I wonder why ... ?

Delivering the Speech of Your Life

Admin — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:03:00 +0100

Delivering a good speech is hard, because it requires a lot of experience and when you are young, how many times are you going to deliver a speech ? Not much.

At Startup Weekend Eindhoven 2011, I have had a hard time to make the speech. The problem I had was, my idea was already busted with the second presentation thus I needed to come up with an another existing idea of mine. I made myself clear that no condition will stop me to go out there and make the pitch. Great that I did it.

My lizard brain was working hard to stop me, not to do the thing, but I did easily shut it off, even though the physical effects was high.

It is important to note that, doing you homework well before the pitch/presentation/speech is very important. Write you speech, record your own sound and listen very carefully to your tone and keep on doing. You will get better, and don't forget to do it in the real world, not in your safety zone, not to your friends/mom/girlfriend. Deliver it to an audience of 100. You are going to see the difference.

Anyway, here is another great article at HBR about speech http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2011/03/delivering-the-speech-of-your.html

Know your goal. When the speech is over, what do you want the audience saying about it and you? What difference do you want to make? Most speakers never ask this of themselves.
Memorize your speech. That's right. Memorize every word of it. Deliver it in front of a mirror five times, six times, ten times. Then deliver it while your kid is screaming in the background, to develop the confidence that you can recite it no matter what distraction pops up. Why memorize it? Because nothing will put an audience to sleep faster than someone reading from a prepared text. Because when you memorize it, it stops being about getting the words right and starts being about getting the feeling right. Imagine if Andrea Bocelli didn't memorize the words to the songs in his repertoire. How much room do you think there would be for him to feel them?
If you don't want to knock it out of the park, don't follow rule 2.
Practice the transitions. What will get you from one point to the next? Is it "if," or "when," or "then I." Know and memorize the precise construction of each transitional sentence. It's in uncertainty about transitions from one point to the next that people lose their grace in public and start saying "aaahhhh."
Don't fear silence. You want to silence a room? Don't talk. Be silent and look at the audience. Five seconds. Seven seconds. Just taking them in. Connecting with them. But never do it for effect. Do it to get intimate with your audience. It silences a room like you wouldn't believe. Why? Because it's not normal. Audiences are used to speakers filling every nanosecond with the sound of their own voice, leaving zero time for reflection. Audiences are used to being avoided, not appreciated. When they come upon someone who can command their own silence, they understand, "This person is serious."
Never, ever, ever use PowerPoint as your speech notes. The slides are for your audience, not for you. The moment they see you rattling through a list of bullets that you should have had the courtesy to memorize, they put you in a category with every other boring presenter they've ever seen and you've lost them.
Give something of yourself. Don't be afraid to feel something in front of an audience. Don't be afraid to say something that will make you feel something, and that will make the audience feel something.
Be yourself. Don't feel you need to mimic the testosterone level of a motivational speaker. You will look and feel fake. Robert Kennedy never tried to copy Martin Luther King's rhetorical skills. RFK was soft-spoken. He owned that. And as a result, was every bit as affecting as King.
Don't speak in abstractions. Say what it is that you mean. Plainly. Avoid the lexicon of your own trade. People are sick of it. It doesn't mean anything to them anymore. Speak in human.
Feel what's happening in the room and use it to connect your speech to this moment. In this way, if your mike goes out, you can make a joke out of it, rather than it making a nervous wreck, and a joke, out of you.
Make eye contact until it scares you. Distribute your eye contact around the room. Not for effect, but because you genuinely want to connect with the people in front of you.
Don't miss your own talk. It is a privilege and an honor to be asked to speak. Take the opportunity to commune with other human beings. It's like getting to watch a falling star.
Come from a place of love for your audience. That's mastery. When you allow yourself to feel the humanity of your audience, you have succeeded in taking the focus off yourself. There is a universe of difference between this place and a PowerPoint presentation. This is the place from which change is made. From here you can move mountains.

What we need more and less

Admin — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:59:00 +0100

A Great list published at Harvard Business Review ;

WE NEED LESS:	WE NEED MORE:
Information	Wisdom
Shallow billionaires	Passionate teachers
Self-promotion	Self-awareness
Multitasking	Control of our attention
Inequality	Fairness
Sugar	Lean protein
Action	Reflection
Super sizes	Smaller portions
Private jets	High-speed trains
Calculation	Passion
Experts	Learners
Blaming	Taking responsibility
Judgment	Discernment
Texting	Reading
Anger	Empathy
Output	Depth
Constructive criticism	Thank-you notes
Possessions	Meaning
Righteousness	Doing the right thing
Answers	Curiosity
Long hours	Longer sleep
Complaining	Gratitude
Sitting	Moving
Selling	Authenticity
Cynicism	Realistic optimism
Self-indulgence	Self-control
Speed	Renewal
Emails	Conversations
Winning	Win-win
Immediate gratification	Sacrifice

