Google's Chromebook: The Network Is The Computer

Congratulations Google! You have just invented the Sun Ray (which Sun invented more than 10 years ago, by the way...).
At last, the phrase first pronounced by John Gage, "The Network is the Computer" has become more a reality, which is not surprising, being so many ex-sunnies working for Google.
Oh, you can learn more about Chromebook in Google's official page, of course.

About Sun, there was even a laptop like version of the Sun Ray, very much like the Google's Chromebook. Probably there are other brands that OEMized the hardware, but the one I know most is Tadpole (I guess they are still doing it with Oracle).
Probably the Sun idea was more interesting as using a Sun Ray installation you can choose which operating system you want to use (Solaris, any Linux Flavour, even Windows). Indeed, Chromebook is just a subset of the original Sun idea, as with a Sun Ray you could also connect via Wi-Fi, ADSL and although I cannot confirm about 3G, it is probable that a version with that connectivity is around.
Which is interesting is the ability of Chromebook to perform some tasks without being connected to the network, which suggests some kind of internal memory storage (flash maybe, a small HDD?), something that the Sun Ray doesn't have.

Well, this is another sample of a cool technology invented by Sun, but whose profits are taken by others at last. Yes, when Sun came with the Sun Ray we didn't have wi-fi so widespread as today and 3G mobile was science fiction yet. So Sun aimed the product to the enterprise customers. The problem was a lack of vision and of an adequate marketing strategy to make a move like the one that Google has just made. Instead of the "1 dollar per cpu per hour" coined by Sun as the beginning of the cloud computing (the Sun grid), this would have probably been a more interesting move.
Well, unfortunately Sun is dead, by not doing such things. The question is if Oracle will be able to monetize all such investment or will be others, like Google, who will take advantage of a more mature market to exploit those "iPod moments" of inspiration.

Oracle Identity Analytics: Custom Reporting

Oracle Identity Analytics, the Oracle's tool for role mining and management, a product previously known as Sun Role Manager, provides by default a set of reports to help us know and study the status of our Identity Management platform. This set of reports is based on JasperReports, the opensource tool to generate reports.

Of course, it is not possible to create beforehand all kind of reports any customer may need, as every customer has a different need, so it is quite useful to be able to create new reports based on the specific requirements of each customer. As the reports used in OIA are based on JasperReports, you can use iReport to create new reports, although I'd say it is more useful to know the data model of OIA than the use of iReports. This is a question for another different article nevertheless.

In any case, most of Oracle customers already have BI Publisher in one way or another, so we have to underline that OIA also allows the use of any external report engine, as BI Publisher, so to generate custom reports with an external report engine only requires a proper access to the database where OIA stores all the data analyzed.

In any case, it is possible to extend OIA with new reports, and this is what my friend René Klomp is going to talk about. In fact, what I'm going to do is just add the proper link to the articles where René explains quite clearly the way of creating and importing a new report into OIA. As you will see, the most important question here is to understand the query to be performed in the database. The rest is more or less simple, and if it is true that Jasper is quite easy to use, it is also true that BI Publisher templates are very easy to customize and easier to understand than the Jasper ones (in my opinion).
The second article is a follow up of the first one, referred to a certain type of report, one we were working a couple of months ago for one of our customers: how to report which entitlements (or policies for OIA) are not associated to any role (after a mining process). In this way, you can see if the mining process was a good one, if all the entitlements were used and associated to roles, or if there is a problem in the entitlements definition, in the role definition or maybe in the way permissions and entitlements are applied to users in the company.
Thanks René, you have done a great job in your blog.

Starting out...

After a long time without adding any entry to my Sun blog, I decided that it is time to move it out from the place where it all started.
Although technically I was allowed to keep on blogging at Oracle, I feel that things have changed too much to maintain the spirit of the blog, so I decided to take it out of Oracle and to start it in a different place, with some different objectives.

This way, this new era on my blog starts with no boundaries to Oracle, and so the articles expressed here will be about my interests in technology, and not necessarily Oracle's interests.
Equally, I don't intend to base this blog in the study of Oracle products, although I may mention any of them if my opinions fulfill the Oracle's clauses of Social Media Participation Policy (if this clauses are applicable based on local legislation).

Well, after this brief "safe harbour statement", it is time to start out...