Oracle’s price lists

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list.pdf

and more generally -

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/pricelists.html

I found these on Oracle’s site while catching up on what’s new and exciting at my old company. I seem to remember this being a closely guarded secret, but it seems times are a’ changin…

Of interest is that ‘Named User Plus’ pricing is actually pretty cheap for a lot of the database products. Of course, what you’ll really want is the processor based licenses for production, but NUP seems to be an inexpensive way to get supported software for development. Cool.

Oracle releases SQL Developer Data Modeler

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/datamodeler/index.html

Apparently this dropped on July 1. Not sure how I missed it. And although its a free download, it is not a free product. Licenses are $3000 per seat. Not that many will be paying this price I suspect.

Blogstipation

The ironic thing is that I wrote this months ago, but it never made it out of draft mode…

Blogstipation is what happens when you hold all of your ideas in for too long. When they come, it often isn’t pretty. And while it’s a relief for you – to get unblogstipated – for those in the general area its not a fun thing to watch.

So I’ve been severely remiss in my maintenance of this blog. And all the while, great things have been happening, and I’ve been coming closer and closer to realizing my dream job.  And as I write other things – business plans, corporate missions, operating procedures, etc – I realize that I have been mentally constipated. I’ve been holding on to my thoughts, letting them steep in my mind, waiting until they felt ready. But what I should have been doing is articulating them here.

The new signup dynamic

It used to be that when something caught my attention, I’d study it for a while before making a commitment. I’d read about it, look for docs and skim, poke around, etc.

But these days in the age of ‘free everything’ (btw, nothing’s really changed – there are no free lunches now, or ever) it seems more and more sites force a signup before giving up the goods on what’s in the package. This used to be (and probably still is) commonplace for porn sites  - ‘age verification’ is a convenient ruse to justify hiding the goodies until you’d paid your dollar-now-plus-45-more-rebill-just-give-me-your-credit-card-numbers-now. The psychology here is that they know there will be a segment of the population that will, knowing the risk of crappy content, will commit anyway because the promise/potential is so attractive. It’s a mechanism that works only because people ‘really really want it’.

So now it’s really common to go to a site that may be the answer to a problem you’re experience. For example: “wow, I really wish there was an easy way to get constructive feedback on my app at no cost and no investment of time on my part!”. Now when I see a site that claims to provide that, but offers no details on how, but does make it really easy to signup (who needs password validation – typing is hard, I don’t want to do it twice..), I do – hoping that it can. 

Needless to say, I was disappointed. Now if there was some more explicatory material I’d have saved somebody a MySQL row, and myself yet another marginal spam exposure risk.

Getting back in

I went back to my project the other day after an almost week long distraction, and found it surprisingly difficult. I didn’t remember things like API class names and even some syntax rules without looking them up. This is, of course, in Python. My development pattern has been intermittent, and that’s not apparantly a good way to really (at least for me) acquire a level of facility with a new language. I kind of need to be immersed.

Python IDE’s

I’ve been lamenting the lack of a good IDE for Python for a while now. I’ve tried a few – PyDev and Sun’s Python version of NetBeans, and a couple others. None was able to hold my interest for various reasons. One critical feature of an IDE is refactoring support, so I’m looking again with that specific criteria in mind. So far here’s a list of python IDE’s -

• ERIC
• SPE
• emacs w/ROPE
• PyDev
• eclipse
• TextMate
• Coda

This list will evolve – so far that’s off the top of my head, with the tools I’m least familiar with at the top.

Maybe I’m Going About This All Wrong…

I see opportunities everywhere. Every few days, I think of something interesting enough to record as a possible business or product. These days I make a point these days to write this stuff down in my ‘Projects’ list and periodically review this list for stuff to explore. I keep my project list prioritized by a combination of obligation (stuff I’m committed to do), viability (can I do it), profit (how much is it worth) and cash flow (when would I get paid) potential. I’m usually working on a couple of things at once, and one of my biggest daily challenges is to stay focused on the predetermined priorities and not spend time on the new, interesting opportunity I just thought of.

The problem is, when I look at my list I inevitably feel strongly that some of the stuff needs to get done sooner than I’ll get to it given current plans. I usually respond to this perception by trying to do more – adding a couple of extra hours to my day, for example, to research or prototype the new idea. And of course I always feel overloaded or behind, because even if I’m in a good place with my current project(s), I’ve got all this pressing stuff to do later on in the list. Complicating this is the fact that while most of my ‘pet projects’ are independent ventures where I am the sole beneficiary, most of the stuff at the top of the list are things I’m committed to do for other people  – my clients. I need to service clients to maintain current cash flow, whereas all of my pet projects would, if successful, provide passive income. So I’m spending my energy generating short term rewards at the expense of potential long term independence. That doesn’t seem right.

So maybe I need to change how I think about all of this – particularly about the things on my list that are good ideas for passive income generation that I don’t have time to do personally.  Outsource.  If I didn’t have any programming skill or experience, this would be a no-brainer. I have two ideas that are each fairly simple to implement, but potentially very useful within their niches to help small businesses make money or satisfy customers. Instead of letting them languish until I have ’spare time’, I should probably pay someone else to build them. My problem is that I like to program, I’m pretty good at it, and I’m cheap. But in this case these characteristics are counterproductive.

While it feels riskier to spend money on development (rather than do it myself), in fact it’s probably the opposite.

Public Library Business Resources

I just attended a free course at the Burlington County Public Library – “Small Business Owners’ Toolkit”. The presenter was Joan C. Divor – the Business Services Librarian there. It was a really enlightening course. The business research resources that are available at our local libraries are actually pretty impressive. I was able to find some information that completely changed my outlook on one business venture I’ve been thinking about with just a cursory search. 

