Unispace Blog

We will be in Echelon 2011!!

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:37:00 +0000

Echelon 2011 will be the biggest ever edition
of Asia’s best startup launchpad event. It will
discover Southeast Asia’s best start-ups on
an all new scale.
A series of Satellite launchpads across Southeast Asia will uncover a broader range of regional start-ups and filter them to create a higher-quality main event in Singapore. Echelon 2011 will be a two-day, double-track event that happens in Singapore in June with an expected attendance of more than 1,000 delegates; a demo pit of more than 40 start-ups and companies; and workshops and fringe events.

Sorry for the hard sell, but we will be in Echelon 2011 from 16-17 June. We are listed as one of exhibitors there. We will be in Booth #28 and there will be free mysterious gifts. Limited stocks only.

The State of Cloud Computing

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:03:00 +0000

<p$1><p$1></p></p>
An entertaining video of the clouds from Salesforce. Cloud computing is everywhere but there are more possiblities than just emails or video. Enterprise software are the next major frontier for cloud computing. Think of Salesforce.com. Or even Office 365. Enterprise market are much more larger and lucrative market for cloud computing.So what do you think of cloud computing in enterprise market? :-D

What is Workflow Patterns?

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Fri, 14 May 2010 17:42:00 +0000

Today, I found out about workflow patterns which are done by initiative is a joint effort of Eindhoven University of Technology (led by Professor Wil van der Aalst) and Queensland University of Technology (led by Professor Arthur ter Hofstede) which started in 1999. These patterns which has grown from 20 to 40, has been adopted by major BPM players such as IBM, oracle and others BPM vendors. They also responsible for the creation of YAWL which a language and workflow engine, implemented in java.

According to the site, there are four major type of workflow patterns:

Control-flow pattern – (captures aspects related to control-flow dependencies between various tasks (e.g. parallelism, choice, synchronization etc)
Data pattern - deals with the passing of information , scoping of variables, etc (more for programming purposes)
Resource pattern - deals with resource to task allocation, delegation, etc.
Error handling pattern - deal with the various causes of exceptions and the various actions that need to be taken as a result of exceptions occurring

And what are we doing for our workflow software are very much related on resource pattern. Our Hydra workflow are very much specialized in resource pattern workflow as we deals with delegation of task, and routing of workitems (a term we use in our workflow system to denotes workflow process). Apparently there are tons of ways to describe these human centric workflow. Among these are :

a. Creation Patterns:

b. Push Patterns

c. Pull Patterns

d. Detour Patterns

e. Auto-Start Patterns

f. Visibility Patterns

g. Multiple Resource Patterns

These are sure a long, long list of type of workflow patterns (43 items here). Well, I'm still at the process reading and understanding these patterns. Maybe in next coming article, i might come out on how to implement some these in our workflow system. Maybe we can't support all of it now but i believe a great percentage of them are achievable.

So what you think of resource pattern workflow? And will this helps in real organization in terms helping organization dealing with process everyday? Do give us feedback on this. Till then, take care!

Business Process Management Meets Enterprise 2 0 (Slide)

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:39:00 +0000

Couple days ago, i stumble upon an article about collaborative BPM which i found quite interesting. From that article i found this slides which did by Sandy Kemsley.

It certainly interesting article that mention how BPM vendors starts to incorporate social features into their product and how this would appeal to the newer generations of users. I wonder application like facebook and twitter changes behaviour of system users. Does they demand such features because they are exposed to these or those feature s enables to have more empowerment in their work? Do let me know what you think?

And yes, do enjoy the slides. :-D

Business Process Management Meets Enterprise 2 0

Next Generation LOB (Line of Business) Applications Slides

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:53:00 +0000

Found another slides on LOB (Line of Business) application and it's next generation of evolutions using Microsoft technologies. There's quite a short and concise overview on which technology to solve or new way of doing things in an LOB application.

Very interesting presentation and we are using some of it but not in the entirety which we can look forward to.

So what you think of these technologies developed by Microsoft? Are there better way of doing this? :-D

Next Generation LOB (Line of Business) Applications

Patterns For Cloud Computing Slides From Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:43:00 +0000

Today, I found this presentation from aadjemonkeyrock (a blog which i follows). The title certainly intrigues me at first as we are very much into cloud computing. But beware, it's a pretty long presentation with over 180 pages but most are pictures not words.

