Category: Technology

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Business Marketting Technology Web

Collaborators of Success

Who are Customers? Have you heard of the saying, ‘Customers are always right”? Why does this saying have a huge importance in business? Well, customers are the people who pay for the products or services that you produce or provide. It is their money that ultimately fuels the growth of any business.

Customers and businesses are really two sides of the same coin. I even dare to take it one step further. Customers really are partners in business and collaborators of success.

Leaving out customers in important decisions of business is like tossing one wheel out of your 4×4 while going up the hill. The law of nature is that what does not grow gets eliminated. Businesses must grow and customers are becoming more and more important.

I am not a master businessman(not yet) and I have no degree in business. The closest I come is having 2 courses in economics and 1 in administrative studies and I am self employed. But what I am is an observer and I am observing that businesses are moving away from shareholder’s game to a stakeholders game. Although this shift has been happening for quite a long time now, there are few businesses that have taken this game to heart and these are the ones that truly seem to be pulling away from and ahead of the rest.

Ultimately everyone is playing their part. The workers are playing their part, the businessmen are playing theirs and customers are playing their part. The world is becoming smaller and smaller by the minute. A product or service is no longer made or provided by one party or even one part of the world. Collaboration is in a big part the soul of progress in our world today. What’s really making it happen is technology – the Internet to be very specific and to be even more specific – Web 2.0!

If the parties involved in providing products and services are working together, then why not take things a little further. Why not let the customers or the end users play a big role in  it as well. Because ultimately this work, whether it be some product or a service, is for the customers. Make customers your partners in business and collaborators of your success!

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Software Technology

Iphone, Thunderbird + lightning, and ICal

I have an Iphone and simply love it. I also use thunderbird as my default mail client and the lightning plugin as my calendar and I’m on a mac. I searched the Internet for clues to sync the iphone and lightning. Every site and every forum that I came across gave me all these weird solutions like syncing lightning with Google calendar and then sync that with ICal finally syncing that with your Iphone using Itunes.

I decided to go with a different approach. Remember what the wise ones said, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” I just thought of going with a simple solution:

  1. Export Calendar from Thunderbird.
  2. Import it in ICal
  3. Sync with Iphone Using Itunes.

And IT WORKED! Why do people go off looking for complicated, round about ways of doing things?

And for windows,¬† the same should work too. Except you’d be using Outlook instead of ICal. I haven’t tried it. If anyone who has can post a comment here.

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Software

Migrating from Eclipse to Netbeans

continued from “I love Open Source and Freeware”

I have never actually made a move this big this quickly. I guess it all comes with the idea of change. Netbeans is clearly a developers IDE where as eclipse is a bit of an overall IDE. For large scale projects I still think Eclipse is better.

The question is what are the benefits I’m getting with Netbeans? and What am I compromising on?

Well as for the benefits – This will be biased because my requirements at the moment orbit around PHP and web development and I must say I am amazed by the wealth of tools available. I really didnt even have to search alot for this. Netbeans has a PHP IDE that you can download. It has amazing code completion for html and javascript AND css with a little preview window at the bottom – its really a full fledged web development IDE.

Eclipse really lacked this. Even eclipses PDT project didnt provide what netbeans has. The UI seems much pleasant to work with, but eclipse seems to have a much more efficient default layout in its PHP perspective.

I also liked the netbeans update manager – its much more gracious, but limited in comparison to eclipse’s.

But I really feel the pinch in netbeans issue/task management. NOTHING comes close to Eclipse’s Mylyn. Luckily Netbeans does have a connector for bugzilla, but its not that great and you’re just better off opening up your browser to manage all your code issues. But I have to make a choice and I had to choose netbeans because of the tools provided for actual development. Plus at the moment all my projects are small and managed mostly by me, but as my projects grow and more people join I might again have to switch to Eclipse, unless netbeans gets something that can run head to head with Mylyn.

It will take some time for me to get used to Netbeans. I found JMaki and it seems to be a bold step to bring in all the javascript libraries under one roof – seems a bit confusing at first glance, but I will look into that and maybe even give it a chance to show its head up in one of my projects. One thing sucks is that it doesnt support mootools(yet, or maybe there’s a way to get it to work).

@Deepesh Kapadia

Also, just want to say thanks to Deepesh for suggesting Netbeans – it’s improved quite a lot since the last time I used it.

