This new version includes support for Oracle compatibility (which was previously only available for commercial editions), and a few other features, including an enhanced db shell known as CLP+.

If you downloaded DB2 in the past, take this new edition for a spin and let us know what you think. If you haven’t, now would be a great time to try out DB2 Express-C in its enhanced incarnation.

It’s entirely free of charge and there are no limits on the amount of data you can store in development, testing, or production.

In a future post I will also explain why, contrary to what some may believe, it’s an excellent choice for startups that are looking for a solution that goes beyond the relational paradigm.

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In his famous 1961 inaugural speech John F. Kennedy said to his fellow American citizens, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. In the same spirit I can’t help but ask myself, what would it take to modernize and restart Italy?

Though easy solutions do not abound, there is something that young Italians can do to greatly help this situation: create startups. Over the past 30 years American startups have generated 44 million jobs. Starting a company is perhaps the most noble act Italians can do to improve their country and their own economical condition, while at the same time helping to create jobs for their fellow Italians.

I know that starting a company is not an easy or straightforward process in Italy. Doing so means facing a labyrinth of laws (plus very high taxes). The fiscal system is inefficient and often rewards tax evaders with a laissez-faire attitude, while showing a cruel persistence against honest small business owners.

It’s also hard because there are virtually no angel investors or venture capitalists. Though parents are sometimes seen as angel investors (of sorts), to some, for providing young Italians with a place to stay rent-free well into their twenties and sometimes even thirties.

The existence of obstacles shouldn’t be a good enough reason to prevent you from trying at all though. When you have very little to lose, because you’re already unemployed (or are not making anywhere near enough to get by), why not try and start something of your own? It’s obvious that without an initial capital, funds, or credit you can’t launch a physical retail outlet or start having goods manufactured for you in China.

Thanks to the web however, it’s possible to bootstrap a company and encounter relatively negligible monthly costs. The only real capital required is knowledge, which is freely obtainable online, paired with the ability to work both diligently and smartly towards a goal.

With rampant unemployment in Italy, particularly in the south, one would expect a huge surge of technical startups in Italy. You’d imagine people staying up until 3 AM in order to fulfil their dream of running their own business. Sadly, these are not the droids you are looking for. Unemployment figures are appalling, yet there are very few self-employed people or entrepreneurs to be found throughout the country.

The real limit is the mentality that most young Italians have.

Risk aversion. Even when there is very little to lose and you’re 20-25 years old and without a family of your own to sustain yet.

Recently a great deal of people from all over the world applied to temporary leave their respective countries to go to Chile, in order to create a startup and take advantage of a $40,000 fund for startups that the country is offering without any strings attached. Americans jumped at the occasion, despite the availability of local funds. How many Italians have gone so far? Very, very few. And yet they are the ones who could truly use – and need to avail of – chances like this.

Fear of failure. Italian society has never come to terms with the fact that failing is an opportunity to grow and try again. If you fail once in Italy, you are often seen as a failure forever (short of doing amazingly well later in life).

In North America it’s pretty much established that statistically you’ll fail a few times before getting it right. Nobody would attach such a negative label to you because you tried to create something of value and didn’t end up succeeding. You’ll be respected far more than timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Real experts are usually people who have failed more than most people and have learned important lessons in doing so. This is true in any field, not just the business world.

Sense of self-entitlement. People in Italy still expect to obtain a long term post office or government job where you’re unlikely to get fired and will remain there for 40 years, just because they got a college degree.

I’ve interviewed several Italian job applicants throughout my life, and it’s not unusual to see them become visibly upset when a fellow Italian wouldn’t hire them over someone from a different country (simply on the merits that we’re both from Italy) – even when they’ve never written a single line of code outside of their university courses.

Fatalism. In Italy there is the belief that your future doesn’t depend on your own efforts, rather that it’s mostly influenced by impregnable external forces. When you are not convinced that you can take charge of your life, it becomes really hard to make the sacrifices and jump through the hoops required to achieve success.

Why work like a dog if you don’t believe in your heart that you can change your life and live the Italian take on the American dream? (I refuse to believe that the real Italian dream is to become a soccer player or a show girl, or to have a unionized job where you can’t get fired no matter how bad you behave.)