This presentation I find quite interesting as it does explained what is cloud computing from Microsoft point of view. And Azure is the solutions for Microsoft technology adopter such like us. Certainly certain patterns are quite interesting such as concept of multi tenancy. It's also ironic that Google is mentioned on the presentation on the topic of MapReduce and how this can be solve via Azure platform. Overall it's interesting presentation on the cloud computing roadmap from Microsoft.

But i think there are more plenty patterns implemented by other vendors. So what do you think on cloud computing patterns or roadmap? You can leave your comment here. :-D

Patterns For Cloud Computing

Happy Chinese New Year!!

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 13:41:00 +0000

Health makes all things possible,
Wealth makes all things work
Love makes all things beautiful.
May you all have all 3.

We would like to wish all of you a happy chinese new year!! Gong Xi Fatt Chai from all of us in Unispace!

Cloud Computing, in Plain English, to IT Directors, VP

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:07:00 +0000

Interesting article about cloud computing. In the video, it says clouds is powered by virtualizations. So which virtualization should we go to? open source or propriety? Let me know if you have any opinions. :-D

Building a Lean Startup

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 08:32:00 +0000

I come across an interesting and short presentation on Lean startup. As curious like usual, I checked out the slides and really like it. One point in the slides that mentioned are 1 day release that struck me the most. As we are practicing few weeks per release which kinda normal nowadays. So what you think of 1 day release cycle? :-D

And check out this SlideShare Presentation, cheers!

Building a Lean Startup

View more presentations from ashmaurya.

My encounter of Cross Domain for Silverlight 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:27:00 +0000

Today I ran into unusual problem. Today I want to transfer our Beta 0.7 version to testing server which we just recently bought. As it's works perfectly in my developer machine (does this sounds familiar :p), so i happily transfer my databases and compiled files over to the new server.

Then i realized the URL is pointed as localhost and this works on local machine which I don't intend to test on the machine but over local network. So my past experience with ASP.Net, i can either connect to the newly setup website using IP address (eg. http://localhost/workflow7 to http://192.168.2.10/workflow7). Well it does show me the login page and after I login into, the unexpected happens. As we are developing in Silverlight and about that's about 90% of our current GUI, it stops working and I got this error, crossdomain error calling webservice which we using to communicate our UI layer with application layer. This is really puzzling as I already have the clientaccesspolicy.xml in my application folder. So I start to google about this and seem this is quite a common issue for Silverlight with web services.

Thus I’m really scratching my head and after intense 1 hour of searching, I found no solutions. I have tried crossdomain.xml after found . But still not working but if I switched back to localhost, then everything works again. This is surely frustrated. But after a good dinner and bath, I try my luck again in Google and i found this excellent article about setting cross domain for Silverlight workaround from Jon Galloway article which pointed me to correct direction about my issue. It got me to Tim Heuer blog about clientaccesspolicy file. I read the whole the article and the last paragraph show my mistakes and it's so plain simple. Let me quote from the site about whereabouts of the file

"Either way, when you are done with the file, it needs to go in the ROOT of the domain. This is important as it is not the application root, but the root web. Even if your app is at foo.com/myapp, the policy file needs to be at foo.com/clientaccesspolicy.xml."

Root is the word I’m looking for and my file is located wrong place after all. So it should be at the root of the domain and after i copied the file over to my root domain which in this case is the default (wwwroot folder which i think is default folder used by 90% people :-D). My application now is working now. I'm so relieve that I don't have to spend another few hours for this problem. So thanks to Jon and Tim for help me to solve my issue. So anyone else is having this issue? Do leave me a comment if you have similar issues and I see if I can help as well.

Have a nice day!

Happy New Year 2010!

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:16:00 +0000

Here at Unispace, we would like to wish everyone Happy New Year!! This year we will be releasing our beta real soon and will update everyone here about it.

We would like to wish everyone good health, plenty of 'Good Luck' and tons of happiness in coming year ahead. Have a blast 2010!

Unispace blog address has changed!

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:50:00 +0000

Today our Unispace blog had changed from unispaceworks.blogspot.com to blog.unispaceworks.com. This is to reflect a more streamline our websites addresses. Hope this will make easier time for our readers or customers who are following our blogs.

