Acme Sprockets

My running club, MCRRC, will co-host the USA Cross County Championships at the Agricultural History Farm Park in Derwood, MD on Saturday February 7, 2009. Some of the best runners in the nation will compete for prestigious championship titles.

A few Oracle-related books I recommend:

I'm a software tool guy—I frequently craft and use a variety of simple (and some not so simple) tools to make my projects and computer life easier. While I use a variety languages, I've been using Ruby more and more over the last couple of years. I like to share with my colleagues, so I figured I'd create gems out some of these tools. This is really easy to do.

This summer I started using a Garmin Forerunner 205 and love it -- I use it mostly for running, but also took it hiking up in the Colorado Rockies in September.

My clients are typically concerned about batch process run times. As their business has grown, they want to process more and more data. Or, the users are now more savvy and want that data sooner. Failing to make SLAs is bad, bad, bad.

Generally, a batch stream is made up of a number of serially run jobs. And each job may have have a number of serial activities. But which ones to focus on?

Experience has shown that the largest opportunities are generally found by identifying the largest percentage contributors to the overall processing time. After all, making a 10% improvement in a 20-minute job is only 2 minutes, while a 10% gain in a three-hour job saves 18 minutes.