The following chart shows the results of some research that was carried out by the the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As you can see, many Americans, Swedish, and English people replied “no” to the question, “Does success depend on forces outside our control?”. Italians however showed their fatalism, with more than 70% replying “yes”.

(By the way, tip of the hat to Fabrizio Capobianco for spotting this image on a slide by Richard Boly.)

I understand that as a whole a strongly catholic country may hold onto the popular belief that everything comes down to “God willing”, and that in many fields corruption and nepotism are the norm, not the exception. However it must be really sad to live a life in which you don’t believe in your ability to change your own destiny. Real change often derives from the ambition and desire to improve one’s situation in life.

Cynicism and envy. In Italy, people tend to ridicule, envy, or be distrustful of those who actively want to create a better future for themselves or to change the status quo.

When Mashape’s founders wrote an open letter to the Italian tech community in which they suggested that they were leaving Italy for Silicon Valley, people mocked them to no end. Many derided them and said they’d be back in a year with their tails between their legs and nothing to show for leaving Italy. What actually happened (as non-Italians might expect) is that they received $1.5 million from some of the largest investors in America, and in the process were able to get more investors to pay attention to wannabe Italian entrepreneurs.

This story speaks of a generation of cynics and discouraged people who not only struggle to produce something of value themselves, but who also actively sabotage others so as not to look incapable or lazy by comparison.

Overall Italians are a smart and (in the technical field) a generally talented group of people. Perhaps Italy will never have its own Silicon Valley, but it has a huge amount of human potential that should be put to good use. Change and innovation in my native country must start from the ground up, beginning with the attitudes and belief system of its youth.

I urge fellow Italians to fight these negative tendencies and stop, once for all, looking for excuses. If you wait for the ideal conditions to come along, you’ll never achieve anything important in life.

All change requires is for people to start taking action and trying for real. After all, just look around at the way Italy is these days: you don’t have a lot to lose. Yet there is so very much to potentially gain in the fight to reshape and transform Italy into the country it truly deserves to be.

[An Italian version of this article is available on Stacktrace.]

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The submission deadline has been extended to Monday, October 10th, 11:59pm PST, so there’s still time for you participate, if you wish.

Three participants will be selected for an all-paid trip to IOD in Las Vegas three weeks from now. You don’t have to be a student to participate; professionals and hobbyists are more than welcome to take part, too.

The extension has been granted thanks to the unprecedented level of interest, with almost 2,000 people taking the course (many of whom asked for an extension).

You can take the course and not participate in the challenge, but participating is a good chance to put your knowledge to the test when it comes to solving a real world problem of your choice.

The submissions received so far have been very interesting, and include topics spanning from global warming to calculations on the cup size of fashion models.

If you can think of an application for which MapReduce technology is able find insightful answers amongst a large dataset, consider taking the challenge. Who knows, you might just land yourself a trip to Vegas!

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Early feedback has been great and helped shape the book. The reception by early readers and reviewers has been nothing short of incredible. Here is one:

My career got a huge boost when I got serious about blogging, two years ago. So I’m in absolute awe at this amazing book, going above and beyond the best advice I’ve ever heard on the subject. I wish I would have read this two years ago, as I had to learn this the hard way. Honestly, this book has got me inspired to get back to writing more.
—Derek Sivers, founder, CD Baby, sivers.org

I’m pretty confident, humbly, that you’ll love it. It provides you with all the info you really need to succeed with your own blog, and it does so in an organized manner that will get you to plan, build, promote, benefit from, and grow your own blog.

While useful to a general audience, the book was specifically written for developers and technically minded entrepreneurs (e.g., hackers and founders). Above all, it aims to be a practical book packed with actionable advice, and not your typical fluffy book about blogging.

You can buy the beta here, and please let me know what you think about it once you get around to read it. I’m very excited to be able to share the fruits of much hard work that took most of my evenings and weekends for the past few months.

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This is a heads up for my readers who are interested in Big Data. Follow these steps to learn Hadoop and get a chance to win a trip to Las Vegas:

1. Register with Big Data University.
2. Enroll and complete the free Hadoop Fundamentals I course.
3. You’ll receive a certificate of completion and an invitation to partecipate in the first Hadoop Programming Challenge.
4. On October 3rd, three participants to this challenge will be selected for a free, all expenses paid, trip to Information on Demand (IOD) 2011 in Las Vegas on October 23rd – 27th.

Best of luck to you.

(Hat tip to Free DB2)

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The most important update is that the book is not going to be self-published. Instead, after receiving offers from a couple of major publishers earlier this year, I decided to publish the book with The Pragmatic Bookshelf. My experience with them has been more than satisfactory so far.

The book is going to be about 250 pages, and at the moment I’ve completed about 70% of it. The exact title and cover are not set in stone yet, but there is a concrete possibility that it will head into beta soon. This means that the book is likely to become purchasable before it’s fully finished, even though this hasn’t officially been confirmed yet.

Early technical reviewers have provided extremely encouraging feedback. Among those who’ve shared their valued thoughts are well-know world class bloggers who found the book to be packed with useful advice.

To give you a better idea of what the book is all about, I’ll share the (very provisional and subject to change) Table of Contents (as it appears at this early stage) here.

Table of Contents

0. Introduction

Part I — Plan it

1. What kind of blog are you going to run?
1.1 Solo vs Collective
1.2 General vs Niche
1.3 Pundit vs Instructional
1.4 Business Blogs
1.5 What’s Next

2. A rock-solid plan for your blog
2.1 Define Your Blog’s Main Topic
2.2 Analyze the Size of Your Niche
2.3 Give Readers a Compelling Reason To Stick Around
2.4 Set Goals for Your Blog
2.5 Choosing and Registering a Domain Name

Part II — Build it

3. Setting up your blog
3.1 Choose Your Blogging Software and Hosting
3.2 Installing WordPress
3.3 Configuring WordPress
3.4 Enhancing WordPress With Plugins
3.5 What’s Next

4. Customizing and fine-tuning your blog
4.1 Pick a Professional Theme
4.2 Enable Tracking of Your Site’s Visitors
4.3 Customize Your Sidebar
4.4 Encourage Social Media Sharing
4.5 Win Over Subscribers
4.6 Don’t Get in Trouble, Use Disclaimers
4.7 Master On-page SEO With Platinum SEO
4.8 Performance Considerations
4.9 Enable Code Highlighting in Your Posts
4.10 What’s Next

5. Creating remarkable content
5.1 Content Is King
5.2 Write for the Web
5.3 Can Linkbaiting Be Ethical?
5.4 Write Catchy Headlines
5.5 Develop Your Own Voice
5.6 Where to Find Ideas for Your Posts
5.7 Case Study: Math-Blog.com’s Headlines
5.8 Get Readers to Explore Your Content
5.9 Dealing With Copyright Violations
5.10 Back Up Your Content
5.11 What’s Next

6. Producing content regularly
6.1 What’s the Post Frequency, Kenneth?
6.2 Consistency Is Queen
6.3 On What Days Should You Post?
6.4 Schedule Time to Blog
6.5 Manage Your Time With the Pomodoro Technique
6.6 Surviving Writer’s Block
6.7 Get Others to Write for You
6.8 What’s Next

Part III — Promote it

7. Promoting your blog
7.1 Market It and They Will Come
7.2 Correcting a Self-Sabotaging Mindset
7.3 Perform On-Page and Off-Page SEO
7.4 Not All Links Are Created Equal
7.5 Guest Blogging on Other Blogs
7.6 Other Forms of Article Marketing
7.7 Participate in the Community
7.8 The Dark Side of Link Building
7.9 Promoting Your Articles on Social Networks
7.10 Promote on Technical Social News Sites
7.11 Case Study: ProgrammingZen.com’s Referral Traffic
7.12 What’s Next

8. Understanding traffic statistics
8.1 Baseline vs Spike Traffic
8.2 Key Site Usage Metrics You Need to Consider
8.3 Interpreting Visit Quantity and Quality
8.4 Where Do They All Come From?
8.5 Analyzing Google Analytics and Clicky Statistics
8.6 Keeping Track of Your Blog’s Growth
8.7 What’s Next

9. Building a community around your blog
9.1 Engage Readers
9.2 Supplement Your Blog With Community Tools
9.3 Forms Of Criticism
9.4 Your Mantras When Dealing With Criticism
9.5 What’s Next

Part IV — Benefit from it

10. Making money from your blog
11. Promoting your own products
12. Benefiting from your blog to the fullest

Part V — Scale it

13. Scaling your blogging activities
14. Beyond blogging: your strategy for social media
15. Growing your online presence
16. Final words of advice

If you are interested in receiving ongoing news about the book, you can sign up for my spam-free, very infrequent, announcement newsletter here.

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PHP is a required skill for this position. If you have experience with cloud computing (Amazon EC2), relational databases, open source contribution, and/or Moodle, that would be great. Part of your internship responsibilities will involve contributing to open source projects.

If you are interested, please get in touch by email at: Y2FuZ2lhbm9AY2EuaWJtLmNvbQ== (Base 64 encoded.)

Image used with the permission of Christopher Lord.

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An online compiler, or online IDE is a full software development environment on the web. This allows us programmers to develop from a wider range of machines without any software installations, and to always have our code handy whenever we may need it. There are a wide range of online compiler’s out there today, but Compilr.com is unique since our goal has been to create a fully fledged IDE for developing desktop applications on the web. The idea itself spawned from a combination of wondering what makes an IDE all that it is, knowledge of server side web development languages like PHP and using modern JavaScript libraries to create some really desktop-like user interfaces, and it’s because of the interest in these technologies that we have been able to bring Compilr to where it is today.

2. Why is using an online compiler / online IDE better than programming on my computer?

To develop from a wider range of machines without any software installations, and to always have our code handy whenever you may need it. But some more truly great things can be accomplished from an online IDE such as the ability to develop Windows code from any other OS or a fully online software team communication suite; allowing team members to work on the same code, communicate code changes actively, and instant message each other. Yes, you can accomplish this with desktop software to some extent, but with an online environment you can bring those change notifications instantly opposed to having to look for changes in source control such as svn or git. Online IDEs can also bring a whole new level to social code sharing, like open public projects that can be edited and tested by anyone in the entire world directly in their browser, yet still providing everyone with the version control they need to spot and prevent issues.

3. How did you translate a traditional IDE into a web format, and what stack did you use for the web IDE itself?

Currently we have deployed a lovely combination of Drupal for our CMS features, ExtJS for the bulk of our IDE’s user interface, a custom back-end service to handle code building and a number open source projects.

4. Would you consider Compilr to be complete enough for production use or is there substantial work still to be done?

It all depends on your production, currently we do not have any team integration, but we do support publicly visible projects. So if you’re a one person army, working on a Java, C#, or VB.net desktop application or XNA game, then Compilr might be the right solution for you! In my mind there is always work to be done and this includes: code completion “IntelliSense”, online execution of applications and debugging beyond build warnings and errors, and all those lovely team integration features I mentioned earlier.

5. What is on the horizon for Compilr.com?

Besides all the features we want to add, we are always looking for suggestions, expanding our user base, and looking for way to gain recognition for ourselves and Online IDEs in general, we really believe that online IDEs will provide a lot of value for developers in the future.

6. Are there any technological concerns for maintaining an online compiler? What about security?

Security is definitely a concern for us, during our development we take a lot of care in making sure our access points are as secure as possible, although we are human, and we are capable of making mistakes, so we preform regular backups just in case.

7. As more users come to Compilr, how do you plan to scale the system?

We are constantly optimizing code so we can fit more users on to less machines, with less bandwidth. But we also plan on clustering our users, for example: Group 1 would be mirrored on server A and B while Group 2 would be on server C and D. Completely separating the users data and compilation requirements, besides the common elements required by the CMS front end.

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A couple years ago Tim O’Reilly invited a Web 2.0 expo audience to “stop throwing sheep” and start doing something worthwhile. More recently, a post with the title America Lacks Meaningful Innovation went so far as to question the ability and willingness of American companies (particularly web companies) to be innovative.

Nearly three years on and today we’re throwing birds instead of sheep. Damn angry ones for that matter. Nevertheless, the point could be made that we’re still throwing animals instead of doing something supposedly worthwhile (as a typical web startup isn’t exactly revolutionizing health care, the energy industry, the environment, or other highly important areas for the future of civilization).

It could be argued however that entertainment is an important part of life. Granted entertainment doesn’t do anything as necessary and urgent as curing cancer, but it isn’t as though the expectation that every entrepreneur should focus on such a noble and almost unattainable problem is there either. Furthermore, innovation can – and does – happen even in places where you don’t expect it.

