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  2011-10-25 Tue

19:18 Upcoming Webinar: Oracle Critical Patch Update October 2011 E-Business Suite Impact (1385 Bytes) » Oracle Security Blog
Oracle October 2011 CPU - Oracle E-Business Suite Impact
Thursday, October 27, 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT

Every quarter, Oracle releases a Critical Patch Update (CPU) that fixes a number of security bugs in all the Oracle products including the
• Oracle Database,
• Oracle Application Server,
• Oracle E-Business Suite.

These patches are large, complex, and often difficult to understand for the Oracle E-Business since multiple patches are required with some being cumulative and others needing prerequisites.

This quarterly eLearning session will focus on the October 2011 CPU and the impact on E-Business Suite environments.

Topics will include;
• a review of the security vulnerabilities fixed in the CPU,
• an analysis of the required CPU patches,
• a discussion of a high-level patch strategy.

Example vulnerabilities will be demonstrated in order to show how easy it is exploit many of the fixed security bugs.

Click here to register for this webinar.
11:45 Shubh Diwali and digital lights (2168 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

Diwali is a national holiday in many countries around the world. It is a celebration of light and family.

The digital connections we're now making are a different sort of a light and create a different sort of family. Knowing who is out there, what they need and what they can offer inevitably makes the world smaller, safer and more productive.

On a commercial level, when you know who your customers are, you can stop propositioning strangers and get down to the serious work of satisfying the needs and wants of those you know. A light goes on and you are no longer stumbling in the dark.

The digital light also transforms medicine. Alert readers have heard about the push to swab, to light up the truth of your DNA by swabbing your cheek and registering for a database. Painless and fast. Not merely on behalf of one person, but for everyone.

Bone marrow transplants are misnamed--they should be called bone marrow transfusions, because most of the time, that's exactly what they are. No organs, no surgery, little discomfort. The most difficult part is registering, the shedding of light, sharing information about yourself.

It's hard for me to remember how disconnected the world was 25 years ago when I started out on my own. It really was a dark ages--information, people, relationships--finding just about anything was most of the work. The world is lighting up, and just in time.

Happy Diwali.

02:17 Buying earned media (1301 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

The term has been around since 1988, but it's not truly understood by many.

You can't buy earned media.

It doesn't arrive on schedule.

Earned media isn't free media, because the amount of time and energy and risk you have to expend to get it is hardly free.

It's like all the other things we earn. It is worth more precisely because you cannot simply command it to comply.

[An aside: throughout the history of advertising, ad agencies have rarely, if ever, bought ads for themselves. Worth noting that firms that would seek to help you generate earned media are much better at taking their own advice.]

  2011-10-24 Mon

09:01 StackExchange Architecture Updates - Running Smoothly, Amazon 4x More Expensive (2000 Bytes) » High Scalability

We've had a few articles on the StackOverlflow Architecture and Stack Overflow Architecture Update - Now at 95 Million Page Views a Month. Time for another update. This time from a podcast. Every week or so Jeff, Joel and guests sit around and converse. The result is a podcast. In a recent podcast they talked about some of their recent architecture issues, problems, and updates. And since I wrote this article before my vacation, they've also published a new architecture update article: The Stack Exchange Architecture – 2011 Edition, Episode 1.

My overall impression is they are in a comfortable place, adding new sites, adding new features, making a house a home.

Notable for their scale-up architecture, you might expect with their growth that they would slam into a wall. Not so. They've been able to scale-up the power of individual servers by adding more CPU and RAM. SSD has been added in some cases. Even their flagship StackOverflow product runs on a single server. New machines have been bought, but very few.

So, the StackOverflow experiment shows the scale-up strategy for even largish sites is a good practice.  True, their product naturally separates by topic, much like the early Facebook, but Moore's law and quality engineering are your friends. They estimate Amazon would cost them 4 times much.

Here's what StackExchange has been up to:

03:45 Form and function (1981 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

When the form changes, so does the underlying business model, which of course changes the function as well.

Mail ---> email

Books ---> ebooks

DVD ---> YouTube/Netflix

1040 ---> Online taxes

Visa ---> Paypal

Open outcry ---> Electronic trading

Voice call centers ---> forums and online chat

Direct mail ---> permission marketing

In each case, the original players in the legacy industry decided that the new form could be bolted onto their existing business model. And in each case they were wrong. Speed and marginal cost and ubiquity and a dozen other elements of digitalness changed the interaction itself, and so the function changes too.

The question that gets asked about technology, the one that is almost always precisely the wrong question is, "How does this advance help our business?"

The correct question is, "how does this advance undermine our business model and require us/enable us to build a new one?"

There are projects that are possible with ebooks or Kickstarter or email that could never have worked in an analog universe. Most of the money made in the stock market today is via trading approaches that didn't even exist thirty years ago.

When a change in form comes to your industry, the first thing to discover is how it will change the function.

  2011-10-23 Sun

04:15 When is it okay to start worrying? (1089 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

A friend was waiting to hear about the results of a job interview. He hadn't heard in a while and he asked me, "how long before I should start worrying?"

Of course, the answer is, "you should never start worrying."

Worrying is not a useful output. Worrying doesn't change outcomes. Worrying ruins your day. Worrying distracts you from the work at hand. You may have fooled yourself into thinking that it's useful or unavoidable, but it's not. Now you've got one more thing to worry about.

  2011-10-22 Sat

02:42 The difference between management and leadership (1093 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

Managers work to get their employees to do what they did yesterday, but a little faster and a little cheaper.

Leaders, on the other hand, know where they'd like to go, but understand that they can't get there without their tribe, without giving those they lead the tools to make something happen.

Managers want authority. Leaders take responsibility.

We need both. But we have to be careful not to confuse them. And it helps to remember that leaders are scarce and thus more valuable.

  2011-10-21 Fri

03:46 Cities don't die (but corporations do) (1376 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

In modern times, it's almost unheard of for a city to run out of steam, to disappear or to become obsolete. It happens to companies all the time. They go out of business, fail, merge, get bought and disappear.

What's the difference?

It's about control and the fringes.

Corporations have CEOs, investors and a disdain for failure. Because they fear failure, they legislate behavior that they believe will avoid it.

Cities, on the other hand, don't regulate what their citizens do all day (they might prohibit certain activities, but generally, market economies permit their citizens to fail all they like).

This failure at the fringes, this deviant behavior, almost always leads to failure. Except when it doesn't.

Ecosystems outlast organisms.