Ruby on Rails Basics - Views

Admin — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 22:18:00 +0100

View basic

Lets start with generating a demo project called demo 3

rails new demo3

After generation completed, we could add post model with title and body fields

rails g scaffold post title:string body:text

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Demo3</title>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag :all %>
  <%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>
  <%= csrf_meta_tag %>
</head>
<body>

<%= yield %>

</body>
</html>

go to views/layouts yield basically appends all the rendering text from the views go to the views/posts/index.html.erb file

<h1>Listing posts</h1>

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Title</th>
    <th>Body</th>
    <th></th>
    <th></th>
    <th></th>
  </tr>

<% @posts.each do |post| %>
  <tr>
    <td><%= post.title %></td>
    <td><%= post.body %></td>
    <td><%= link_to 'Show', post %></td>
    <td><%= link_to 'Edit', edit_post_path(post) %></td>
    <td><%= link_to 'Destroy', post, :confirm => 'Are you sure?', :method => :delete %></td>
  </tr>
<% end %>
</table>

<br />

<%= link_to 'New Post', new_post_path %>

Filters before after around is executed both before and after an action is executed

private 
	def get_and_respond_with
		@post =  params[:id].present? ? Post.find( param )
		yield
		respond_with(@post)
	end

Place private keyword to the end of your rails controller otherwise all the methods underneath it will become private members. Private members are there for to not to serve a actions to the controllers we can have a rendering login in before or after action, which needs to be You can use

layout "my_layout"

to define a layout used all over the post controller which will search in the application folder or simply create a new view under the application called “posts.html.erb” which will be automatically picked up by convention or you can also define which template to use in an action

def index
    @posts = Post.all
    render :layout => 'juicy'
end

Partials

Add the following line under index.html.erb

<%= render 'category_list' %>

place a new layout view under posts called _category_list.html.erb and place some html Now navigate to /posts, you will see your extra html is rendered onto the page. underscore ( “_” ) sign to the trick to indicate that it is a partial view. Lets change the _category_list.html.erb file and add the following code

<h1> Category </h1>
<% categories.each do |c| %>
  <li>	<a href="#"> <%=c %> </a> </li>
<%end%>

undefined local variable or method `categories' for #<#<Class:0xa98d474>:0xa98ba98> because we did not defined our categories variable we get an error. Lets define the variable in our render call replace the render ‘category_list’ with

<%= render :partial => 'category_list' , :locals => { :categories  => [ "test" , "test2" ] }  %>

:locals is the data that we are passing into the partial view and the only data is named “categories” with an array of values we can also use layout to render the partial view create a new file called _green_box.html.erb in posts folder and place the following html code

<div style="background-color:green">
<%= yield %>
</div>

and modify the render line with

<%= render :partial => 'category_list' , :locals => {:categories => [ "test" , "test2" ] } ,  :layout =>  'green_box'  %>

and refresh your posts page!

Helpers

bahadir@ubox:~/RubymineProjects/demo3$ rails g migration add_author 
      invoke  active_record
      create    db/migrate/20110206174947_add_author.rb

Open up the add_author.rb

class AddAuthor < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
  	add_column  :posts , :author_first , :string
  	add_column  :posts , :author_last , :string
  end
  def self.down
	remove_column  :posts , :author_first , :string
	remove_column  :posts , :author_last , :string
  end
end

This is a migration script that will help us to create the author_first and author_last column when we migrate up ( self.up ) and remove them ( self.down ) if we want to migrate down rake db:migrate

bahadir@ubox:~/RubymineProjects/demo3$ rake db:migrate
(in /home/bahadir/RubymineProjects/demo3)
==  AddAuthor: migrating ======================================================
-- add_column(:posts, :author_first, :string)
   -> 0.0008s
-- add_column(:posts, :author_last, :string)
   -> 0.0005s
==  AddAuthor: migrated (0.0016s) =============================================

Now go to _form.html.erb

  <div class="field">
    <%= f.label :author_first %><br />
    <%= f.text_field :author_first %>
  </div>
   <div class="field">
    <%= f.label :author_last %><br />
    <%= f.text_field :author_last %>
  </div>

and last thing to do is to add the fields to the show.html.erb file

<p>
	<b>Author first:</b>
	<%= @post.author_first %>
</p>
<p>
	<b>Author last:</b>
	<%= @post.author_last %>
</p>

Lets look at how we can use helpers go to your index.html.erb and add the following line

<td><%= author_name(post) %></td>

and open up the helpers/posts_helper.rb and define the following method

module PostsHelper
	def author_name(post)
		"#{post.author_first} #{post.author_last}"
	end
end

Lets print out the date of the post as well. Open up helpers/application_helper.rb and add the pretty_date function

module ApplicationHelper
	def pretty_date(date)
		date.strftime("%B %d %Y")
	end
end

now go back to index.html.erb file and change the author_name line by appending the date of the post

<td><%= author_name(post) %> - <%= pretty_date(post.created_at) %> </td>

Other View Engines - HAML add the haml gem to the GEMFILE file

	gem 'haml'

and run the script

	bundle install

and restart your server create a new file called index.html.haml and add the following lines

