Censorship or legitimate actions?

Bloggers Worldwide Blast India's Ban - Technology News by TechWeb: "India banned thousands of blogs last week while trying to block 17 blogs and Web sites that India's telecommunications department claimed spread religious hatred. After a government order issued July 13, Internet service providers cut off access to domain names instead of targeting specific sites. The order came after bombings that killed at least 182 people on Mumbai's commuter trains on July 11." Who is right? Is it censorship as the bloggers and journalists are saying or is it a legitimate cutdown on hatred sites. THe indian government is walking a very fine line. Tough call and a fine line to walk as know too well with debates going on here about the accrued surveillance going on. Apparently they shutdown domains instead of specific sites, is this a botched job? or something the government saying something else, sending a message?

India product development

As I like it: IT firms look for bigger bite of outsourcing pie: "Currently, just around 5 to 10 per cent of outsourced product development involves creating an entire product here in India." What people forget about product development is the need for product environment understanding. I see no problem for India being the best at designing & developing the products that are to be sold in India since they understand better the realities of the market than anybody else. I do see a problem for them to work on their own for a product to be sold outside of India. The designers, developers, people interfacing with the marketeers needs to be well versed in the world of the marketeer itself in order to do a good job. If the India they are talking about is an india with local presence yes they will grow their share of the market, but then the price will not be the differentiator anymore - it will be time to market, quality. No or little product environment understanding at innovation time is a recipe for a product flop.

Nortel partnering with MS

Microsoft, Nortel Partner To Deliver Communications - Technology News by TechWeb: "Microsoft Corp. and Nortel Networks Ltd. on Tuesday announced a strategic alliance to help companies migrate off of traditional telephone systems and onto a unified communications platform that encompasses email, instant messaging, Internet telephony, and multimedia conferencing." This is interesting for Nortel to collaborate with MS. I like the idea very much, I wonder also if those partnerships are exclusive. Is Cisco or Avaya out of the loop on this, do they need to find someone else to dance with? By the press release money is going to be comitted to this both in the sales channel and product development, it would point to something where both players are putting skin in the game. I would much rather have both partners work seriously together, than have the option of shopping around. Anyhow I think it's a great coup for Nortel to sign up MS.

Do you think they are happy with Sun?

The greatest error message of all time? | The Register It's easy to see that they are not happy with Sun's hardware or level of services. I think it's the kind of invite HP and IBM will gladly accept. A good level of service and the right attitude (a mix of flexiblity with full transparency) goes a long way for a vendor to make sure such messages aren't posted by your clients.

'Invisible' Rootkit Heralds Trouble Ahead

'Invisible' Rootkit Heralds Trouble Ahead - CIO Tech Informer - Blog - CIO: "According to researchers, other factors that help make Rustock invisible are that it has no process, instead running inside the driver and in kernel threads. It doesn’t hook into any native API, and controls kernel functions via special IRP functions. It removes its entries from kernel structures, and the SYS driver is polymorphic, changing its code from sample to sample." I started reading the article and I got really worried. The rootkit doesn't hook anywhere blah blah blah, so it's undectectable, so it's scray stuff... Anyhow I get to the end of the article and they have a solution for it already. So this article would not exist if they couldn't detect the malware in the firstplace. This is a cat and mouse game yet over again, the bad guys get better, the good guys are following behind. What I should worry about is how far behind are we? The futher away the more damage.

Charlie - 8:23am July 11th 2006

it's been a rough couple of days, but we now have a new baby girl part of the family. Mini Charlie(French prononciation) is born yesterday(July 11/06) at 8:23am at one ounce shy of 6lbs. we can already say she is a cutie! mom is doing super well even though what she went through. Ludovic her big brother by 6yrs is looking forward for her to get home.

Allez les bleus?

CTV.ca | Zidane marks shameful end to glittering career I'm not a big soccer fan, but I was rooting for France the whole way. I'm disapointed they loss. I'm even more disapointed at what Zidane did at the end of the game. He is no Gretzky!

key to the kingdom!

Simple advice for more sensible password use: "The most obvious solution to this hassle is simply to choose one password and to use it everywhere. Indeed, a survey conducted during April 2006 by Sophos reveals that 41% of respondents do just that. Additionally, 75% of the respondents to a separate part of the survey admitted to the use of weak, easy-to-guess passwords. Presumably this means that 31% of users (75% of 41%) have no accounts at all with satisfactory passwords." As developers we don't realize often that the passwords we deal with from the users of our system is the key to their kingdom. The minute ones crack my system, ie get access to user and password information on a system under my watch, the cracker now mostly like have access to several other sites with that same info - because most likely they use one password for all the sites they deal with. It's a big responsibility to store passwords, and it's also a big responsibility to have functionlity to do password management, like forgot your password kind of fct.

