Good news for travellers ...

clipped from www.nytimes.com Early next month, a small company called Cubic Telecom will release what it’s calling the first global mobile phone. On this phone, a 20-minute call from the Bahamas costs $5.80 (that’s 90 percent off T-Mobile’s rate). The Cubic price from Russia is 49 cents a minute (90 percent lower than AT&T). And there’s no monthly fee and no commitment for any of this. It works like a prepaid phone, where you put some money in your account and use it up as you talk. No longer must you hand out a series of international phone numbers for each trip you make, or expect your colleagues in the United States to pay $50 a pop to reach you.

Docstoc

Docstoc

For sharing professional documents

Simonyi and intentional software

News from infoq.com from the JAOO Conference in Denmark

At the JAOO conference in Denmark today, Charles Simonyi (recent space tourist, and ex-Microsoft lead architect of Word & Excel) summarized a brief history of software as a struggle between the separation of the problem and the solution, referring to the mismatch between how domain experts think about and store their domain knowledge and how programmers have to store and rewrite that knowledge to build software to serve those domains.

The vision of Intentional Software, the company Charles founded is a world in which domain experts can write their requirements in any notation or input form that is familiar/comfortable to them (boxes, lines, tables, formulas,etc) and this "domain code" is used as a first class citizen within the software development project, used as an input around which the rest of the application gets generated. Business users write the domain code, developers write the program generators.

The vision has been developed into the "Domain workbench" product by Intentional Software, who has been working on it for over 5 years and is currently going through private beta testing and production use at a couple of consultancies, including Capgemini. The domain workbench fits all the requirements of a Language Workbench as defined by Martin Fowler.

Domain code is represented behind the scenes in a tree structure called the "intentional tree" which can be projected into multiple notations to allow business users to express domain code in different ways most suitable for them.

Read full article

Google Analytics and AIR

clipped from www.techcrunch.com That’s why I found Google Analytics AIR beta, publicly released on September 17th, to be such a breath of fresh air (no pun intended, really). This unofficial AIR version of Google Analytics delivers the functionality of browser-based Google Analytics but with greater usability and a richer experience. If you haven’t heard of AIR (once named “Apollo”), it’s a platform developed by Adobe that enables web developers to deploy their web services outside of the browser so they function more like traditional applications. This is the first AIR program that I have tested that really gets me excited about the platform. As a beta program, it’s not perfect (I ran into a few errors), but overall it has been executed very well. It’s also nice to see such a full-functional program developed using someone else’s API (in this case, Google’s).

New tool for blogging and maybe a whiteboard for the website ...

clipped from www.techcrunch.com A new site called Sketchcast launched moments ago - it’s a tool for bloggers and others to create a presentation to express an idea using a sketchpad and (optionally) a †sound recording, and then embed it into a website. Sketchcasts can also be subscribed in iTunes and RSS readers via a feed.

LeWeb3

LeWeb3
to be held in Paris, natch') is scheduled for December 11-12 and is open for registration. A sampling of speakers such as Esther Dyson, Michael Arrington, Om Malik and Facebooks's Nethanel Jacobssen promise a great two days of the latest on the web.

Flaw in Adobe Reader 8.1

The hacker who discovered a recently patched QuickTime flaw affecting the Firefox browser says he has found an equally serious flaw in Adobe Systems Inc.'s PDF file format.

"Adobe Acrobat/Reader PDF documents can be used to compromise your Windows box. Completely!!! Invisibly and unwillingly!!!," wrote Petko Petkov, in a breathless Thursday blog posting. "All it takes is to open a PDF document or stumble across a page which embeds one."

Petkov said he had confirmed the issue on Adobe Reader 8.1 on Windows XP and that other versions may be affected.

The security researcher said he would not release code that shows how this attack works until Adobe provided a patch for the problem, but he has already sent other software developers scrambling for bug fixes over the past week.

Read more on PC World

One more freebie and more competition for Microsoft....from Google

Google announcing the latest addition to its free office suite, a rival to Microsoft's business presentation tool, Powerpoint.

Other freebie news

Slashdot also reporting that the New York Times will be ending their paid subscription internet service TimeSelect in hopes of attracting more readers which should translate into higher advertising revenue.

