Matt Casters on Data Integration

Finally, after 2+ years of planning, the renovation or our house started, the whole family moved out and the first container arrived in front of our house:

After less than a day, it was full and trucked out.  Makes you wonder how much 35+ year old junk we had in our house :-)  The old fire-place in our living room had to go too:

One of the effects now is that with the dissapearance of a few walls you can now see through the house from the front door into the old kitchen. (soon storage space)

Wish us luck.  5 containers got filled so far (after one week) and we have a few more to go.

Until next time,
Matt

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I’m back at my favorite spot at the Orlando airport:

This week has gone bye so fast it’s kinda scary.  I got dragged into one meeting after another design session after another knowledge transfer opportunity for 5 days in a row.  After our long working days, the discussions and talks just continued over dinner and beers.

It was great to meet everyone and as always we had a good time around the office and at the Ale House.  I even managed to stay sober this time around.  Well at least most of the time.

As always, the thing that struck me the most was how fast Pentaho changes.  It’s almost like visiting a different company every time I drop in.  Since I don’t see the day-to-day changes around the office, the difference between the first time I visited (15 people) and now (70+) is striking.  The office space occupied more than doubled for example.

Well, let me tell you, it’s an honour to be able to witness this great growth process in person.  I’m looking forward to things to come!

Until next time,
Matt

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One of our community members, María Carina Roldán from Assert Solutions in Argentina, wrote and contributed a nice Kettle tutorial over on our Wiki.

From all of us at Pentaho HQ: thank you Maria for the nice work!

Matt

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Dear Pentaho friends,

So, here I am again at Brussels Airport, waiting for the plane to Frankfurt and then to Orlando.

I’ll probably be the only person on the plane that doesn’t go to Orlando for the love of Disney, Universal and Cape Canaveral.  And NO, I will not be wearing Mickey Mouse ears on the way back like most of the 10,000 hollering kids all around me.

On the contrary, we’ll be working on serious stuff at Pentaho, things like row level security in metadata, Management services for Kettle and hopefully work a bit on a new engine for transformations.

Besides that it’s going to be a nice opportunity to meet old friends and see new ones I never even met.  Pentaho keeps growing pretty fast and every time I walk into the building I see more and more unfamiliar faces.  It’s a good thing that from past digital contacts, I know their all good people, the lot of them.

For those in Europe that want to give me a call this week: please do this in the afternoon!  The last job recruiter (I never even heard of the man nor the company) that called my cell phone at 3:30AM Orlando time, had to get special ear surgery. (for which I refuse to apologize)  Let me spell it out : the time in Orlando is a six hours earlier.

Oh well, it’s a good thing my annual vacation starts right after this trip.  With the planned construction work and move out of our house with the whole family, that’s a Good Thing(tm).

Until next time,
Matt

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Today we announced that Pentaho can deliver BI solutions to the iPhone.  Will Gorman & the rest of the team at Pentaho again did a great job here!

The announcement is great news for all those people that have one … or can buy one.

Until Friday, that excluded myself.  In Belgium there is a law against “coupled sales” of goods.  That means that you can not sell an iPhone together with a contract.  The same is true for a number of other European countries by the way.  The minute an operator would try to sell the iPhone exclusively with a contract, the other operators would go to court and win too. As a result of this law, most if not all phones are sold in Belgium without a contract and 100% of the phones are usable on all our networks.

This issue has led to the fact that Apple didn’t even bother to sell an iPhone in Belgium.  This in turn made our minister of enterprises Vincent Van Quickenborne angry. (Minister “Q” for his friends and voters)  So far, “Q” has been mostly known for failing to simplify the administration in Belgium.

Now, he is angry because he feels like it was such a shame that Apple “was unable” to launch the iPhone in Belgium previously because of the coupled sales law.  Things would be so much better without that law, people would be able to get their hands on various technological gadgets for very cheap prices.

Obviously this is not true.  Let’s compare prices shall we.  The minimum contract for an iPhone in the US is $70/month for 2 years.  That will set you back at least $200 for the phone and $1880 for the contract at a minimum. That’s in total a whopping $2080.

In Belgium, the price for the same iPhone is set at 525 EURO or $820.  You will still have to buy a contract but in fact you are free to do as you please.  If you just want to toy with it on your own Wifi at home and use it as an otherwise regular phone/iPod/picture viewer/whatever, you’re free to do so.  That itself can cost you from next to nothing with pre-paid cards to a lot more than the $52,5/month remaining.

Please note that I explicitly left out the data ($30) or text plans ($5) that AT&T has to offer that can crank up the cost tremendously ($2600, $2720).

Now, how many people would pony up the >$2000 if they had a big warning on the box, in the store or on the website?

Warning, will cost at least $1000 per year!

Exactly!  My feeling is that by charging for the actual price of the device instead of allowing people to get lured into all kinds of shady contracts, costs are probably lower for the customer on average!

In short, I think “Q” is dead wrong and full of it.  He would do better to investigate the ever ongoing and prevailing illegal coupled sales of Microsoft Windows and computers.

Until next time,
Matt

P.S. All this still doesn’t mean I’m going to buy one of these overpriced gadgets, but I just might.

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