Joan, the instructor, was very helpful as well. As a research librarian she made the point that we should look at her and other public library staff as professional resources. They are, after all, trained professional researchers. Because of her course I found some resources I didn’t know existed, and learned tricks on the use of others that make them a lot more useful. 

All in all, an hour and a half of very well spent time.

Software for the Virtual Enterprise

You don’t have to be a big company to need an information technology strategy.

Since I’ve started my little enterprise I’ve been playing with various tools around the web that provide the communication, organization, and sharing infrastructure needed to work effectively as a virtual team. Depending on the type of project, the types of tools can vary, but for a software development effort (including most web development) you need at least a place to share  code. Then you probably want some sort of planning tool – to capture goals and milestones. And then you probably could use something to capture your shared understanding in more detail – someplace to record design decisions, operating principles, core requirements, architectural assumptions, etc. Oh yeah, you probably want some way to have real-time discussions – the phone might do, but gets expensive when your peers are many time zones away – so some kind of IM usually works.

There’s more of course, but you get the idea.

It’s perfectly possible to use email mostly for the majority of this stuff. But after a while (a short while if you’re me) it gets old and you look for something better.  And since one of the core assumptions of my practice is that extending your business to the web – using web-based tools and capabilities as part of your core business process – is not only profitable, but easy, demonstrating this in my business is a practical necessity.

The problem is, there’s a lot of options. The field seems to comprise a lot of pure-plays and a small number of integrated solutions. For example on the source code management front you have a multitude of pure-play providers – github, bitbucket, beanstalk, cvsdude, etc. And a little higher up the stack we have assembla, launchpad and others that provide not just source repositories but also issue management and other related project management tools.

So here for my own edification I list what I need to provide a comprehensive software and design project management and collaboration toolset that can be used internally by my employees and partners, as well as externally by customers to participate in design, track progress and submit feedback (bugs, issues, tickets, etc).  In the next few posts I’ll describe what I can discover regarding available tools and how they stack up against my requirements and budget.

Requirements

First I should describe my business. I work with small businesses to develop their information technology strategy and assist them with technology integration.  The high level activities here are:

• finding and engaging customers
• information collection, organization and analysis,
• proposal generation (recommendations),
• project definition, and
• project management

Or, looking at it from a business process perspective:

• marketing activities – tbd
• pre-sale activities – requirements collection, research and analysis, proposal / recommendation formulation, presentation
• post-sale activities – project definition, resource acquisition, project management, maintenance and operations, support, billing, payments

Much of this should be visible to both the technologist and the customer, however some things may need to be private while being prepared (e.g. proposals). Also, many activities will be collaborative, and teams will be very dynamic. Generally producers should be able to set who can view/edit documents they create or  information they store. Most documents will be edited by multiple parties and some level of versioning or history must be provided to allow for accountability and failsafe copies.

Here’s a quick list of capabilities/tools/processes that need to be provided or provided for:

• Contact Management (dex? or something like it)
• Proposal Generation Tools (templates, checklists, etc)
• Document Review Tools (for collaboration – wiki probably suffices though)
• Version Control (for all project artifacts)
• Issue Tracking (Trac is nice)
• Document Repository (webdav, versioned)
• Project Management (project definition and tracking)
• Time Management (time entry)
• Collaborative Documents (wiki)
• Design Review and Feedback (especially for web and graphic design – ??)
• Content Management (customer facing, brandable, customized)
• Blogging / Journaling (wordpress? or simpler custom alternative)
• Proposal Automation (beyond templates and checklists)
• Billing and Invoicing (collecting funds)
• Payments (paying vendors)
• General Workflow (tieing things together, automating business rules)

And of course if we have all these, we’d also want:

• Fault tolerance, scalability, and high availability (nuff said)
• Identity managed consistently between apps/tools
• Minimal repetition of information or process
• Ease of use
• Strong, flexible,  and easily understood security model

More later…

Dex and the guys from Ottawa

I got lucky today. After some morning meetings (networking! yay!) I decided to spend the afternoon at Indy Hall and try to bang out some progress on my current project. I got there around two, which was kind of late, so I put my headphones on and resolved to code till they locked the doors. But around eight it became clear there was a presentation/event of some sort going on so I came out of isolation and started paying attention to what was going on.

It turns out a couple of guys from the Ottawa co-working scene were visiting as part of their road-trip around the hemisphere gathering info on the co-working scenes around North America, and promoting a new web product one of their group had produced – Dex.

Now the co-working talk was interesting, but I really woke up when Scott Annan started talking about Dex. He started with some history, which sounded a little like mine, which was cool. Then when he started to talk about Dex I noticed quite a few things he said were things I’ve been thinking about lately – relating to agile software development methods, value-driven design using an ‘everybody wins’ philosophy, and the addition of an ethical dimension to the design model. All these are concepts that have been cooking in my head for the last few months as I’ve been thinking about business models, product and marketing strategies, and business philosophies that I could get and stay excited about. I’ve sort of been trying to reflect on my experiences and knowledge and distill from that some principles upon which I could build a business on.  And while some of what I’ve come up with is actually pretty well known to experienced business people, some of it I had never heard anyone else say until tonight. Coming from folks who have thrived on some of these principals over a good period of time is a validation for me that I’m heading in the right direction.

And also, Dex is really cool. It’s a CRM app that really does a lot of things right. Like Scott said near his intro to the concept, most CRM apps are crap. In my experience, they’re multi-dimensional crap. Crappy interfaces, crappy functionality, and crappy implementations. I haven’t seen the guts of Dex, but based on the interface and the features I really don’t care. I think it’s a great example of taking a fresh perspective on a familiar problem space and using it to generate features and capabilites that are hard to think of when you use traditional models.