Flock

On 3rd of November, I downloaded a new web browser called: Flock

Flock is heavily based upon Mozilla Firefox and other Mozilla technologies, and it is a cross-platform browser (Works on Windows, Mac, and Linux). The first things you will notice whne you install Flock are the side areas which displays different web services like: Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. So that is why the creators of Flock call it a "Social Browser".

In addition to the social networking features, Flock has a number of other nice touches include:

• Custom homepage, "My World", tells you when your friends have new photos and videos and when you have new feeds. My World gives quick access to your recently visited favorite sites as well.
• Built in uploader, to submit content to Flickr and Photobucket.
• Technorati tagging.
• Blogging tools.
• Facebook side bar.
• Bookmarks, in addition to being saved offline, can be replaced with del.icio.us. When a bookmark (known as a favorite) is added, it is added to the user's del.icio.us account.

Meanwhile, I invite you to try it out for yourself. You may not be sufficiently persuaded to switch (and I’m not going to delete IE or Firefox from my hard disk quite yet), but I guarantee you’ll enjoy the experience!

Silverlight

Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash?

Now, web designers and developers can finish their works without a need for FLASH?!

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross platform, cross browser that enables designers and developers to build rich media experiences and RIAs for browsers. Currently support Firefox, Safari and IE browsers on both the Mac and Windows.

Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

It supports playback of WMV, WMA and MP3 media content across all supported browsers without requiring Windows Media Player, Windows Media Player ActiveX control or Windows Media browser plugins.

Silverlight 1.0

It is made up of the following components:

• Input - handling input from devices like keyboard, mouse, stylus etc.
• UI core - managing rendering of bitmap images (including compressed raster images like JPEG), vector graphics, text and animations.
• Media - playback of MP3, WMA Standard, WMV7, WMV8 and WMV9/VC-1 streams.
• XAML - to allow the UI layout to be created using XAML markup language.

( Sample of Silverlight game )

Silverlight 1.1

It includes a version of the .NET Framework, with the full Common Language Runtime as .NET Framework 3.0; so it can execute any .NET language including VB.NET and C# code.

( Sample of Silverlight Application )

Top Banana

Top Banana is a new starter kit that lets developers add sophisticated and streamlined video editing to their content sites. It lets their users easily upload and edit video snippets into movies in a fun and free-form manner. Top Banana application was built with C# and runs cross platform on any system where Silverlight is installed.

For an example of Silverlight, check the next 7 minute video:

Books

There are several books were published for Silverlight; to see the list click here.

For more information about Silverlight, check the Microsoft official website.

Mashups

Today morning, I attended the Microsoft BPIO workshop (Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization ) at Microsoft Innovation centre in KISR. This was one of the rarly professional workshops I had. During the session the Swedish instructor Ulrika Leufvén (Picture below) gave us example on collaboration product called: Popfly, which is consider as one of WEB 2.0 technology called: "Mashup Creator". So I decided to talk about Mashups.

In technology, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is if we want a website displaying all crimes happened in Miami on a map?! So we can link the crimes database to Google Maps!! and we will get one map graph having red dots on it?! thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source. This called Mashups.

Live Examples of Mashups

1. Chicago Crime website contains the previous example which I mentioned. You can browse crime by street for instance.
2. Yahoo Pipes

Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API, although some in the community believe that cases where private interfaces are used should not count as mashups. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom), web services and screen scraping.

Many people are experimenting with mashups using Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo APIs, which has led to the creation of the mashup editor.

Where Mashups Came From?
It is originally referred to the practice in pop music (notably hip-hop) of producing a new song by mixing two or more existing pieces.


For more information, watch the following clip:

Attracting Highly Skilled People to Your Team

This is an article I posted from another blog. I thought you would enjoy it too.
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Author: Geri Schneider Winters


I was recently helping a friend staff a fairly large project with a team of very experienced, very skilled people. I mentioned that people were really excited about the opportunity. He asked me “Why are they excited? What is it about this project that makes people want to work on it?”

That led us to a discussion about teams of highly skilled people and what motivates them to want to work on a project.

