While my daughter was working on a school project, she was looking for a fully searchable text of “Animal Farm” from George Orwell and found it on the Australian web site Project Gutenberg Australia. The offer was legal, but had she downloaded the text, she would have committed a serious crime, a copyright violation. Two [...]
When Turn 10 offered Forza Motorsport 2, I bought an XBOX360 just to play this game. And I didn’t regret it. During more than two years I played approximately 3.000 games online, most of them in the public lobby system that Forza Motorsport had. I’m not a good racer, but I improved over time. I [...]
InstantOLAP is a lightweight reporting and OLAP system. It’s made for OLAP reports. But if we have a non-aggregating query, we can still list all the rows by using the ROWNUM() function, which helps iterating over the result set. But we’re not able to use a dimension for grouping the rows of the result set. [...]
I have heard of Google Chrome for the first time on September 1st. A comic strip about Chrome was leaked on the Internet. At that time, there was no software download available. Rumors soon followed about the early availability of a beta version and a Google press conference the next day. This press conference actually [...]
I’m part of a team that builds a data warehouse for our client, an international recognized car and motorcycle manufacturer. Right now, the data comes from various sources, most of it is provided in CSV files. As a first step, these files are loaded into a staging area. It has been decided to accomplish this [...]