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wow! How easy to Keep the CPU cool while coding

2008-03-28T17:04:00.001-07:00

10 Principles Of Effective Web Design

2008-02-07T03:39:00.000-08:00

Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has established as a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.

We aren’t going to discuss the implementation details (e.g. where the search box should be placed) as it has already been done in a number of articles; instead we focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches for effective web design — approaches which, used properly, can lead to more sophisticated design decisions and simplify the process of perceiving presented information.

In order to use the principles properly we first need to understand how users interact with web-sites, how they think and what are the basic patterns of users’ behavior.

How do users think?

Basically, users’ habits on the Web aren’t that different from customers’ habits in a store. Visitors glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. In fact, there are large parts of the page they don’t even look at.

Most users search for something interesting (or useful) and clickable; as soon as some promising candidates are found, users click. If the new page doesn’t meet users’ expectations, the Back button is clicked and the search process is continued.

Users appreciate quality and credibility. If a page provides users with high-quality content, they are willing to compromise the content with advertisements and the design of the site. This is the reason why not-that-well-designed web-sites with high-quality content gain a lot of traffic over years. Content is more important than the design which supports it.
Users don’t read, they scan. Analyzing a web-page, users search for some fixed points or anchors which would guide them through the content of the page.

Users don’t read, they scan. Notice how “hot” areas abrupt in the middle of sentences. This is typical for the scanning process.
Web users are inpatient and insist on instant gratification. Very simple principle: If a web-site isn’t able to meet users’ expectations, then designer failed to get his job done properly and the company loses money. The higher is the cognitive load and the less intuitive is the navigation, the more willing are users to leave the web-site and search for alternatives.
Users don’t make optimal choices. Users don’t search for the quickest way to find the information they’re looking for. Neither do they scan web-page in a linear fashion, going sequentially from one site section to another one. Instead users satisfy; they choose the first reasonable option. As soon as they find a link that seems like it might lead to the goal, there is a very good chance that it will be immediately clicked. Optimizing is hard, and it takes a long time. Satisfying is more efficient.

Both pictures show: sequential reading flow doesn’t work in the Web. Right screenshot on the image at the bottom describes the scan path of a given page.
Users follow their intuition. In most cases users muddle through instead of reading the information a designer has provided. According to Steve Krug, the basic reason for that is that users don’t care. “If we find something that works, we stick to it. It doesn’t matter to us if we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboard, then design great billboards.”
Users want to have control. Users want to be able to control their browser and rely on the consistent data presentation throughout the site. E.g. they don’t want new windows popping up unexpectedly and they want to be able to get back with a “Back”-button to the site they’ve been before: therefore it’s a good practice to never open links in new browser windows.

1. Don’t make users think

According to Krug’s first law of usability, the web-page should be obvious and self-explanatory. When you’re creating a site, your job is to get rid of the question marks — the decisions users need to make consciously, considering pros, cons and alternatives.

If the navigation and site architecture aren’t intuitive, the number of question marks grows and makes it harder for users to comprehend how the system works and how to get from point A to point B. A clear structure, moderate visual clues and easily recognizable links can help users to find their path to their aim.

Let’s take a look at an example. Beyondis.co.uk claims to be “beyond channels, beyond products, beyond distribution”. What does it mean? Since users tend to explore web-sites according to the “F”-pattern, these three statements would be the first elements users will see on the page once it is loaded.

Although the design itself is simple and intuitive, to understand what the page is about the user needs to search for the answer. This is what an unnecessary question mark is. It’s designer’s task to make sure that the number of question marks is close to 0. The visual explanation is placed on the right hand side. Just exchanging both blocks would increase usability.

ExpressionEngine uses the very same structure like Beyondis, but avoids unnecessary question marks. Furthermore, the slogan becomes functional as users are provided with options to try the service and download the free version.

By reducing cognitive load you make it easier for visitors to grasp the idea behind the system. Once you’ve achieved this, you can communicate why the system is useful and how users can benefit from it. People won’t use your web site if they can’t find their way around it.

2. Don’t squander users’ patience

In every project when you are going to offer your visitors some service or tool, try to keep your user requirements minimal. The less action is required from users to test a service, the more likely a random visitor is to actually try it out. First-time visitors are willing to play with the service, not filling long web forms for an account they might never use in the future. Let users explore the site and discover your services without forcing them into sharing private data. It’s not reasonable to force users to enter an email address to test the feature.

As Ryan Singer — the developer of the 37Signals team — states, users would probably be eager to provide an email address if they were asked for it after they’d seen the feature work, so they had some idea of what they were going to get in return.

Stikkit is a perfect example for a user-friendly service which requires almost nothing from the visitor which is unobtrusive and comforting. And that’s what you want your users to feel on your web site.

Apparently, Mite requires more. However the registration can be done in less than 30 seconds — as the form has horizontal orientation, the user doesn’t even need to scroll the page.

Ideally remove all barriers, don’t require subscriptions or registrations first. A user registration alone is enough of an impediment to user navigation to cut down on incoming traffic.

3. Manage to focus users’ attention

As web-sites provide both static and dynamic content, some aspects of the user interface attract attention more than others do. Obviously, images are more eye-catching than the text — just as the sentences marked as bold are more attractive than plain text.

The human eye is a highly non-linear device, and web-users can instantly recognize edges, patterns and motions. This is why video-based advertisements are extremely annoying and distracting, but from the marketing perspective they perfectly do the job of capturing users’ attention.

Humanized.com perfectly uses the principle of focus. The only element which is directly visible to the users is the word “free” which works attractive and appealing, but still calm and purely informative. Subtle hints provide users with enough information of how to find more about the “free” product.

Focusing users’ attention to specific areas of the site with a moderate use of visual elements can help your visitors to get from point A to point B without thinking of how it actually is supposed to be done. The less question marks visitors have, the better sense of orientation they have and the more trust they can develop towards the company the site represents. In other words: the less thinking needs to happen behind the scenes, the better is the user experience which is the aim of usability in the first place.

4. Strive for feature exposure

Modern web designs are usually criticized due to their approach of guiding users with visually appealing 1-2-3-done-steps, large buttons with visual effects etc. But from the design perspective these elements actually aren’t a bad thing. On the contrary, such guidelines are extremely effective as they lead the visitors through the site content in a very simple and user-friendly way.

Dibusoft.com combines visual appeal with clear site structure. The site has 9 main navigation options which are visible at the first glance. The choice of colors might be too light, though.

Letting the user see clearly what functions are available is a fundamental principle of successful user interface design. It doesn’t really matter how this is achieved. What matters is that the content is well-understood and visitors feel comfortable with the way they interact with the system.

5. Make use of effective writing

As the Web is different from print, it’s necessary to adjust the writing style to users’ preferences and browsing habits. Promotional writing won’t be read. Long text blocks without images and keywords marked in bold or italics will be skipped. Exaggerated language will be ignored.

Talk business. Avoid cute or clever names, marketing-induced names, company-specific names, and unfamiliar technical names. For instance, if you describe a service and want users to create an account, “sign up” is better than “start now!” which is again better than “explore our services”.

Eleven2.com gets directly to the point. No cute words, no exaggerated statements. Instead a price: just what visitors are looking for.

An optimal solution for effective writing is to

use short and concise phrases (come to the point as quickly as possible),
use scannable layout (categorize the content, use multiple heading levels, use visual elements and bulleted lists which break the flow of uniform text blocks),
use plain and objective language (a promotion doesn’t need to sound like advertisement; give your users some reasonable and objective reason why they should use your service or stay on your web-site)

6. Strive for simplicity

The “keep it simple”-principle (KIS) should be the primary goal of site design. Users are rarely on a site to enjoy the design; furthermore, in most cases they are looking for the information despite the design. Strive for simplicity instead of complexity.

Crcbus provides visitors with a clean and simple design. You may have no idea what the site is about as it is in Italian, however you can directly recognize the navigation, header, content area and the footer. Notice how even icons manage to communicate the information clearly. Once the icons are hovered, additional information is provided.

From the visitors’ point of view, the best site design is a pure text, without any advertisements or further content blocks matching exactly the query visitors used or the content they’ve been looking for. This is one of the reasons why a user-friendly print-version of web pages is essential for good user experience.

Finch clearly presents the information about the site and gives visitors a choice of options without overcrowding them with unnecessary content.

7. Don’t be afraid of the white space

Actually it’s really hard to overestimate the importance of white space. Not only does it help to reduce the cognitive load for the visitors, but it makes it possible to perceive the information presented on the screen. When a new visitor approaches a design layout, the first thing he/she tries to do is to scan the page and divide the content area into digestible pieces of information.

Complex structures are harder to read, scan, analyze and work with. If you have the choice between separating two design segments by a visible line or by some whitespace, it’s usually better to use the whitespace solution. Hierarchical structures reduce complexity (Simon’s Law): the better you manage to provide users with a sense of visual hierarchy, the easier your content will be to perceive.

White space is good. Cameron.io uses white space as a primary design element. The result is a well-scannable layout which gives the content a dominating position it deserves.

8. Communicate effectively with a “visible language”

In his papers on effective visual communication, Aaron Marcus states three fundamental principles involved in the use of the so-called “visible language” — the content users see on a screen.

Organize: provide the user with a clear and consistent conceptual structure. Consistency, screen layout, relationships and navigability are important concepts of organization. The same conventions and rules should be applied to all elements.
Economize: do the most with the least amount of cues and visual elements. Four major points to be considered: simplicity, clarity, distinctiveness, and emphasis. Simplicity includes only the elements that are most important for communication. Clarity: all components should be designed so their meaning is not ambiguous. Distinctiveness: the important properties of the necessary elements should be distinguishable. Emphasis: the most important elements should be easily perceived.
Communicate: match the presentation to the capabilities of the user. The user interface must keep in balance legibility, readability, typography, symbolism, multiple views, and color or texture in order to communicate successfully. Use max. 3 typefaces in a maximum of 3 point sizes — a maximum of 18 words or 50-80 characters per line of text.

9. Conventions are our friends

Conventional design of site elements doesn’t result in a boring web site. In fact, conventions are very useful as they reduce the learning curve, the need to figure out how things work. For instance, it would be a usability nightmare if all web-sites had different visual presentation of RSS-feeds. That’s not that different from our regular life where we tend to get used to basic principles of how we organize data (folders) or do shopping (placement of products).

With conventions you can gain users’ confidence, trust, reliability and prove your credibility. Follow users’ expectations — understand what they’re expecting from a site navigation, text structure, search placement etc. (see Nielsen’s Usability Alertbox for more information)

BabelFish in use: Amazon.com in Russian.

