This is a fascinating topic that deals with the agile development approach to software engineering (as opposed to conventional software approaches).
The main ideas in agile development are open customer collaboration and communication, responding to change, harnessing the power of individuals and interactions and ultimately producing working software through continuous feedback.The primary methodology discussed in the book is the XP methodology. There is an ebook available on scribd.com for electronic reading.
There are some questions that I would like to throw in with regards to software development that may spark some questions.In Roger Pressman's "Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, 6/e" the key issue is the future of what software development needs. Software creation is still incredibly slow. Reuse of components are critical in growth of software development. More on this topic in a future post
Ubiquity is a firefox feature that is basically aimed at giving the web a language that would allow the user to do tasks with the power of language.
Here I take u through a 5 min tutorial of some cool features in Mozilla Firefox's Ubiquity. Ubiquity is the language of the web. Firefox and the browser have revolutionized the way we interact. The entire presentation was recorded using screentoaster.com and music from thesixtyone.com
The full video can be watched at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTHvs3V8DBA
Ok for true social networks and connectivity to make it to the masses "Mobile" is a crucial part of the equation. Some services lose their value and reach if they cannot be utilized on the go, take twitter for example. Sure twitter can be used online with a conventional pc but many of the "in the spur of the moments" (which I feel twitter should be used for) are lost if not on a mobile device
Here are some details posted on Turkcell's website:
22 Nisan – 30 Haziran arasında NET yazıp 2233’e gönderin, aylık 100MB internet paketini ilk 2 ay indirimli kullanın! İster Google’da arama yapın, ister Facebook’tan arkadaşlarınızla mesajlaşın… Cepten internet keyfini ayda sadece 4 TL/30 kontöre doya doya yaşayın!
22 April to 30 June send a sms with the word NET and send it to 2233. The promotion is limited to 100MB per month and you can surf pages such as google and chat with your friends on facebook (as if we didn't know that already) for only 4 Turkish liras (equivalent to 30 credits)
more details at http://www.turkcell.com.tr/bireysel/kampanyalar
So as we can see the mobile sphere isn't exactly on take off yet but the idea that you can comfortably surf communications sites on the go such as twitter and facebook (with little to no graphical settings chosen) means that Turkey is moving in the right direction.
I'll probably subscribe to the service and put up some feedback...
Good news for AMD (and IstanbuI) fans alike...
"Sunnyvale (CA) – AMD updated its server processor roadmap with several surprises. The new monolithic six-core Opteron version, code-named Istanbul, will be introduced in June."
full story at http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-42125-135.html
Ubuntu 9.04 was released today. Like all previous releases of Ubuntu I found it necessary to start the download process as soon as I could. Let me just take a quick moment to explain why Ubuntu (a linux distro) is crucial for the open web that we live in today.
Firstly the idea of the netbook is a prime example of where the Operating system has actually changed its meaning in past years. Take the days where many of us did our work and play offline, those days the OS was everything. Linux could never have survived outside of the enthusiast scheme because even up to this day Linux is basically a Internet intensive OS.
Now what ever we power up whether it be a phone, a pc, a laptop or a game console we are loading up a system that operates the device (yeah the Operating System) if the browser is the new operating system then what does it mean to have a OS? why pay for an OS?
Answers here are simple from a users point of view. Basically we use MS Windows because our programs run on it, not because we love Microsoft or anything but rather because it came with the PC, it generally provides good support and because we all know about it.
But thats where I think Ubuntu has it's charm. Besides Ubuntu being an enthusiasts OS it is also the Internet's Operating system. Nowadays all conceivable activities we'd want to do on a device can be run online through some free app, some web 2.0 mashup or some social network. Basically the role of the raw OS is just to control the Hardware at it's core.
With the whole world reaping the benefits of highspeed networking the "Cloud" concept has been making wonderful developments, Take gmail, google docs, basically all web 2.0 apps etc these internet services are freeing us of the functions our OS provides up without ever having to update our SW, never worrying about an outdated OS that is susceptible to being compromised
So take this for a twist... from "Let me load up my OS to run my Browser to run the web" to ......"Let me load up my browser to run my virtual OS on the web"
:-)
Ok just thought I'd throw in a quick opinion on the deal that was struck by Oracle and Sun.
This year I've been doing quite a bit of SQL working with Oracle and the obvious question of certification has come up. With the obvious restructuring of things going on that side certification will probably also change.
Currently Oracle has the Oracle Database 11g Administrator as its starter certificate program. We'll be watching how this space develops.
video chopped up from ted.com
This year I'll be tackling a new branch of subjects in Operations Management that have to do with investment sciences. The book that I'll be using (actually conveniently stumbled upon from Bogazici University here in Turkey) is Investment Science by Luenberger. This of course means that a new way of looking at things will emerge with added knowledge.
So anyway I picked up the financial times (middle east addition) at the airport and found some intriguing articles about what so called tech people are doing in times of this financial difficulty. The article written by Lucy Kellaway is basically about how real, formal English is making it's way back into the mainstream of the Internet and daily conversation. It does seem like people are often times overly informal on-line but she suggests that in times of financial difficulty and a more competitive and cautious hiring going on even Google employees have moved towards full formatted letters and proper English as we would call it.
What this ultimately means for professional social net-workers (Those people who have colleagues as friends on facebook more as a gesture of friendship) is that their writing styles will probably portray more structure and go back to the days where you are judged on the eloquence of your writing.
What this means for the future of social networks in my opinion is networking shifting away from being something that is just a spur of the moment reaction to something to rather a more thought response to something with some objectives in mind.
image from http://blog.cleveland.com/business/technology/