%h1 Welcome
- @posts.each do |post|
	- if (should_show?(post))
		%h2= post.title
		%i #{author_name(post)} - #{pretty_date(post.created_at)}
		%hr
		= link_to 'Show', post |
		= link_to 'Edit' , edit_post_path(post)
		= link_to 'Destroy', post, :confirm => 'Are you sure?' , :method => :delete
%br
= link_to 'New Post', new_post_path

Holy cow! http://html2haml.heroku.com/ Holy cow #2 some more refactoring to the index.html.haml

%h1 Welcome
= render :partial => "category_list", :locals => { :categories => ["thing","thing2"] }

// you might not use as if you name the partial view as "post" but if you need to 
// use the as parameter to pass in the collection item
= render :partial => 'post' , :collection => @posts , :as => :post 
%br
= link_to "New Post", new_post_path

Create a new file called _post.html.haml and paste in

- if (should_show?(post))
	%h2= post.title
	%i #{author_name(post)} - #{pretty_date(post.created_at)}
	%hr
	= link_to "Show", post |
	= link_to "Edit" , edit_post_path(post)
	= link_to "Destroy", post, :confirm => "Are you sure?" , :method => :delete

Ruby on Rails Basics - Controllers and walk through

Admin — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 14:17:00 +0100

Choosing an IDE or Editor

Developed with

I have downloaded the RubyMine from Jetbrains who are the makers of famous ReSharper for .NET guys and IntelliJ for Java. I generally like the products of Jetbrains but I see RubyMine is still in its early stages and not free. You may still download the product and try it for 30 days.

Frankly, I see RubyMine tries to do a lot, download bundles run rails, use any rails generators but since we are in the learning stages and understanding under the hood, it is better to go with a basic normal editor.

The editor I am going to use is BlueFish which I mentioned before. BlueFish is a very nice simple editor which makes it easy to browse folders, create files, and also nice syntax highlighting for different languages ( html , javascript , java , ruby , PHP, PERL , Python )

Folder tree is refreshed automatically if you click one time to the folder ( wow! ) It is very handy if you use rails through command line!

New Rails project

Lets start with writing code. First of all we need to create a new rails application. In order to do that open up a console and run the following command

rails new demo1

creates a new demo1 project. The project is empty which means there are no mappers, controllers or views are created for you. New command only generates a basic Rails project structure.

Mapper

config/routes.rb here you define a new route for the request handling

open up the config/routes.rb
Go to line 51
root :to => "home#index"
uncomment the root and change the string with home#index

Basically with this piece of code we tell rack that we will have a home controller and in that home controller there will be method called index. Lets create that controller first

go to app/controllers
add a new file called home_controller.rb
in that file place the following line of code

class HomeController < ApplicationController
   def index
     @message = " Hello from the home controller"
   end
end

We don’t want to place any html inside the controller, so let’s create our view as well. The file extension of the html file will be .erb which stands for eRuby that is the ruby templating file like asp or jsp

go to app/views/
create a folder called home
create a file named index.html.erb
and place the following code.

<h1>
	<%=@message%>
</h1>

It is important to understand that all the files and code placed inside is a convention.

home_controller.rb maps with root :to => "home#index"
and the class
HomeController maps with root :to => "home#index"
def index maps with root :to => "home#index" and index.html.erb as well

To try how things will be broken, just rename one of the following into “homex” and see the errors.

If you place everything fire up rails in console using

rails s

in your application directory.

Using Query Strings

Make a request to your home http://localhost:3000/?m=testtest Rails contains an object called params and to get the value of the m query string

@user_messsage = params [ :m ]

Open your index.html.erb to modify the html and print out the parameter that passed in ( which is a bad idea to directly output the value )

 <h1> <%=@message%> & <%=@user_message%>  </h1>

and if you refresh you browser you will see

Hello from the home controller & testtest

but if you pass in an html tag with your query string , Rails 3 will automatically encode the output http://localhost:3000/?m=testtest<h2>

Forms

Create a form and post the information to server and back Create a new file called new.index.erb under your views/home folder paste the following code ( normal way, not rails way! )

<form action="/home/create" action="post">
  <input name="message" />
  <input type="submit" value="submit" />
</form>

and we need to map this action in our routes file.

Open up config/routes.rb
Add the following line under root ( line 51 )
match "home/new" => "home#new"
means that when you receive a request to home/new call the home controller’s new action.
Lets define our action in home_controller.rb
```
def new
end
				
```
fire up the browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000/home/new
you should see a simple textbox with a submit button and when you press the button, you will get an error says that

Routing Error
No route matches "/home/create"

Routing

Rather than mapping all the actions one by one, we may remove ( comment ) the match line and active the line 57

match ':controller(/:action(/:id(.:format)))'

which will do the auto mapping for us. ( sounds familiar with ASP.NET MVC global.asax routing definitions ? :)

We previously define basic html to post our data to the server, but in rails you don’t need to write that piece of code.