A typical example from usability sessions is to translate the page in Japanese (assuming your web users don’t know Japanese, e.g. with Babelfish) and provide your usability testers with a task to find something in the page of different language. If conventions are well-applied, users will be able to achieve a not-too-specific objective, even if they can’t understand a word of it.

Steve Krug suggests that it’s better to innovate only when you know you really have a better idea, but take advantages of conventions when you don’t.

10. Test early, test often

This so-called TETO-principle should be applied to every web design project as usability tests often provide crucial insights into significant problems and issues related to a given layout.

Test not too late, not too little and not for the wrong reasons. In the latter case it’s necessary to understand that most design decisions are local; that means that you can’t universally answer whether some layout is better than the other one as you need to analyze it from a very specific point of view (considering requirements, stakeholders, budget etc.).

Some important points to keep in mind:

according to Steve Krug, testing one user is 100% better than testing none and testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end. Accoring to Boehm’s first law, errors are most frequent during requirements and design activities and are the more expensive the later they are removed.
testing is an iterative process. That means that you design something, test it, fix it and then test it again. There might be problems which haven’t been found during the first round as users were practically blocked by other problems.
usability tests always produce useful results. Either you’ll be pointed to the problems you have or you’ll be pointed to the absence of major design flaws which is in both cases a useful insight for your project.
according to Weinberg’s law, a developer is unsuited to test his or her code. This holds for designers as well. After you’ve worked on a site for few weeks, you can’t observe it from a fresh perspective anymore. You know how it is built and therefore you know exactly how it works — you have the wisdom independent testers and visitors of your site wouldn’t have.

Article by: SMASHING MAGAZINE

flv file is not playing in firefox

2008-02-06T06:37:00.000-08:00

-flv file is not playing in Firefox
-Flash file is not playing in Firefox
-video is not streaming is Firefox
-I have uploaded a flash video player which plays flv file through streaming, when i run it in Internet Explorer works very fine but in Mozilla Firefox doesn't work....(that was my problem and then i found exact solution for that and my problem solved and you can also try it..)

Solution:- try it....
Please make sure that you have added a 'flashvars' element in both 'embed' and 'object' tags, Might be you missed it...

View more reference

Could not load file or assembly

2008-02-01T06:32:00.000-08:00

Fix for ASP.NET "Could not load file or assembly App_Web..." Error

Delete all temporary ASP.NET files, by removing the folders under the following directory and then check it:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\

Read full Post

Computers will never take the place of books

2008-01-17T06:59:00.000-08:00

An amazing passionate recipe for Developers......!

2008-01-10T20:59:00.000-08:00

Developers take a passionate recipe daily before going to start their non-stop activities. Recipes like given below promote developers,praise developers that they are the most valuable like in a TEAM. see how MICROSOFT call its DEVELOPERS.......Amazing?

How to upload file to the ftp Server or Flash Media Server(Influxis) using c#

2008-01-10T04:09:00.000-08:00

//First create FtpWebRequest object with the ftpURL

System.Net.FtpWebRequest ftpRequest = (System.Net.FtpWebRequest)System.Net.WebRequest.Create(CompleteFTPPath);

//Set the ftp Method, like 'UploadFile' for upload

ftpRequest.Method = System.Net.WebRequestMethods.Ftp.UploadFile;

//Give your user name & password of the ftp login

ftpRequest.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get("username"), ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get("password"));

ftpRequest.UsePassive = false;

// By default KeepAlive is true, where the control connection is not closed
// after a command is executed.

ftpRequest.KeepAlive = false;

// Specify the data transfer type.

ftpRequest.UseBinary = true;

// Opens a file stream (System.IO.FileStream) to read the file to be uploaded

System.IO.FileStream streamObj = System.IO.File.OpenRead(CompleteLocalPath);

// Notify the server about the size of the uploaded file

ftpRequest.ContentLength = streamObj.Length;

// The buffer size is set to 2kb

int buffLength = 2048;
byte[] buff = new byte[buffLength];
int contentLen;

// Stream to which the file to be upload is written

System.IO.Stream writeStream = ftpRequest.GetRequestStream();

// Read from the file stream 2kb at a time

contentLen = streamObj.Read(buff, 0, buffLength);

// Till Stream content ends

while (contentLen != 0)
{
// Write Content from the file stream to the FTP Upload Stream

writeStream.Write(buff, 0, contentLen);
contentLen = streamObj.Read(buff, 0, buffLength);
}
// Close the file stream and the Request Stream

streamObj.Close();
writeStream.Close();

Adobe Flash Media Player has stopped a potentially unsafe operation

2008-01-05T05:21:00.000-08:00

Adobe Flash Media Player has stopped a potentially unsafe operation

When I run my flash application from my system and connect to the Remote Flash Media Server I get the following message.

That reminds us about the new Flash Player 8 security changes and how local content cannot access remote files. I clicked Settings…. to allow this application run. When you will click on Settings….you will be redirected to the Flash Player Security web page where you can allow your application to run properly by adding it in that.

You will have in front of you Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager like given below. You need to click on ‘Edit locations… ‘ to add your application locations.

As you click on add location will have a new window which will represent you the recently tried application path. To add your application path select application by clicking on the Browse for files… button and select application.

After that your application will be added in that so close that web browser and restart your application which should run successfully.

Life Cycle of Software Development

2008-01-04T05:16:00.001-08:00

By Peter Slade

Do developers only work in a Teamwork Environment?

2007-12-26T02:19:00.001-08:00

Killer place to work

2007-12-19T05:26:00.000-08:00

Everyone desires to have a BEST place to work where he/she will have more fun, more facilities as well as Productivity, loyalty, regularity etc.

GOOGLE is awarded with No.1 BEST PLACE TO WORK FOR 2007

Life at google

100 Best Companies to Work For 2007

Fun with Computer’s Life

2007-12-18T06:51:00.000-08:00

Fun with Programmer’s Life

Do you know the effects of exceedingly attachment to Computer or use of Mouse?

Results sometimes have fun and sometimes cannot be as pleasurable as in video... :-D

Life of a Programmer

2007-12-18T06:21:00.000-08:00

Life of a Programmer

How an irritated Programmer behave to the System?
Do you also behave like that if you are unable to get away yourself from such a disturbed problem?

Please don’t do that to your home PC

A Day in the life of a Programmer

2007-12-18T05:30:00.000-08:00

A Day in the life of a Programmer:

Programmers know their daily activities,

How to tackle problems
How to overcome the frustration of intricate problems that come in daily life programming

(-: See your day ever passed like the buddy in VIDEO :-)

IT greats: Top 10 greatest IT people

2007-11-21T06:20:00.000-08:00

IT greats: Top 10 greatest IT people

Author: Computer Weekly reporter

Posted: 00:00 27 Oct 2006

For every world-famous name with a world famous fortune, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, there are hundreds of other individuals who have moved the IT industry and its technology inexorably forward.

Fame and fortune has rarely been their immediate spur. A passion for changing the world through technology is the hallmark of the IT Greats. Sometimes they have changed technology, sometimes they have transformed the way technology is marketed or radically altered the way IT is perceived by society.

Some have been involved in great leaps forward, some have made incremental changes that have stood the test of time.

Whatever the case, our industry is truly one where we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and we are proud to pay tribute to some of them in the results of our IT Greats poll.

Top 10 greatest IT people
1. Steve Jobs

2. Tim Berners-Lee

3. Bill Gates

4. James Gosling

5. Linus Torvalds

6. Richard Stallman

7. Arthur C Clark

8. Ted Codd

9. Steve Shirley

10. Martha Lane Fox

1. Steve Jobs: innovator who enjoyed a second bite of the apple

Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple Computer, topped the Computer Weekly 40th anniversary poll due to the devoted following he has generated through his pioneering work in personal computing and product design.

Jobs was born in 1955 in San Francisco, and during his high school years he showed his early enthusiasm for computing by attending after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He met fellow Apple founder Steve Wozniak during a summer job at HP.

In the autumn of 1974, Jobs, who had dropped out of university after one term, began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games.

At the age of 21 Jobs saw a computer that Wozniak had designed for his own use and convinced his friend to market the product.

Apple Computer was founded as a partnership on 1 April 1976. Though the initial plan was to sell just printed circuit boards, Jobs and Wozniak ended up creating a batch of completely assembled computers, and entered the personal computer business.

Their second machine, the Apple II, was introduced the following year and became a huge success, turning Apple into an important player in the nascent personal computer industry.

In 1983 Apple launched the Lisa, the first PC with a graphical user interface – an essential element in making computing accessible to the masses. It flopped because of its prohibitive price, but the next year Apple launched the distinct, lower priced Macintosh and it became the first commercially successful GUI machine.

Despite his success in founding Apple, Jobs left following a boardroom row in 1985. But his influence on the computer industry did not end there.

Jobs moved on to found Next Computer, then in 1986 he bought little known The Graphics Group from Lucasfilm, which achieved global dominance in animated feature films during the 1990s, after being renamed Pixar.

Much of Next’s technology had limited commercial success, but it laid the foundation for future computing developments. The company pioneered the object-oriented software development system, Ethernet port connectivity and collaborative software. It was the Next interface builder that allowed Tim Berners-Lee to develop the original world-wide web system at Cern.

Without Jobs, Apple had stumbled. Market share fell while it struggled to release new operating systems. Its answer was to buy Jobs’ company Next, together with its innovative operating system, and welcome back its charismatic former CEO.

On returning to Apple, Jobs drove the company ever deeper into the consumer electronics and computing market, launching the iMac and iPod.

Whether Jobs’ next creation changes the world like the Apple II, or turns out to bomb like the Apple Lisa, his place in computing history is guaranteed.

2. Tim Berners-Lee: father of the web and champion of IT freedom

Dotcoms, bloggers and Google all have one man to thank for their place in the 21st century world. In 1990,
Tim Berners-Lee made the imaginative leap to combine the internet with the hypertext concept, and the worldwide web was born.

Born in 1955 in London, Berners-Lee’s parents were both mathematicians who were employed together on the team that built the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers.

After attending school in London, Berners-Lee went on to study physics at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. While at Oxford, he was caught hacking with a friend and was subsequently banned from using the university computer.
He worked at Plessey Telecommunications from 1976 as a programmer and in 1980 began working as an independent contractor at the European nuclear research centre Cern.

In December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. While there, he built a prototype system called Enquire.

He joined Cern on a full-time basis in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, Cern was the largest internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity. “I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas,” he said, and the worldwide web was born.

He wrote his initial proposal in March of 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall.

He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the worldwide web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor (called World-wide Web and developed on Nextstep) and the first web server called Hypertext Transfer Protocol Daemon (HTTPD).

The first website built was at http://info.cern.ch/ and was put online on 6 August 1991. The URL is still in use today. It provided an explanation of the worldwide web, how one could own a browser and how to set up a web server. It was also the world’s first web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other websites.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various companies willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the web.

