A country's economy depends highly on how it acts as a medium for business. The World Bank just issued its report Doing Business in 2006: Creating Jobs where countries are evaluated on how they facilitate business and job market growth. In terms of ease of doing business, New Zealand, Singapore and the USA are top. While Ireland ranks at 11, Germany is far behind on rank 19 -- despite the claims of our politicians about how their measures are greatly fostering business. (via Guy Kawasaki)

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Thanks to Tom&func=viewSubmission&sid=354 and Kluus, I just had a quite different impression from one of my favourite songs, Nightwish's "Wishmaster". I just watched this YouTube video from a guy that made his own video clip based on misheard lyrics of the song "Hamster -- A dentist..." I had to constrain myself so much from scaring my colleagues by rolling on the floor laughing.

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Seemingly, Kristian Köhntopp wasn't as weary as I was today. In his (obviously german) article Leben mit Fehlern - der Schlüssel zum Scaleout ("Living with errors - the key to scale out"), he describes how to solve scalability problems by implementing software based on a service oriented architecture (SOA) and by loosening requirements. He explains how too much restrictions, imposed by concepts like Two-Phase Commit or ACID(Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability), can make scaling an infrastructure a difficult task. Using WEB.DE, MySQL and Amazon as examples, Kris illustrates how using an architecture that employs small distributed services as building blocks, abandoning some of those tight restrictions, and dealing with a certain level of uncertainty or inconsistency makes distributing load and gaining performance a lot easier. It's an article well worth reading.

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The Oracle DBMS has powerful features for handling big arrays of data. With release 1.18, DBD::Oracle makes these features accessible from Perl DBI: With this release DBD::Oracle finally implements Oracle's native Array Interface. You will see very dramatic increase in speed. For example; the time for a 2 million plus insert query dropped from well over an hour to less than 10 minutes when using execute_array() and the new code. For documentation and downloads, go to CPAN~pythian/DBD-Oracle-1.18a/, as usual.

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As a part of the -boot camp- introduction programme our new sysadmins go through, I also give a talk about the concepts of the CORBA middleware architecture. I explain what CORBA is, what its goals are, as well as its advantages and its shortcomings. I put the slides of my talk (in german language) online just now.

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In a recent poll, 50% of 1,020 Americans declared that they believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded the country in 2003. Last year, it was only 36% that answered this question positively. Pollsters deemed the increase both "substantial" and "surprising" in light of persistent press reports to the contrary in recent years. It seems that George W. Bushs spin doctors are worth their money. The other possibility is that the average IQ of U.S. citizens is dropping rapidly.

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In a comment on my blog entry Mobile phone backup with ZYB#c707, John pointed to a tutorial on how to use ZYB.com as a kind of middleware for syncing Outlook and your mobile phone. The idea behind TechTag's How to easily sync Outlook calendar with an ordinary cell phone if you can use the ZYB service not only as a backup facility but also as a "shared storage" to keep two phones in sync, why shouldn't it be possible to sync your phone with your Outlook calendar and contacts via ZYB? The only problem is how to connect Outlook with ZYB. TechTag tried two different SyncML plugins for Outlook, having more success with the non-free one.

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Did you already do some work on your PC today? Checked your electronic mailbox? Surfed the Web? And everything worked? Maybe you just got some reports that your corporate website is running smoothly and page views are growing and growing? Well, then maybe it's time that you remember who makes all this possible -- the people working in the background running network cables, installing software, doing upgrades to your hardware and explaining in a soft voice that your printer will function just fine if you actually switch it on. Yes, I mean those scruffy people in the basement. The sysadmins. Friday July 28th is System Administrator Appreciation Day Think about something nice and give them some love for them sacrificing their spare time and mental sanity for you.

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From now on, I'll publish my pictures on Flickr You can't give talks about the advantages of the Web 2.0 and stay credible without using these services, can you? ;-) At the moment, I'm uploading the pictures I took during the journey through Ireland that Carolin, Tom and I went on in 2002. To be exact, jUploadr is doing the upload. jUploadr is a great tool for annotating, tagging and uploading pictures to Flickr. Since it's written in Java (as you can guess from the initial "j"), it's platform-independent. So it works on Linux and it makes photo sharing on Flickr so much easier: just drag and drop your pictures onto the jUploadr window, type in some headlines, descriptions and tags, and click "Upload!". Easy-peasy.

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Mobile Diva Darla Mack confirms rumours about Skype releasing a mobile version of their VOIP client for Symbian-based mobile phones: According to Alberto Lorente, managing director of Skype in Spain, from September, Skype will also be compatible with telephones equipped with the operating system Symbian, which is used by Nokia. That's great news, because the hope of a Skype client coming was one of the reasons I decided to get a Nokia E61. In other news, there will also be a new version of Skype for Mac OS X (german). That's also great because a MacBook is entry no. 1 on my christmas wish list. :-)

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