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General
When a 19th century romantic French writer by the name of Victor Hugo said “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come” he obviously could not envision Pakistani bureaucracy. Not only can it reduce an idea to nothing more than its meager skeletal remains squirming in its own vile, it too often does.
Come 2004, the IT bubble is about to burst in a military run, democratic, American influenced politically independent subcontinent country by the name of Pakistan. It is here in our story that along comes an idea. It is a simple idea yet revolutionary in every way, the idea to prepare this country for the…
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Events General
The past whole week I was really excited about going to the exhibition on 5th and 6th at expo center Lahore since the theme read “home expo and super car expo”. I was counting on seeing some innovative home solutions, fancy cars and a lot of appliances for both. As I entered the arena, an ear piercing heavy bike engine race greeted me. Oh wow nice, we have bikes here too… and lots of them, but let’s see if we have the actual products that are expected.
First cars!! Honda Launched its new City Aspire at the event. This attracted a lot of young crowd who wanted to check it…
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General
NOTE: This is a sponsored post
Football. The most popular sport in the world. That may be hard to believe, we being a die-hard cricket nation, but there are many amongst us who get their blood pumping whenever our favorite team kicks some balls (pun intended). There’s excitement in the air, and the airwaves for that matter, when Spanish rivals Real Madrid and Barcelona are about to have a face-off on the field. Manchester United or Chelsea? The answer could incite either jeers or cheers, depending on who you’re surrounded by. It feels like you belong to an exclusive club really, not to mention how convenient it is to…
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Coffee Session General
There are two main things that are currently causing out growth in ICT to stall. One is the lack of original ideas, so most of the entrepreneurs either copy what is already around internationally or locally (same ideas of online shopping, online bidding) we still have not hit the jackpot with someone creating some thing like instagram or drawsomething and being acquired by one of the big names.
The second issue always lamented by entrepreneurs is lack of any funding sources in Pakistan. Over the years we have seen efforts being made to create funds which would help but what ended happening that most of these funds either did…
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Coffee Session General
We all know about the 7 layers of the OSI model. This is the framework by which computer networks are defined. Starting with the physical layer, going through the transport layer and finally culminating in the application layer where end user applications reside. I believe that this should be redefined to include and additional layer – the Social Layer. From the current vantage point, the Social Layer lies right above the Application layer – hence it is served by the Application layer.
The 90s witnessed a boom in what is now referred to as web 1.0. This consisted of static applications hosted over the web. Static applications meant that…
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General Mobile Apps Software & I.T.
Pakistani IT industry has been progressing rapidly over the last few years. It is heartening to see that the industry players are innovating and working in different areas to establish their expertise.
Recently, TenPearls, one of the leading IT companies of Pakistan, launched “Carumba!”, a 3D car racing game for iPhone and iPad. Carumba! has been designed and developed by TenPearls’ innovation labs. Launched as a free game, Carumba! allows users to earn coins during the race, and redeem them to unlock other cars and tracks or to get additional nitro boosts. It has also been integrated with Apple’s Game Center.
The game has received very good response from…
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Events General
‘Rethinking Pakistan’ [and my expression goes LOL and I will explain why] was the theme of the conference which took place at margalla hills Islamabad on March 31st 2011 organized by TEDx, lets just summarize here what TEDx is; before we further dig into the “theme” and happenings of this conference.
TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) and ’x’ denotes the independently organized events under the TED umbrella, mission is “Ideas worth spreading” and this events basically brings together individuals, communities and organizations with the opportunity to excite dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level (geographically). The programs combine live presenters, performers and pre-recorded talks from some of the most brilliant…
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Announcements Events General
ICT R&D Fund aims to provide graduating students a chance to really make their final projects counts. I have always felt that students in their final year some times product excellent products which due to lack of any infrastructure and proper guidance plus funding just go in the Universities Libraries.
Seems ICT R & D fund is giving these students a chance to take their projects to the next level by acquiring funding, if you are a final year student doing a project all you need is to get this form filled and submitted through your head of department .