<% form_tag ( 'create' ) do %>
	<input name="message" />
	<input type="submit" value="submit" />
<% end %>

navigate to http://localhost:3000/home/new

def create
  	@message = params[:message]
  	# new in Rails 3 build in, use notice
	redirect_to "/" , :notice => @message
  end

and refactor index.html.erb into

<h1>
	<%=@message%>
</h1>
<%=notice%>

as you realized, we did not use the @user_message but use the notice session parameter which we set in the create method

CRUD

So far we went with the basics but the real power of rails starts with database operations and how easy to manage, generate and iterate. We start with the rails generator Scaffold

rails g scaffold pint name:string price:decimal

This will tell the rails that, hey rails

I want have a new model called pint
Pint will have two fields which are
Name is a string
Price is a decimal field

Rails does not like singular form of models ( like pint in this scenario ) Here is the output rails 3 generates

bahadir@ubox:~/RubymineProjects/demo1$ rails g scaffold pint  name:string price:decimal
      invoke  active_record
      create    db/migrate/20110206113538_create_pints.rb
      create    app/models/pint.rb
      invoke    test_unit
      create      test/unit/pint_test.rb
      create      test/fixtures/pints.yml
       route  resources :pints
      invoke  scaffold_controller
      create    app/controllers/pints_controller.rb
      invoke    erb
      create      app/views/pints
      create      app/views/pints/index.html.erb
      create      app/views/pints/edit.html.erb
      create      app/views/pints/show.html.erb
      create      app/views/pints/new.html.erb
      create      app/views/pints/_form.html.erb
      invoke    test_unit
      create      test/functional/pints_controller_test.rb
      invoke    helper
      create      app/helpers/pints_helper.rb
      invoke      test_unit
      create        test/unit/helpers/pints_helper_test.rb
      invoke  stylesheets
      create    public/stylesheets/scaffold.css

After that check out the folders in your folder structure. Let’s migrate the database so that our model is also reflected ( huh did we have already a database setup ? :) Well, Sqlite is already in place and rails already made the setup for us.

rake db:migrate

bahadir@ubox:~/RubymineProjects/demo1$ rake db:migrate
(in /home/bahadir/RubymineProjects/demo1)
==  CreatePints: migrating ====================================================
-- create_table(:pints)
   -> 0.0018s
==  CreatePints: migrated (0.0019s) ===========================================

navigate to http://localhost:3000/pints
add couple of records now let’s do some trick
Open up pints_controller.rb

and the following 2 lines

format.xml  { render :xml => @pints } after this.
format.json { render :json=>@pints}
format.text { render :text=>@pints}

and navigate to
http://localhost:3000/pints.json or http://localhost:3000/pints.text or http://localhost:3000/pints.xml

I am amazed how easy it is! Hold on a second, we did not setup any routing and application responds us. How could it be happen ? Open up routes.rb file Line 2 is added by the rails generator

resources :pints

which does the all the routing tricks for us.

Deploy your first Google App Engine Python project

Admin — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 17:10:00 +0100

Todays challenge is setup Python 2.5 in Ubuntu and deploy a sample application to Google App Engine. I chose Python over Java, since I don’t know much about Python and Django. Okay, it’s time to figure out

In my setup, I am using Windows 7 and running Ubuntu 10 in Virtual Box.

Before installing python, lets first install Eclipse and eclipse won't run without Java jre's. First you need to download jre, first we need to add a list of sources to the sources.list file so that we may download the java jre and jdks using sudo apt-get install command. In order to do that

go to /etc/apt/ folder
double click the sources.list
Go to Other Software tab
Press Add button at the left bottom of the dialog
add the following:
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy multiverse

install java in ubuntu

open up a terminal client
run the command
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

Also a handy link to install Eclipse in Ubuntu
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EclipseIDE

Install google app engine Eclipse extensions
http://code.google.com/eclipse/docs/install-eclipse-3.6.html

Install Pydev - Python development extension for Eclipse
http://pydev.org/manual_101_install.html

Ubuntu 10 comes with python 2.6 but in order to run Google App Engine without any problems when deployed, you need to download and setup Python 2.5 because that is what the App Engine works right now. If you try to install python 2.5 with

sudo apt-get install phyton2.5

you are going to fail my friend. Let’s see how we can install python 2.5

I have found the following web site http://kovshenin.com/archives/installing-python-2-5-on-ubuntu-linux-10-10/
which describes the steps to install 2.5

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fkrull/deadsnakes

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install python2.5

and if you run the command

python2.5

you will see an output like this;
Python 2.5.5 (r255:77872, Sep 14 2010, 15:51:01)

Setting up interpreter in Eclipse
http://pydev.org/manual_101_interpreter.html

Download Google App Engine Pyhton SDK
http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html and extract it to a folder ; e.g /home/bahadir/AppEngine/

Create a new Google App Engine Project

Select the location of the Google App Engine Python SDK

After your first test project created, you can click the Google App Engine deploy button. I guess, I don’t have the deploy settings for python, I got an error, “this is not a google app engine project”. Thus, I go back to basics, fire up the terminal.

