Oracle VM Templates released!!!

Exciting news! Oracle has released its PT8.50 and HC9.1 environment in the form of three VM's (one each for web/app/db tier)!!! This is really exciting stuff! I think this would make environment management really easy for Peoplesoft clients and I can see Oracle pushing out "certified" environments in the future for other applications and modules as well.

I'm not sure why Oracle is not moving into the AMI space. It wouldn't be a whole lot of work to convert these images to AMI's and run on a Virtual Private Cloud, but it would be cool if Oracle released these images with their blessing.

In a way this would put a monkey wrench in the plans of those small fry VAR's who were planning on picking up some crumbs off the Oracle table (hint hint!) but in the long run I think this is a great strategy!

Oracle and Amazon AWS behind the protection of a VPC would be an awesome combination and would really enable agile project environments! Imaging provisioning your test environments on a half-day notice after cutting gold images, and getting two teams to test two test-moves as soon as both are complete!

I haven't installed and played with these yet, but this is a development that will probably push me over the edge and I think I'll end up by a 4-8 core box just to recreate a Virtual lab for testing out the exciting new configurations possible!

References:

• Via: Nicolas Gasparotto's Blog, "On the Peoplesoft Road"
  
• Origianl Announcement: "Oracle VM Template for Peoplesoft"
  
• Oracle White Paper on the VM Templages(Pdf)
  

Haskell and Java ... two great tastes that go great together

Or something to that effect. Lately, I've been on a bit of a Java and Haskell binge. I hadn't done Java for a long time after doing some elementary work in it a while back. It was a treat to find this set of lectures taught by a really energetic and competent teacher (ex googler?), so I've been playing around and having fun with "Karel the Robot" following the awesome stanford lectures by Mehran Sahami for CS106A. And here is the link to the Youtube Programming Methodology Lectures (All of em!).

Meanwhile, in true ADHD fashion, I have also been fascinated by the coolness that is Haskell. And this was triggered by the most recent C9 lectures by Dr. Eric Meijer on Haskell.

Here are the links to the first two lectures.

C9 Lectures - Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 1 of 13



C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 2 of 13



And after that whets you appetite a bit, head on over to blip.tv for the Haskell talk given by Simon Peyton Jones (of Microsoft) for OSCON 2007. (it is broken into two videos)

Part the First (78 minutes):


Part the Deux (111 minutes):



References:

1. A Gentle Introduction to Haskell
2. Haskell WinHugs (Hugs98) "interpreter"/REPL to play around with on your Windows machine.
3. Haskell Platform Suite (GHC compiler, libraries.. the whole shbang! all in one easy package... just in case you fall in love ;^) ...

4. Stanford Eclipse (comes with the ACM libraries and a much leaner interface for playing around with the class assignments - if you're just starting out with Java and don't want to lose sight of the forest for the trees)
5. CS106A - Programming Methodology Lectures on Youtube (all 28 of them!)

Larry Ellison Unscripted (cross post from PeepCloud)

Larry Ellison on the origins of Oracle, Acquisition of Sun, Linux vs. Solaris and Cloud Computing ...

And here is the clip where he went postal after the host asked him about "Cloud Computing".... I hadn't laughed this hard in days! :) (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!)

Source: Fora.Tv

Peoplesoft HCM 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.50 is OUT!

Well, it's been out since Sep 18th, I just never got around to posting the exciting news! As the Peoplesoft Dev blog points out, the GA Release is now available. I checked edelivery and yeth!!! it is out baby!!! :)

This new version has a lot of goodies! Some of the new stuff from the blog entry:

2. Improved Developer Productivity

• a. Enhanced Interactive PeopleCode Debugger
• b. AppClass Drilldown PeopleCode Editor
• c. Improved Integration Test Tools
• 3. Expanded Reporting and Query options
• a. Query as Feeds enabling users to retrieve PeopleSoft data via RSS

4. Infrastructure, LCM and Security enhancements

• a. Adoption of Java 6 on all server tiers
• b. Latest versions of WebLogic Server, WebSphere and Tuxedo
• c. Full support for 64-bit Linux and Windows
• d. Secure PS_Home
• e. Integration to Oracle Configuration Manager
• f. Support for Oracle TDE, Database Vault and Audit Vault
• g. FTPS and ADAM (AD LDS) support

Get Running/Stopped Services Using PowerShell

Here is a little snippet you can use to get a list of Stopped/Running services on your Windows box color coded by "State" (Running or Stopped)

get-service | sort name |
foreach {
if ( $_.Status -eq "Running")
{ write-host $_.Status $_.Name }
else
{ write-host -foreground RED -background YELLOW $_.Status $_.Name} }

Data Quality Matters!!

A real world example of how data corruption (logical/physical) can have real, tangible consequences given the nature of real time integration that exists between systems that govern our lives.

Ramping up nicely - 10 - 50 concurrent clients

Here is the link to the stress test graph below generated by the loadimpact.com server hitting the main url of tingoo.com/forum with 10,20,30,40 and 50 clients (max is 50 for freeloaders like me! :)

There were 24000 total requests in the span of about 4 minutes! That is not bad for a vanilla install, given that there aren't any posts out there yet and most of it is being handled by the cache on the server side, but still :)

Details

Target:
www.tingoo.com/forum/

Test started:
2009-07-09 10:58:34

Test ended:
2009-07-09 11:09:34

Clients 10 20 30 40 50
Delay (s) 4.34 4.45 4.54 4.94 5.29

This is on a 256mb VDS (with that ungodly turbopanel turned off!) The max memory never hit more than 80mb which is pretty darned good too! I was also able to keep browing the forum and viewing pages when 50 simulated clients were hitting it. I don't think Tingoo will ever hit 50 concurrent users anytime soon.

Time to start populating the forums, but the first order of business is the selection of an appropriate theme.