Categories
Software

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

I found this while I was searching for code management software. I will get on implementing this as soon as possible. Software development is a complex task, with numerous methodology and even more components. Its very dynamic and it can span so many different realms, from science to art, to engineering and management. It virtually exercises every muscle of knowledge and learning.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development[1]

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_Manifesto

 

Categories
Software

I love Open Source and Freeware

Have you ever heard “Technology brings us closer”? I know I have, and I know its true. Specifically, I think programmers are at forefront when it comes to sharing and connecting. In what other profession is there hundreds and hundreds of hours of work put in to make something really useful for people that you don’t even know and do it for FREE; and not only do it for free, but make your work available to the public so they can see how you exactly did what you did.

This friends is the world of open source. The reason I love open source is, first of all – everything is free! It also keeps us variety and the power to chose not to be confined to large software enterprises that at times seems to be sucking out our wallets from our back pockets.

Open source software is the only field where FREE is actually fascinating, fantastic, fabulous and fun and not just free. Some of the open source and freeware software is actually 5 to 10 or even more times better than software that you actually pay for. Here are some of the software that I use and absolutely LOVE:

  • Linux – Specifically Ubuntu desktop. I just love this OS. Some people might find it a bit surprising, but given a little more time to mature I may even be able to trade in my mac book pro for an ubuntu notebook! Let me add a little note here, Ubuntu is actually the Linux OS, the user interface is from the GNOME project. Whats really amazing about any linux distros is that you can easily change the interface to something feels right for you. There are other distros that I should mention here ‚Äì Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian etc.. But I like ubuntu, especially the desktop because it just works. I used fedora in 2006 and it was a pain in the rear.
  • Eclipse ‚Äì according to me this is THE best IDE to use. There is a flavour for everything that you want to do. I use the PHP Development Tools (PDT) and it makes my work less work and more fun. I also use the free aptana plugin from time to time for web development.
  • Mozilla Apps ‚Äì Mozilla offers such amazing apps its hard not to talk about them. Firefox is by far the best web browser out there, thunderbird is a fantastic email client ‚Äì few years back I tried to like this email client but I couldn‚Äôt and instead opted for MS Outlook. Now 2 months back (July 09) I stumbled onto thunderbird again and wow does it impress me. I got so impressed I switched from Outlook. I you are fond of the outlook calendar, look no further, thunderbird has an amazing plugin called ‚Äòlightning‚Äô and its got all your calendar needs. I‚Äôm not a big fan of plugins, but this friends is an Ah-mazing plugin ‚Äì it actually feels like a native feature of thunderbird.
  • Apache ‚Äì Apache is by far the number one http web server out there, and I highly doubt that this will ever change!
  • Mootools ‚Äì is a javascript framework that I use and that I think is really convenient. I don‚Äôt know if this is the best one out there because honestly I have not used any other. There are actually many out there. Yahoo even has one out there and has large library with tonnes for features.
  • AVG Free ‚Äì although not open source, it is actually free and I think gets the job done. An excellent (and free) substitute for Norton ‚Äì oh how I hate norton.
  • Zonealarm ‚Äì again this is not open source, but is actually free. It had a few problems with some of their intermedia releases, but now they are back on track.
  • Gimp ‚Äì I love this. Its not as user friendly has photo shop(but then I don‚Äôt find photoshop that user friend to begin with. But being fair, I‚Äôm really a beginner at using advanced image editing software anyway), but its free and it does the job exceptionally well.
  • OpenOffice ‚Äì this is THE best substitute for MS Office. This is an excellent package. After all it does everything that MS Office does and more; you can convert your word files into pdfs ‚Äì thats one feature that first caught my attention. I use MS office on windows since I already had it, but I use OpenOffice on my macbook, since I didn‚Äôt want to pay the extra. You don‚Äôt need to be worried about your friends, co-workers or your boss not being able to open your openoffice files because you can save those files in MS Office formats.
  • Filezilla (ftp client)‚Äì an ftp client and server. Can‚Äôt say anything more about this. I think this one just rocks. If you are using anything other than this for your ftp needs, you should slap yourself haha.

There may be more that I’m using that I’m missing out there. I’ll update the list later. If you have any questions, you can contact me or leave a comment.