To run your project locally, you may use the development server for app engine which is found in the Google App Engine SDK. The parameter is the location of your application which app.yaml is located.

./dev_appserver.py /home/bahadir/workspace/guesswhat/src/

In order to upload your application to google engine use the following command

./appcfg.py --application=cambelb --email=me@bahadircambel.com update /home/bahadir/workspace/guesswhat/src/

-- application is the name of the application id you set in your google app engine
-- email is your login email

At the initial run of the appcfg script, you may be prompt to enter your password information, if your email is not already authenticated.

Here is the output

./appcfg.py:42: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead os.path.join(DIR_PATH, 'lib', 'django'), /home/bahadir/AppEngine/google_appengine/google/appengine/tools/dev_appserver_login.py:33: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
import md5
Application: cambelb (was: wishiremember); version: 1.
Server: appengine.google.com.
Scanning files on local disk.
Initiating update.
Cloning 2 application files.
Uploading 2 files and blobs.
Uploaded 2 files and blobs
Precompilation starting.
Precompilation completed.
Deploying new version.
Checking if new version is ready to serve.
Will check again in 1 seconds.
Checking if new version is ready to serve.
Will check again in 2 seconds.
Checking if new version is ready to serve.
Closing update: new version is ready to start serving.

Now you can navigate to your application:

http://cambelb.appspot.com

When I use my gmail account, I had some trouble to upload my application to the Google App Engine. I decided to switch to my domain and use that account ( bahadircambel.com ) and worked!

Sign up to Google App engine : code.google.com/appengine
App Engine Uploading project: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/uploadinganapp.html
App Engine SDK Downloads: http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html#Google_App_Engine_SDK_for_Python

Building your first Android App - Part I

Admin — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:00:00 +0100

This is a guide to install the Android SDK, create a new Emulator and run your first application using Eclipse and Android SDK.

Go to http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html and download the appropriate file

The tutorial at the google site is great, http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html and make sure not to forget the Eclipse ADT ( Android Development tools ) plugins

Once you install the Android SDK and the Eclipse Android platforms create a new virtual device

Press Add at the right hand side

Fill the new virtual device properties

Give a name to your device
Choose the build target ( Android 2.2 )
Locale 200MB of SD storage

First thing first, once you open up the Eclipse

Go to Window\Preferences Make sure SDK location is filled in

Go to File\New\Project

Select the Android Project from the Android Folder

Write down your project name
Select the Build Target ( If you don't see any build targets, your Android SDK location has not been set correctly or you dind not installed the Android SDK. )
Fill in the Application Name
Fill in the Package Name ( in .NET Package names are namespaces, and in Java world the general convension is <com>.<companyName>.<project> like com.microsoft.mvc )
Write a simple Activity Name ( which will be the entry point of the application and will create a java file under the src folder, and this is a must so that Java Android project will start)
Min SDK version as 8 ( Does not matter at this point )

Once your project is created,

Double click res\layout\main.xml in your Package Explorer (This is where you are going to design your application )
This will open up the design surface

If you want to change the text that will be displayed

Open res\values\strings.xml
Modify the Value field ( Not the name ) in Attributes for hello ( String ) area on the right hand side of the Resources Elements area.

Okay, lets run the Android project.

Open up the src/Main.java file
Click Run

This is the mistake that I make in the first run. I have tried to run the project when the xml files are open which is a mistake. If the Eclipse Console gives the following error

[2011-02-01 20:33:04 - GuessWhat_Hello] Error in an XML file: aborting build.

[2011-02-01 20:33:05 - GuessWhat_Hello] res\layout\main.xml:0: error: Resource entry main is already defined.

[2011-02-01 20:33:05 - GuessWhat_Hello] res\layout\main.out.xml:0: Originally defined here.

[2011-02-01 20:33:05 - GuessWhat_Hello] C:\java\work\GuessWhat_Hello\res\layout\main.out.xml:1: error: Error parsing XML: no element found

Which means you are trying to run by the xml file which creates a copy of the xml files as you see in the third line which causes the compiler and Eclipse to stop.

Please Close all the Xml files or make sure you click the Run when the Main activity or Src\Main.java is open

Once the Run failed

Go to project menu
Click Clean
Delete the main.out.xml file from the disc
Then open up the src/Main.java ( Make sure the Tab is active )

You may encounter the following screen on the first run

Select the Android Application in the Run As dialog.

and Eclipse Console will output black colored.

At the first time, Android Simulator takes couple of minutes to load. Here is a sample Console output ( Note that I have this tutorial in my Xeon Box with 6 Gig, it might take longer in your case )

[2011-02-01 20:38:57 - GuessWhat_Hello] ------------------------------

[2011-02-01 20:38:57 - GuessWhat_Hello] Android Launch!

[2011-02-01 20:38:57 - GuessWhat_Hello] adb is running normally.

[2011-02-01 20:38:57 - GuessWhat_Hello] Performing com.guesswhat.first.Main activity launch

[2011-02-01 20:38:57 - GuessWhat_Hello] Automatic Target Mode: Preferred AVD 'Default' is not available. Launching new emulator.

