MacLochlainns Weblog

My take on the good, the bad, and the ugly of our Winter season, beside all the snow I’ve shoveled and blown to get in and out of my driveway, is:

The Good?

February brought us MySQL 5.6 GA (General Availability) and Ruby 2.0.0-p0. Mega thanks to the MySQL and Ruby teams! By the way, if you’ve always wanted to know a little about Ruby without a great deal of effort, you should check this awesome little 20 minute Ruby tutorial. Naturally, the best Ruby Programming book is a bit dated, and maybe there will be a new one later in the year. If anybody knows whether there’s a new edition forthcoming, I’d appreciate hearing about it! Another more current, Ruby 1.9, book is Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide.

The Bad?

It seems like a lot of folks who implemented Microsoft SharePoint are rapidly preparing to migrate from SharePoint 2010 to 2013, but what’s unclear is whether they’re upgrading for the features or bug fixes. It does seem many are opting for the Microsoft cloud services, and rumor has it that’s because a little collaboration requires a lot of hardware in the data center. It’s probably a good idea to do some research before implementing Microsoft SharePoint.

The Ugly?

If NBC got the quote right today, President Obama disappointed me by saying, “… I should somehow do a Jedi mind meld with these (republican) folks …” How can the President not know that Star Trek Vulcan’s aren’t in the Star Wars universe? Worse yet, my disappointment with Peter Jackson returns because he is releasing the theatrical version The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Bluray and DVD on March 19^th and then an extended version later in the year. Ouch!!! He’s getting into my wallet again.

Spring starts later this month and the rumor is that Oracle will release Oracle Database 12c soon. Then, we get Iron Man 3, Star Trek into Darkness, and the Lone Ranger, along with warm weather.