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You will achieve creativity

My favorite business book of all time is "Growing a Business" by Paul Hawken, and in the book he shares the following mission statement (from a company whose name I won't mention here) as something you probably don't want to write:

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

Rumors of an Apple "media pad" device

I can dig the rumors about Apple developing a new "media pad" device. (Some rumor-mongering here and here.) I had one of the early-model Windows-based Toshiba tablets that had a small display (maybe 10-12"), and the "display" part of it spun on an axis.

By Alvin Alexander on October 20, 2012

A collection of PHP scripts for OpenSSO

Before I get too far away from this code, I wanted to present my examples related to PHP and OpenSSO in a more logical order than the way in which I originally posted them. To that end, here is my collection of PHP/OpenSSO tutorials, showing how a PHP application can manually interact with an OpenSSO server in a single sign-on, identity-management world:

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

The link popularity of OpenSSO, WebSeal, and web tools

I've been working on a single sign-on project lately, evaluating both OpenSSO and IBM's trio of TIM, TAM, and WebSeal, and I noticed that Google has only 32,000 links to real WebSeal resources. By contrast, even as a young open source project, OpenSSO already has over 100,000 links.

Out of curiosity, I decided to google a variety of web languages and tools, and here are my search results:

By Alvin Alexander on August 8, 2011

My first problem with Windows

In light of those recent Microsoft ads that show that Windows PCs are cheaper than Macs (without ever using the word "Windows"), here's my first problem with Microsoft Windows:

Three minutes and two seconds, how long it took to log into my Windows PC

By Alvin Alexander on April 24, 2013

Sun OpenSSO best practice

This is the second-funniest thing I've seen this week ... from the "Best Practices" section of the Sun document titled "Localizing the Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8.0 Login Page":

Best Practices

When modifying files, follow these guidelines to achieve the best results:

1) Do not remove or modify the license text in the beginning of source files.

Oh yeah, that's going to make a huge difference in your performance. :)

 

By Alvin Alexander on August 5, 2011

An apology, and a good laugh

I just wanted to offer a quick apology to everyone that has sent me emails lately. Yes, I have received your messages, and I will get to them as soon as possible. I'm just a bit swamped right now, so please bear with me, and I'll get to them all as soon as possible.

In the meantime here's a fun exchange from the MySQL support pages:

1) From Person A: It's a bug that I can't write sql/ddl like this:

start_date date not null default now(),

2) Reply from a support person:

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

Jobs for thieves

I was just chatting with my oldest sister, and we were talking about companies who are currently hiring. While looking at that list, my sister casually mentioned that there is another name for a financial advisor: "thief".

On a whim, I went to Monster.com and typed in "thief", and found these job listings:

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

Apple has nearly $1M per employee in the bank

Last night I put two recent news articles together, and realized that Apple has nearly one million dollars in the bank per employee(!). Okay, it's actually only $802,857 per employee, but that's still not too shabby. (At the current rate, in another quarter or two it actually will be $1M per employee.)

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

An operating system for all

Well Steve, it's taken seven years, but it's finally come true.

Seven years ago I stood on a stage, taking random questions from an audience, when someone asked what I thought of the new operating system from Apple, Mac OS X. I said "It will be the first operating system my mother and I will both be able to use and enjoy."

This week, when my mom (and my sister and nieces) open the Christmas present shown below -- an entry level iMac -- that statement will finally come true.

By Alvin Alexander on October 20, 2012
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