[2011-02-01 20:38:57 - GuessWhat_Hello] Launching a new emulator with Virtual Device 'Default'

[2011-02-01 20:38:59 - GuessWhat_Hello] New emulator found: emulator-5554

[2011-02-01 20:38:59 - GuessWhat_Hello] Waiting for HOME ('android.process.acore') to be launched...

[2011-02-01 20:39:37 - GuessWhat_Hello] HOME is up on device 'emulator-5554'

[2011-02-01 20:39:37 - GuessWhat_Hello] Uploading GuessWhat_Hello.apk onto device 'emulator-5554'

[2011-02-01 20:39:37 - GuessWhat_Hello] Installing GuessWhat_Hello.apk...

[2011-02-01 20:40:01 - GuessWhat_Hello] Success!

[2011-02-01 20:40:01 - GuessWhat_Hello] Starting activity com.guesswhat.first.Main on device emulator-5554

[2011-02-01 20:40:04 - GuessWhat_Hello] ActivityManager: Starting: Intent { act=android.intent.action.MAIN cat=[android.intent.category.LAUNCHER] cmp=com.guesswhat.first/.Main }

Personal development plan

Admin — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:17:00 +0100

I would like try more things in the development space and here is my resolution that what I am going to do this year..

Here is my resolution;

Learn phyton and deploy an application using Google App Engine.
Write basic Ruby with Rails or Sinatra and deploy using Heroku
Write an Android app for my lovely Galaxy Tab
Get more experience with MongoDB
Use sharding in MongoDB and deploy apps to Amazon EC2 ( I need to get 2 more servers )
and buy a MACbook, get a new Vodafone contract with iPhone and implement same Android app in iPhone with Objective-C
Write more code with MVC3 Razor
Connect all these together with a Social media app.
Use GIT more
Write a Facebook app
Learn Dutch

Although the list seems to be long and requires quite extra effort for all different technologies platform, I think this is an essential learning requirement and it's fun! I believe the list is also a very good investment and it will have a nice ROI.

MongoDB - how to install as a windows service - how to backup-export-dump - how to store-import

Admin — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 02:00:00 +0100

The following instructions assumes that you are using windows and command prompt

How to install MongoDB as a service ?

Navigate to MongoDB bin folder

If your mongodb placed under C:\mongodb,

Create a logs folder
Create a file name log.txt manually
Fire up command prompt and navigate to C:\mongodb\bin where all the mongodb executables and tools are placed
Place the following command which will create a data folder under mongodb folder
.\mongod.exe --dbpath C:\mongodb\data --logpath C:\mongodb\logs\log.txt --install
Once you see the log message saying that MongoDb is successfully created, run the following command to start the windows service
net start "MongoDB"
Go to Administrative Tools\Services and check the status of the MongoDB service saying "Started"

How to backup MongoDB ?

The output of the backup/dump will be in BSON representation which is the MongoDB data format Binary JSON. MongoDB uses the tool mongodump to get the dump of the databases/collections. Once you run the following scripts, MongoDB will create dump folder and create separate folders for each database

Fire up command prompt
Navigate to mongodb bin folder ( C:\mongodb\bin )
To get a dump of all databases
.\mongodump
To get a dump of a single database including all the collections ( db name is ecommerce )
.\mongodump --db ecommerce
To get a dump of a single collection in a database ( db name is ecommerce , collection(table) name is orders )
.\mongodump --db ecommerce --collection orders

How to restore database or collection

To restore a database or collection, think the other way around. You need to do exactly in reverse order to restore the database. Place your exported/dumped files to the desired server and use the mongostore tool.

Navigate to mongodb bin folder
Place the dump file to bin folder
Run the command
.\mongorestore --db ecommerce --dbpath ecommerce
To check if the restore is successful
Go to your bin folder in command prompt
./mongo.exe ecommerce

Which will fire up the Mongo shell, connect to the ecommerce database. In order to see the possible commands type help for list of operations ( optional )

show collections

will list you all the collections in your ecommerce database

And that is it ! After dealing with SQL Server and all different kind of database, I can clearly see how easy is MongoDB, administration, operations, everything is trivial. This is what I call success in simplicity ( or hiding all the complexity behind the scenes ). Thanks MongoDB and 10Gen

For a more detailed description and reference look at the mongodb documentation

Part 1 - The social experience: Why companies should adopt to social media platforms?

Admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:00:00 +0100

I don't watch the news, I don't watch any sport games, almost I don't watch anything on TV. My whole information source is internet, if I hear something really important I fire up my favorite browser and look at one of the famous global news site. I literally remove all the existing media from my life and I am quite happy with it, and you might be doing the same already.