Berners-Lee made his ideas available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. He is now the director of W3C, a senior researcher at MIT’s CSail, and professor of computer science at Southampton University.

3. Bill Gates: mixing maths and money to build microsoft

As joint founder of the world’s biggest software company, Microsoft, Bill Gates’s approach to technology and business was instrumental in making technology available to the masses.

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington in 1955 to a wealthy family: his father was a prominent lawyer and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and The United Way.

At school Gates excelled in mathematics and the sciences and by the age of 13 he was deeply engrossed in software programming.

With other school mates he began programming and bug fixing for the Computer Center Corporation, and in 1970 Gates formed a venture with fellow school student and Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters using the Intel 8008 processor.

In 1973, Gates enrolled at Harvard University, where he met future business partner Steve Ballmer. Their first venture was to develop a version of the Basic programming language for the Altair 8800, one of the first microcomputers.

Soon afterwards Gates left Harvard to found “Micro-Soft”, which later became Microsoft Corporation, with Allen. Microsoft took off when Gates began licensing his MS-Dos operating systems to manufacturers of IBM PC clones. Its drive to global dominance continued with the development of Windows, its version of the graphical user interface, as an addition to its Dos command line.

By the early 1990s, Windows had driven other Dos-based GUIs like Gem and Geos out of the market. It performed a similar feat with the Office productivity suite.

Gates fought hard to establish Microsoft’s dominant position in the software industry and has fought even harder to defend it. His ability to get Microsoft software pre-installed on most PCs shipped in the world made Microsoft the world’s largest software house and Gates one of the world’s richest men. It also meant Microsoft found itself on the wrong end of anti-trust legislation in both the US and Europe.

Gates stood down as chief executive of Microsoft in 2000 to focus on software development and on 16 June 2006, he announced that he would move to a part-time role with Microsoft in 2008 to focus on his philanthropic work.

Since 2000, Gates has given away about £15.5bn, a third of his wealth, to charity. Such is his fame in the world outside computing,fictional Gates characters have appeared in cartoons including the Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy.

4. James Gosling

Of your choice of the most influential people in IT, James Gosling is the true geek. Unlike Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, neither of whom finished college, Gosling completed a PhD in computer science and contributed to software innovation at a technical level.

Born in 1955 near Calgary, Canada, Gosling is best known as the father of the Java programming language, the first programme language designed with the internet in mind and which could adapt to highly distributed applications.

Gosling received a BSc in computer science from the University of Calgary in 1977, and while working towards his doctorate he created the original version of the Emacs text editor for Unix (Gosmacs). He also built a multi-processor version of Unix, as well as several compilers and mail systems before starting work in the industry.

In 1984, Gosling joined Sun Microsystems, where he is currently chief technology officer in the developer product group.

In the early 1990s, Gosling initiated and led a project code-named Green that eventually became Java. Green aimed to develop software that would run on a variety of computing devices without having to be customised for each one.

Although much of the technology developed as part of Green never saw the light of day, Gosling realised that some of the underlying principles they had created would be very useful in the internet age.

Sun formally launched Java in 1995. Gosling did the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. For this achievement he was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as Newa and Gosling Emacs.

Although some critics say Java has not lived up to its initial "write-once-run-anywhere" claim, Gosling's success in the Computer Weekly polls is precisely because Java has allowed the creation of robust, reusable code which runs on devices as diverse at mobile phones, PCs and mainframes.

5. Linus Torvalds

As the creator of the Linux operating system, Linus Torvalds has been a driving force behind the whole open source movement, which represents not only an ever increasing challenge to proprietary software, but is also the inspiration for the industry to move to open standards.

Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the Linux kernel.

6. Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, an initiative to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software. Stallman has written several popular tools, created the GNU licence and campaigns against software patents.

7. Arthur C Clarke

2001: A Space Odyssey writer Arthur C Clarke has consistently been ahead of his time in predicting how technology will change the world. Most notably, in 1945 he suggested that geostationary satellites would make ideal telecoms relays.

8. Ted Codd

Ted Codd created 12 rules on which every relational database is built - an essential ingredient for building business computer systems.

9. Steve Shirley

Steve Shirley was an early champion of women in IT. She founded the company now known as Xansa, pioneered new work practices and in doing so created new opportunities for women in technology.

10. Martha Lane Fox

With Brent Hoberman, Martha Lane Fox created Lastminute.com in 1998, and as "the face" of Lastminute raised the profile of e-commerce ever higher in the public consciousness.

Readers hail Dilbert the guru of corporate culture

According to Computer Weekly readers, Dilbert, which features every week on the back pages of the magazine, has more insight into corporate life and organisation than any number of highly paid management consultants could ever achieve.

Written and drawn by Scott Adams, Dilbert portrays corporate culture as a world of bureaucracy for its own sake, where employees' skills and efforts are not rewarded. Much of the humour emerges from the characters wrestling with the obviously ridiculous decisions and behaviour of management.

1955: a good year for computing

The top four people in our poll were all born in 1955, making it a very beneficial year for the world of computing.

It may have been a good year for computing, but 1955 was a sad year for science, as Albert Einstein died on 18 April.

It was also the year that the first McDonald's fast food franchise was opened: we'll leave you to make up you own mind about that one.

Your big names

Outside the main choices for greatest hardware, the most popular readers' suggestions were:

1. Ken Olsen, founder of Dec, who invented the minicomputer

2. Clive Sinclair, home computer visionary

3. Vint Cerf, one of the internet's founding fathers

4. Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems

5. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle

6. Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder

7. Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language

8. Donald Davies, co-inventor of packet switching

9. Ken Thompson, co-creator of Unix

10. Grace Hopper, Cobol pioneer

10 Warning Signs of Project Failure

2007-10-24T03:50:00.000-07:00

10 Warning Signs of Project Failure
By Allen Bernard
October 18, 2007

Unless you are in a mature industry such as banking or insurance, where information is the life-blood of what you do, chances are you will be familiar with at least some of these 10 project management failings put together by Robert Francis Group analyst Mimi Ho.

"One, they're right on the button and two, if you take a look at the large majority of them, it all has to do with project planning and early stages of analysis that companies like to jump over," said Jeff Monteforte, owner of Exential, an independent project management consultancy in Cleveland, Ohio.

In other words, when IT projects fail it rarely is a result of the technology. At its core, project management is all about people.

"Even in some of our clients, some of them are doing very well … and others are just starting where they don't even have executive support and they get the executives saying 'Just start the project I don't care what you do'," said Ms. Ho. "And projects fail … and they're like 'It's IT's fault.'"

The Top 3 problems Monteforte, a 20-year veteran of the project management business, encounters most often are: lack of executive support; changes to project scope and the lack of change management; and failure to establish user expectations which leads all too often to unrealistic deadlines.

The Top 3 project killers he encounters are: lack of executive support; lack of pre-project planning; and insufficient people (not monetary) resources allocated to get the project done.

Ms. Ho also sees the same problems—especially lack of executive support—as Monteforte but adds poorly defined project requirements to his lists.

"You need to speak with stakeholders directly because the bill changes or they visualize the project being a certain way but when it's communicated the project could be different," said Ms. Ho.

According to RFG and Ms. Ho, what follows, in no particular order, are the 10 most common pitfalls to successful project completion:

Undefined or poorly defined project requirements. - Project managers should collaborate directly with key project stakeholders to define specific detailed project requirements and deliverables. Defining specific project requirements is necessary to maintain alignment of project tasks to desired business outputs, as well as to ensure that projects have clear and specific project objectives established.

While this step may seem obvious, many companies will skip this stage and go right to solutions to jump start a project. Business and/or IT executives assume the requirements (such as controls, dashboards, data, dependencies, functionality, integration, metrics, outputs, and workflow) are met without performing any confirming analysis.

These projects tend to fail and the companies usually encounter over spending, project restarts, rework, and/or unmet expectations.

Lack of project planning. - Once the requirements are known, then conducting thorough, upfront project scope planning is an essential next step to help project managers and stakeholders accurately and clearly define project scope.

It is important for people to understand that there is more than one way to achieve the requirements and that scope and cost vary by approach. Project scope management is therefore necessary to develop reasonable project estimates, enhance the management of customer and stakeholder expectations, and mitigate project risks such as cost overruns and schedule delays.

Project managers should establish and standardize a scope management process to develop concise project scope statements and credible budget and schedule estimates.

Lack of or poorly developed budget forecast. - Thorough research and preparation is necessary to develop a reasonable budget estimate. Many companies will skip this step or just do a very rudimentary estimate due to the amount of work needed to complete the task.

Some companies that do not maintain internal archives of project costs turn to external consultancies to acquire external spending/budget information on companies that have completed similar projects in a similar market.

Using the estimated budget, project managers should collaborate with stakeholders to help further refine the project scope and final deliverables. Project managers should use their initial budget to base actual spending plans as well as to proactively track spending and respond quickly to potential issues to prevent shortfalls in the budget.

Lack of stakeholder involvement. - Project managers should ensure that primary project stakeholders are involved with the project from the beginning and throughout the entire project. This is crucial to ensure that visions are properly communicated, defined, and verified.

It is very common for project efforts to be delegated to staff that do not have sufficient knowledge or understanding of the desired effort. As a result, projects are defined incorrectly and the projects delivered do not meet the expectations of key stakeholders.

Lack of executive support. - An IT project can be highly political and may end up involving an excessive number of unnecessary or incorrect participants. IT executives should seek ongoing senior management endorsement and enforcement of the planning process to keep the effort on track and to minimize pushback from line of business (LOB) managers.

Support from senior management and staff involvement are both needed to drive and keep the effort focused and moving. Ownership of the project must be shared to satisfy the demands of user management. IT executives must convey this message to senior management to retain involvement and participation.

Frequent or large changes to project scope. - Scope changes can significantly impact the cost, schedule, risks and quality of the entire effort. Project managers should watch out for early and frequent changes to the project scope.

While scope is defined early in the planning and estimation phases, there are valid reasons for change. For example, a stakeholder may acquire additional insight into a problem during the course of the project or external market conditions and/or government regulations can drive requests that extend beyond the initial project scope. However, changes to project scope can also occur as a result of developing a poor initial scope document.

Project managers must ensure that adequate time is spent on defining and refining the work effort directly with key stakeholders.
Lack of change management process. - Project changes will occur. However, uncontrolled changes and insufficient change management processes will increase the probability of project failure. A formal and structured change management process is necessary to ensure effects of any changed requirements are properly analyzed, prioritized, and balanced according to the project's budget, schedule, and scope.