Categories
Software

Vista: The first Impression

I thought before I start talking about Windows Vista, let me first find out what the word “Vista” really means. I couldn’t really come to the conclusion of its true meaning, because there are a lot of ‘experts’ telling their own stories. Some of the meanings that I came across were – hen, sight, “Hasta La Vista” meaning good bye, and one of the worst ones – excretion!

However, the most insulting one that I found was on one of forums that I came across:

Windows

V = Virus
I = Infections
S = Spyware
T = Trojans
A = Adware.
Ouch!

I can tell you one thing – I am sure it isn’t that bad. From all that I have heard, Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making Vista a very secure operating system (I know some of you might already be chuckling from your experience with previous Windows systems).

But I really want to talk about what my first impression of Vista was when I started using it. Wandering why I even bothered to get Vista? My Dell laptop broke and I really needed a new one. BTW, I am never ever going to get a Dell again. First, my charger breaks, then I had to replace my battery, then one of my memory slots die, so I bought a 512 ram chip to keep working with one slot, and now even that was busted. And all this happened in less than 3 years. Yah I know I should have gotten extended warrantee, but who knew it was going to be a piece of $5%!*.

Oh right… yah,…Vista. Firstly, there are 6 different versions of Vista! Why? Ya really WHY? There’s no version that gives you best features packed in one. If you take Home Premium (I don’t even want to mention Home Basic), you’re missing out some of the things you might need for your small business, if you take Business edition, you’re missing out on the entertainment part of your system. The only version that gives you all is Ultimate edition. But what if I don’t want everything? Then you and I have to choose either an ‘entertainment system’ or a business system. Why couldn’t they come up with at least one Windows Vista “value pack” that doesn’t just throw everything at you like Vista Ultimate does, but gives you best of both the entertainment world and the business world.

Moving on. I was hoping as soon as I turn on my laptop I would be able to start working with it – not really! It took more than half an hour for it to do its “initial setup”.

The Transparent look is nothing really to marvel at. I was literally yawning. And you know how you can choose different windows that are open by pressing “Alt + Tab” in windows XP? Well,…you can do that in Vista too, but it looks way better. However to spice things up you can press “windows key + Tab” and do the same thing in 3-D! (WAOW right? Not! Like I care,…yawning). Both the transparency effect and the 3-Dness is useless.

Another useless feature is the little preview window over the taskbar for programs that have been minimized. For example, say you are working with 5 different word files, is that little preview window going to show you enough so that you can click nothing else but the right one? Absolutely not! I’d rather save time and just click on the window to see if that’s the one I want.

The only feature that made me say “now THAT’s what I am talking about.” is the search feature. Ever tried doing a search on your Windows XP and seeing that stupid dog doing boring tricks while you wait for at least one file to show up in your search window? Well great news – in Vista they got rid of that dog, man’s (man/woman using windows) best friend. Vista actually shows you your search results as you start typing, and then keeps narrowing it down – that I like.

The Gadgets are okay…Hmmm Gadgets (Widgets) sounds familiar doesn’t it. I.E. (Internet Explorer) 7 is much better than previous versions. Its much secure and has other needed features like tabbed browsing. But that’s just for people who have never looked outside their ‘windows’. I finally don’t mind using I.E. for surfing the Internet.

There are other things that give users some better experience compared to previous version of windows, but overall Vista is a disappointment. Or perhaps I was just expecting more. I decided to hand down my new Vista Laptop to my sibling and stick to my windows XP. I just hope Vista is not the ME of 2007 (remember Windows ME?), which is a scary thought.

Categories
Technology

Ah Finally!: My Blog Begins

Finally I’ve made the move to start my blog. There’s a lot of things I want to talk about here, but I must say progress will be quite slow at the beginning. That’s because I’m in the middle of a few things at the moment.

To highlight a few things in my life a the moment – I’ll be graduating in June 2007 with a Honours Specialized degree in Computer Science :D, so that’s exciting. Just looking for jobs at the moment, you know the usual thing people do after graduation. I am really looking forward to start working. The fact is I am more excited by the thought of working than the fact that I’m finally done with university!

I’ll be adding RSS feeds etc to my blog soon. There are many tools already available, but I’m thinking of writing my own little program that’ll do it for me. I’ll probably even post it on my website for people to download…I’ll see how it goes.

While searching for some tools on the Internet, I came across this, it’s pretty amazing, not only is it thought provoking, but the way the video is made and how it progresses makes it even better.

Enjoy :)… or well… ponder upon it