I believe several factors come into account. Very skilled people like to work on projects with:

• Other very skilled people
• Confidence in the success of the project
• An atmosphere of mutual respect
• A long enough duration to build relationships

Very skilled people like to work with other very skilled people. You might think, “It must be aweful having all those big egos together.” In fact, I have found the opposite. I have found that when someone is truly very good at what they do, they are very easy to work with. It is the people who are not really all that skilled, who are afraid someone will find out they are not all that skilled, who exhibit the “ego problems” on a project.

This does not mean everyone on the team has to be very skilled, but it does mean that several people should be at the same high skill level. Very skilled people love sharing ideas with other very skilled people. They are typically patient with someone who is really trying to learn. Very skilled people have very little patience with people who claim to be experts, but who are really not that good, and who refuse to listen to anyone else.

Another thing that attracts very skilled people is confidence in the management team. Everyone likes to be on a successful project. Very skilled people are no different. If they believe that the management team has the skills to be successful, and that the project has support from upper management, then they will be very interested in the project.

Long project duration can be appealing, especially for contractors. It is very interesting to work on the whole project rather than just a few weeks at the beginning. You get to find out "how the story ends". Also, a long project gives an opportunity to build relationships, especially with the other very skilled people on the team.

An atmosphere of mutual respect is critical. When the project team all respect each other and the stakeholders, magic can happen. A cohesive team will outperform other teams every time. An atmophere of mutual respect is vital to creating a cohesive team.
Will there be disagreements? Of course! And those disagreements will sometimes be loud, simply because you have a number of people with very strong opinions. But if everyone has respect for each other, those disagreements will be worked out without animosity and to everyone’s satisfaction.

Where have I seen these kinds of teams in practice?In musical theater with actors, on software projects with developers and with business analysts, in startup companies of various kinds, and on various kinds of team projects at universities. The basic appeal is common in all these situations. Very skilled people like to work on projects with:

• Other very skilled people
• Confidence in the success of the project
• An atmosphere of mutual respect
• A long enough duration to build relationships

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Now it is your turn.
Have you worked on a team with very skilled people? Have you had to put together a team of very skilled people? What do you think motivates them to join your team?
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* Article used with permission from Wyyzzk, Inc.’s Resources for Business Analysts. This website of reports and tips contains information to help you succeed as a Business Analyst in IT.

Death March

If you are working in IT Company and you are involving into projects, You must know about "Death March"? In the software development industries, a death march is a dysphemism for a project that is destined to fail.

Usually it is a result of unrealistic or overly optimistic expectations in scheduling, feature scope, or both, and often includes lack of appropriate documentation, or any sort of relevant training. The knowledge of the doomed nature of the project weighs heavily on the psyche of its participants, as if they are helplessly watching the team as it marches into the sea. Often, the death march will involve desperate attempts to right the course of the project by asking team members to work especially grueling hours, weekends (sometimes with a straight face), or by attempting to "throw (enough) bodies at the problem" with varying results, often causing burnout.

Death march projects are becoming increasingly common in the software industry. The symptoms are obvious: The project schedule, budget, and staff are about half of what is necessary for completion. The planned feature set is unrealistic. People are working 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week, and stress is taking its toll. The project has a high risk of failure, yet management is either blind to the situation or has no alternative. Why do these irrational projects happen, and what, other than pure idiocy, leads people to get involved in them?

If you want to avoid a death march, you should prepare a study to cover the entire project lifecycle, systematically addressing every key issue participants face: politics, people, process, project management, and tools. No matter what your role--developer, project leader, line-of-business manager, or CxO--you'll find realistic, usable solutions. This edition's new and updated coverage includes:

• Creating Mission Impossible projects out of DM projects
• Negotiating your project's conditions: making the best of a bad situation
• XP, agile methods, and death march projects
• Time management for teams: eliminating distractions that can derail your project
• "Critical chain scheduling": identifying and eliminating organizational dysfunction
• Predicting the "straw that breaks the camel's back": lessons from system dynamics
• Choosing tools and methodologies most likely to work in your environment
• Project "flight simulators": war gaming your next project
• Applying triage to deliver the features that matter most
• When it's time to walk away

For more information about death march, and you want a practical advice to help you survive, everything from negotiating with upper management to breathing life into faltering projects and need help to determine if you should look for another job, I strongly advice you to read this book for author Ed Yourdon. To see the Table Of Contents clich here.