3D Tag Cloud for Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:46:00 +0000

Today i just made some changes in my blog. There's been ages i have updated our blog. As a programmer, i always fascinated with animated programs. So today i made some adjustments to the blog to show a really cool tag clouds. It's combination of flash and some fancy javascripts.

It's a product from WP-Cumulus made by Roy Tanck which meant for WordPress. But there are different implementations for WP-Cumulus and for blogger i found from Amanda Fazani. In her article, we explain how to install BlogCumulus by changing Template and voila we are done! there are some tweaking to it, such as fonts, background color. So for more info, check it out here.

Business Model Presentation

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:01:00 +0000

Today found an interesting slides on Business Model and it's business example is Skype, an VOIP software company.

Interesting to know how to position our business model based on this slides? Will update in the next post. See if that helps us.

Please leave your comments if you have other ideas on your Business Model.

Business Model

View more presentations from Ennovainc.

Youtube : Social Media Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:33:00 +0000

Something to share about Social Media which a buzz this couple of years. Here's a video showing what is social media about and their impact to our current world...

Heard of facebook before? :-D i guess so.... Enjoy the show....

Gold Mindset Workshop

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:20:00 +0000

Last week, Veyron and I attended a 1 day workshop. The title of the workshop is "Gold Mindset for Technopreneurs". It was organized by Mdec and Change University.

It started our abit late where i'm late as well. It suppose to be start at 9am and i reach there about 915am.... but luckily i'm not the last, there are couple of people that are late as well. Thus we start about 930am. We started off with some ice break sessions and then our first game 'Blue and Red' game. I'm not going details on the games but i play that before in my Asiaworks course, thus i was relegated to Observer role. But it's pretty good to see those people playing the game and i thought it will be alot of twist but in the end, ethics prevails and one participants points out maybe the stakes of the games is not high enough.

the sharing sessions after the game, i felt dragged abit long and mostly due to trainers really want us to know about what we want to achieve out from the workshop. About 1230pm, we break for lunch. Nothing fancy about the lunch but i had ot with the trainer and we had a good chat about power presentation for senior management like CEO.

we resume our workshop at 130pm and we started off with focus games and how focus enable us to reach our goals. i think the highlights of the afternoon is on the next game we about to play, the speed game. the game is really simple, the goal of the game is achieve the fastest time for all 19 person from the outside of the room and sitted on the chair. the time is counted from everyone come in and last person sit down on the chair. Well first i thought this is going be boring.

the first time we did it, from opening the door , rushing in and scrambling for a chair, all of us took 14 seconds and we thought it's okay. Trainer ask us can we do better than 14 seconds and we say we can. for the next few times, we did from 14 seconds to 8-9 seconds. We did alot of strategies like rearrange the chairs nearer to the door, line our selves up before go in and synchronize our movements and many little things. But our trainer told us that little things only will improves little time as we tried a few times and we still achieved about the same time.

Thus this seriously need a new way of doing it and we did. Most of the time i was the follower, follow whatever other self-elected leaders says. We in the end split ourselves into 2 groups as there are two doors and we achieve 5 seconds. But now trainer told us this is not even bronze timing. And we were like how can this be. We adjust and coordinate better and change some people in two groups. In the end, after i think 20 times of trying, we manage to break the record of 3.58 seconds. We really relieved we made it and break the previous 2 groups record.

i think this help breaks the ice for all of us and we feel we really achieved something that day which we never thought possible. So i think everyone that day learn about change and how learn to change and cope with change can lead us to some better place. We are all champions that day.

We end the day with alot of sharing and from everyone sharing i guess alot of people is learning something and some participants that in the morning seems withdraw or uninterested suddenly by end of the day, all come to life and willing to share their thoughts. Which i can really change and those people has truly "stretched".

As for me, that day i learned something about myself and makes me think alot, deep into what is i want to achieve the days forward. For the past 2 months, we as a group has learn alot and for me is a really eye opener to world of entrepreneurship. But i'm glad i'm part of it now and enjoy the ride and see where this will take us forward. So readers, if you have any interesting stories, let us know. cheers :p

Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches - Web 2.0 Expo NYC

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:29:00 +0000

A fews weeks ago, i was discussing on the LAMP architectures based on a slides i'm found in the internet.

Today i also want to share another quite interesting slides on scable web architectures. This has more details to it from presentation layer all the way to data layer which is find most interesting. As we all know data layer is hardest to scale as it's quite hard to seperate your data out and merge it back in one query. And if you keep all you data in one place, sooner or later, you'll find that it will degrades faster than you say 'We have problem, Houston'. But of my recent reads in internet, all methods involves open source.

