Site Redesign Underway

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I’ve finally started redesigning my website. It’s something I’ve meant to do for ages, and I finally started today. As you can probably tell I’m not much of a “designer”. I’m just using the default WordPress theme, although likely that will change soon, although the default theme is much more readable than my previous design. The big improvement I’m focusing on is reorganizing the content and navigation to make the site more accessible.

The previous site’s home page was a short blurb about me, with links to various parts of the site.  The site itself was broken into three main sections: Personal, Professional, and Photography.  The reality is that the vast majority of visitors to my site wanted content that was part of my Tech Blog or my Resume.  

My professional side drew most of the visitors to the site, and so the new design leads with a summary page of my professional world: my projects, my recent Tech Blog posts, Twitter feed, etc…

I plan on migrating from two locally hosted Gallery instances: personal and professional photos to using Flickr for personal stuff and 500px for portfolio work.  I also plan on moving several standalone HTML pages into WordPress pages to they are easier to manage.

I welcome feedback and suggestions!  Hopefully my site will be easier to use and I will try to update it more often.

Bad Recruiter E-Mail Tips

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I get a lot of e-mails from recruiters, so I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. I used to reply to all of them, thanking them, and politely declining. Now there’s too many, so I’ve stopped replying to the “bad ones”. Here’s how you get your e-mail in the “bad” list:

1. Don’t address me by name, showing that perhaps you’ve read my resume, website, etc… or have done any homework on me at all. Instead, start your e-mail with something like: “Dear Consultant,”, “Dear,”, “Dear ,”, or just skip any salutation entirely.

2. Misspell most words. Ignore the rules of grammar. I know many recruiters are not native English speakers, but still, use your spell checker, have someone proof read your initial contact email template. Blatant misspellings do not convey a feeling of professionalism.

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What Oracle/ATG Could Do With Licensing

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This is a follow-up to my post earlier this week: ATG Licensing – One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

I feel like Oracle has really shot themselves in the foot on this. They’ve changed up how many licenses need to be sold as a minimum to small and medium customers, and they’ve done this without adequate training for their sales staff. They’ve dramatically increased the mid-market entry level costs, pricing themselves out of many deals – even with aggressive discounting. They’ve also really failed to take care of their existing customers. There’s a huge number of existing ATG customers out there, who were sold a bundle of licenses which prevents them from upgrading without spending a significant amount out of pocket. Those customers have been paying annual support fees against a broken promise of free upgrades.

The problem will get worse as future generations of processors start shipping with hex- and octo- core base configurations. In short Oracle’s licensing policy does not work with modern CPUs and ATG software pricing and infrastructure architecture.

So what could they do? I have a few solutions:

  1. Allow for software disabling of cores. This is simple. Just add an “ATG Licensing Addendum” to the contracts that allows for this. Problem solved now and in the future.
  2. Use the Oracle Standard Database licensing model based on “Sockets” not “Processors”. This is really a clean solution, has precedent in Oracle’s licensing practices, and scales well in the future.
  3. Automatically allow all MC4 bundle customers to upgrade to 6 “Processors” of Commerce and 6 “Processors” of Search on ATG 10, for free. They were sold a small but deployable bundle of Production and Staging licenses. They’ve been paying their support fees. They deserve to still be able to run a small but deployable setup of Production and Staging.
  4. Automatically upgrade any customers who have been sold ATG 10 with less than 6 “Processors” of Commerce and Search to 6+6. These customers have been sold an impossible to deploy list of licenses. Through ignorance (most likely) their ATG Sales rep sold them a lie. Make it right.

What do you think is most fair?