In Australia and New Zealand we have a great store called Dick Smith Electronics (founded by the Australian Entrepreneur, Dick Smith).  20 years ago this was the store that inspired my love of electronics.  They had a wide range of kitsets, starting from things that were very simple for kids to pu...

Recently, a lot of new non-relational databases have cropped up both inside and outside the cloud. One key message this sends is, "if you want vast, on-demand scalability, you need a non-relational database". If that is true, then is this a sign that the once mighty relational database finally has a...

Image via CrunchBase Oh Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.  In almost every respect Twitter has been a perfect example of how not to launch a start up.  They have made blunder after blunder and in application of conventional logic, they shouldn’t be around today. Issues that come to mind (that I remembe...

So it’s that time of year again when everyone puts out their predictions for the year ahead.  I think predictions are a bit of a waste of time because to be interesting predictions have to be big, but a year really isn’t all that long so actual changes over the course of 2009 are likely to be j...

Image via Wikipedia Recently I have seen several articles about Solid State Drives (SSD) and some articles are picking 2009 to be the year of the SSD.  While I agree SSD’s will bring some great benefits in the years to come, I wanted to clarify the current state of SSD’s in relation to usage in...

Image via Wikipedia Yesterday afternoon I was showing my son some funny songs he liked on YouTube.  The last one was the “Star Trekking Across the Universe� song, anyway near the end of it my laptop hung.  This started a 5 hour process to get it back up and running again. Ok it’s hung, hard ...

Image via Wikipedia For the purpose of this article “A Data Platform� is what I use to describe an implementation of servers, database management software, a data model, and any surrounding classes that separate data from user facing application logic and functionality. I have noticed that somet...

This is my response to Billy Bosworth's question " should oracle have bought mysql? " I don’t think Oracle is going to be kicking themselves too hard here.  From memory in October 2005 Oracle announced it had acquired InnoDB (the most popular transaction storage engine for MySQL).  ...

I agree whole heartily with this post and have posted similar comments in response to a post around how Google is dealing with their “brainsâ€� leaving and setting up their own start ups.  I believe the successful execution of an innovation is just as important as the innovation itself.  Small â...