Project managers should consistently and publicly take a phased approach to projects, so that users understand that not all changes must be completed for the current release. This will help acceptance of trading off specific desired changes for faster availability of greater functionality. This will also help reduce the impact of change onto the project, and allow for cost and time containment.

Failure to establish appropriate client/user expectations. Disputes often occur as a result of mismatched expectations. Missed project targets will cause delays, rework, and additional project spending. Setting user expectations is necessary to establish a baseline of what and what not to expect from the final deliverable.

Project managers should work with key stakeholders in establishing and prioritizing project requirements as well as reviewing budgets and schedules. Additionally, all people involved in the project effort should have periodic joint sessions, to ensure the same communications on project expectations are received by everyone.

This process helps keep users involved and abreast of the project's status, as well as minimizing the potential for misunderstanding of project expectations between stakeholders.

Unrealistic deadlines. - Stakeholders want their projects completed now. In some harsh environments, they may question IT's commitment and effort. IT executives and project managers must work with stakeholders to help them understand what is possible with the level of incumbent IT resources.

Project managers should collaborate with key stakeholders in defining reasonable project schedules and deadlines to ensure that business conditions and requirements are met and better manage expectation levels.

Project managers will need to ensure that project cost, scope, and time are optimally balanced to achieve the desired deliverables and the desired time. Effective planning and monitoring are necessary to help develop a strong start for the project. However, project managers must remain aware and anticipate change as re-planning is necessary throughout the project.

Insufficient resources. - Required resources are often underestimated and scheduled inaccurately. Companies often encounter problems with resource allocation, as many companies to do not spend sufficient time on resource scheduling and proper management.

In fact, it is very common for companies to overestimate the on-boarding of staff to a project, which immediately causes the project to be late and in trouble, impairing IT's image with LOB managers and executives. In addition, resources are often utilized ineffectively, especially when individuals are required to support multiple projects concurrently. Insufficient resource supply will cause delays and impact overlapping projects.

Project managers should plan according to the established project schedule estimates and work with concurrent project schedules to help ensure that resources are properly scheduled.

Summary

All companies have experienced projects that have gone over budget, schedule, and scope. However, project managers can learn from past historical data, experiences of peer companies, and project management organizations.

Taking a proactive approach to preventing project failure is a necessary first step to overcoming repeated failure. Sufficient research and planning as well as patience in establishing necessary project processes are essential to developing a solid project management foundation.

Project managers must ensure that the initial project plan is strong enough to sustain the project throughout its life cycle. A project plan should be assessed on the project's alignment with business strategies, budget, the cost/benefit analysis, relevance, resource requirements, and scope to help determine its value contribution to the enterprise.

The top 10 reasons Web sites get hacked

2007-10-09T22:17:00.000-07:00

Experts say the people who actually build Web applications aren't paying much attention to security; a non-profit group is trying to solve that

By Jon Brodkin, Network World
October 05, 2007

Web security is at the top of customers' minds after many well-publicized personal data breaches, but the people who actually build Web applications aren't paying much attention to security, experts say.

"They're totally ignoring it," says IT consultant Joel Snyder. "When you go to your Web site design team, what you're looking for is people who are creative and able to build these interesting Web sites... That's No. 1, and No. 9 on the list would be that it's a secure Web site."

The biggest problem is designers aren't building walls within Web applications to partition and validate data moving between parts of the system, he says.

Security is usually something that's considered after a site is built rather than before it is designed, agrees Khalid Kark, senior analyst at Forrester.

"I'd say the majority of Web sites are hackable," Kark says. "The crux of the problem is security isn't thought of at the time of creating the application."

That's a big problem, and it's one the nonprofit Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is trying to solve. An OWASP report called "The Ten Most Critical Web Application Security Vulnerabilities" was issued this year to raise awareness about the biggest security challenges facing Web developers.

The first version of the list was released in 2004, but OWASP Chairman Jeff Williams says Web security has barely improved. New technologies such as AJAX and Rich Internet Applications that make Web sites look better also create more attack surfaces, he says. Convincing businesses their Web sites are insecure is no easy task, though.

"It's frustrating to me, because these flaws are so easy to find and so easy to exploit," says Williams, who is also CEO and co-founder of Aspect Security. "It's like missing a wall on a house."

Here is a summary of OWASP's top 10 Web vulnerabilities, including a description of each problem, real-world examples and how to fix the flaws.

1. Cross site scripting (XSS)

The problem: The "most prevalent and pernicious" Web application security vulnerability, XSS flaws happen when an application sends user data to a Web browser without first validating or encoding the content. This lets hackers execute malicious scripts in a browser, letting them hijack user sessions, deface Web sites, insert hostile content and conduct phishing and malware attacks.

Attacks are usually executed with JavaScript, letting hackers manipulate any aspect of a page. In a worst-case scenario, a hacker could steal information and impersonate a user on a bank's Web site, according to Snyder.

Real-world example: PayPal was targeted last year when attackers redirected PayPal visitors to a page warning users their accounts had been compromised. Victims were redirected to a phishing site and prompted to enter PayPal login information, Social Security numbers and credit card details. PayPal said it closed the vulnerability in June 2006.

How to protect users: Use a whitelist to validate all incoming data, which rejects any data that's not specified on the whitelist as being good. This approach is the opposite of blacklisting, which rejects only inputs known to be bad.

Additionally, use appropriate encoding of all output data. "Validation allows the detection of attacks, and encoding prevents any successful script injection from running in the browser," OWASP says.

2. Injection flaws

The problem: When user-supplied data is sent to interpreters as part of a command or query, hackers trick the interpreter -- which interprets text-based commands -- into executing unintended commands. "Injection flaws allow attackers to create, read, update, or delete any arbitrary data available to the application," OWASP writes. "In the worst-case scenario, these flaws allow an attacker to completely compromise the application and the underlying systems, even bypassing deeply nested firewalled environments."

Real-world example: Russian hackers broke into a Rhode Island government Web site to steal credit card data in January 2006. Hackers claimed the SQL injection attack stole 53,000 credit card numbers, while the hosting service provider claims it was only 4,113.

How to protect users: Avoid using interpreters if possible. "If you must invoke an interpreter, the key method to avoid injections is the use of safe APIs, such as strongly typed parameterized queries and object relational mapping libraries," OWASP writes.

3. Malicious file execution

The problem: Hackers can perform remote code execution, remote installation of rootkits, or completely compromise a system. Any type of Web application is vulnerable if it accepts filenames or files from users. The vulnerability may be most common with PHP, a widely used scripting language for Web development.

Real-world example: A teenage programmer discovered in 2002 that Guess.com was vulnerable to attacks that could steal more than 200,000 customer records from the Guess database, including names, credit card numbers and expiration dates. Guess agreed to upgrade its information security the next year after being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.

How to protect users: Don't use input supplied by users in any filename for server-based resources, such as images and script inclusions. Set firewall rules to prevent new connections to external Web sites and internal systems.

4. Insecure direct object reference

The problem: Attackers manipulate direct object references to gain unauthorized access to other objects. It happens when URLs or form parameters contain references to objects such as files, directories, database records or keys.

Banking Web sites commonly use a customer account number as the primary key, and may expose account numbers in the Web interface.

"References to database keys are frequently exposed," OWASP writes. "An attacker can attack these parameters simply by guessing or searching for another valid key. Often, these are sequential in nature."

Real-world example: An Australian Taxation Office site was hacked in 2000 by a user who changed a tax ID present in a URL to access details on 17,000 companies. The hacker e-mailed the 17,000 businesses to notify them of the security breach.

How to protect users: Use an index, indirect reference map or another indirect method to avoid exposure of direct object references. If you can't avoid direct references, authorize Web site visitors before using them.

5. Cross site request forgery

The problem: "Simple and devastating," this attack takes control of victim's browser when it is logged onto a Web site, and sends malicious requests to the Web application. Web sites are extremely vulnerable, partly because they tend to authorize requests based on session cookies or "remember me" functionality. Banks are potential targets.

"Ninety-nine percent of the applications on the Internet are susceptible to cross site request forgery," Williams says. "Has there been an actual exploit where someone's lost money? Probably the banks don't even know. To the bank, all it looks like is a legitimate transaction from a logged-in user."

Real-world example: A hacker known as Samy gained more than a million "friends" on MySpace.com with a worm in late 2005, automatically including the message "Samy is my hero" in thousands of MySpace pages. The attack itself may not have been that harmful, but it was said to demonstrate the power of combining cross site scripting with cross site request forgery. Another example that came to light one year ago exposed a Google vulnerability allowing outside sites to change a Google user's language preferences.

How to protect users: Don't rely on credentials or tokens automatically submitted by browsers. "The only solution is to use a custom token that the browser will not 'remember,'" OWASP writes.

6. Information leakage and improper error handling

The problem: Error messages that applications generate and display to users are useful to hackers when they violate privacy or unintentionally leak information about the program's configuration and internal workings.

"Web applications will often leak information about their internal state through detailed or debug error messages. Often, this information can be leveraged to launch or even automate more powerful attacks," OWASP says.

Real-world example: Information leakage goes well beyond error handling, applying also to breaches occurring when confidential data is left in plain sight. The ChoicePoint debacle in early 2005 thus falls somewhere in this category. The records of 163,000 consumers were compromised after criminals pretending to be legitimate ChoicePoint customers sought details about individuals listed in the company's database of personal information. ChoicePoint subsequently limited its sales of information products containing sensitive data.

How to protect users: Use a testing tool such as OWASP'S WebScarab Project to see what errors your application generates. "Applications that have not been tested in this way will almost certainly generate unexpected error output," OWASP writes.

Another tip: disable or limit detailed error handling, and don't display debug information to users.

7. Broken authentication and session management

The problem: User and administrative accounts can be hijacked when applications fail to protect credentials and session tokens from beginning to end. Watch out for privacy violations and the undermining of authorization and accountability controls.

"Flaws in the main authentication mechanism are not uncommon, but weaknesses are more often introduced through ancillary authentication functions such as logout, password management, timeouts, remember me, secret question and account update," OWASP writes.

Real-world example: Microsoft had to eliminate a vulnerability in Hotmail that could have let malicious JavaScript programmers steal user passwords in 2002. Revealed by a networking products reseller, the flaw was vulnerable to e-mails containing Trojans that altered the Hotmail user interface, forcing users to repeatedly reenter their passwords and unwittingly send them to hackers.

How to protect users: Communication and credential storage has to be secure. The SSL protocol for transmitting private documents should be the only option for authenticated parts of the application, and credentials should be stored in hashed or encrypted form.

Another tip: get rid of custom cookies used for authentication or session management.

8. Insecure cryptographic storage

The problem: Many Web developers fail to encrypt sensitive data in storage, even though cryptography is a key part of most Web applications. Even when encryption is present, it's often poorly designed, using inappropriate ciphers.

