phil – Philip Olson lived here

One year at Oracle

I’ve been working at Oracle for about a year now, specifically on MySQL related goodness. It’s a database, and I’m a technical writer. Essentially this means that I write words about MySQL that helps programmers write software, which mostly entails websites. I’m lucky to work with great people and am thankful for that. The documentation team is made up of myself, Jon, John, Paul, and Stefan. And we’ll be adding sixth person soon.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. I forgot about my blog but will begin writing here again. Thanks for being so patient. ;)

Write more Philip, use your words

As you probably notice, this blog appears abandoned. I’m not sure why because I do love writing, but maybe micro-blogging is to blame. Writing short snippets on facebook/twitter has taken over but I’m sure others have written about this so I’ll stop rambling. I do plan to write more and this entry serves as is a reminder for myself to make this happen.

Also, I recently lived on a farm for a few months and enjoyed the experience. I’m in great shape. Being active is good for the soul.

blog software update

I’m in the midst of moving blog software. Some things appear broken. I hope this problem does not continue. Haven’t yet touched the theme, I think the font is too small. My eyes hurt reading this blog.

PHP Planet Note: I see PHP Planet has added all of my PHP posts, yet the pubDate remains the same (old) so I’m unsure why it’s doing that. The URLs did change however. Investigating…. FAIL.

Update: Wrote the planet.

the future of this outdated blog and life streams

This is yet another well intentioned “I’m going to start blogging more” blog post that you see elsewhere but this one is mine. It’s just not the same since micro-blogging (twitter) came along but we’ll see. I almost converted to Habari but then got distracted committing to habari-extras (helping clean up the plugins) and have since been waiting for Habari 0.7 to be released (it’s within the 0.6 cycle currently). And now I’m distracted again, this time with life streams.

So, I’m going to either help work on the lifestream Habari plugin or use something totally different, something geared towards life streams. The arstechnica article titled “Make your own lifestream with open source Storytlr offers several ideas and methods and I’ll most likely end up with something from there. Stay tuned.

And thank you for reading this entry.

communication 2.0 is lame

Today I experienced an enormous flashing light above my head so will write about it now. Communication 2.0 is chaotic and lame. I write to blogs (this one, comments on others), micro-blogs (twitter), social networks (facebook), mailing lists (e.g., php docs), forums and other places yet it’s all scattered and lost as opposed to being together and remembered. Why so Weak?! A new TODO: Change this. How? One route: Locate APIs of utilized resources, mash them together, then do stuff with it like display. Also, research this and related topics like privacy.

Integration that already happens for me today (automagically):

Tweets are shown in this blogs sidebar (via a blog plugin)
Blog posts are shown in facebook (as notes)
Tweets (some) are displayed in facbook (when appending #fb to tweets, using the selective twitter facebook application)
iPod touch apps display facebook/twitter info

Obviously this situation can be improved a ton, both by simple means (currently existing applications) or customized (like designing how to gather and use all of this raw information) with the latter being on the ever-growing TODO.

Whatever the case, the current situation is weak and will change. Google wave should help.