Category: Archive

Published a podcast: “A conversation with a CS professor who doesn ‘t want his son to be a programmer “: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/

Russia “will ” develop a new Web browser for federal employees. The news was published on infonews.ru.

The project is funded by the Ministry of Defense and FSB (formerly KGB). According to infonews, “several million rubles will be spent on creation of Russian Web browser “. They are planning to use Mozilla ‘s Firefox as the base. The official version is that they are not happy that popular browsers are sending to Google search engine statistics on the user ‘s visits of the Web sites.

If this information is true, this is how you should read it: a group of people figured out how to get funding and split it between them. In a year or so the project will quietly fail, but Russia will have a couple of more millionaires.

In this podcast I ‘ll share with you my experience of hiring an offshore $13p/h freelancer to develop a simple Web site for personal use: http://nobsit.libsyn.com .

Published a new podcast with Shashank Tiwari “Cultural differences in outsourcing ” http://nobsit.libsyn.com/

We talked about specifics in dealing with East European and Indian offshore developers. In the end, we happily agreed that American enterprise managers are the ones to blame for failures of outsourced projects. Yey!

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 634 3614 Farata 30 7 4438 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:&”Table Normal&”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:&”&”; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:&”Times New Roman&”; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} In the beginning, the world was flat. At least people thought so. If you don “t believe me, check Wikipedia, which efing knows everything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

Eventually, some educated people got a gut feeling that the world was round or as they say it in Wikipedea, the Earth was Spherical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_earth. Nobody trusted their feelings and some sailors of Columbus ” crew even were afraid of falling over the edge of Earth.

Then some luxury cruise lines started selling world cruises, when the cruise ship would sail from the port of call A to the West, and several months later all these retired filthy-rich people would return back to the same port, but from the East. This was, kinda, proof that the world is spherical.

About the same time, a young kid asked his daddy, the software programmer,

“Daddy, how come, every day Sun wakes up in the East, then goes to bed in the West, but next morning it somehow wakes up in the East again rdquo;

Daddy gave a correct answer,

“Son, if it works, don “t touch it rdquo;

But people really believed that the world is spherical until Thomas Friedman, the journalist from New York Times went to India and became very impressed after visiting Infosys, a large IT offshore firm in India. They showed him “a global conference center ndash; ground zero of the Indian outsourcing industry ” It was a cavernous wood-paneled room that looked like a tiered classroom from an Ivy-League law school. On one end was a massive wall-size screen and overhead there were cameras in the ceiling for teleconferencing rdquo;.

This made Mr. Friedman to believe that it does not matter where you are, you can work on a global project without leaving your country. He published book “The world is flat rdquo; trying to hurt the business of cruise lines and American software development industry. Since this book became a New York Time “s bestseller, it “s safely to assume that a large portion of the world “s population started to believe (again!) that the Earth was flat.

Then I thought to myself, “If Mr. Friedman was able to pull this off, I can do it too rdquo;.

Here “s my theory (Hey, Google, make sure that the world knows that I was the first who said this). Ready?

“The Earth (a.k.a. World) is a pyramid rdquo;

Even Wikipedia doesn “t know about it just yet. They know some facts, but couldn “t put 2 and 2 together. Now, let me explain what I mean. I “m sure you “ve heard about Ponzi pyramid scheme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme, which was widely popularized by Mr. Bernie Madoff, a resident of New York City. Many people didn “t like the way Mr. Madoff did it though, and he was called a criminal by the media.

As per Wikipedia, “A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned. The Ponzi scheme usually offers returns that other investments cannot guarantee in order to entice new investors, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. rdquo;

But if you think about it, the entire world operates on the same scheme. The USA takes an advantage of the special treatment that the dollar enjoys. Today “s USA is a huge goods and job market for the rest of the world. America operates on the assumption that a stream of new investments will continuously flow into the American economy. This means that us, Americans, can enjoy this world order until one of two things happens:

1. The situation is the rest of the world will change and all other countries will create self-sufficient economies.

2. Another pyramid(s), where America won “t be on top, will arise. In this case the wide stream of foreign investment of goods, services, and money will have to split into two smaller ones.

