Experience is what you get when you did not get what you wanted. Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things. They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough They are there to stop "the other people" Randy Pausch If you want to watch and listen to a lecture by professor of CMU Computer Science that will teach you things way beyond realms of software engineering, check this video.

As part of current project I need to test some ORM frameworks and for that, you need a database. In this particular case, database equals Oracle. I need a local instance to be able to work outside of the customer's location. On my notebook, I have already installation of MySQL (for all the Rails stuff) and SQLServer (for ASP.NET). Plus few lightweight databases (meaning that they do not really need a server) such as sqlite3, Derby and HSQLDB).

This is blog entry I wrote over a two years ago - before this blog has even started. Now I found it on the disk during cleanups and found out it is still valid. The iPod mentioned was my first, now long dead first generation Shuffle. Here it comes: Spent most of Friday night and part of Saturday reading this book. I did not really expect to finish it, considering the size (~ 500 pages) and the fact that I am not such a great fan of Oracle products - especially not the Oracle Apps.

Today's Blog of the Day is "The Reader". Everything about ebooks and readers - all the stuff I like. See at http://wowio.wordpress.com/ Here I discovered that Sony is assumably preparing new version of reader - PRS 505. From the changes that should be included, none is IMHO really so important. The memory capacity of the reader with SD cards (which are reaching 8GB these days) is much bigger than you ever will need.

Few nuggets from recent surfing and reading newsfeeds: A very nice explanation of differences between Ruby Gem and Rails plugin in Arun Gupta's blog The community seems to be still fairly divided on the "Is Vista good or bad" ? For the laters, read the story from the corporate IT point of view. I still have not found any good reason to upgrade :-). Good story of how the experience of joining a project should not look like