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Jan Alonzo: jmalonzo
This morning I started to do a brain dump in Evernote rather than Google Docs, which is what I normally used. Google Docs is my preferred application for note-taking, brain dumps, and more recently, for general-purpose document archiving (I still use Dropbox for personal stuff).
But this morning was different. I asked myself why did I do it in Evernote rather than Docs? The first thing that came to my mind is that I don’t need another tab in my browser window. I already have 30+ tabs in it and it’s getting difficult to get to a manageable state.
Secondly, I realized that using/writing in Evernote’s desktop app just feels more comfy and I feel more focused. Being in a browser with Docs also make me watch the keys I press. I frequently press Ctrl-Q which kills my browser (Chrome) and I had to reload all 30+ tabs to restart again. Productivity kill. With Evernote, it’s just one app and it wouldn’t take too long to restart it.
Perhaps, I’ll try to work on my use-cases for Evernote more. My last post gave me insights on what I’m doing wrong with EN and what I should be doing in it.
Posted via web from .plan
Filed under: Uncategorized      
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Calen Legaspi: Five Software Trends and What They Mean for Business in the Third World
This is based on my talk at the Innovation Summit organized by John Clements and Harvard Business Publishing last month.
There are five trends in the software and internet space that every businessperson and entrepreneur should be aware of, since they're going to shake up the business landscape dramatically.
Trend #1: Accelerating pace and cost-reduction of software development
My company engaged in a joint-venture last year to develop an online product. The JV partner has been trying for three years to develop the product with different partners with little success, even as he employed some of the top developers in Philippine software industry.
Since the project was R&D with an unknown future revenue, we said that we could only commit two or three junior people at a time plus some interns, though the project was overseen by our CTO and we used the cutting-edge Grails framework. After two-weeks, the team presented its initial work, and the JV partner exclaimed, “You guys accomplished more in two weeks than the other teams did in six months!”
I could attribute this success to the Grails framework, and example of the rapid-development frameworks available today that weren't available to programmers just three years ago. The productivity jumps with these frameworks is literally and order of magnitude. And the best part is, most of these frameworks are free and open source!
This is a trend that will only accelerate – Software can be built faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper, because of rapidly improving frameworks, tools, components and free web service APIs. What does this mean for business? It means that big software companies will increasingly face competition with smaller companies with smaller teams of developers. Size and financial muscle will be less and less of a requirement to build powerful software.
Trend #2: Everything is going on the internet
When was the last time you went to a store and bought packaged software? Probably not in a while. More often we download software and install, but this too is getting less and less. Lately, web applications are getting so rich in functionality and feel that they are getting close to the richness of installed applications. This trend will continue with HTML 5. Not only will we experience even richer web applications, these web applications will have the capability to operate even offline and to store data on harddrives.
Software-as-a-service will increasingly be the primary way to distribute and access software. What does this mean for business? It means that the cost of distributing software is coming crashing down as well. You no longer need a massive manufacturing, packaging, distribution and retailing operation just to deliver your software. Even the cost of hosting software on internet servers is coming crashing down, with cloud computing. Again, the playing field is increasingly being leveled for smaller, more nimble software companies to compete against the giants.
Trend #3: The internet of things
In January 2010, scientists from Yale University and South Korea announced that they had created a transistor made out of just six carbon atoms! Does Moore's Law ring a bell? Moore's Law not only means that microchips will get more powerful, but they will also get smaller and cheaper at an accelerating pace.
What about Gilder's Law? Gilder's Law states that the bandwidth of a communications network triples every year.
Throw in nanotechnology, IPv6, self-configuring wireless networks and low-power wireless protocols and what do you get? The internet of things.
The internet of things means that not just PCs, mobile phones and servers will be on the internet. Increasingly, it will be things. Since computer processors and wifi adaptors are increasingly getting smaller and cheaper, we will increasingly have them everywhere – on our clothes, vehicles, appliances... even on crops and livestock. They will all have computer processors and be connected on the internet!
Again, what does this mean for business? It means that computer programs can be created that are even more powerful than previously imagined, since now they can reach out, extract data, or even control, a plethora of things that are all connected to the internet. And since software can be created cheaper and faster... software developers are becoming increasingly powerful.
Trend #4: Microsegmentation
Why is so much investment money going to search engines and social networking applications, which users are able to access for free? These are data-mining operations, for the purpose of highly-targeted advertising. Their goal is to learn as much as they can about you in a detailed manner, so that when advertisers need to reach out to someone like you they can do so without wasting their money on those they don't want to reach. For advertisers, it means it's now affordable to reach out to that needle in a haystack, without having to spend advertising money on the hay.
What does this mean for business? Again, small companies get a more level playing field against the big. Even with limited funds, a small company can dominate a small and dispersed niche, since it can target its advertising only on the people who'd be interested in its product.
Trend #5: Rise of the MicroISV
MicroISVs (Micro Independent Software Vendors) are software company made up of only one or two people. They've been gaining in popularity in the US in the past few years.
This phenomenon is simply the result of the previous trends I just talked about – It's so easy to develop, maintain, promote and distribute powerful, desirable software such that even just one or two people can do it. This just validates in the most extreme way that the playing field is leveling towards smaller, more nimble software companies.
What does this all mean for business in the third world?
The advantages that MicroISVs enjoy are the same advantages that software companies in the third world have access to. The level playing field being created does not just apply to size, but geographical location. Companies in developed countries do not enjoy significant advantages over those in developing countries.
This means that innovation and technopreneurship will continue to shift to the third world. We're seeing a lot of new technopreneurial enterprises emerging from China and India – not just outsourcing but the creation of intellectual property. I'm sure we will see innovation coming from other developing countries like the Philippines soon, for as long as these countries maintain the technical, business and cultural skills in needed to foster these innovations.