Self Motivation

Few days ago, Kuwait received 2 awards in technology field. The cermony was part of the World Summit Award (WSA) held in Venice (Italy) as part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a global UN backed initiative to promote e-Content.

The 2 awards has gived to:

• Ibsar Software by Sakhr - a unique program offering the blind and visually impaired an effective tool for interaction with modern computer technologies
  


• Arabic Video Phonetics Application by KISR - helps patients to learn the pronunciation of proper Arabic pronunciation with the help of video sequences

WSA chooses the Kuwaiti Eng. Manar Al-Hashash to be one of the boarding directors for World Summit Award, to be the only Arabic member in the community.







After l checked the boarding director list, I found all of them are IT professionals (Directors, Senior Consultant, and Profs) from different countries.

Now the question is, why these two applications nominated in summit and others failed? Why WSA selected Eng. Manar as one of the boarding directors?! Is it because of her angel face?! I don't think so! If you looked to Manar's resume, you will know these facts:

• Computer Engineering graduate, Kuwait University.


• She got her MBA.


• Founder and the General Manager for DotDesign, a software development company


• Owner and Chief of editors for IT magazine "DOT"


• Writer a weekly IT column for Al-Watan newspaper


• She was awarded an IEEE for her outstanding Internet and e-Commerce projects in 2000


• Presents weekly LIVE IT programme called: "Compunet World" on the Kuwait Satellite Channel in Arabic language and another programme on KTV2 called "Zero Ones" in English language.


• Represent Kuwait in the international IT conferences

Manar is truly an amazing personality, and a perfect example of a young and successful female entrepreneur in the Middle East and she belongs to one of the most well-known persons in her region concerning technology, new media and e-Content; personaly I wish a continous success.

On the other hand, most of us wants to be active member in his/her company, create victories, or to be promoted!! But of these things won't happened by magic?!! So let's ask our selves, what did we achieved for the last 2 years?! what is the benefits we offered to the society? In my opinion most of us are waiting for someone else to make everything ready for us without doing the effort! Others are searching for Aladdin's lamb to create the success?!

People, and especially youth should learn to have a long-term plan to assure good and prosperous future. I think there is such a tremendous potential is available and let us try to provide a good example to be active and creative.

Success is not an easy path, and it required a lot of work and study, and the one who will get it need to be a hard worker and a self motivated.

New Mobile Platform from Google!

After the booming of Apple latest mobile (iPhone), Google decided to go on mobile too!! On 5th November 2007, Google unveiled new mobile project named: Android, the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices


Our vision is that the powerful platform we're unveiling will power thousands of different phone models." Said Google CEO.
The Android platform consists of an operating system (Linux-based), middleware, a user-friendly interface, and applications. 34 companies have said they will join the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), a multinational alliance that will work on developing applications on the Android platform. Members of the alliance include mobile handset makers HTC and Motorola, Samsung, and LG

The Android software stack is expected to provide handset makers and wireless operators an open platform they can use to develop innovative applications. The new software will compete directly with smartphone software from other companies like Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm, and Research in Motion. Unlike some of these mobile operating systems, Android will not be tied to a specific device.



Advertisement
Google is prepared to spend huge sums to make Android a success, since it hopes to pipe ads onto Android phones. This is the latest example of its strategy to make more money in its main business—online advertising—by opening up other markets. Recently it unveiled OpenSocial, a set of software standards for social networks, which is also intended to create more outlets for online ads (and to keep Facebook, a leading social network, from becoming a serious competitor for them).


When it will be in the Market?
Consumers should expect the first phones based on Android to be available in the second half of 2008




References
Google Press Center