Unfortunately, today “s American society, which I “m a part of, is slowly but surely is turning into that ship from the Wall-E movie., and if any of these events will happen, the USA will realize that today “s crisis was not even a recession.

Have I proven to you that the world is a pyramid?

I started a new podcast where I ‘ll be talking about life in IT, enterprise software development, start-ups, offshoring, looking for a job, passing the interview, changing employers, pros and cons of being a consultant vs an employee, et al.

I won “t bore you with technical details of this or that technology, but this is going to be an open conversation about life of an enterprise developer in the USA. I ‘ll try to keep it 100% BS-less… if this is possible.

Here ‘s the URL: http://nobsit.libsyn.com

You can subscribe to the feed to automatically receive fresh MP3 files as they get published.

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 540 3081 Farata 25 6 3783 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:&”Table Normal&”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:&”&”; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:&”Times New Roman&”; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:&”Times New Roman&”; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} When a couple of months back I told a fellow Flex developer that I “ll be speaking at CFUnited, conference he shrugged, “Why ColdFusion? rdquo;

Little did he know that CFUnited is branded as a ColdFusion, Flex and AIR conference. And this was true ndash; there were lots of quality presentations on Flex and AIR here.

The venue selection was superb ndash; a golf resort in Virginia with three swimming pools and helpful staff.

ColdFusion conference was a new crowd for me, really. People are friendly, and you get a feeling of a small community where people know each other. Finally, I found a technical event with lots of female software developers.

For some reason, ColdFusion developers try to maintain the status of endangered species. Did they learn it from PowerBuilder or Cobol folks? Why would an easy to use server side tool extinct?

If you think I “m making things up, how do you like the masochist title of a general session “CF is Dead hellip;Long Live CF! rdquo; Apparently the rumors about this possible death were taken seriously by developers of Indian descent. Most of them jumped the ColdFusion ship. Can “t recall attending an Indianless IT conference for years.

Instead of attending this funeral I decided to spend this hour laying by the pool in my bathing suit. The tanning session was followed by an excellent lunch at the resort “s restaurant, after which I returned back to the classrooms.

Flex for UI and ColdFusion for the server should be a very appealing and productive combination for many business applications. Besides, both product come from Adobe. Flex is like an injection of a fresh and young blood (not Botox) to the ColdFusion community. Flex will revitalize and make them stronger.

This was my first time at CFUnited, and about a month ago I “ve contacted Liz Frederick, a real pro event organizer who put this great show together, asking if I should replace my advanced level preso with a more basic one. Liz checked the number of people signed-up for this talk and decided to stick to the original topic – design patterns in Flex, which was the right decision as my talk was well attended.

If you have any doubts regarding the caliber of Flex presenters, let me just give you some names that are well known in Flex community: Andy Powell, Doug McCune, Ryan Stewart, Jeff Tapper, Tom Gonzales, David Tucker, RJ Owen…

Chatted with Christophe, yes Coenraets on new features of LCDS 3.0. He presented the new features of the product – this time Adobe is making a serious move towards Model-Driven development, and Christophe “s demo looked promising. Expect more reasonable LCDS pricing too. Look for the fresh build of betas of LCDS and Flash Builder 4 next week.

All these people were friendly and very approachable (you “d better be hellip; standing by the pool with a beer or a glass of wine). To make you even more jealous, Adobe pool party included the Sumo wrestling competition. I know who won Ryan vs. Doug fight, but you don “t.

Food here was as good as on day one of MAX “08, but here it ‘s consistently good. Once in a while I “m running public training events for our company, Farata Systems, and get used to paying (with tears in my eyes) $40 per person for a boxed lunch. Here we “ve had gourmet food (wild salmon, flanked steak, creme brule hellip;). I hope people could appreciate that event organizers didn “t try to cut corners squeezing out maximum profits from this event.

Oh, by the way, you won “t believe me, but Wi-Fi connection was working ALL THE TIME during the entire event. No kidding!