Last date for submission for forms is 31st…
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Coffee Session General
I wanted to discuss the Thiel Fellowship and sort of run the idea among our readership to figure out if it was justified or not. Bay Area hedge fund manager Peter Thiel started a Fellowship program in his name about a year ago trying to capitalize not on start ups, but the smart kids who may actually come up with the next billion dollar idea.
Let there be no mistake. Innovation solves problems. Bankers, lawyers and hot shot executives are good for only one thing: managing an existing infrastructure. It is the innovators who turn existing ideas on to their heads and enable breakthroughs. Considering the point above, it…
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11:52 am
Similar thoughts are shared by joel spolsky on his blog. Here are some extracts
“The trick here is that when you manage programmers, specifically, task switches take a really, really, really long time. That’s because programming is the kind of task where you have to keep a lot of things in your head at once. The more things you remember at once, the more productive you are at programming. A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping zillions of things in their head at once: everything from names of variables, data structures, important APIs, the names of utility functions that they wrote and call a lot, even the name of the subdirectory where they store their source code. If you send that programmer to Crete for a three week vacation, they will forget it all. The human brain seems to move it out of short-term RAM and swaps it out onto a backup tape where it takes forever to retrieve.”
you can read the full article here
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html
1:17 pm
Ammar, I totally concur with Joel that multi-tasking for programmers is a complete no-no. I have noticed that when they are programming full-throttle, even a phone call can put a halt to the process. And it irritates the hell out of them. The question is, is this equally applicable to other members of the team – i.e. interface designers, project managers, operations managers, etc.?
6:23 pm
I dont think Managers shoudl be affected by thread switching — in fact all good managers should be ABLE to switch threads and gain the new context in the shortest amount of time — how else will they manage a myriad of issues from their team and environment?
Interface design — however — isnt just a creative art. It also requires keeping in mind a large number of target workflows, user demographics, use-cases, other related interfaces and more. Ofcourse that depends on how well defined and consistent the “global interface” rules are (e.g. all File Open dialogs should look the same etc).
From my side I love task switching — its a sure-shot way of keeping at a 100% of personal productivity. That’s the only way I have been managing Green & White, consulting, running a company, designing products, planning new initiatives, not to mention the administrative / operational stuff.
However I absolutely agree with programming — there is just no way to multi-task and program, and any time I have to look at anything I’m faced with a 2-3 day rampup time (to put everything in short-term RAM so to speak) and then a 100% mental capacity and bandwidth spent on the code itself.
Personally, I consider this a weakness of IDE user experiences, not necessarily a consequence of the work.
6:34 pm
Some additional food for thought tho, and this comes from traditional supply-chain management:
Task switching becomes painful when the load-time and tear-down time are too much and the actual processing does not maintain state.
Consider an assembly line where you can either make Widget X or Widget Y but not both. The production-time (goign from one point to the other in the assembly line) is 30 mins, but rampup and teardown time each is 2 hours. Its stateless because you cant just “pause” the open parts when you want to make widget B — you just have to take everything off the table and start again.
The human mind in some ways is similar — there is pretty much ONE main assembly line. Some of the smartest people are able to create two but then that’s not everyone.
The rampup time is the time used to gain context. The teardown time is the time taken to write everything down somewhere so you dont forget later on.
Phonecalls disrupt this assembly line — its like one of the machine breaking causing the entire line to stop, or worse.
So how do you solve this problem?
1- You use some way of scheduling the items loaded in the assembly line by order of priority, opportunity cost, and total production expectation of the day.
2- You find a way to minimize rampup time — usually (in SCM) by preparing “ready to go” kits of the parts, along with “fixed rules” of how those parts will be processed.
3- You add a way of maintaining state — as an example, what if you could simply move the actual table with all the parts just like they are, put in a blank table, make Widget B, then move tableA back in?
In the above three things, “fixed rules” are the processes established in the firm, “parts” are pieces of information or context needed to complete your task.
I think the above three duties is what software productivity tools should be doing — unfortunately most only focus on #1, and not context maintenance.