2008 Blog Metadata

Since I know of, or am too lazy to look for, any tool to give me metadata on my blogging last year, I did it all by hand. Lots of fun.

Posts - 113

JAN  7
FEB  5
MAR  5
APR 12
MAY 15
JUN  9
JUL 19
AUG  7
SEP 11
OCT  5
NOV  7
DEC 11

Comments - 376

According to Google Analytics, March was my lowest month in terms of volume, 676 visits. December was the best at 2,100. Total visits for the year, 18,247.

My highest weeks in terms of visitors were those that I either got fired, laid off or furloughed which would lead me to believe people like those sorts of things. ;) Actually, I think it's a show of support. I'm grateful to be able to share the tougher times here and receive tons of encouragement.

The application developers vs. database developer series (other than my losing my job series) was very popular. You can read part I here and part II here.

The two highest days in volume were the day I got fired, 682 (because the post that got me fired came through Google Alerts about an hour after posting so everyone in the company got to read it), and the day I posted about the passing of Carl Backstrom.

As we move on with our lives it's easy to put things aside like Carl's death. In his role as Mr. Javascript/CSS on the Application Express team, he had the opportunity to interact with a lot of people. I had nothing but positive experiences with him and so did many others. He is sorely missed by many.

Oracle in the Amazon Cloud

This is pretty old by now...I had every intention of blogging about it yesterday, but I didn't get to the computer last night.

So I'm "watching" Twitter, there's a whole lot of activity from Oracle Open World, and I see an update from oracletechnet (a.k.a. Justin Kestelyn, the OTN Editor-in-Chief) about the new Cloud Computing Center on OTN.

Of particular interest is the Flash demo of provisioning an EC2 instance with Oracle provided virtual machine images (Amazon Machine Images or AMIs).

Licensing information can be found here.  The FAQs can be found here.

The one problem that I haven't seen resolved yet with the Cloud setup (hosted offsite) is security.  As a financial services company, it would be difficult if not impossible.  I did ponder the ability to use the Cloud as a dev and QA environment, as long as everything was masked before hand and you used Transparent Data Encryption (TDE).  Also, as the FAQ states, it might be a good place to store your backups.