What can we do so that our country can compete in this new level playing field?
 The first is to support education. I mean not just for tertiary education in computer science and business. I also mean basic education in science, math and communication. Brain power wins in the new era and a country needs to cultivate its intellects to compete.
 The next is that we need to build communities between technologists and businesspeople. There's just not enough interaction between these groups of people. Business people understand markets and their needs but not how to create solutions to fulfill them. Technologies know how to create solutions, but not what markets need. We need to get these people in the same room often enough so that they can start exploring ways to fulfill market needs.
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Dean Berris: deanberris
For most of the later part of January and almost the whole of February I’ve been pre-occupied with some of my consulting work. There were some huge news that I wanted to share but didn’t find the time to share with the world through my blog. Here’s a quick run-down of the things that have been going on that I wanted to write about but didn’t find the time until now.
- My proposed BoostCon 2010 talk was accepted, and I’ll be presenting at Aspen, Colorado on May 13th if the schedule doesn’t change. If you’re going there too, I’d love to meet you face-to-face.
- The cpp-netlib team has released version 0.5 to the wild and contains some funky C++ HTTP client and server support. There’s more coming from that front and look out for another release really soon.
- I’m winding down work with my latest consulting gig and now I’m looking out for interesting C++ related projects to work on. For sure I’ll be spending a lot more time working on my open source libraries, but I’m now available to do consulting for funky C++ projects you might have.
- A handful of friends and I have just incorporated a consulting firm that specializes on highly scalable web applications development. I personally am playing the role of Chief Operating Officer of that company, but I will be doing some system architecture and design for the products we will be launching soon as well as system architecture guidance for clients of the firm. I’ll definitely link to our site as soon as we finalize the look and have it hosted.
So there you have it, just a list of quick-fire items that has taken a hold of my time for January and February. I’ll be covering some of the other C++ related news that happened during the past few weeks in the hopes that I can start a conversation with readers of the blog and the public as a whole. It’s been a good couple of months for C++ and I think it’s just going to get better and better.
Filed under: updates       
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Jan Alonzo: jmalonzo
Filed under: Uncategorized      
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JM Ibanez: Sporadic Update #42
(And Yes, I am Still Alive).
Notably, I've grown a year older, I'm still working at one of the best companies to work for, in the Philippines, in my opinion, and I'm still taking pictures. Mostly.
There's a lot on my mind, actually. I'm not sure whether I should keep this LJ or simply return to lurk mode, but what the hey.
In other news, I bought myself a personal laptop (my previous laptops were all work-assigned). Since I decided I needed something that'll last me quite a while, and that'll also be very usable as a development machine, I decided to buy a MacBook Pro. Yes, a MacBook Pro. Admittedly, I'm still an open source guy; the first thing I did to get an inhabitable work environment on it was to download Emacs :)
On the personal front: my body clock is out of whack, yet again. I experimented with doing a detailed log of my activities, and kept a small notebook at hand for several months the last time I had this problem— and I must say, it worked for me at the time. I was able to keep a handle on the times I slept and woke up, and it kept me aware of how much sleep I was actually getting, and how much work I was getting done. I only stopped keeping the log fairly recently, after work suddenly piled up on me and I couldn't integrate my log-keeping into my workflow. I'll try it once more, and I'll probably make it more "sticky".
That is all, I guess. Until several months from now, or the next post (whichever comes earlier).
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Jan Alonzo: jmalonzo
Posted in Uncategorized      
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Jan Alonzo: jmalonzo
Gwibber is a popular Linux desktop app that you can use for Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and a bunch of other social networking sites. Here’s a brief instruction on how to use it using pygi – the Python GObject Introspection library – instead of pywebkitgtk.
- Download WebKitGtk, Gwibber (preferably the development version via bzr) and pygi and install them.
- Grab the patch attached to bug 507920 and apply it to Gwibber.
That’s all there is to it.
From a user’s perspective, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using pywebkitgtk or pygi as there are no user-visible changes in doing so. But from a developer’s point of view, using pygi allows one to prototype using the latest copy of WebKitGtk as well as being able to take advantage of APIs that use third-party libraries, in case of WebKitGtk using API that use libsoup. Doing this by hand in pywebkitgtk would take a considerable amount of time and would probably more error-prone.
So if you’re a python-gtk developer looking to embed WebKitGtk in your new application, I would strongly suggest using pygi instead of pywebkitgtk.
n.b. I’m the maintainer of pywebkitgtk and will probably deprecate it once pygi is merged in pygobject, the official python GObject bindings.
Posted in software Tagged: pygi, python, pywebkitgtk      
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Jan Alonzo: jmalonzo
As I get older and *ahem* wiser, I feel the need to constantly change and assess myself and my improvements on a daily or weekly basis. There are an awful lot of things I would like to change personally, but for now I would like to share a few things that I would like to focus on for 2010 in terms of my open source effort.
Last year
During the past year I’ve made significant contributions to a few open source software applications, in particular the WebKitGtk port of the open-source WebKit project, as well as maintaining the state of the pywebkitgtk project. But I suddenly lost interest due to a lot of factors: one of them was basically that eventhough I’ve contributed a significant amount of time and resources to those projects, I’ve realised I hardly learned something new or significant. This is my fault in that I’ve focused too much on things I knew already or things that were easy and not putting enough effort to learn and dive into the unknown. I’ve learned that and next time I get involved, I’ll be wiser.
This year
I would like to get back to developing web apps again and be more proactive in maintaining and developing applications and software that I already have instead of looking for the next fun project to work on. I’ll probably be writing new stuff but it will be solely based on need, not because something that I want.
There are definitely a lot of things to learn from the past year (or two) and hopefully moving forward I won’t be making the same mistakes twice.
Posted in asides      
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