Why ? TV is one way. You cannot select what you want to watch if only zapping through different channels, while on internet you can choose whatever you want to with lots of opinions as well. TV channels are dead ( Where Google TV will tune in )

Facebook has half a billion users, Twitter 100 millions, Google who knows how many people uses ( A billion ? )

Here are some stats ;

WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS
World Regions	Population ( 2010 Est.)	Internet Users Dec. 31, 2000	Internet Users Latest Data	Penetration (% Population)	Growth 2000-2010	Users % of Table
Africa	1,013,779,050	4,514,400	110,931,700	10.9 %	2,357.3 %	5.6 %
Asia	3,834,792,852	114,304,000	825,094,396	21.5 %	621.8 %	42.0 %
Europe	813,319,511	105,096,093	475,069,448	58.4 %	352.0 %	24.2 %
Middle East	212,336,924	3,284,800	63,240,946	29.8 %	1,825.3 %	3.2 %
North America	344,124,450	108,096,800	266,224,500	77.4 %	146.3 %	13.5 %
Latin America/Caribbean	592,556,972	18,068,919	204,689,836	34.5 %	1,032.8 %	10.4 %
Oceania / Australia	34,700,201	7,620,480	21,263,990	61.3 %	179.0 %	1.1 %
WORLD TOTAL	6,845,609,960	360,985,492	1,966,514,816	28.7 %	444.8 %	100.0 %
NOTES: (1) Internet Usage and World Population Statistics are for June 30, 2010. (2) CLICK on each world region name for detailed regional usage information. Copyright © 2000 - 2010, Miniwatts Marketing Group. All rights reserved worldwide.

Frankly, the growth rate of internet and the time it takes in our life is skyrocketing each year. 2 billion internet users, and within the next 10 years who is what will the numbers be. I can easily say that we are going to depend on internet and social media platforms to share our experience in this life.

Lets look at the situation of todays enterprises.

United Airlines has shaken by a single artist ( Dave Carrol ) , whose guitar was damaged during the flight. He made a song about the airline ( United breaks guitar ) and the damage he did by himself is astonishing. 10 Millions views so far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Here is the whole story: http://travel.latimes.com/daily-deal-blog/index.php/smashed-guitar-youtu-4850/

Here is the wikipedia page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Breaks_Guitars :)

Lesson 1: Don't piss off the customers in internet age or be ready to pay back with millions of dollars

Why developers should broaden their knowledge through different platform/technologies

Admin — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:53:00 +0100

I started my career as a C# & ASP.NET developer. I was quite happy with what I can achieve till the moment I got hit in the head. During that time I was assigned to a Dutch company ( Novulo ) to do some PHP development. At the first, I was pretty much reluctant to change the language, but I did not have that much a chance to switch and I knew the company was going to migrate their framework and tools into .NET.

One day, I was writing some code for a company and I needed to do some basic front end code to post some data to the server. I put my form and input elements in place and write the code in server side, everything was in place and boom it did not work. I double check everything, form, input elements names was matching in the server side, and the damn thing was not working. After lots of frustration and spending around 2 hours of back and forth, I started googling to find out the problem.

It turns out that I needed to put ID and Name attributes in place to post it back to the server. I was cursing php really hard why the heck I needed that. Well, you can be laughing my ignorance, but that was me staring at the computer screen blankly. How stupid could I be that I did not know that. After some time, I remember the situation and realized one thing. ASP.NET did that to me. I have never really really needed to use the basic principles of HTTP Form posting mechanism. Thanks, ASP.NET , you really saved a lot of time by letting me not to acquire those basic skills that is necessary to get the job done.

Of course this is not the ASP.NET's problem at all. The root cause of the problem was my attitude against the technology and the platform. I was single minded single threaded, to do some work. Work that requires lots of extra miles to learn stuff every day.

During that time as well, my javascript was not sharp enough, and the job at that time was requiring some client side code, which I really enjoyed it, and let me extend my skills, and you know what, the more I write, the more I enjoyed it. It is simple, there was no editor, just plain old Notepad++ to write the code. Learning javascript made me understand more new C# basic functional programming stuff, delegates, anonymous functions, lambda expressions etc..

Writing PHP felt like, building an apartment with bare hands, but it also made me realize how fragile the code was because there was no compiler, plus if you keep on making mistakes, it will cost more time to realize because of the testing cycle. Thus, READ the code was the most important thing! Lessons learnt!

As of today, I am trying to broaden my knowledge through different platform and technologies. Right now, Android and Ruby on Rails are on my plate. I have been writing some small Java code as well which force me to learn Eclipse IDE.

The more I explore, the more I feel good, and learning new stuff is always fun ( or it is always fun because you think it is )

I don't have desire to be an expert on any topic at all, but sailing on the different oceans let you realize more technologies, and you can better see the bigger picture and that is a very big advantage in today's technology's pace.

Open up your mind and vision, it will pay you back nicely.

30 days free trial

Admin — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 02:46:00 +0100

Most SaaS companies offer 30 days of trial period. I am wondering why 30 days ?