Agile Outsourcing

Dr. Dobb's | May 12, 2005: "I advise outsourcer representatives to colocate with the businesspeople at the client site. Minimally, business and test analysts should act as interfaces between the two groups; better still, some developers should also be on site. You'll need to fly people back and forth between the two sites—although this increases your costs, it dramatically reduces your risk of communication failures. Ideally, some client staff should work at the outsourcer and some outsourcing staff at the client sites, rotated on a regular basis to minimize the impact on their family lives. On a long project, all of the outsourcing staff should rotate at least once to enhance their understanding of the client's environment; this builds bonds among the people involved, reducing the impact of cultural differences."

In my mind how your outsource a project depends highly on what the project is about, and about one's organization way of doing things. How much does the project depend on communication, versus how much is my organization outsourcing ready.

Scott here suggests to rotate people back and forth to minimize communication problems to de-risk and fix communciation gaps. Yes I agree to a certain extent, it will make the project that much more expensive.

Still I don't believe this works all the time, communication gaps aren't only a time zone thing. Face to face communication are not an immediate fix for product environment understanding, there is still a ramp up there to consider. If you ask me this is one factor people tend to forget too often about projects, the need for the product environment understanding. Jumping right into a project means, no ramp up, and this means the people, crew, team, you outsource too - understands your realities. Typically when a project falls into the category where product environment is necessary, innovation is high. When innovation is high, communication is high, but still a lot goes unsaid, because it's a lot of discovery, and to know where to look, you're back to - you guessed right - understanding the product environment.

He also says that fix bid should be thrown out the window, I think they are a necessary evil in the establishement of a relationship. It's much easier to do Time and material, or a variation of as suggested "Gated project financing", but trust must be established first. Trust that the vendor is not only credible, but reliable, say what you do, do what you say!

A Lake full of Vodka

Vodka for everyone - Slashfood: "The Mirror reports that Lake Brancholinskie in Wielkopolska was transformed from freshwater to 30% alcohol from the spillage" What happens to the fish? do they get drunk? or die of drunkness. Apparently everybody in the town is out at the lake to fill up these days. Free vodka, although not the typical 40%, still at 30% one doesn't need to drink much more to feel good.

Mario gets canned

Mario gets canned - Slashfood This picture reminded me of something. In the early days at Corel, we were working like mad to get our product out the door. Needless to say the pop consumption was at a maximum. Daily intake could be in the dozen or so. After working so many hours in a day, you crave for some fun. We started pilling up the pop cans, and sticking them together with scotch tape and rubberbands. We ended up with a huge pile that was shaped more or less as a monster, it was fun. It was pretty much visible to everyone from the 2-3-4-5 floors in the building. The building has this big atrium with glasses, so that from the elevators you can see people working through the windows 40foot across the atrium. Needless to say the popularity or unpopularity of the monster grew, it generated reaction one way or the other because of its huge visibility. Soon enough our monster was deemed a health hazard, we dismantled it, what a downer!

Most Microsoft Workers Search With Google - Technology News by TechWeb

Most Microsoft Workers Search With Google - Technology News by TechWeb: "'Do companies drink their own Kool-Aid? (or eat their own dog food, depending on which company culture you follow),' Hitchcock asked on his site." This is such an interesting question. I remember when I was at Corel and we took over the WordPerfect suite. After the honeymoon people started switching back to MS office. It took a very clear e-mail from way up to enfore "The drink your own Kool-Aid" mantra. For most we were more efficient with MS office, since all, not most, all files from outside the company, partners, suppliers, were coming in Office format. After that e-mail not only were we all using and learning to be more effective with WP Office, but we engineering realized that we had to get the MS office file format import right if we were going to interact with the rest of the world. I left Corel and I switched back to using MS Office, simply for convenience sake, it was installed on the machines we were buying. In the case of search the problematic is similar, as in it's all about efficiencies. In the case of search though it's even more important. The reason is as most if not all people at MS are knowledge workers, and they fall in the category of people in the work force that are spending a good chunk of their days looking for answers, searching, whether on their desk, desktops, or the web. So if Google gives them the results they need faster, sicne we all spend so much time searching, we save a lot of time by using the right search tool, finding us the answers we need. As MS I'm sure is about as much as eating their dog food as anyone, it's a tough call to force the crew to use their own technology if the competitor's is superior. They end up less productive, and loosing more ground to the competition itself by being forced to use less efficient tools. On the other hand how do you improve your own technology if you're not using it.