Today is the Memorial Day holiday in the US. I’m sure many of you have the day off, and I hope that you enjoy it, while also remembering those that have given their lives in military service.
For those of you outside of the US, I have some humorous (I hope) bloopers you can enjoy.
Steve Jones
I’m sure most of you have heard of Google Glass by now. This is a hardware platform, literally built into a set of glasses that’s designed to mate with your Android cell phone and allow you to access and use your phone in conjunction with your glasses. It’s an interesting idea, and while I’m not sure if it will catch on, I’d like to see some parts of this technology come to fruition.
There’s a new company that is trying something similar, providing a new way to access databases. Virtual Search, Inc. has combined a set of glasses with a built in display with a set of virtual reality gloves and proprietary software to allow you to search your Analysis Services cubes in a quick and intuitive manner.
Users can connect to a cube and then visualize the aggregations in a starscape-like manner. With gestures that are customizable for each user, the software allows the wearer to quickly add or remove filters along dimensions and measures in a way that can speed up querying for the business user. Data dictionaries and other meta data can pop up in the display on the side as users quickly move through what-if scenarios.
I have to think this would be an easy sell in many companies, if only for the cachet of cool that this would bestow upon the users. I’m sure many of my employers would spring for the hardware and likely fund a project to build new cubes to test the interface. I’m also sorry to tell you this isn’t true, nor likely to be true. It’s my little April first thought for the day. As a short apology, the podcast for the day is a series of bloopers so you can laugh at my inability to record a short 3 minute segment each day.
Hopefully you enjoyed this and while you might be drooling over the prospect, you aren’t too disappointed. If any of you software developers are so inclined to try building something like this, you might float your idea over at Kickstarter.
Steve Jones
Here are a few funny moments from the podcasts
Last fall I heard an interview with one of the people who had worked on Skyfall. I can’t remember who it was, but this person mentioned the director had made the film with an eye towards the Best Picture award. It’s less than a month away from the Oscar awards, and Skyfall wasn’t nominated. I’m not sure it should have been, but I did very much enjoy the film.
Last year was a good year for geeky films. The top grossing films of 2012 were dominated by those topics that we might see as appealing to the nerds, geeks, and technologists. I greatly enjoyed the top 4 and would recommend to others. However the amount of money a film makes doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth watching, and if a film doens’t earn much money, that shouldn’t mean you want to avoid it.
This Friday, as a break from the software and database discussions we have, I wanted to ask you
Did you think John Carter or Total Recall (the remake) were worth watching? Are there other films you’d recommend that might not have been well marketed or widely distributed? With the streaming video services and online rentals, it’s easy for many of us to watch films that we might have missed in the theater.
Let us know this week what you recommend and give us an idea for how we might relax over the weekend or throughout the year. At least until the Dr. Who 50th Anniversary special.
Steve Jones
We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone in the SQLServerCentral community.
I hope very, very few of you are working on this holiday Tuesday. I’m off, spending the holidays in the mountains with my family, including my oldest back from Seattle for a week. It’s a tradition for us to spend either Christmas or New Years skiing, and this year we’ve decided to spend a week in Steamboat Springs.
I’ve left you with some holiday bloopers to enjoy and I’ll be back with some end of year thoughts later this week.
Download the WMV – 37.9MB
Download the MP4 (iPod) – 33.2MB
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