So how about microsoft stuff? Do microsoft have architecture to scale? Or they just don't have what the open source has? Or should architecture be technology-agnostic to be fully effective?

Well i will let you enjoy the slides or leave me your comments on this.

Enjoy!

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches - Web 2.0 Expo NYC

View more documents from iamcal.

Scalable web-based workflow platform

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Today i come upon a interesting slide that discuss about architectural of a web based workflow platform. It has interesting concepts that made up the platform.

The one i want explore more is they sugges to used LAMP platform which consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL and
PHP
Perl, hence LAMP as the platform to host the system.

But what about if the other rest of the population uses Microsoft technologies? So what it should be? Is it Windows, IIS, SQL, ASP.net? WISA... sounds abit weird, is it?

But whatever it is, seems like these are the only 2 that i know of. So i'm just wondering is there other combinations to create web platform that has the similar features. So any takers anyone?

But if you don't have any opinions, just enjoy the slide. :-D

Scalable web-based workflow platform

View more OpenOffice presentations from Ashutosh Bijoor.

WPF Workshop

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:18:00 +0000

For the past 2 days, I have been attending WPF workshop organized by MDEC / NTDC. I was clueless on WPF and since Puan R has been asking me to attend it, I registered it knowing that i need to come back from singapore earlier. As our project will be using Silverlight, a subset of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) as part of our a Rich Internet Application strategy, so WPF subject is quite important topic for us. This is one of the pre-seed programme benefits that we have received recently. I hope many more to come in the future.

For WPF, I was exposed to fundamentals of WPF about the XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) and was able to create simple animations and pretty interesting controls which never could have been so easily done via Winform or javascripts. Though XAML is at first hard to decipher, but using tools such as Expression Blend 2 and Visual Studio 2008 ( the intellisense in VS2008 does help alot which Blend don't have) does help me learn about XAML much easier and faster.

Well WPF is all about XAML and without it, it will render it useless. I learned alot about WPF concepts such as layouts, templates, controls, binding, events, commands and many many many more. I now know more about WPF capabilites on 3D, manipulating graphics, controls and many more. I also learn about differences on WPF standalone (exe), WPF Browser Application and the more famous plugin, Silverlight.

Tomorrow i'll be learning more about data binding and 3D topic. Hope my trainer, Mr Lee Daqing can cover all the topics by end of tomorrow. Below is my first WPF application which has a circle bouncing up and down mimicing a bouncing ball although my example will ignore gravity as it will bounce indefinitely but hey this is my first application. Enjoy and comments on my XAML on how to improve it further.

In next article, I will explore on how to make a object to be moveable using mouse drap on runtime. Happy Coding!

Recapture of Moments...

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:18:00 +0000

Alot of happens since our last blogs and we are extremely busy on our projects and daily lives. Well this blog is not about our project progress but just want to share on some of the things we did last couple of month.

April and May is certainly a busy month for us. On April 20th, we finally met up with our development manager, Encik S (full name is not provided to protect personal info :-p) and was briefed on our deliverables and Mdec expectations. More important is that we received our first cheque on first schedule. This is truly a memorable day for us as this justify our efforts for the past 1 year since Veyron floated the idea of Pre-Seed fund to me almost one year ago.

In April also, both Veyron and I attended a one day workshop organized by EO (short for Entreprenuers Organization). The workshop is coincidently name as "Surviving the Crisis" - Going Global Getting Lean as the main tagline for this year. It was an eye opening for us as we get to meet lot's of entreprenuers, CEOs and world class speakers for the event. There are 3 keynote speakers this year namely,

Verne Harnish, author of "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits"
Guys Parsons, a leading practitioner in applying Lean principles
Prof George Kohlrieser, author of "Hostage at the table: How Leaders can overcome Conflict. Influence Others and Raise Performance"

All the speakers really give me alot of inspring and information especially on being surviving and thrives in times of crisis. It was eye opener event as well for me to hear from them and i guess i was slightly more knowledgeable that day. All the keynote speeches has alot of impact on me, while all speakers come from different perpectives but all has a common message which is how to thrive in time of crisis and that's important to know in times like this.

