LAMP is still glowing bright with technology trends. Even AJAX is being cleaned up with google support and other companies coming along. Well life is going, as I learn to code more and more each day. It is my life and it is going well. Now if only pthreads and boost would learn to come together and things will be perfect. Yes this is a sad excuse for my blog to come back to life but it has to start somewhere.. :)
posted by Mr.Unlucky @ 6:21 PM
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Hello blog that I started in my class last semester. You sure were there for me to communicate to my class and to my instructor. I would come on here and make sure I did my assignment and would read what others had done to get to know them better. It was a fun experience, so today I write to you and say hello.. I will be back my dear blog friend but will need to change over to a known school blog
posted by Mr.Unlucky @ 6:20 PM
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In the paper, “Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks”, Casiaro and Sousa Lobo discusses the balance within an employee of being competent in what they do at the same time being a likeable person. A balance that they deem can be nurtured within your employees and one that can be leveraged for corporate performance. It at first seemed like a very basic paper that individuals like to work with people that they like, which seems reasonable enough to me. Once they started discussing it further though, it came apparent that this could be a very valuable tool in application within a business. The direct examples of the tech support lady, who could calm down the clients before they got to the competent jerks in the IT department. From a management view point however, even with the knowledge that she was creating such a social hub, that she should be kept over the person doing the work would be hard pressed to show to HR.
I would like to make a brace statement, that all IT people are competent jerks. Waite, before the mobs come after me, the article made a very valid point that it is all a matter of perspective. I don’t personally think that any IT person would be a jerk, but I could see from others perspectives that they may think of the IT jerks just because the IT employees are more logical and may lack the communication skills that the lovable fool would have. The methods that the paper said could truly help this sort of situation out where a well balanced individual could help to bridge this gap of communication.
It’s a balance though that an individual needs to be actively aware of. I say this because one can always just focus on the interpersonal communication efforts but as the paper stated, a lovable fool can quickly becomes a hated one. There needs to be that balance that the person knows what they are talking about, not just talking.
A very interesting paper, and one that I found very useful for future reference. I must be on my way to being a lovable competent employee cause I'm not a jerk nor a fool so I'm getting there !
posted by Mr.Unlucky @ 8:36 AM
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Building a 24-hour knowledge factory does have merit in that there are business processes that could be split into 8 hour increments and be passed onto the next global teammate. In fact, the 24 hour knowledge factory is already being worked into some professions. For example, an article recently published was discussing hospitals sending out x-rays over seas so that a radiologist who is wide awake could exam them instead of someone who half asleep working on the nightshift. The major factor that I feel 24 hour knowledge factories will fail is in the communication between the passing of hands. Even with new technologies of documenting what was done by the team before hand, the explaination may not directly translate or be understood the same to someone else. This is an issue of someone that could be sitting right next to you, so imagine someone across the world from you and their work ends up getting held up because they need to wait for a response from you, which in turn makes your work held up. In a sense this is like the grade school lesson where each student stands in a line and passes on the same msg to the next person by a whisper, by the time the msg gets to the last person in the chain, the msg ends up meaning something entirely different. True, technology would have these communication lines documented and communication lines could be built but its one thing building a process and having everyone from around the world following it. Back to the radiologist example, the document that I read gave an example of how a smaller offshore company made the best bid to exam the x-rays had only 2 certified professions that were signing off on all the work of the 20 other employees who were untrained.. Thats a scary thought that your work is dependent on whom ever each night and its hard for your business to be able to go out there each night and track what is going on in the other country efforts-which directly goes into my next topic,security.
The security risks that passing this work between working teams of different countries is more then the document leads one to believe. We have our own internal trade secret traders, so how much would the problem get when we open up to offshore companies.
On a good note though, communication and security are just barriers that can be overcome with time, effort, and patients. Its a very interesting topic, that it seems the medical professionals will be the front runners on seeing how well it will work.
Here is an article regarding radiologists:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12392-2005Apr23.html
posted by Mr.Unlucky @ 9:46 PM
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An interesting simulated test is being done by the CIA and other government officials. They are running a simulated cyber attack that is based 5 years into the future and testing their skills on preventing it. Very interesting, if you ask me. Not sure what exactly this will tell since it is all simulated and may not have the randomness of a true hack but it will be interesting to see how the government responds to it.
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,102065,00.html
posted by Mr.Unlucky @ 1:04 PM
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Writing Secure Web Applications
http://www.advosys.ca/papers/web-security.html#log
Based on what we have learned about the majority of the web using the lamp architecture, the security problems that this article points out is a very useful resource for everyone to go back and read. Even with these risks being documented across the internet and have even caused damage to sites, it is still very easy to just be a lazy programmer and not make sure that every security hole is fixed. Perhaps one reason these security flaws are not always on the front page of one’s to-do list, is that with web applications, an individual can quickly make the change if someone finds the flaw. This way of thought though is obviously not correct as financial lost could be a hard hit to face. I feel that the article best sums up this fact in its summary regarding closing the “barn door” Security needs to be covered on all fronts from the roof to the floor so that the barn can be completely secured on all fronts. Why even bother with the rest if your going to leave the door open to do what every a hacker would want to!
How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation
http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_evaluation.html
This paper is a very interesting read and discusses how Heuristic Evaluation improves the evaluation benefits in both cost and finding usability issues. Usability issues the paper says can not all be discovered no matter how good an individual evaluator is or how many evaluators you have. It comes out to be a fine balance of cost and usability improvements on the web site in the evaluation process. The number that the paper noted where the cost benefits and issues found was with 5 testers. I am interested if other research shows different results in this balance based on different test groups. Still though, I see how the balance of more people looking at entire website and not being stuck in one spot would allow more issues to be found as each person would be able to see the site from a different view point. Once the numbers of group members grows, from my own team experience the results become a much slower process, so I do agree with the concept of this balance
posted by Mr.Unlucky @ 9:19 PM
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This is big news even though it is old to yahoo and other portal pages. Google has unleashed its next small project at www.google.com/ig If you already have google mail, you already have an account to cusomised a homepage [its what google is calling it]. It allows you to add your gmail account, misc news feeds, weather, stocks etc... It offers a nice clean interface with out all the yahoo clutter. Once you have the homepage set up, try clicking and dragging one of the sections to another part of the sections, and it will allow you to place the section layout where ever you want them.
-very nice must be another example of AJAX as an early post I made references the architecture.
Well I like it, so you may want to give it a try.
posted by Mr.Unlucky @ 6:56 AM
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