In the early days of Ingres Corp, the AR-PR team did an exercise with the executive team to understand how they viewed Ingres. One of the questions they asked was “If Ingres was a car what car would it be?” I’m not really a car person, so I answered “C Class Mercedes Benz”. Now the fact that I drive a C Class Benz with a license plate that reads “INGRES” probably had something to do with my answer, but I was able to back up my response. My car provides great value for the money, is very well equipped, incredibly reliable, and handles anything that’s thrown at it with ease. It is backed up by an amazing team, and has roots in Europe and in the US. There are obviously cars out there that can go from 0-60 faster and can achieve greater speeds, but Read the rest of this entry »
If Ingres was a car what car would it be?
March 7th, 2008
Woman on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown
February 27th, 2008
It’s no secret that I have a 400 a day email habit and need a fix for my Blackberry Addiction approximately every six seconds. In fact it has gotten so bad that my friends and family have performed interventions and confiscated the device, but even without it on my hip, I can feel it vibrate in much the same way an amputee feels an itch in a missing limb.
Yesterday I encountered a problem with my device when the Blackberry Messenger icon wouldn’t respond. Read the rest of this entry »
Reassuringly Expensive?
February 1st, 2008
I grew up in Ireland, a land of saints and scholars, where we’re uniquely blessed with an expansive and colorful vocabulary. My father banned only one word from the family home, that word was “cheap”. We learned an understanding and appreciation for ”value” from an early age, and in fact we conducted “TCO” studies long before we understood that term. “Cheap”, we learned, was a waste of hard earned money, “inexpensive”, on the other hand, could often be a part of a good value proposition.
This year I’ve resolved to get fit and decided to buy a treadmill so that I could combine my love of junk TV with exercise.
Think Global, Act Local
January 30th, 2008
Regular readers of my blog will recall that late last year I described France as a hot-bed of open source activity. Today you may have seen the announcement from the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), of which Ingres is a member, announcing the formation of OSA Europe. The European Chapter of the OSA shares the goal of building compelling open solutions, based upon the integration and interoperability of best of breed open source solutions, and promoting best practices and frameworks around these solutions.
A funny thing happened on the way to the office
January 16th, 2008
I hopped on a plane in New York this morning and planned on writing a blog about new year’s resolutions. Resolution one is to “Stop Procrastinating” which might explain why that particular blog is three weeks behind schedule. When I landed in SFO, my blackberry almost melted under the strain of all the email traffic around the MySQL and BEA acquisitions. Read the rest of this entry »
Hardware - The Open Source Revolution
January 9th, 2008
One of my many vices is that I’m a junk TV addict; I live alone in a house with six TVs, three DVRs, a blue-ray disc player, and a Slingbox so that I can feed my addiction while I’m on the road. I’ll waste as much as three hours a day catching up on the latest junk TV, and just like junk food it’s compulsive but completely unmemorable. I read with great interest in Monday’s New York Times about a device that will allow users to convert pretty much any video source into an MP4 on either a memory card or USB storage device, and the most amazing thing about the device is that it’s an open source hardware platform. Read the rest of this entry »
Money Can’t Buy You Love
December 12th, 2007
I was amused to learn that Sun has announced a million dollar awards program targeted at fostering innovation around Sun’s open source development project. Those of you who have been following Ingres for a while will remember that when we first contributed Ingres to the open source community we too set up a million dollar prize fund to foster innovation in the open source development community. In hindsight it was a rookie mistake; money won’t buy you the love or respect of the open source community; many open source developers have full-time jobs as professional developers and participate in open source for fun, not profit. Read the rest of this entry »
