding the technical parameters, etc., having read some interesting articles, I simply found all answers. Generally speaking, all steps/issues of buying (apart from one) went smoothly, because, as you probably agree, it is a nice moment of IT life to buy a new technical thing. :)

Thus, returning to this 'thing' that was tasteless for me.
Having collected my chosen technical laptop parameters (called: 'must have options', e.g. matte LCD, Ubuntu/no operating system), I moved to the laptop market, or in others words, I started to search for e-shops having my ideal laptop.
As you probably know, the whole laptops' market is occupied by the vendor of one operating system – 'the winner takes all or at least 90%'. How do they do that? Maybe they just 'stick' the number of the licence on the laptop's bottom during transportation, and after that they say: 'ups, now you should sell only with this OS'. ;)

I have even seen one organisation 'Freedom for laptops' that is going to take care of this 'sticky business' in Poland. I do really hope they will succeed and make me at least 90% happier next time I will search for my new laptop.


The King is dead, long live the King!

Continuing this melody of hope, I have removed OpenOffice from my newly installed Ubuntu 10.10. Having done this, I'm not saying that I don't like OpenOffice, I just don't like red coloured Oracle logo on it. It reminds me of the 'sticky business' options that I don't accept.
The new software removal/installation on Ubuntu is as easy as a pie, so I have installed LibreOffice – Liberty Stands Still ;)

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.