Digital Sanctum

In a press release yesterday:

Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire all outstanding shares of BEA for $19.375 per share in cash. The offer is valued at approximately $8.5 billion, or $7.2 billion net of BEA’s cash on hand of $1.3 billion.

It seems to me that this has OSGI written all over it. The press release mentions that customers will have the option of “…coupling BEA’s WebLogic Java Server to virtually all the components of the Fusion software suite.”. As I recall Oracle and BEA are both OSGI big hitters and is a contributing factor for the companies being able to merge their technologies more easily.

Update: As if BEA wasn’t enough to satisfy Oracle’s buying spree, Oracle decides to buy Captovation as well.

There’s an interesting article in the NY Times about the PlentyOfFish.com and Craigslist sites. The article explains that the sites have little or no customer service functions because they’re either automated (no humans needed) or fellow site users do the work of hand-holding.

I thought I’d share the article since a lot of people recommend spending the time and effort to promote a good customer service experience to your customers. I agree but also find it interesting that these large sites have been able to all but eliminate customer service and still be very successful.

Oleg Shpynov, the lead for the IntelliJ IDEA Ruby plugin, announced JRuby support will be available as part of a public beta version due out in early September.

New Features will include:

• Scope based autocompletion and resolving
• Rename for local variables and fields
• Javadoc like help for ruby classes, modules, methods, etc
• JRuby run configurations support, that allows you to run scripts
  using JRuby interpreter.

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I went to Blogger.com today to check out the newest features and noticed when I navigated there my system slowed to a crawl. I quickly realized it was the Blogger.com site! You can see the spike at the end of the CPU History graph when I opened the Blogger.com site in my browser. Anyone else having this issue?

Update: Apparently this is a Linux only issue (I’m running Ubuntu Edgy) while running Firefox and it’s been around for a while.

I’ve just start fooling around with the initial (0.1) release of the Ruby plugin for JetBrains’s IntelliJ IDEA IDE. I’m pretty impressed with the initial release since it has some code completion and automatically configures an application runner with logging. If you want to find about about the current and future features, go here.
Here’s a screenshot: