May 26th 2008
5000 forum threads
Today we’ve passed the 5000 threads marker on our beloved Kettle forum.
Congratulations to all participants!
Matt
Archive for May, 2008
May 24th 2008
ICT in Belgium : help wanted
The new employment figures for ICT in Belgium came through yesterday: 6500 jobs created in the past year. In that same year, the number of job openings grew from 14000 to 14250.
The BI consultant in me is rubbing his hands with glee when I read such news. The fact that good people are unavailable to do projects simply means more failures in BI projects and more opportunity for us real BI consultants and real BI companies to pick up the pieces later.
No, I don’t have any numbers to prove that of-course. 76% of all statistics is made up anyway, including this one. However, my experience tells me that there are more than enough people out there willing to take on work that they know nothing about. No offense to my esteemed wood-be colleagues, but in 2008 there is still an astounding number of people that think that building a data warehouse in 3NF is a great idea.
Matt
May 20th 2008
Dear $!{firstname}
It’s pretty much my job to see what’s going on in BI and specifically in the world of Data Integration. As such, I’m subscribed to quite a few blogging services to see what’s going on, including ITToolbox.
Apparently, they are badly in need of a few IT people themselves, not just to serve their paying advertisers, but also for their own spam campaigns. Look below to see what they dropped into my mailbox…
Goodbye ITToolbox! By the way, make up your mind, write in Dutch or in English, don’t mix the 2, it’s unprofessional. And if you do send HTML around the globe, try to set the appropriate encoding.
Until next time,
Matt
P.S. I *am* thinking about taking up a career in ICT 
May 13th 2008
Kettle 3.1.0-M2
Dear Kettle fans,
We’re releasing Milestone 2 of version 3.1.0 a bit faster than the previous incarnation.
Even though it’s only been a few weeks since milestone 1, we’ve managed to resolve 49 JIRA cases, 10 improvements and new features and 39 bug fixes. We’re projecting to go into feature freeze (M3/RC1) around May 22nd.
Please remember that a milestone release is essentially a development version and not suitable for production use.
Enjoy Kettle!
Matt