First of all, to make it clear, I don't want to give my credit card to try a product and I don't see the point why to ask for a credit card. The only thing that makes easy if you decide to buy the product at the end of the trial by simply pressing the buy button without any credit card info. It prevents lots of customers to use your product, try your product or tell their friends how great the product is. I could not use Amazon EC, because I did not have any credit card available at the time. But Amazon was in advantage than the rest, because they are big and famous. They might have a couple of logical reasons not to waste resources but if you are doing a project management application, that might be the worst idea to ask for credit card information.

If your product takes 30 days of trial to explore, your product sucks. Normally, it takes around 10-20 minutes to figure out what the product is actually doing. You might navigate all the screens, and find out how the application workflow. Here are the crucial things that I will look for in a SaaS offering;

Is it easy to use ? Do I need to hassle all the time, or does the company realized the importance of simplicity ?
Does this product have the functionality that I am willing to use everyday in my work/life ?
Does this product have acceptable response time ?
What are the missing functionalities that I must/could have ?
Who else is using this product ?
What is the company all about ?
Are they nice people ?
Are they writing what they think of in their blogs ?
What is the product's roadmap ?
Are they going to survive through competition ?
What is offered in the product worth the price ?
What value does this product offer ? ( Value - Price )

These are my thoughts when I try to rationalize the buying decision. I don't think any of the above items related to 30 days of usage. For a team setup, all the team members might give it a try in a 30 day period.

So here is my hypothesis;

If a single user is going to use the product give him a 2 day offering and let him extend the period 30-60 days with a frequency of 2 days. Thus, every two days he needs to make the decision to extend the trial period or not. The more he says "yes", more it likely he will buy the product. Than multiple the frequency with the number of users.

Pros

Let the user say yes or no more frequently, the more he says "yes", more likely he will buy the product
Focus on 2 days of sale per customer, engage with the customer, listen, get in touch.

Cons

You might irritate the customer
Most companies use 30 days period, and saying 2 days of free trial sounds weird

It is really important to focus these 2 days. It is a big constraint for sales but I think it is worth it and the nice thing is you can easily extend the trial period. The usage of the application could be analyzed and evaluated.

How can I focus on my sales operation so that my sales frequency gets shorter ?
What improvements can I make on the system ?
How can I tell to the customer that my product is good and worth the price within 2 days ?
What analytical information can I extract out of the usage ?
May I offer some discount on the price ?
What is the thing that forces my customer to extend his trial period ? Price, usability, value, performance, popularity ?

Khanacademy - How one man can make a huge step

Admin — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:48:00 +0100

See what you can learn. Great inspiration and vision. Go check it out, and tell your friends. Topics covered math, science, history, finance. One guy, 1600+ videos, amazing! http://www.khanacademy.org/

Before leaving his daily job as an hedge fund analyst, he started helping out his cousin which ended up as this project. His project covered in CNN and got lots of media coverage as well. Bill Gates was even giving him as example that how Internet is a great place to learn stuff.

It is a not-for-profit company and Salman only operates his business by donations.

Birthday wish in the stores

Admin — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:00:00 +0100

I have a pile of books that is waiting in the wish list of mine. I am wondering why for example http://www.bol.com does not implement a functionality to let your friends buy the books that you wish for on your birthday.

I will definitely refer the list to my friends ( on Facebook 600+ people ) which means lots of people will visit the website and browse through the pages and who knows some of them might order different books or electronics for themselves as well.

Customer Development

Admin — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 22:00:00 +0100

You might be wondering if somebody is developing an application to simulate customers. Simply no!

All these years, it is all about the product. When it comes to the product development some questions come to mind;

How should be develop the applications ?
Should we use agile techniques or waterfall ?
Just code it

If you give a second to yourself and think about the end result, how is going to buy your product ? What is all the effort for ?

Oh, yes, the effort is for a customer or the customer, who is the actor playing the stakeholder role in software development ( aka Bruce Willis )

As a customer, I would like to write my email address and press ok button to login to website

Great here is a functionality, we just spend $1000 for a virtual buyer.

The point is do we really know who is "the customer". Did we ask him what he really wants ? How many "the customer" we have ? How frequently they use the application.

In a startup scenario, you start with an idea or a problem. You define the problem, solution, stakeholders, etc.. Find your ultimate co-founder, talk about how great the architecture be, and discuss horizontal scaling vs vertical scaling. Learn how to make a great pitch with Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule. Put a deadline and codeeeeee. Day and night with that dark screens with fancy colors, write more till you feel asleep onto your keyboard and wake up write more and more and more. Okay, you got the idea.

There is one tiny problem with this ultimate killer startup scenario which is ; do really somebody willing to pay to the problem you are just solving and spending tons of VC backed money ?

Back again

Admin — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 04:11:00 +0100

It has been a while since I did not write any blog posts. Couple of days ago, I dumped my old server and got a new fresh one, which I can control easily and host all of my other applications.

Most importantly I am not only going to write about software but entrepreneurship, marketing, and all the theories that are going behind the scenes. We hear the Facebook valuation around 50 billion, and I cannot stop myself to say WTF!. Acquiring 500 million users is not an easy thing esp dealing with the performance, scalability both for the company and the site.