How it Changed…..

Sharing from a friend’s mail:

Here I am sitting in my office @ night…
Thinking hard about life
How it changed from a maverick collage life to strict professional life……

How tiny pocket money changed to huge monthly paychecks
but then why it gives less happiness….

How a few local denim jeans changed to new branded wardrobe
but then why there are less people to use them

How a single plate of samosa changed to a full Pizza or burger
But then why there is less hunger…..

Here i am sitting in my office @ night…
Thinking hard about life
How it changed…..

How a bike always in reserve changed to car always on
but then why there are less places to go on……

How a small coffee shop changed to cafe coffee day
but then why its feels like shop is far away…..

How a limited prepaid card changed to postpaid package
but then why there are less calls & more messages……

Here i am sitting in my office @ night…
Thinking hard about life
How it changed……

How a general class journey changed to Flight journey
But then why there are less vacations for enjoyment….

How a old assembled desktop changed to new branded laptop
but then why there is less time to put it on……….

How a small bunch of friends changed to office mate
But then why we always feel lonely n miss those old frnz.….

Here i am sitting in my office @ night…
Thinking hard about life
How it changed….. How it changed……..

Internet: How much US Subscribers Lag in GSM

Thanks to CDMA and now the locked GSM, US is behin Euorope and Asia in GSM. Here is an interesting encounter, CNet is proudly educating US subscribers how they may change SIM cards while travelling abroad to save on call tariff (Swapping SIMs to save big on calls abroad). To make it more interesting, there is a FAQ that tells what a SIM card is and how it is replaced. On a recent visit to home, an expat friend from Amazon.com was astonished to see how much we use our cell phones and text here in Pakistan.

Swapping SIMs to save big on calls abroad

25 million handsets at risk due to IMEI

25 million handsets at risk in India due to the Chinse handsets lacking unique IMEI. According to a recent regulation, Indian governemnt is going to block all such handsets. India is estimated to have atleast 25 million chinese handsets majority of which is owned by low end consumers. This may have huge potential effects on many industries including operators, handset manufacturers, taxes and many others.

It may also raise concerns in neighbouring regions like Pakistan who are also a big market of chinese handsets.

For Details, See>> 25 million handsets die as clock strikes midnight in india!

Telenor’s India Plan Faces Difficulties from Telenor Shareholders

Telenor’s aggressive plan to enter the rich Indian mobile market by taking 60% shares in Unitech (a start-up mobile operator) is facing strong opposition back at home. Telenor is said to finding alternates to complete its plan.

The day Telenor unvieled its plans to buy 60% shares in Unitech India, its share price fell by 26%. Then, the shareholders have put forward a strong opposition to its plans of a Rights Issue of $1.8bn. There was a political pressure as well on the 54% share holder, the Norwegian Government. During one year, the Telenor has faced a 70% decline in its share prices which is under pressure due to the global financial crisis effecting its sales and revenues. The share holders have very strong concerns on a rights issue under these conditions. Telenor’s CEO told Financial Times that they are considering on alternates to collect funds for Unitech investment like selling assets, cutting dividends or reducing capital spending.

See Also:

Telenor Forced to rethink its move to India

Going may be tough for Telenor

Fallacies of Distributed Computing

During development of a distributed messaging based application, I felt that developers still bring the fallacies about distributed programming when coming from a conventional programming background. There are somethings different in distributed programming, for example, Network unreliability, latency and bandwidth limitations. Since I have been working on distributed applications from the age of tightly coupled synchronous calls to loosely coupled, asynchronous messaging which is hot these days; I had an understanding of the challenges of distribution but this resource was much more formulated collection of these challenges. You may check a brief summary on Wikipedia or get a more detailed article here.

Martin Fowler’s First Law of Distribution (”Don’t Distribute”) is another good advice for distribution which advises Don’t distribute until it’s required because of the inherent issues of distribution.

Novel Ships Mono Development Tool

Novel has released Mono Development Tool, part of its Mono Project which delivers an open and portable framework compatible to Microsoft .Net framework. It provides an option to develop and run .Net applications on a variety of platforms like Linux and Mac OS X. Instead of competing with leading .Net IDEs, they are concentrating to provide a cross platform tool. With this release, they are also shipping Mono 2.0 Beta parallel to .Net 2.0. Though I don’t know much of business success stories of Mono, but it definitely has a potential.

Links:
eWeeks Article
Project Mono Home Page

I’d rather fish with Dad than make a million — Cricketer Clarke sacrifices lucrative IPL for his ailing father

That was a little bottom-side news on a local news paper but enough to shock me: Australian cricketer Michael Clarke left a potential deal with IPL that may earn a million dollar or more for him. The major reason behind was that he wanted to give more time to his father who is suffering from cancer.

Thanks a million, son

Clarke ignores IPL to spend time with sick father — Crick Info

Clarke has captained Australian Twenty20 team and was among the highest profile Australian to leave the lucrative chance that might pay him $1.47million for 44 days’ work in India for April and May.  “Dad and I talked about it (IPL). I told him what it was – the money they were offering and things like that. But Lara, mum, dad, my sister and I had dinner and I told them then that I wasn’t going to go. They asked why, but they were very supportive of my decision,” Clarke was quoted as saying by ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ .

In this materialistic age when the money matters much more than the human feelings and relations, when sacrifice means to leave something to get another worldly thing, when we really love just our own material desires; a busy professional sacrifices a huge benefit just to care for his father. Oh my God! We may argue rudely that the pity cricketer had a more cheap and efficient solution of hiring a team of medical professionals to care for his father and should opt the deal to earn more money for his father and family. Come on! even one billion dollars would  not give more than this sacrifice and the ’silly’ fishing hours to his ailing father who melted his life for his kids and family.

Such sacrifices were common in East for centuries and, here, people used to give much higher priorities to human issues over materialistic gains BUTTTTT, alas, now the ‘fast moving’ life style (rather the fast-decaying life style) is going to swallow all these old-fashioned stuff. This is making the lives more and more difficult everyday — everyone is alone to face the hardships of life. We are running so fast behind money that we don’t have enough time for our families, our kids, our elders and even ourselves. My physician may be warning me to spare some time for my health and a work-life balance but I would rather prefer to have some multi vitamin pills and some easier cholesterol reduction treatment because the new life style and the sky-high targets that I have set for myself/family are pushing me hard.

Is Microsoft Stepping back from Mobile Web Development?

Many people feel that Microsoft is stepping back from mobile web development tooling. This feeling has got fuel from the stunning fact that Microsoft has taken off the designer support from its new Visual Studio 2008. The MSDN documentation for .Net 3.5/Visual Studio 2008 (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b73×06dt.aspx ) asks to create mobile web project in Visual Studio 2005. Most of the pages on ASP.Net mobile development on MSDN are outdated and not updated for a year or many years. The official ASP.Net portal asp.net has a mobile web roadmap that ends in a desert after .Net 2 (http://www.asp.net/mobile/road-map/) and it seems not been updated for many years. The device support is silent for any progress after 2003 http://www.asp.net/mobile/tested-devices/). In his blog, Omar Khan, the Group Program Manager of Visual Web Developer, gave his custom templates to leverage Studio 2008 for mobile web development and people bombarded him with questions about Microsoft stepping back from mobile web tooling and he couldn’t answer them(http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2007/09/17/tip-trick-asp-net-mobile-development-with-visual-studio-2008.aspx).

This has created a threat among us, the people involved in technology selection about our selection of ASP.Net for mobile development. We were already concerned about narrow device support for Non-Windows based phones.

Can anyone from Microsoft may comment on this?

Occasionally Connected Computing – Best of Both Worlds! May Be!

These days I’m previewing OCC — Occasionally Connected Computing Architectures. This is an architecture where client application may continue working even when off-line (though the functionality or data freshness may degrade within a given limit under which user may continue his work). As the traditional online applications are too much dependent on the network health and availability while the networks are prone to problems (See Wikipedia article Fallacies of Distributed Computing) such applications suffer too much from network problems. But by making it ready to work in both off-line and online modes, these applications may be made much more usable and productive.

How It Works

Cache Locally — Sync When Connected

It keeps some sort of local storage of data/service messages when off-line and synchronizes with the server when gets connected. There may be different implementations but basic idea is the same. Some simple systems may have a local database with replication performed when online. Others may have a local cache for reference data and prepares a message queue for the transactions performed which are forwarded to the server when connected. Similarly, the server may also send some updated info/service messages when connected.

Two Approaches from Microsoft: Service-oriented vs. data-centric approach

Strengths

Continuous Operation When Connection Unavailable/Poor (Though quality of work may degrade)

Rich UI of Desktop Applications

High throughput of Local Applications

Ease of Deployment of Web Applicatiolns

Challenges

Both sides of application must be loosely coupled

The client application must adopt to changing connection status

Conflict Resolution when something may change at both ends

Security

Transaction Management

Current Status of OCC

Due to the poor UI of traditional web applications, the smart client was being pushed hardly by Microsoft and some other vendors were also investing in it (like java Web Start with Swing and Web services in java, SWT from eclipse and Flash). But Google’s AJAX based interactive web applications struck hard into that advancement. But, now, once again people have started talking about RIA (Rich Internet Applications). And OCC supporting vendors are trying to push it once again. Microsoft Silver Light and Java FX are the more famous recent progresses.  But still we, the enterprise architects have to wait a little more for a stronger market acceptance. After that we will get enough testimonials, enough patterns, tool support, APIs and components.

References

Wikipedia : Fallacies of Distributed Computing

Microsoft : Occasionally Connected Smart Clients

Adobe White Paper : The Occasionally Connected
Computing (OCC) Model

Occasionally connected computing architectures

LinkedIn Set to Become Financial Research Broker

The professional social network is getting into the expert advice game, joining Gerson Lehrman, Yahoo and Google.

Looking to leverage its base of millions of professionals, LinkedIn this year will launch a primary research service to help financial services employees tap experts for advice on the social site’s network of 18 million-plus users. More…