free pressos from CA on the Cloud

http://www.ca.com/au/content/campaign.aspx?cid=233771

to me CA brand seems the furthest from the Cloud...

Google code university

Back in the days before Google, I was pretty good at picking up new skills because I was good at these 2 things....
1) finding information: every time I went to a new town I would find librarys and go to 621 and 500 etc in the Dewey Decimal and copy or make notes on new books I found on electronics/technology and math/science

2)Then I would take away my notes and learn it, or try it, or test it, or make it...

Its seems
Skill (1) is gone.....the information is available to everyone thanks to Google (I guess thats their vision eh)

Check this out, I was looking for python courses on youtube and came across this
http://code.google.com/edu/
free comp sci uni! 4 that A55!

RAT for all

One of the nice features of Oracle 11g is Real Application testing, basically you can record and playback database loads - and with a bit of opatch'n you can also record loads from older version and playback (with and 11g installation) retro fit that shi7!

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/manageability/database/pdf/metalink_real_application_testing_for_earlier_releases.pdf

Cosmic Rays and ECC

Sun,IBM and Cisco have given me the cosmic ray excuse a few times over the years but having a bit of a read of the Sci papers its seems to be a bit of an issue

http://www.boeing.com/assocproducts/radiationlab/publications/SEU_at_Ground_Level.pdf
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

ECC used to be a high end feature, now as ram becomes more dense you can expect errors in your systems almost daily

Here is a project to log the ECCs with Linux

http://www.anime.net/~goemon/linux-ecc/

there was a patent in 2007 to build detectors into RAM ICs
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,309,866.PN.&OS=PN/7,309,866&RS=PN/7,309,866