• Just put in a switch for the doorbell, never would have thought it was a good idea until you think about sleeping babies and barking dogs #
• Is it mean to throw snowballs at a pregnant lady? #
• @jkuramot You could always get one of these: http://bit.ly/dxEldB #

Just a quick post on something I was working on, my father passed away suddenly yesterday so I don’t have as much time to put into this post as I had hoped. Anyways, over the holiday I put together a quick Ubuntu VMWare virtual machine with Oracle XE, the new 11g Technical Preview 3 jDeveloper release and the SOA suite. Over the last week I uploaded it to Amazon S3 and am now distributing it as a torrent. Here are the links to the four torrent files (Amazon doesn’t let you compress multiple files into a single torrent).

http://www.matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk1.zip.torrent
http://www.matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk2.zip.torrent
http://www.matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk3.zip.torrent
http://www.matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk4.zip.torrent

It is a VMWare virtual machine, personally I still like VMWare because I can run it on my laptop and take it with me anywhere. Oracle VM has its place in the server room, but not on the desktop, yet. It can be used by anyone with VMWare Player (www.vmware.com) for free.

The username and password for the machine is : oracle / oraclevms
These are torrents so please continue to seed them after your downloads are complete, this is the only way I’ll be able to afford to keep them online for people. If you are new to torrents check out http://support.bittorrent.com/ there you will find all the info you need, or just ask one of your pirate friends and I’m sure they can help you out. Admittedly the VM isn’t as nicely put together or as small as I normally do, but due to the circumstances I hope people can understand. I may be offline for a few days, but enjoy the download. This is my trial run for the bigger Oracle/VMware torrent site I hope to have together soon. Thanks to everyone helping with it, we’ll be launched shortly.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to “Click It” below:

I like to think of myself as a pretty good follower of the Oracle news world, I spend at least an hour a day going through blogs, tweets, google alerts, etc. to make sure I’ve got a finger on the pulse of everything going on at Oracle. Honestly, its never enough, and for the many Oracle customers who’s job isn’t to keep up with every piece of Oracle technology its a confusing world right now.

Every other week we are seeing a new acquisition, new great code examples, etc. and there is no time to keep up with it. Also, its hard to find the best content through all the different sources. I’ve been using sites like Digg and Reddit to keep up with non-Oracle news. While Oracle is huge there is no way Digg would ever create an Oracle category, so I began my search to create my own Digg clone for the Oracle community. Luckily someone already had the same type of idea and created the open source software package, Pligg. All I had to do now was come up with a new design, deploy the site and tweak some of the settings.

So without further ado here it is http://www.ora-click.com the Digg clone for Oracle news. Feel free to join the site, submit some stories and contribute some comments. Right now I’ve got it set so that it takes three “Clicks” for it to appear as Popular News, obviously over time as more stories are submitted we’ll have to bump it up, but I think three is a great start.

If you’re looking to submit your own news all you have to do is log in and go to http://www.ora-click.com/submit.php put in your URL, story title and description. If you’re looking to embed the Ora-Click buttons in your own site I’ve created two sets of buttons to add to your posts.

The small button:

which can be added with the code:

<script src="http://www.ora-click.com/clickit/button-small.php" type="text/javascript"></script>

And the large button:

which can be added with the code

<script src="http://www.ora-click.com/clickit/button.php" type="text/javascript"></script>

It’s that simple, feel free to Click this story and try it out. The site has full RSS feeds for the entire site and also the categories individually. If you have any questions or comments please let me know either through comments here or via email at matt@matttopper.com.

Have fun and enjoy, for those that have asked the virtual machines site isn’t dead, I’ve just been working a million hours and haven’t had time to bring it up to my standards. Look for me to launch a new VM tomorrow on this site as a trial run for it.

After an eventful week in Seattle, I was supposed to take the red eye back to DC for the weekend.  The flight was supposed to leave at 11:30 pm, well its 1 am now and I’m still an hour from take off.  Which means its 5am in back home time.  I think all the airlines have gone to crap in the last 6 months, I can’t remember the las time I had a flight that went off without an issue.  Hopefully I make it home and can sleep off the rest of the morning, after the week I had lord knows I need it.

On a good note I got an email from my good friends at IOUG that they’ve selected my “Oracle Identity Management: The Total Identity Solution” presentation for Oracle World this year! Woo hoo!!! It’ll be my first time presenting at Oracle World, with the BI CAB meeting and Regional Directors Meeting its already shaping up to be a busy conference.  We’ve been thinking of doing “Ask the experts session” at the conference giving time for people to come by the booth and ask our top people just about anything they want.  Discuss a problem they have, demo a cool project we’re working on, or just shoot the … well you know.  We’ll see, I think it could be a fun idea and give me a chance to meet some really cool people.