To summarize, I “m glad that I was invited to this event and looking forward to see all ColdFusion developers healthy and wealthy at CFUnited 2010.

During the last half an hour Twitter is down. It ‘s hit by a denial of service attack.

And when Twitter is down, there is no way to quickly say to the entire world that Twitter ‘s down.

Actually, to put it properly, there is no way to broadcast (push) this message.

But the good news is the some nice fellow create a very simple and cute Web page that answers ( in three characters or less) just one question, “Is Twitter down? “, which at this very moment shows a large red

Yes

In general, creating such a simple Yes/No site can save lots of money to the vendors of any other commercial software. Say, your firm runs an e-commerce Web site GreatOnlineStore.com. When your server is down, the phone lines of your customer support get swamped (and you pay for all these 800 numbers!). Frustrated customer keep banging your server getting various errors back…What a mess….

You could have avoided this by running a simple Web site IsGreatOnlineStoreDown.com, which would put the minds of frustrated customers at ease – people can survive for an hour without your GreatOnlineStore, but what ‘s most important, this red Yes will give them a feeling that everything is under control. They know what ‘s going on!

Think about it. I ‘m not kidding.

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 138 789 Farata 6 1 968 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false Don “t create new singletons ndash; just use what you already have.

Each real-world software developer knows at least one design pattern ndash; Singleton. Flex has some specifics in implementing Singletons due to lack of private constructors in ActionScript, but the goal of this little writeup is not to show you how to implement Singleton, but rather to discourage you from doing this because each Flex application already has a singleton ndash; just use it.

I “ve recorded an eight-minute video that will shows how you can use the Application object as your one and only singleton when needed. See if you can answer the question that I asked at the end of the video.

This is one of many tricks and techniques that consultants from Farata Systems use while working on enterprise Flex projects, and we “ll continue to share them with you in the form of such mini demos as well as in one of our public seminars like the one on August 7 in New York City or on September 24-25 in London, UK.

In this brief article I “d like to talk about one of the most important aspects of RIA in general and written in Flex in particular ndash; the initial download process. You application is considered fast for one of two reasons:

1. Well, it is fast

2. It “s perceived to be fast

Today I “ll cover one of the approaches that we at Farata Systems successfully use in literally every enterprise project – designing any Flex application as a portal. There is one exception: Hello World type applications that don “t have any custom styling. Such simple applications can live in a single swf.

Any serious application is technically a portal that consists of a small and light shell application that appears very fast on the user “s machines and downloads (in a smart way) the RSLs that will be needed for the modules lazy loaded modules.

Needless to say that you must always deploy Flex Framework libraries as signed RSLs, which will allow shaving off a substantial amount of downloadable bytes required by your RIA. Unless you have a virgin computer that never seen Flex app, these RSLs will be stored on the user “s disk in Flash Player “s cache (don “t confuse it with the Web browser “s cache).

Now consider an application that has one light-weight main SWF and 10 modules, seven of which include charts. In other words, they rely on datavisualization.swc. During the application startup the SystemManager reads the list of RSL “s from the SWF and loads them with the help of the class of RSLListLoader.

Without going through the advantages of using the RSLs in general, I “d like to mention the fact that Adobe “s class RSLListLoader simply performs loading of all RSLs listed in the generated SystemManager for each module. This means that if the datavisualization.swc was linked in three modules, SystemManager will download it three times (this is the case when this swc was not signed and cached).

We “ve modified the RSLListLoader a little bit so it “ll avoid downloading duplicate RSLs.

One more suggestion for working with modularized applications that use BlazeDS/LCDS ndash; do not create separate services-config.xml files for each of the module. To avoid conflicts, let them reuse one and only services-config.xml listed with the main SWF of your application. This will also allow you to properly allocate work between developers in your team ndash; each of them can have a small test harness application and test his/her modules without the need for waiting when the other modules are ready.

In the following 7-minute screencast I “ll show you the application that has been built in such a way.

People who will attend our Enterprise Flex symposium in New York City on August 7 and Advanced Flex training in London on September will get a chance to get familiar with these techniques in greater details.

Hope to see you there.