Even IBM joining open source

Slashdot reports that IBM, after having announced last week that they are joining OpenOffice.org by dedicating 35 developers, will be releasing a free, downloadable office suite in direct challenge to Microsoft. Named Lotus Symphony, it will be based on Open Office, include free support, and probably platform support on at least Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Velvet Puffin

VelvetPuffin, check it out here

Hard to keep up! But Velvet Puffin's description is fairly self-explanatory "IM meets social networking". I watched part of Scobie's vidcast, but not all the way to the end, so still perplexed as to how they came up with the name....

oDesk and Facebook ?

clipped from www.techcrunch.com oDesk, a next generation marketplace for contract developers, has recently seen a spike in requests for Facebook developers. oDesk offers developers a number of aptitude tests to certify their programming skills in various areas - existing tests include Ajax, CSS, .Net, DHTML and ASP, among others. They’ve now added a forty minute Facebook aptitude test as well. Companies can now sort through developers based on their skill level in creating Facebook applications. In related news, VentureBeat is reporting that a new course, called Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook will be offered this fall in Stanford’s computer science department. Dave McClure is a co-instructor.

An online PDF editor next?

clipped from www.techcrunch.com Adobe’s Online Image Editor Previewed Michael Arrington 29 comments » Right on schedule, Adobe previews an online version of its ubiquitous Photoshop tool, to be called Photoshop Express. Adobe isn’t saying much, other than to point out that it is not a Photoshop replacement but rather “a new member of the Photoshop family that’s meant to make Adobe imaging technology immediately accessible way to large numbers of people.” Either way, a number of startups are not going to be having such a good weekend. Sphere It This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 12:32 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

According to yesterday, September 7th's, Hindu, Chief Mentor N R Narayana Murthy and CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan of Infosys met with Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan in Trivananthapuram to discuss the establishment of a major, international-standard Research and Development Center at the TRV Technopark.

They are also exploring the idea of finishing schools to improve education, starting first with the weakest sectors.

Good description of the science AND art of software development

From Joel on Software, read the full article

Design is the art phase, where you’re doing new, creative work. Even though what you’re doing is completely new, after you’ve gone through a few software development cycles you’ll start to get a pretty good idea of how much time it takes to design a new version of your software. I’ve usually worked with relatively long development cycles of 12-18 months, and it’s always taken me about two months to get a detailed, first-draft spec containing enough detail for the development team to create very granular estimates.

That said, when you’re building something brand new from scratch, you really can’t estimate the design phase at all, and that’s OK. Today I met somebody from a company in Seattle that’s working on a project headed up by one of the world’s great programmers, Charles Simonyi. Near as I can tell, they have been in the design phase for 16 years.

Development is the engineering phase. It’s a construction project. As long as you start with a detailed blueprint, which, of course, can change over time, but which is really your best guess for what you’re building, this phase can be scheduled with great precision. FogBugz 6.0 has a spiffy new feature called Evidence-based scheduling, which uses a variation on the Monte Carlo method for making your schedules remarkably reliable during the development phase. When I get a chance, I’ll you about it in more detail.

Debugging is the science phase. Science is difficult to schedule because you’re looking for things, and predicting when you’re going to find them is remarkably difficult. Unless you know in advance how many bugs you’re going to find, you don’t have an ice cube’s chance in the Sahara to work out a detailed estimate of how long this phase will take. Here at Fog Creek we’ve learned that for a new release of FogBugz, this phase takes at least 12 weeks, sometimes a little more, and we just leave it at that.

RR Donnelly in Technopark,Thiruvananthapuram

RR Donnelly announces the opening of a second BPO facility in Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram. This will add 1,000 employees to the existing 500 already working in Technopark, not to mention the 4,500 employees now working in Chennai.

ISO Vote 'No' to Microsoft's Office Doc Format

Apparently the ISO voted down fast tracking Microsoft's OpenXML document format. Microsoft was hoping for the adoption of their format by the ISO committee as it would directly impact sales of Office 2007 by governments and large institutions who require that all documents and communications to be archived in an ISO-approved format.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/09/iso-rejects-mic.html

From StickyMinds.com-11 ways Agile Methodologies Fail

1. Ineffective use of the retrospective
2. Inability to get everyone in the planning meetings
3. Failure to pay attention to the infrastructure required
4. Bad ScrumMasters
5. Product Owner is Consistently Unavailable or There are Too Many Owners Who Disagree
6. Reverting to Form
7. Obtaining Only "Checkbook Commitments" from Executive Management
8. Teams Lacking Authority and Decision-Making Ability
9. Not Having an Onsite Evangelist for Remote Locations
10. A Culture that Does Not Support Learning
11. Denial is Embraced Instead of the Brutal Truth

Read the full article

TouchGraph, Check it Out!

Cool google service which shows website or search connectivity visually.

Paramount Airways to link major Kerala cities

In more signs of progress and easier connectivity (personal, that is), Paramount Airways is planning to fly between major Kerala cities such as Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Kozhikode.