"These flaws can lead to disclosure of sensitive data and compliance violations," OWASP writes.

Real-world example: The TJX data breach that exposed 45.7 million credit and debit card numbers. A Canadian government investigation faulted TJX for failing to upgrade its data encryption system before it was targeted by electronic eavesdropping starting in July 2005.

Furthermore, generate keys offline, and never transmit private keys over insecure channels.

It's pretty common to store credit card numbers these days, but with a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/ compliance deadline coming next year, OWASP says it's easier to stop storing the numbers altogether.

9. Insecure communications

The problem: Similar to No. 8, this is a failure to encrypt network traffic when it's necessary to protect sensitive communications. Attackers can access unprotected conversations, including transmissions of credentials and sensitive information. For this reason, PCI standards require encryption of credit card information transmitted over the Internet.

Real-world example: TJX again. Investigators believe hackers used a telescope-shaped antenna and laptop computer to steal data exchanged wirelessly between portable price-checking devices, cash registers and store computers, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"The $17.4-billion retailer's wireless network had less security than many people have on their home networks," the Journal wrote. TJX was using the WEP encoding system, rather than the more robust WPA.

How to protect users: Use SSL on any authenticated connection or during the transmission of sensitive data, such as user credentials, credit card details, health records and other private information. SSL or a similar encryption protocol should also be applied to client, partner, staff and administrative access to online systems. Use transport layer security or protocol level encryption to protect communications between parts of your infrastructure, such as Web servers and database systems.

10. Failure to restrict URL access

The problem: Some Web pages are supposed to be restricted to a small subset of privileged users, such as administrators. Yet often there's no real protection of these pages, and hackers can find the URLs by making educated guesses. Say a URL refers to an ID number such as "123456." A hacker might say 'I wonder what's in 123457?' Williams says.

The attacks targeting this vulnerability are called forced browsing, "which encompasses guessing links and brute force techniques to find unprotected pages," OWASP says.

Real-world example: A hole on the Macworld Conference & Expo Web site this year let users get "Platinum" passes worth nearly $1,700 and special access to a Steve Jobs keynote speech, all for free. The flaw was code that evaluated privileges on the client but not on the server, letting people grab free passes via JavaScript on the browser, rather than the server.

How to protect users: Don't assume users will be unaware of hidden URLs. All URLs and business functions should be protected by an effective access control mechanism that verifies the user's role and privileges. "Make sure this is done ... every step of the way, not just once towards the beginning of any multistep process,' OWASP advises.

U.S. faces competitive disadvantage from lack of women in IT

2007-09-28T03:04:00.000-07:00

In both academic and business settings, women in high-tech fields lag far behind their male counterparts in numbers and clout

Discrimination against women and minorities is putting the U.S. at a disadvantage in technology innovation, according to the chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley.
Robert Birgeneau said of the top 50 university computer science department jobs in the U.S., not one is held by a woman of color. "How embarrassing," he said. "It's an astounding waste of talent in an increasingly competitive world."
Birgeneau was the keynote speaker at a workshop on women in technology as part of the Emerging Technologies Conference being held at MIT this week.
He said that while the number of women and men enrolling in undergraduate and post graduate technology programs has evened out somewhat, women are far behind their male counterparts when it comes to academic positions.
Birgeneau cited a study released last fall by The National Academies titled "Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering." The study said that at the top research institutions, only 15.4 percent of the full professors in the social and behavioral sciences and 14.8 percent in the life sciences are women, "and these are the only fields in science and engineering where the proportion of women reaches into the double digits."
The study also showed that women will likely face discrimination in every field of science and engineering. "We're at a drastic disadvantage in the United States, which is outsourcing to other countries like India and China, who are working madly to compete with us and who are investing deeply in education," he said.
Karen Vogel, founder of The Women's Congress, a women's business-to-business conference, said one factor contributing to the lack of advancement for women in technology jobs and faculty positions is that women often don't support other women when it comes to workplace advancement. Not everyone agreed.
Ilene Lang, president of Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit corporate research and advisory organization, said during a conference session on workplace culture that preliminary data from an online survey of U.S.-based corporate women found barriers to advancement mostly include a lack of role models, too few corporate leaders who would champion women, and little access to business networks that could plug them into corporate decision-makers.
The survey included two groups of women: Those working in nontechnical roles in high-tech companies and those working in technology positions in companies other than high-tech.
Lang said that the same barriers come up year after year in Catalyst's surveys. "One of the key problems women raise is that they do not get direct feedback on how they can improve. Feedback is always indirect and dances around the edges," she said.
She said there weren't major differences in the results between the two groups of women that made up the 471 respondents in the survey, "except women in technology roles said they intended to stay in their roles longer." The detailed survey results are due out some time next spring, Lang said.
Some women at the conference spoke about their personal experiences with discrimination, including a lack of women in high-level managerial and executive positions.
Ying Li, general manager of applied research and data mining at Microsoft, said during a panel discussion that there are few women who are senior technical leaders at her company.
Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, who was the first woman professor of computer science at the University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil, said she was able to advance in her career because she never thought of herself as a woman when it came to her job.
"If you start thinking of yourself as a minority, then you start getting a complex about it," she said.

By Lucas Mearian, Computerworld, IDG News Service

Five free Web apps we can't live without

2007-09-27T12:47:00.000-07:00

September 27, 2007 (Computerworld) The current explosion of AJAX-powered Web sites has helped spawn countless next-generation Web apps offering everything from simple to-do lists to complex project management, not to mention the ability to share all kinds of things -- documents, calendar listings, photos, video and more.

But with so many sites out there and new ones cropping up almost daily, who's got time to try them all? Playing with dozens of Web apps to find ones you like can sort of defeat the purpose of many of these services: to boost your productivity.

Fortunately for you, we've already done a lot of this work. In the collaborative Web 2.0 spirit, we're sharing some of the favorite tools we use here at Computerworld. Even with their occasional flaws, we just can't stop using them.

From a simple to-do list to a robust drag-and-drop database builder, here are the ones we've found to be borderline addictive. (But we know we might have missed some, and hope you'll post your favorites -- with URLs -- in the comments area below.)

Web apps we can't live without:
The A-list Ta-da List PBwiki Google Docs Bloglines v3 beta Zoho Creator	Honorable mention Basecamp Google Calendar Carbonite

The A-list

Ta-da List

Any application has to balance the urge to offer lots of functionality with the need for an easy-to-use interface. But that's especially true for Web-based apps, where software bloat can be especially annoying because of slow connections and server wait times, and where users expect to point and click without having to read a 100-page manual first.

You'd be hard pressed to find a more streamlined, simple service than Ta-da List, which bills itself as "the Web's easiest to-do list tool." After opening an account, click "create a new list," name it, type in a task and click "add this item." Add more items by typing them in. Order the items by clicking on "reorder" and dragging items up or down.

Done rearranging? Click "I'm done reordering." When a task is completed, click the box next to it to move it down to the bottom. Edit or delete items (or the list itself) by selecting the edit link.

That's pretty much it. There are no categories, no tags, no priority numbers. I typically use it when I've got a couple of different things in the works that I want to make sure I remember. It's simple, elegant and very quick -- easy enough to replace jotting down a list on a piece of paper, but with a cool AJAX interface.

And unlike a paper list, my Ta-da list is available anywhere I can get online; I can't misplace it. I can also share it with others, either for viewing only or as a group collaborative list. While there are Google ads on the site, they're fairly innocuous and don't feel intrusive while I'm using my list.

Ta-da List was created by 37signals, the company best known for the Basecamp project management service that spawned David Heinemeier Hansson's open-source Ruby on Rails project. Hansson is a damant about keeping all his software lean, and nowhere is that more true than Ta-da List. project. Hansson is

If you must have more functionality in a to-do list, our sister site PCWorld.com recommends RememberTheMilk as a reinvented to-do list "in a snazzy interface that lets you make lists in configurable categories, all laid out on the front page as tabs." I agree that "adding to-dos is easy, though adding deadlines, notes and time estimates is unintuitive." Overall, RememberTheMilk seems like a bit too much work for what I'd get out of it, but for those who place a higher value on functionality than on elegance and simplicity, it's worth a look.

PBwiki

Besides giving us the Web's most famous encyclopedia, wikis offer a handy tool for many other types of informal group collaboration. A lot of open-source projects use wikis to share technical information with their users as well as among developers. While there are plenty of free wiki software packages you can download and install, in-house installation also means in-house update, patching and support.

Initially recommended to our editorial team by one of our Web developers, PBwiki has turned out to be a useful tool to share information and advice about stories in the works and future story ideas. The site claims you can "use PBwiki to make a free wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich," and that's pretty much accurate. And once the wiki is set up, adding pages or text to it is quicker and easier than logging into a more structured format.

PBwiki offers ad-supported free wikis as well as paid, ad-free accounts. Wikis can be public or private/shared. You can add widgets (such as basic spreadsheets, chat, Google maps or videos), with additional functionality for paid accounts. All accounts can see revision updates and changes on the site and track changes via e-mail notification. Business accounts also offer different levels of access per user, the ability to make certain pages read-only and page-level RSS feeds.

Of course, there are drawbacks to free-form data as opposed to more structured formats; you can't really query or sort a text blob. There is a basic search box in a PBwiki, but searching for "Machlis" across many wiki pages can't give you the same targeted results as, say, querying a database for "all stories by author Machlis in the last three months."

Still, if you don't expect a wiki to do the job of a spreadsheet or a database, PBwiki can be a useful addition to your information management arsenal.

Google Docs

Yes, yes, I know: "Don't be evil" Google threatens to become the ubiquitous do-exactly-that Web empire, amassing too much information about individuals and too much power over what was supposed to be an egalitarian medium. Do we really want Google taking over our most-used applications, too? Perhaps not, but I can't help but like Google Docs.

Our recent review of four online office suites found that Google's offering lacked some important features such as spreadsheet charts. Unlike some, though, I'm not seeking to replace my desktop word processor or Microsoft Excel (by far my favorite spreadsheet). Instead, I see a good online suite as adding features such as file-sharing or online backup to my existing text editors and spreadsheet app.

Google Docs offers an easy way to work on documents at home, at the office and elsewhere, without having to e-mail files around. I keep some simple documents in Google Docs and download backups to my own PC. When I want the power-user functions of Word or Excel, I can work in those packages, upload the file to Google Docs and then download again to my next system before starting to work again. It's a version control system for documents and spreadsheets.

I often use Google Docs to keep my own "cheat sheets" for various applications and technologies, so I can remember instructions for coding I'll likely need in the future. It's useful to be able to add something I've suddenly figured out about, say, Ruby on Rails, whether I'm coding at home or at the office, without having to remember to add the information to a document residing on another machine.

