benj

In the latest news gripping the I.T. industry, Oracle has just agreed to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 Billion. The board of both companies has already agreed to the deal in principle, and it should be finalized within the next few months barring any antitrust problems.

This is exciting news indeed, most especially for end users familiar with both companies. Sun Microsystems is the owner of the widely used Java programming language, and the thought of better (and easier) integration with Oracle’s database systems should be something to look forward to. Aside from that, what’s really grabbing my interest is that fact that Sun Microsystems also owns MySQL, arguably the most popular database system used in web based applications. It’s the database system I use in developing web applications and it has certainly stood the test of time, data, and traffic. I’m curious to see just how Oracle can improve upon the current MySQL architecture, maybe we will start seeing more and more Oracle features in MySQL?

It should be interesting to see any product developments that might happen over the next few months and years. My only regret was not getting hold of Sun Microsystems stock before when IBM backed off from purchasing the company. The stock jumped 30% yesterday and should increase few more percentage points.

Muji is a Japanese retail company that sells a wide variety of household and office goods. Their main emphasis in terms of design is minimalism. That means Muji products look extremely plain, but that is what actually sets them apart. I first came across their store a few years ago in Langham Place in Mongkok HK. I wasn’t able to look at their office supplies then but was able to buy a nice polka dotted polo shirt. A few years later I went to their store in a mall near Knutsford Terrace HK. That was when I bought a large amount of supplies for my own use.

One of the things that grabbed my attention was this transparent cased marker. How cool is this?

Here are some notebooks and pad papers I bought in Muji’s Taipei store in New York New York mall

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I was giving a lecture on File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and web hosting last Saturday when I recalled something about Google’s Data Center.

Basically, Google handles its own hosting for its website as well as its internal requirements. The link below containts some tidbits about Google’s Data Center.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

Interestingly, Google builds its own server architecture instead of just buying servers from IBM, HP, etc. (if your market cap is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, you can do this easily). The article doesn’t point out how many servers there are but it does say that each server container has 1,160 servers with each data center having many containers. So I guess it’s safe to say that Google has at least 15,000 servers? That’s a lot of computing power, but with the complexity of Google’s search algorithm, the large number of daily visitors, as well as hundreds of applications for their internal use, I would think that all this computing power is really necessary.

Over the past few days news about the latest “super-worm” called Conficker has been spreading. It’s supposed to go live on April 1 and do all sorts of damage, but so far so good. Or is it April 1 US time? Anyway, here are some general tools you can use to get rid of or minimize the effects of viruses and worms:

1. Windows Update - Make sure you’re using a licensed copy of Windows though

2. HiJack This - This is a slightly more complicated tool to use, but so far it has been able to clean up everything I’ve encountered. Be sure you know what you’re doing before you even attempt to use this tool. Misuse can lead to a total system crash.

3. Trend Micro’s Cleanup Engine - I haven’t actually used this tool yet, but Trend Micro knows their stuff, so this should be pretty good.

4. McAfee Stinger - This is a tool to scan for and get rid of certain viruses and worms. As stated in their website, it’s not a substitute for a full anti-virus system.

5. Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool - I’ve had quite a bit of success with this. Mostly it seems to fix some of the effects of worms like disabling the task manager, disabling the different options of the control panel, etc.