DB2 on Campus: The DB2 on Campus Program is a project designed to promote the use of DB2 in universities. The logistics and delivery of the program is performed between the DB2 Express-C team, and the local IBM Academic Initiative representative. The program consists of the following items and activities:

1. A speech titled “The role of DB2 Express-C in the Information on Demand World”. This speech explains DB2 9 technology, with an emphasis on pureXML™, and encourages students to use DB2 Express-C, create university DB2 user groups, participate in the DB2 forums, and write documents about DB2. All of these activities can help them to advance their future careers.
2. Introductory DB2 courses to obtain DBA and developer skills.
3. Free DB2 books donated to the university library
4. Free DB2 certification exams offered to the students

I will be at University of Minho on September 19th doing the speech for the DB2 on Campus program. There was not enough time to prepare the full-day event, but if you or someone at your university is interested in having this full-day event happening at your university, please feel free to email me and I’ll put you in contact with the program’s manager in order to schedule the event (my email is vrodrig at us.ibm.com).

There is a DB2 On Campus Facebook group. Follow these instructions to join. 

Subscribe to the DB2 Express-C blog to keep updated on news regarding this free to develop, deploy and distribute database(1). 

DB2 Student Ambassador: This is a program for individual students that want to promote the use of DB2 at their education institutions. Though the program is voluntary, it gives students a chance to learn more about DB2, develop presentation skills and marketing skills. All of these skills will be valuable in their careers. At the end of the program, the student will receive a letter of recommendation from IBM including all the details of the activities performed. The more activities performed, the better the letter of recommendation! We hope this will help the student get a job more easily in the future.

I consider this to be an excellent opportunity to get involved and interact with developers from a huge project like DB2, distributed across Toronto and Silicon Valley laboratories.

More information  about this program can be found here: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/students_programs.html#ambassador

Although I’m only familiar with the DB2 programs, for the ones interested, there is also an IBM Academic Initiative program, focused on Open Standars, Open Source and IBM resources for the academic world.

The opportunities are out there, so just grab the one you like and boost your career

(1) Yes, it is the fully loaded version available for free, with one limitation: it can only use up to 4GB of RAM  

Something is wrong with Ruby’s libxml xpath evaluator. I’m only able to use the wildcard * to select elements and not the element’s name. After doing some research on the project’s page, there are 2 comments about the problem, complaining that libxml’s support of XPath is just too limited and it has lots of problems when dealing with namespaces. Default namespaces are not parsed, namespace wildcards are not supported and namespace prefixes won’t work all the time. What’s the advantage of announcing a 300x faster xpath speed than rexml when it doesn’t work and valid xpath expressions return syntax error?

>> doc.find('/*:Customer').first.name
doc.find('/*:Customer').first.name
XML::XPath::InvalidPath: Invalid XPath expression
	from (irb):73:in `find'
	from (irb):73

It’s time to go back to the slower but working rexml.

Gotta love Canada!

PS: the snow arrived today! I start to see some white roofs and, the coolest part, cars driving with snow on their hoods

Que eles (nós) sao (somos) muitos, já eu sabia, mas desta é que eu nao estava à espera