Mashed Articles

Apture released an updated version in May 2009. Main improvements are

* new interface
* smarter suggestions to your search terms
* much faster interface with a drag and drop menu
* quick browse interface is faster
* better visual effects (it’s prettier)

But a big change and interesting change is the ability to connect multiple pieces of content. So you can now connect one Apture link to multiple pieces of content – e.g. YouTube or Wikipedia or Twitter.

This layering of embedded content is a great addition – it means I can offer readers several different ways of getting additional information – e.g. video plus text.

Apture are always willing to listen to users, so if you try it out and have an idea for an improvment, you can always tweet at the Apture CEO – @tristanharris.

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Thanks to Karen Virapen, who is an e-learning guru in the University of Ulster, for sending me this link. It’s a fantastic animation, and I just love the way information is embedded throughout the story. It got me thinking about unusual ways of displaying or teaching what we already think we ‘know’.

Enjoyed 2 days off in the Ardennes in the woods around Saint-Hubert, I took a book along that was already a couple of months on my bookshelf: Oracle Essentials 4th Edition. Triggered also by a customer looking into Oracle Advanced Queueing (AQ).

Nice book, giving a good overview of all the features available in and around the Oracle database. Obviously the book doesn’t go into every detail, but it does give a good overview or “refresh”.

While reading the book, I came to realize that the Oracle database is 28 years old! I still remember starting my career in September 1987, developing with the Informix database and 4GL on NCR Unix servers. Informix, together with Progress, was a major competitor of Oracle at that time.

Only in 1995 I really worked with Oracle. Oracle 7 with ESQL/C (embedded SQL) in C on Sun Solaris.

At that time, I learned about the distinguishing feature of Oracle: multiversion read consistency. The fact that Oracle will not fail when reading a row updated by another transaction. Instead, Oracle will retrieve the row as it looked like when the transaction started from its transaction logs. This avoids locking all the rows being read, as opposed to all the other databases, including Informix. Obviously, an update of such row will fail as it was already updated by another transaction.