In fact, I'm writing this story now in a Google Doc document. I don't need slick formatting, headers and scripts; basic writing, HTML coding and spell-check works just fine. However, when it comes time to turn it in, I'll be downloading it to my own system, saving it as a Word doc and e-mailing the file to my editor, since she's partial to Word's "track changes" function, which I must admit is more elegant than Google Doc's "compare revisions."

Still, comparing revisions is a nice function to have, along with some formatting, quick-link additions and sharing. And I've got a backup copy somewhere I can easily access if I want to make changes at home and then e-mail a new file.

Google's spreadsheet definitely isn't powerful enough for some of my projects. (A personal task analyzing local pedestrian accidents had too much data, for example.) However, it's fine for moderate strength tracking needs and superior when I want multiple users adding fairly simple data to a sheet. It's baffling that Microsoft hasn't jumped into the business of offering a Web platform for easily sharing Excel documents, although others such as eXpresso Corp. are trying to get into that business.

Meanwhile, I'm finding Google Docs a nice backup and version-control server for important and useful but not terribly private or sensitive documents.

Bloglines v3 beta

There are loads of RSS readers out there, including worthy entries like NewsGator and Google Reader, as well as some with Web 2.0 interfaces on steroids, such as Pageflakes.

But over the years, I kept returning to Bloglines, despite its aging Web 1.0 interface, because it did what I wanted done with a minimum of fuss. Finally, though, the new Bloglines v3 beta offers an updated UI with a start page and some drag-and-drop ordering that brings the RSS service into the modern era.

My goal in reading RSS feeds isn't to recreate a full, rich-media Web experience. If I wanted that, I'd be surfing directly to source sites. Instead, I want to scan headlines and summaries. I don't want to play around with a lot of buttons, links and options; I'm looking for information.

I want simple ways to subscribe to feeds and see what's new, with some basic feed organization tools. I want to be able to import and export OPML (a way to save a collection of feed subscriptions). And being able to "clip" and save individual stories is nice.

The beta was pretty limited when I started testing, without even a way to mark posts as still unread (that's since been addressed with a "pin" function). I'm still awaiting the "clippings" (keep and save some items) and "publish" (mark items to put in a new RSS feed you can make public) options, but the Bloglines beta help pages assure such functions are on the way.

The start page shows you summaries of headlines when you hover over the item, an AJAX standard that's just coming to Bloglines, and lets you easily add, delete and rearrange components.

The only major annoyance so far is that when I click on links from my start page, I just get a Bloglines summary pop-up instead of going to the source site; for that, I've got to move my mouse over to the pop-up window and click a second time. I'd prefer a summary when hovering but a link when I click.

Overall, though, it's looking like the Bloglines update will refresh but not mess with the basic functionalities that have won the service a place near the top of my browser bookmarks.

Zoho Creator

Unlike word processors or wikis, I haven't seen a flood of free Web sites for building database-driven applications. The few other database entries I'd tried were generally either limited, expensive or cumbersome. But not Zoho Creator.

Zoho Creator sports a surprisingly easy interface for creating your own apps -- even those that include some table joins (that is, looking up information in one table for use in another, which puts the "relational" in relational databases). With a few drag-and-drops, I quickly created data entry forms with text fields, drop-down lists, text boxes and so on.

My test applications ranged from simple (tracking charitable contributions) to complex (story tracking by writer, editor and status), and all ended up doing pretty much what I wanted.

One database collects all Computerworld product reviews published this year. You can see the live interactive database below. Sort by any of the available columns by clicking on the column header (clicking the same header toggles between ascending and descending sort). Click on the search box, and you'll see options to search by product name as well as headline and date.

There's a drag-and-drop option for adding a "lookup" field that pulls selections from another table. It's likewise fairly easy to set up different views of your data, and user-by-user access to each view and form. Creator also offers drag-and-drop scripting, allowing such things as setting defaults or variables based on certain conditions, sending out autogenerated e-mails when a field is changed in a specific way, or validating user input.

For more sophisticated scripting, it's easy to click back and forth between drag-and-drop scripting and the actual code. And I quickly downloaded data from Zoho Creator onto my own system for backup in varying formats, such as comma-separated or XLS spreadsheet format (although, alas, not in SQL) -- a must for any Web-based application where I'm storing important data.

I showed some of my colleagues the sample story-tracking app I put together on Creator, and response was highly favorable. I can think of many real-world uses for Creator, from detailed story tracking in our newsroom to keeping the list of who's slated to buy Friday morning donuts (making it simple to see who hasn't bought their share and even set up automated e-mail notifications when the list is changed). If you're a fan of structured data on the Web, both available to the public at large and shared with a select list of friends or colleagues, Zoho Creator is definitely worth a look.

Be aware that if you're a true database geek, Zoho Creator isn't a replacement for coding your own database app with something like PHP, Python or Ruby, and MySQL or PostgreSQL. Page layouts are limited (there are two, with no style customizations), and you can't do everything with variables, conditional scripting or sophisticated table joins that you can when coding from scratch. (I was told, for example, that I couldn't use a variable value as part of the name of my view.)

You can embed Zoho Creator applications in your own Web pages, although if you decide to use the apps at Zoho.com, you can't do things such as redirect users to a specific view after they've filled out a form. (They just get a message saying data was successfully submitted, followed by a new blank form.)

I find it occasionally frustrating that Zoho Creator uses its own scripting language, Deluge, requiring yet another new syntax to learn if I want to build functionality that goes beyond drag-and-drop offerings. For example, while it's easy to set up autogenerated mail to a specific hard-coded e-mail address, it took me several hours of poking around and document reading to figure out how to do so based on varying conditions. There's some documentation on Deluge at zoho.com but not too many other places to turn. (Note: Power users might want to check out a blog started recently by several Zoho Creator users, Land of ZC.)

And while most of the application is intuitive, some things are not, such as how to store a "collection" of records and even how to edit existing records (a puzzle shared by several of my colleagues, although easy to use once we found it -- a barely noticeable pencil icon next to records in a view).

Fortunately, though, the Zoho staff is quite responsive about answering questions, even from customers with free accounts. Some of the written responses can be a bit difficult to understand, but they're generally useful. In one case, someone even built me a sample application to demonstrate how to conditionally pull data from one table into another.

Zoho.com has a slew of other offerings, including word processing, spreadsheets, wikis, project management, "notebooks" and Web conferencing, although so far I've stuck with Creator. Many of the other apps, including the Google Docs competitors Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet, are quite feature-packed, but too much at the expense of elegant UI for my tastes.

Earlier this month, Zoho announced a private beta of Zoho Business, a pay service that will include a companywide administrative console, telephone support and "co-branding." For now, most of the services are free, and the plan is to keep them so for individual use. I expect I'll be building some real apps on the site soon.

Which versions of Visual Studio are you using?

2007-09-26T21:40:00.000-07:00

Option	Votes	%
Visual Studio 2008	328	11.8
Visual Studio 2005	2119	76.0
Visual Studio .NET 2003	767	27.5
Visual Studio .NET (2002)	87	3.1
Visual Studio 6	643	23.1
Visual Studio 97	33	1.2
I don't use Visual Studio	72	2.6
Responses	2787

Would you encourage a friend or relative to become a software developer?

2007-09-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

Option	Votes	%
Yes	265	14.8
Yes, unless they really had no chance of succeeding	364	20.3
Maybe - it's too hard to generalise	379	21.2
No, unless they were really keen or talented	595	33.2
No	187	10.4
Responses	1790

Programming Grads Meet a Skills Gap in the Real World

2007-09-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

What programmers learn in college and what they need in the work force are out of sync.

Despite the best laid plans of colleges and universities, there remains a skills gap between what computer science graduates learn in their undergraduate years and what they need to become proficient in a typical at-work environment.

In short, many people on both sides of the equation—teachers as well as potential employers—say the educational system is not doing enough to keep pace with the ever-changing needs of IT, and that entering the work force often is as much of an educational experience as is college, particularly for programmers.

Ari Zilka, chief technology officer at Terracotta, in San Francisco, said he knows very well about the skills gap, as he worked his way through college in the high-tech business while attending the University of California, Berkeley.

"I found that UC Berkeley had an excellent curriculum but not only was my schooling lagging behind work, it became very hard to even go to school because work had me learning the concepts and their applicability and nuances that teachers didn't even seem to know."

Zilka noted that many of the new hires he's seen during his career continue to echo the same sentiments as he did.

Some of the things the school didn't teach Zilka and many who are now entering the work force include issues around communication, development skills, and business and product design.

On the communication front, Zilka said, "Presentation skills are critical, and selling and influencing peers is critical."

Some of the development skills that schools might emphasize more include design patterns, coding style and practices, scalability and performance tuning, and a focus on the entire software development lifecycle, Zilka said. He noted that things like quality assurance, unit testing, and stage and release are not usually taught.

Moreover, Zilka said he and his friends used to joke that they would walk out of school knowing mathematical theory, but nothing they would actually use in work.

"In reality, I find that if your school was strong and you learned compilers, OSes [operating systems], hardware design, database design, advanced math and statistics, and the like, you find ways to apply all that theory but you don't learn how to be a developer or a sys admin or any of that," Zilka said.

Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of the C++ language and a computer science professor at Texas A&M University, said, "There is a gap. It is hard to precisely characterize because there are so many different kinds of jobs," he said. However, "It is important to remember that universities should educate—for a life time of further learning—not train for specific tasks."

Yet, "That said, many students have no clue about software development and couldn't program their way out of a paper bag—that's unnecessary and puts them into a bad situation even if their primary job function is not programming."

For example, said Stroustrup, "inter-face design, testing, use of scripting is often not taught, at best, students are assumed to absorb it by osmosis. Most don't and equate programming with fiddling with tiny programs. At TAMU [Texas A&M University], we are trying to address that. I think a bachelor's is too short time; for most jobs you really need a masters—there is too much to learn for just four years."

Rawn Shah, IBM developerWorks Community Programs Manager, agreed with Stroustrup. Shah works for IBM in Tucson, Ariz.

"Today, some of the most sought after developers are those who work with environments and ideas that are complex," Shah said. "The opportunities to do those are harder to find at the basic university level, but are much more obvious at the masters or Ph.D level."

Bill Scherlis, director of the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University, which is home of one of the premier computer science programs in the U.S., acknowledges the skills gap and said CMU is working to help address the gap.

"We hear it all the time from our colleagues in industry that university graduates have programming skills and technical knowledge, but they are somehow not equipped to take on software engineering" roles in the corporate environment, Scherlis said.