The Angry Birds team could, for example, make some serious improvements to WebGL, which would in turn serve startups that are focused on more solemn, and “truly innovative” matters quite well. In a way this would be akin to how the Wii and Kinect didn’t end up being useful only to gamers.

Both viewpoints have their own merits, and the truth lies – as it so often does – in some shade of gray between the two. That’s why I don’t like to think of startups in terms of their quadrant on the Cartesian plane of worthiness and innovation.

O’Reilly can’t be blamed for wanting to inspire a new generation of developers and high-tech entrepreneurs. Mike Eaton, and his thoughts on innovation, shouldn’t be dismissed either. I’m just not fully comfortable with passing judgment on people who work hard on projects like Angry Birds, Minecraft, or other seemingly less important or worthy startups.

I like to look at the issue from a different perspective. I start by assuming, axiomatically, that every profitable startup that’s trying to solve a problem that someone, somewhere has, is worthy of existing and has the potential to be innovative in some capacity. Then things shift to being a matter of finding problems that people have, and how you might be able to go about solving said issues.

Developers have a tendency to be attracted to a common set of problems. This leads to a great number of startups competing against each others in an attempt to solve the same type of issue (e.g., freelance time tracking and invoicing a la Freshbooks). This isn’t a negative thing; competition is good and solutions to all but the most trivial of problems can always be improved upon.

It is however suboptimal. We end up underserving a great number of niches and markets that need our help. It also makes the lives of many of these aforementioned startups unnecessarily difficult. It’s hard to succeed when you are competing against so many other smart people all working at a problem that is largely solved (you may improve on Freshbooks, Freckle, and other hundreds of exciting services, but the market isn’t exactly begging for a new time tracking solution.)

This problem is a particularly big one because there exists a great web-reality divide. When you spend your work life on the Internet it’s hard to see it, but the world is still mostly offline. As a trivial example, an overwhelming number of small business still don’t have a web presence, and often your best shot at gaining information about them is consulting the good old yellow pages.

We have the web which is very connected and produces an enormity of data, and then an offline world that is mostly disconnected and local.

There are two major challenges for the next decade, and this is where I think developers should search for problems to solve.

Filtering, sorting, and making sense of the huge volume of data that’s available online (think Big Data) is certainly one of them. The second is bridging the gap between the offline world and the online world, and bringing that massive volume of offline data into the realm of the digital world where it can be analyzed, organized, extracted, searched and made readily available.

As we work towards these ambitious goals tough, let’s not begrudge those who opt to create small game apps, or decide to earn a honest income with web apps that are anything but revolutionary. It’s all part of an ecosystem that contributes to moving society forward.

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I also created a pre-launch landing page where you can signup to receive occasional updates about the progress of the project, and learn of when the book becomes available for purchase. If you are interested, please signup now.

Your feedback has been extremely helpful in determining the goals for the book. While I won’t share the many personal messages of encouragement I received via that surbey form, I’d like to transparently share the quantitative results of the survey, in case you are curious.

Title-wise, people liked Zen and the Art of Technical Blogging and Zen and the Art of Technical Marketing. I went with the former.

A large majority of survey participants have bought an ebook before:

Of the proposed topics for, and goals you’d like to achieve from reading, the book, earning extra income, promoting a startup, sharing technical knowledge, becoming a better self-promoter, and understanding online marketing where the most popular. So that’s what I’ll focus on.

When it comes to formats, most people strongly favoured PDF. I haven’t sorted out the details yet, but I think I will end up producing DRM-free PDF, Epub, and Mobi ebooks. I may also have a printed version as well, if I can find a printing and distribution system that doesn’t have insane markups on each copy.

Regarding price, I suspect a certain bias in the results. When asked how much you’d be willing to pay, respondents will sometimes state a lower number in the hope that this will influence the price and make it more affordable. Regardless, I have not decided yet on the price and it’s something I’ll likely establish towards the end of the writing process, based on the actual value the book ends up delivering. It will most likely be affordable though; anything between $19-$29 for all the digital formats (with a discount for those who signup to the pre-launch newsletter).

To wrap up, these results show that most respondents would be quite interested in buying this book, so long as the conditions are right:

I may occasionally post announcements about this in the blog as the project progresses, but the best way to stay up-to-date is to signup for the spam-free newsletter for the book. I’m genuinely excited about this book and hope that I’ll be able to bring a good deal of value and insight to many people.

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