.:MattTopper.com:.

Alright, last night I posted on Twitter that this would be released this morning, well its still morning somewhere. Without further ado here is version two of the click-clack. Make sure you read through to the end for some interesting changes coming to the site soon or already deployed.

1. The first story was submitted by me, and not through the big controversial RSS feed option. The story entitled Do you recognize the man in this picture? came to my through my normal RSS feeds. Mashable is a great site that covers new and exciting web 2.0 site and other technology news. Low and behold I’m going through their feed today and saw an article that sparked my interest on a judge who sentenced a hacker for listing the ips coming from a usenet server. I clicked through and look at the picture in the article and its none other than infamous Oracle DBA / Miniature Horseman / Truffle Entrepreneur Don Burleson. Yes that is truly Don, if you don’t believe me, scroll down to the bottom of his own website for the picture. Too funny. 1,000,000 bonus points for Dan Norris for being the first to identify him.
2. The next article comes from Patrick Wolf the Oracle ApEx world asking people if its a good thing to create an ApEx certification. Certifications are something that I’ve always debated about with people, many people can read a book, pass a certification test and have no idea how to apply things in the real world. While there are some certifications that combine book and hands-on during the tests many do not. Personally, while certifiable, I don’t carry any certs its just something that doesn’t appeal to me, I prefer to spend my time learning new things and sharing with the world letting me experience and reference speak for themselves. I do agree that for newbies, certifications provide a great way for them to prove a basic skill set. I would actually love to see Oracle let college students take certification test for free which might help out with my discussion over on on mix. Apex is a very interesting mix of HTML, JavaScript, PLSQL, etc. skills that doesn’t fit the mix of any one certification. I suggest that everyone interested fill out the survey here which will help set the topics for the test.
3. The third article come from from Andrejus Baranovskis who posted on the Oracle / BEA acquisition. There has been a ton of talk on this deal this week. Personally its a very interesting move. We’ve done many shootouts with companies looking to compare the BEA Aqualogic suite of tools vs. the Oracle SOA suite and in every case the Oracle suite won. So I’m not on board with the thoughts that Oracle bought it for that purpose. One of the two main reasons that I tend to agree with is just to get a competitor out of the market. The Tomcat/jBoss market seems to be quickly dying for various reasons leaving only IBM and Sun in the J2EE server market with some other players like Tibco adding to the SOA space. The other major reason that I’ve heard is that BEA has a stellar sales force in China. This came from an unnamed Oracle person, but they said BEA has made some great inroads into China and Larry really liked that appeal. No doubt that the BEA team will bring some great additional talent to the Oracle OC4J/SOA teams, but I really don’t see the BEA products living on their own for very long.
4. The fourth article was submitted by Oracle themselves covering the link to all the free upcoming Oracle events.  If you haven’t taken a look at the bigger http://events.oracle.com/ site I highly suggest it.  The linked site talks about the one day Oracle events across the US. The other day Justin tweeted the new worldwide developer events for the next 12 months  He also started a conversation on Oracle local meetups I have found that the Oracle user groups (ODTUG, OAUG, IOUG, etc.) normally have some great regional groups but most of them aren’t too Web2.0 savvy posting on the bigger event sites.
5. The last top article in the clack for this week is Paul Gallagher discussing his first experience with the new Oracle WebCenter 11g from the technical preview release that came out over the holidays.  I tend to agree that WebCenter is in a watch and hold situation.  Personally its still too buggy to begin building large scale enterprise apps on, especially since I haven’t seen any major numbers on its scalability.  I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by the WebCenter spaces content when I was out for the Oracle Beta events.  The integration to outside communications sources like XMPP, Exchange, Lotus, etc are a great start but they definitely have a good ways to go.  We’re still a while away from the 11g launch and I have full confidence that the shipping product will rock.

So thats the ora-click-clack for the week, I’d like to discuss some other things that came up this week on the site.  I’ve received numerous people who are disappointed that I’m the post king on the site.  Rest assured I don’t sit around all day just posting to the site.  I’m using Eddie’s OraNA.info site to pull the data to the ora-click categories.  Well, Klass, among some other people think that this ruins the game and turns the site into a clone of ora-click instead of a great news site.  So for the next week lets give it a try, I’ve turned off the automatic feeds and I’ll let the members submit their own content.  It was a great idea to get news posted to the site quickly when we had 4 members, but now that we are growing its time to get back to the original focus of user submitted content.  So there you have it, make the site your own.  Also, I’m going to be doing some upgrades on the site to the latest version of pligg adding captcha comments to get rid of some pesky spammers and some other small tweaks.  Watch this space for next week’s ora-click-clack, till then enjoy your week.