"When graduates join organizations [after college] they are often shocked to realize they are dealing with limited resources, deadlines, fuzz requirements, requirements that change weekly, applications that scale, the use of frameworks and libraries, existing code—that may be bad code with bad design decisions, issues of interaction within and among teams, and having to develop code that is secure," Scherlis said.

Those are some of the challenges students are faced with that they may not have faced in school, he said. "And we are crafting responses into the curriculum," Scherlis said. "We have to introduce our students to the mission of real engineering and collaboration."

One way to do that is to foster more team development, Scherlis said. "They get experience and deal with the realities of interacting with other individuals." Indeed, Scherlis said, the school encourages computer science students to take a course in social psychology to better understand how teams work because team development is such a key part of the corporate development environment today.

In fact, the school sponsors collaborative projects between an external organization looking for real solutions to IT problems and student teams at CMU. "And education is secondary to the external organization; they are truly looking to our teams to help them with a problem first and foremost," Scherlis said. So both parties benefit.

IBM's Shah said "software development is now more into how people can work together to solve many seemingly common issues."

In other words, "software development is becoming much more of a group activity, and there is a lot of sophistication to that in the industry that isn't being replicated in a smaller closed environment like a college," Shah said. "Very often, they simply can't because of the time limitations of the semester-based programs."

Moreover, Scherlis said the onslaught of open source technology has been a big benefit to students, as they are able to bet access to source code more easily and get students up and familiar with technology they are bound to see after graduation.

Byron Sebastian, CEO of SourceLabs, in Seattle, said many less experienced developers can learn necessary workplace skills by actively working on open-source projects in their free time.

"A developer with a Computer Science degree as well as hands-on experience in shipping software through an open source project has a running start in being successful in the workplace," Sebastian said. "They get experience working with complex and distributed teams, real 'ship cycles,' real customers, and real usage of their code. My advice to a student in a university studying software engineering would be to also actively work on open source projects to acquire more 'real world' skills they can apply when they enter the job market."

John McMullen, professor of Information Systems at Monroe College, in Bronx, New York, said, "A gap exists for a few reasons. One is that colleges are mandated by accrediting agencies to teach theory and to not be 'training schools.' Most teach courses like 'Programming Logic Using Java (or C++, etc.)' to try to sneak in some practical work but students do not get intensive programming experience."

In addition, "The rapidly changing landscape of development languages and tools—Python, PHP, LSL [Linden Scripting Language, the language used in Second Life], etc.—make it really impossible for curricula to keep up with," McMullen said. "Colleges must teach would-be programmers to 'learn-how-to-learn' new languages and skills."

Eric Newcomer, CTO at Iona Technologies, in Waltham, Mass., said, "You would think that researchers in the universities would be on the forefront of technology, and while that is the case at some universities and with some professors, the universities are generally behind software companies."

Newcomer who has taught database design at the graduate level, said if you look at a typical computer science curriculum you see plenty of fundamentals—programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, database management, etc.

"But you do not usually see things like XML, Web Services, Ajax [Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, Ruby, OSGi [Open Services Gateway Initiative], Eclipse, open source, WCF [Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation], BizTalk, SOA [Service Oriented Architecture], ESBs [Enterprise Service Bus], orchestration engines, integration strategies, etc.," Newcomer said. "And these are the topics IT departments are most concerned with, not the fundamentals. They want to know what new technologies to adopt and what they're good for."

Newcomer said he travels to universities to deliver guest lectures and has witnessed students complain about the skills gap. "I guess the summary is that the schools cover more theory than practice, and focus on teaching well established technologies rather than new ones," he said.

John Montgomery, group program manager for Microsoft's Popfly mashup tool, who has looked closely at the phenomenon of beginning developers as well as grooming developers out of college to work in his teams at Microsoft, said, by and large, the computer science curricula at the top-tier schools do a good job of graduating students with a basic understanding of things like data structures and computational algorithms.

"But it's rare that anyone gets hired to go and write a better bubble sort algorithm or that graduates are called upon to perform array arithmetic," Montgomery said.

For the most part, these are "solved problems"—the frameworks and tools that anyone would give a developer will have already implemented what's necessary to solve those problems, he added.

Yet, "Mostly, developers seem to be presented with ambiguous technical problems, complex development processes, and unfamiliar code bases to work with," Montgomery said. "They'll be likely to be handed some chunk of existing code and expected to add a new feature or resolve a bug. Some schools try to train in the abstract for this kind of problem set, presenting students with classes in development processes."

To Todd Williams, vice president of technology at Genuitec, a Plano, Texas, software tools maker, the best employment candidate fresh out of school is the one who realizes the code they do not have to write may be the best code there is.

Williams said he thinks some schools focus too much on writing software as an art form for the developers to express themselves. But finding a way to accomplish a task without writing a bunch of new code pleases Williams, he said.

"New code equals new bugs equals maintenance burden, equals higher life-cycle costs," he said.

"In fact, if you have to hand-write code you've already admitted that you're going to take the slowest most expensive route available to implement a solution," Williams said. "Most software isn't unique and the issues it addresses can easily be solved by either finding, reusing and integrating existing software or through the use of productivity-enhancing tools that generate most of the code for you. Then, the clever developer only has to string the solution together with the minimal 'code wiring' that makes the pieces function well together."

Williams' employer, Genuitec, sells the MyEclipse IDE (integrated development environment). MyEclipse 6.0, the latest version of the technology, supports both code generation as well as old-fashioned hand coding.

Joe Ponczak, CEO of Codign Software, in Baltimore, said of the programming skills issue: "That's a pretty wide gap there. I think the developers that excel after college are the ones who continuously challenge themselves to learn new patterns, languages and methodologies while in college."

Moreover, although colleges do a good job at teaching the basics, "I think the basics are now 'too' basic and need to be improved," Ponczak said.

For instance, a look at the curricula at several local universities showed a listing of courses that have been taught the same way for years, Ponczak said.

But, "There were few, if any, courses on development methodologies, TDD [test-driven development], emerging technologies and languages, multi-layer development, security, scripting, refactoring, metrics or open source."

Meanwhile, SourceLabs' Sebastian said shipping software from a commercial vendor requires "ruthless pragmatism and customer focus" to be able to quickly deliver features customers require in a high-quality but timely fashion. And being able to make rapid design, feature, and bug triage decisions based on these factors is a skill that is usually acquired though hands-on experience and work alongside professional engineers with years of experience doing so, rather than in the classroom, he said.

While some developers have a natural "knack" for this, it's not a skill that is easily acquired in school.

In addition, large complex systems in the real world have multiple integration points, dependencies, and are often built by multiple teams, Sebastian said. "Learning to work in this environment, and having the skills to design and execute on the integration, assembly, and testing of components is another skill that tends to be acquired in the work-place rather than in school," he said.

Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, in New York, said she too sees the skills gap between what students learn in school and what they need in the work force, "but what is really exciting is that I have seen more and more educators (both at the K-12 level and the university level) willing to make these skills part of their curriculum."

Like others, Stephenson said computer science should no longer be taught as a solitary and isolated discipline.

"There is little effort made to address issues such as effective team work, project planning and time management, and conflict resolution let alone helping students gain the cultural competencies and effective communication skills that are the key to success in a global economy," Stephenson said.

"Also, not enough effort has been made to show students how computing connects to problem solving in the real world," Stephenson said. "The good news, however, is that an increasing number of educators are building these skills into the classroom experience. Teachers now have students work in teams on real world projects where the failure to plan together, work together, and communicate effectively are a big part of the evaluation that the students receive."

Microsoft's Montgomery listed a series of things he would like to see in higher education computer science programs.

One is technology education programs that integrate communication skills. "The best developers are often the ones who can explain problems and solutions the most clearly to others," he said

The second is technology education programs that emphasize teams. "Very few developers really work alone," Montgomery said.

The third is graduates with analytical skills, particularly around ambiguous problems.

"It's important that developers understand the intention of what they're being asked to do as well as the implications of a solution they're thinking of and can weight and communicate these," Montgomery said.

The fourth is graduates with an understanding of development processes. "Not a theoretical one—they need to work on teams that use formal, top-down development process, agile development, teams with other developers, teams with test processes, and so on," he said.

The fifth is graduates with an ability to learn on the fly.

And the sixth is graduates with competence in several programming languages. "C++ is typically a must; C# or some other managed-code language is also mandatory," Montgomery said. However, competence in one dynamic language, such as JavaScript, should also be present, he said. And the graduate should have the ability to know which to use when.

In addition, Montgomery said he believes that for the U.S. to compete on global level people in various domains will have to attain some level of technical expertise.

"The diffusion of technical skills into many domains means that finance majors, doctors, and so on also need to have strong technical skills—what may have been considered development skills a few years ago—to compete on a global stage," Montgomery said. "This new demand is causing leading schools to nurture the growth of MIS/CIS/IT minors as rich programs unto their own."

Seven Wonders of the IT World

2007-09-11T07:13:00.001-07:00

First, there were the Seven Wonders of the World. Then there was a New Seven Wonders list, voted on Internet-style. That got us thinking: What are the seven wonders of the IT world? Here's a look at seven of the biggest, most extreme and most unusual computers and projects.

Computer Closest to the North Pole:
Webcam #1

Who's in charge: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory takes care of this floating eye at the top of the world.

A view close to the North Pole from Webcam #1

Make and model: NetCam XL, made by StarDot Technologies.

Proximity to the pole: Varies. "Since the North Pole is in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, we deploy our instrumentation on an ice floe as close to the pole as we can," says Nancy Soreide, associate director for IT at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. "However, the ice floe does not stay at or near the pole. It drifts."

How it works: The webcam's container stands on a metal apparatus, on top of a piece of plywood and the ice. A battery floats beneath the ice surface, powering the webcam, which sends back pictures via satellite.

Prime time: Runs only during the balmier months, between April and October.

Life span: Think Titanic—at the end of each year's season, the webcam sinks, and is replaced by a newer model.

Operating temperature: From a chilly minus 40 degrees F to a balmy 120 degrees F.

Resolution: 2048 by 1536 (3.1 megapixels).

Weight: 19.5 ounces.

Dimensions: 3.25 inches wide (82.5 millimeters) by 2.20 inches high (56 millimeters) by 6.6 inches deep (167 millimeters).

On the scene: Lots of ice but no Santa sightings or flying reindeer, to date.

Computer farthest from Earth:
NASA's Voyager 1 satellite

Distance from Earth: Voyager is three times farther away than Pluto. That's to say at least 4 billion kilometers, times three.

NASA's Voyager satellite computes at the edge of space as we know it

Distance from the sun: 15.44 terameters.

Distance logged per day: 1 million miles.

Years old: Almost 30, having launched on Sept. 5, 1977.

Places it's dropped by: Jupiter and Saturn, on the way to the edge of space as we know it.