Unfortunately i did not take any pictures from the events to share here or more details on the keynotes as the amount of the info was hummagous and you got to be there to learn it. Another highlight of the event is the Super CEO section which featured Malaysian Airlines (MAS) CEO, Dato' Sri Idris Jala. This section definitely change my mind of MAS as Dato' Sri Idris Jala certainly has the criteria of a great CEO where he shared with us how he become a CEO of MAS when MAS was on USD400 losses in 2005. He shares with us on his 6 principles of busines transformation which he manage to turn around MAS less than 2 years to profits (more than profit USD265 in 2007):

Games of Impossible
P & L Anchorage
Discipline of Action
Situational Leadership
Winning Coalition
Divine Intervention

These 6 principles are those he uses while he was in MAS to transform MAS from red to black and he stressed alot on BRF (arconyms for Big Results Fast). The way he told us on these principles are highly entertaining and informatives as we was laughing and busy writing down on his principles. In between he manage to squeeze in a brief sales talk on the MAS promotion that launched on the same day. But the most suprising part of Dato' Sri Idris is he is good guitar player as he wrapping up his session, he play his sons' own pen song with acoustic guitar. This shows a good CEO is versatile person which is not only a leader but also a salesman, entertainer, a visionary and much more. I also find him to be a down to earth and man with good principles based on faith which I find rare it nowadays. I can only can compare within my limited knowledge of business leaders like YTL group CEO Francis Yeoh.

As we just started this journey into technoprenuership, the next 12 months (11 months left as time of writing.. :-D ) is crucial before we start our commercialization next year (hopefully it can be earlier... maybe end of the year perhaps?), we are looking on how to survives after this period. As we were on this journey, the event certainly make me realized that this is the road I want to go even i'm not sure what is lying for us in the future but i know it will be good for me and my partners and it's worth trying for.

Marketing Ratio

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:30:00 +0000

Today i have known something new about marketing. Marketing isnt something about skills or technique but is all about mathematics. Well indirectly it is still touching a little about skills and technique but to rate the effectiveness of the marketing, its all back to the basic mathematics.

Its all about RATIO. Let me explain it.

When a sales or marketing person is doing their job, they are to follow a certain guidelines or pre-prepared scripts from the company to make their calls and to negotiate with their customers. These scripts could be refined versions or even could be some old skool scripts which was created at 'who knows when'.

When they use this specific scripts, they are only getting that specific amount of feedback or reply from their customer. Lets say the ratio is 10 calls, 5 appointments, 3 presentations, 1 business closure.

This means the ratio of this marketing or sales script is 10:5:3:1. Therefore plainly said, in order to get 2 business closure, the employee will need to make 20 calls to get 10 appointments which will result in 6 presentations and 2 business closure.

A company will always need to review and upgrade their so called "scripts" to increase the effectiveness which can be easily evaluated via the numbers on the ratio. Some really refined scripts will not obtain a 100% effectiveness but through all the fine tuning, it would really get there.

A lot of companies out there actually do not work via a script and thus unable to evaluate their own company's performance thus causing no adjustment or tuning to be done. All companies out there have a sales and marketing department and i always strongly agree that they perform their duty via script basis. They could even come up with multiple strategic "scripts" which they could use over the time to judge how effective they are.

This is highly important espacially during economic downturn times like this.
When the times are good, all company will prevail and make big bucks BUT during hard times like this, only the most disciplined company will outlast the economic meltdown. Think about it and let us know what you think.

Unispace First Blog

noreply@blogger.com (theSlave) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:50:00 +0000

This is Unispace First Blog and also mark the beginning of the a long journey for Unispace to become what she destine to be. My name is Masterbear (pseudoname of course) and i will be the Unispace's first bloggers and in future they will be more.

First, i need introduce Unispace and explain why this blog is being setup in the first place. Unispace is a soon-to-be-project between four young aspiring technoprenuers. Unispace in short is a Web 2.0 workflow system that has some unique attributes that other current workflow system does not have which are collobrations, connectivity, and easy to use. We also plan to have many Web 2.0 features in this project to make this project more exciting for us.

This project is work in progress still and this blog marks on how our journey to make Unispace workflow from the beginning till the end. This blog also serves other purpose such as sharing news, feature updates and our antics in Unispace. It's my aspiration to this blog to share our product to the world. I hope i will see the end product and remember today when i write these words today.

And so god bless Unispace and Good luck!