Gmail has themes now
Gmail has finally gotten themes, serious one, goofy ones, theres something for everyone.
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MISNOMERIC
Look, Think and Act!
Asian CERC Launches Reportsjunction.com
Asian CERC Information Technology Limited, a provider of financial software products and content services, has launched a new website called www.reportsjunction.com. The website offers more than 60,000 documents covering annual reports and IPO Prospectus since 1995 and offer documents and quarterly results. The product basically targets array of us
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Avoiding Over-Runs in Projects: Manage the Requirements Phase!
Often there is much hustle about projects running into “fire” and delays in delivery unlike the ones where the scope is chiseled out very hard.
Over the past several years I have been a part of many such projects. To share a rough figure over 30 % of the projects have been in this so called “fire” because off other significant reasons but 70% (the biggest chunk) because of mismanaged “Requirements Phase” and the common excuse being “Client is not sure of what he wants”.
Often during the Business and Technology tussle we miss out the actual objective of the requirements exercise and end up catering to most of the unexpected and impromptu needs.
To begin with lets take a look at the simplified version of a typical project cycle as can be illustrated as :
Simple View of a Development Cycle
(Click on the image to see a full view)
For any project the critical phase is Requirements as it forms the basis of the entire activity for the remaining cycle. In most of the engagements when I analyzed I came across that most of the user requirement turned to be something not in scope (specific to the case where “Client is not sure what he wants”).
To find a cure for this recurring issue I tried a more objective approach for the requirements. To put it visually here it is
Requirements Phase - The New Approach
In the above illustration
1. Are the User Expectations (a.k.a. the wishlist)
(As a matter of fact whenever a business decides to design or redesign an Application they would like it to be more scalable in context to be able to make use of the same for a longer period of time before it calls for a re-engineering once again so they often try to visualize things in a time scale and come up with requirements which happen to be expectations a.k.a the wish list which is beyond the necessities )
2. The common area where some of the expectations are more or less treated as necessities to be able to give the scalability
(These are typical requirements which are covered under any project as a result of effective planning by Project Managers – the common term they use is “buffers”)
3. Necessities is a must have or the core basis of the project.
Trying this approach helped improve a lot of the time line and “out of scope” issues. Keeping a realistic view of requirements (2+3) helped plan the development activity accurately unlike “Guesstimates”
Aggregators & Syndicators (Web 2.0)
In one of my recent endeavors while understanding and addressing the Web2.0 fundamentals I came across something which was more fundamental than I thought, a simple question “What is the difference between syndicators and aggregators”. Here is what I found
News Aggregator: A news aggregator is a software application or remotely hosted service that collects syndicated content from disparate sources and provides a single consolidated view. These applications can also be commonly referred to as a feed reader, feed aggregator or simply just an aggregator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregation
News Syndicator: In general, syndication means the distribution a news article through a syndicate - in this case an RSS feed - for publication in a number of newspapers or periodicals simultaneously. Used in the context of RSS because RSS syndication is all about distributing content for reuse or redistribution on other websites.
http://www.rsstoolchest.com/rss-glossary.html
Some other definitions from Google -
News Aggregator: Aggregators, such as NewsGator and AmphetaDesk , allow users to subscribe to feeds from sources as diverse as the BBC, Sci-Fi Today, Slashdot and thousands of bloggers across the world. The services work by checking an Internet address at a regular interval, usually once an hour, to see if new content has been added. …
News Syndicator: The process by which a web site is able to share information, such as articles, with other web sites. It is an alternative means of accessing the vast amount of information that now exists on the world wide web. Instead of the user browsing websites for information of interest, the information is sent directly to the user.
Sun Takes Lead In Open Source
History is full of examples in which open standards prevailed because they grew markets, while proprietary systems failed because they didn’t. Sun was founded as an open source company before the term “open source” had even been coined, and open source and open standards have remained fundamental to its strategy ever since.
Top 3 Stupid Comments for iPhone that We Should Defend!
i can’t believe there are people would say so much bad things about iPhone.