How it communicates with Earth: Uses NASA's Deep Space Network, a system of antennas around the Earth. There's no IM out here: Signals traveling at light speed take 14 hours one-way to reach Voyager.

Daily to-do list: Collects data on solar wind, energetic particles, magnetic fields and radio waves.

Powered by: Radioisotope thermoelectric generators.

Power needed: About 300 watts, the amount of power needed for a bright lightbulb.

World's most intriguing data center:
Google

Location: The Dalles, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River, 80 miles east of Portland.

Google's new home

Main attractions: Hydroelectric dam for power, two four-story cooling towers.

B.G. (Before Google): Pioneers knew The Dalles as the end of the Oregon trail.

Jobs inside the data center to date: Between 100 and 200. Google won't specify.

Code name: Called Project 02 by the locals.

Wired by: A fiber optic artery looped through the surrounding wilderness.

Secrecy level: High. Two reporters from the local newspaper are the only media who've been inside the compound and written about it (See "Inside the World of Google"): Google treats any and all details as though they belong to the National Security Agency.

Size: 30-acre site.

Number of servers: Google's mum. It has an estimated 500,000 around the world, spread across 25 locations.

Storage: Across all its data centers, Google stores an estimated 200 petabytes.

Top searches inside the compound: We'd bet it's a tie between "Britney Spears" and "Web 2.0."

World's largest scientific grid computing project:
The E-sciencE II (EGEE-II) project

Launched: September 2006, for use by scientists around the world.

A Google Earth view of European sites hooked into the EGEE grid computing project

Helps power: Large-scale scientific research projects in fields from geology to chemistry—for example, will analyze data from CERN's Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator being built to help investigate details around the Big Bang and related physics questions.

Amount of work it does: 98,000 jobs a day, more than 1 million per month.

Juggling ability: Runs about 30,000 jobs concurrently, on average.

Number of sites connected to the EGEE infrastructure: About 240.

Number of countries connected to the EGEE infrastructure: 45.

Number of CPUs available to users, 24/7: More than 36,000.

Storage capacity available: About 5 PB disk space (5 million GB).

World's fastest supercomputer:
IBM BlueGene/L (BGL)

Powered by: 65,536 dual-processor computer nodes.

The BlueGene/L supercomputer at home at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Home base: This 2,500-square-foot marvel lives at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

Claim to fame: Helps researchers answer physics questions about stockpiled nuclear weapons and materials like Plutonium.

Power requirements: 1.5 megawatts (equivalent to a 2,000-horsepower diesel engine).

Clocked speed: Rated fastest in the world after clocking sustained performance of 280.6 trillion operations per second, or teraflops.

Approximate cost: As part of a larger contract including other supercomputers, just under $100 million.

Measure of compute capability: To match the power of this behemoth, every man, woman and child on Earth would need to perform 60,000 calculations per second (without transposing digits or forgetting to "carry the one").

Brawny bandwidth: Its internal communication network would support 150 simultaneous phone conversations for every person in the United States.

Waiting in the wings: IBM has announced a successor, Blue Gene/P, designed to deliver three times the processing power of the Blue Gene/L.

Smallest PC to run Windows Vista:
OQO, Model o2

The package: OQO's Handheld PC checks in at 5.6 (wide) by 3.3 (high) by 1 (deep) inches.

The diminutive OQO handheld PC weighs in at less than one pound

The skinny: Weighs just under 1 pound (weight varies with configuration).

Vitals: 1.5GHz processor, Windows XP or Vista, 30 or 60GB hard drive, 512MB or 1GBDDR DRAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth.

Most likely to twist your fingers into yoga positions: Thumb keypad with 57 keys total, mouse buttons, digital pen, programmable thumbwheel.

Stayin' alive: Lithium-ion polymer battery keeps it cooking for up to three hours.

Price of entry: Starts at $1,499.

James Bond-worthiness: Sleek, but we'd bet 007 would insist on something even smaller.

Biggest Paradigm Change in Enterprise Software:
Linux kernel

Created by: Linus Torvalds, in 1991, helping open-source developers collectively craft a viable alternative to Microsoft operating systems.

The Linux kernel contains 8.2 million lines of code, with approximately 86 lines added every hour

Number of developers: Total since 1991 is unknown; 3,200 developers for the kernel as of release 2.6.22.

New releases: Every 2.6 months.*

Quick change artists: 2.89 changes made to the kernel every hour.

Lines of code: 8.2 million and growing (about 10 percent per year).

Amount of code added every hour: 85.63 lines.

Revenue diverted from Microsoft: Perhaps only Mr. Gates knows.

*Unless otherwise marked, statistics reflect Linux kernel releases of the past 2.5 years (version 2.6.11 through 2.6.21).

Salary Survey: IT Workers Continue To Flourish

2007-09-10T08:09:00.000-07:00

IT workers continue to ride a strong wave of increasing experience to a third straight year of high earnings, according to Redmond magazine's 12th annual Salary Survey.

The survey, published in the September issue of Redmond magazine and available online, found that the average base salary for an IT pro was $71,988. Story author Michael Domingo summed up the survey results: "Whether on their own or punching the corporate clock, the IT forces are problem solvers, work long hours and are well compensated for their efforts."

(Editor's Note: Redmond magazine is owned by the Redmond Media Group, which publishes this and other IT-related Web sites).
The three critical salary-related categories -- salaries, raises and bonuses -- all saw at least modest gains over the previous year. "Respondents said they made significant gains from [surveys in previous years] of $3,223, with an average bonus of $5,985. That represents a bonus payout that's bigger by almost 86 percent," Domingo reported. Salaries in general have maintained pace with inflation.

One reason for the rosy figures is that the IT workforce is maturing. While the average age of an IT pro has remained fairly constant over previous studies, at about 41 years, the average years of work experience jumped a substantial amount, from 12.1 to 12.8 years.
As is normally the case, leaders make the most money. IT managers had the highest average salary, at $87,103. Next came programming and networking project leads, at $84,004 and $82,725 respectively. Database admins, webmasters, programmers and network engineers averaged salaries in the low to mid-$70,000s, while help desk/user support personnel brought up the rear, with an average salary of $52,824. That makes sense, as those are usually entry-level jobs.

The value of certification, at least as it relates to salary, is murky. While certain specialized certifications, like MCDBA (Microsoft Certified Database Administrator) on SQL Server 7 ($86,225), or MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer) on Visual Studio .NET ($91,124) can lead to high salaries, the overall salaries don't reflect the same value. The base salary for those with no Microsoft certifications was $78,158, significantly above the average base salary of $71,988.

As for what the future holds, the outlook remains good for staying in, or entering, the IT field. The U.S. Department of Labor forecasts growth in IT jobs of between 18 - 26 percent between now and 2014. Those numbers are reflected in Redmond's salary survey as well. Notes Domingo, "IT professionals continue to draw exceptional pay ... With a strong U.S. economy to boot, they can't help but feel upbeat about their job prospects and the money they'll be making in the coming year."

Careers,Get Ready for the Fall Job Hunting Season

2007-09-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

The Tuesday after Labor Day is the second busiest day each year for job hunters.

In the job hunting world, there are two peak seasons yearly in which most disenchanted workers set their marks and get set to go. The first is in early January, on the heels of New Year's resolutions by bored workers across the land promising themselves they'll find more inspiring work that year.

The second is the day after Labor Day, when the sight of kids going off to college and school starting anew reminds workers in a state of job ennui of when they, too, used to be enthused about learning new things.

But recruiters urge that if you think you could be in the former camp by the year's end, you might want to think about jumping in now, and ERE, a community of recruiters around the world, is offering job seekers tips to land their next job.

1. Don't Quit Your Day Job

No matter how loathsome your job is, and how frustrated you are with the amount of time you've been on the job hunt, recruiters discourage job seekers from quitting their current jobs before having found a new one.

Though many will tell you that it's because you really don't know how long it will take until you find your next job, and if it is a long time it will do your resume a disservice, the real truth is that an unemployed job hunter reeks of more desperation than one who knows where their next paycheck is coming from.

"You don't want to seem like a job-hopper," said Elaine Rigoli, business writer for ERE. "From a recruiter's perspective, if you're unemployed and hanging out on job boards all day, you might seem desperate. They want the people who are hard workers and may not even know that they are looking. They're called the passive candidates, or passive majority."

2. See and Be Seen

Increasing one's visibility is key when looking for a new job, and the good news is that the Internet has made it even easier to network without leaving your desk. Posting on blogs, starting your own and keeping your social networking profiles up-to-date are widely used ways to increase one's professional network. Speaking at conferences, writing for magazines and Web sites, and networking with professional organizations ensure that when it's time to move the job hunt forward, you've got lots of resources to tap into.

"Don't just sit there. Get out there and meet people. This goes along with not just quitting your job and expecting the next one to come along. If you're involved in IT organizations and active on technology boards, recruiters may already know who you are," said Rigoli.

3. Reinvent Yourself

More than any other line of work, technology requires that its professionals stay on the ball, working constantly to keep their skills sharp and relevant. Recruiters suggest that job seekers go one step further and learn complementary skills to the IT skills they may already have, and find new uses for your talent.

"Keep your skills sharp. Stay aware of the ways you can take advantage of your knowledge by networking. Find new places that people are looking for your skills," said Rigoli.

4. Don't Discount Smaller Job Boards

It would be naïve to ignore the market share of Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs when launching your IT job hunt, but it would be risky to limit your job seeking to only the big sharks. Within the IT profession, there are dozens of job boards for technology professionals alone, all of which boast a lower signal-to-noise ratio for workers who don't want to wade through irrelevant job ads.

In the IT profession, the more options can be the merrier. IT pros know that IT jobs aren't just in computer and technology professions, but any company in the world with computers at their employees' desks.

"There are so many niche job boards from itjobs.com to jobs.slashdot.org and computerwork.com, not to mention dice.com, which according to one poll was where a full 17 percent of computer professionals went to find jobs," said Rigoli.

"But if you're willing to look into the health care industry, or higher education IT, there are boards for all of these employers as well. Whatever you do, don't limit your search unnecessarily."

5. Consider Smaller Companies

If Microsoft wants to hire two, or 2,000, new IT professionals, it barely has to market itself before it is flooded with so many applications that it would impossible to read every one. But the technology profession is flooded with small IT shops and partner companies who need people with hands-on IT knowledge. They just may not have the overhead or able bodies to go out and find them, and even if they can find them, they cannot afford to train them.

"They can't take raw talent out of the university and train them for a year," Celia Harper-Guerra, director of talent at Cisco Systems, in San Jose, Calif., told eWEEK in June. "A Microsoft can have a one-year training program to become a systems administrator or an engineer. But a small company cannot afford to have a person out of work for a year,"