Anti-porn bill has been passed in Indonesia, that would ban images, gestures or talk deemed to be pornographic.  Following is the justification by the Islamic groups:

Islamic parties said the law was needed to protect women and children against exploitation and to curb increasing immorality in Indonesian society.

Interesting! What is to be seen is how this ban is put into practice?

Are you a small software start-up adapting Agile Software Development practices?  Are you looking for a browser-based tool for managing your projects and collaborate among the users?  tinyPM should be a prospective option for you…

What is tinyPM?

tinyPM is a light and efficient tool allowing you and your teams to enhance Software Development process.  tinyPM is ideally suited for Agile Methodologies, providing all related features out-of-the-box.

What are the key features of tinyPM?

• User Stories as requirements – Requirements can be tracked as User stories.  Stories can be tagged suitably, adding more meaning
• Backlog Management – Once User Stories are created, they can be added to the backlog and tracked from there
• Iterations – As iterations are key to Agile projects, tinyPM enables users to create, manage and track iterations
• Activity History – All key activities like Creating User Stories, Assiging stories to Backlog or Iteration, Assigning Tasks to Users etc. can be tracked with ease
• Task Board – This makes sharing iteration state across team members so easy.  Automatic assignment of iteration tasks to users is also possible
• Project Tracking – Burndown charts on home pages
• Wiki – Essential for collaboration and communication among team members
• User Management – Role based user access

Also, tinyPM is so easy to get started.  All that is required on the Server, is Tomcat and MySQL.

How much does it cost?

There are two versions – Community and Professional version.  From the features standpoint, the only difference between the Free and Commercial version are:

• Free version limits the Number of Users to 5
• Free version provides only Forum based support (No E-Mail support)

For more details on pricing, you can go here

For a Quick Tour on the product, you can go here

This is a nice little product, that is tailored for Agile Software Development.

 

The Azure Services Platform (Azure) is Microsoft’s answer to the cloud computing platform.  Azure provides an operating system and a set of developer services, all required to build applications on the cloud. 

As with any cloud computing service, Azure has the following benefits from the Business standpoint:

• Reduce the need for Upfront Technology Purchases
• Higher Availability and Reliability of applications
• Security provided by the Microsoft Data Centers
• Pay-as-you-use model, to reduce the operational IT costs
• Scale up or Scale down the Infrastructure, at comparitively negligible costs
• Relieving Businesses from other IT costs like Software upgrades, Patch management etc. and instead concentrate on the needs of the users

Azure platform provides native support to Microsoft Technologies – like Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft Visual Studio Development environment – thus enabling developers to leverage their experience for building applications on the cloud.  As per information on the Azure website, more programming languages and development environments like Eclipse, PHP, Ruby and Python, will be supported in the near future.  Azure provides an open, standards-based and interoperable environment with support for multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML.

 

In brief, Azure Services Platform provides following services out-of-the-box (currently).

• Windows Azure – Cloud Services Operating System that serves as Development, Service Hosting and Service Management Environment
• Live Services – Platform for Handling User Data and application resources, to build rich social applications
• Microsoft SQL Services – Extends the SQL Server capability into a web-based, distributed relational database, that can store structured, semi-structred and unstructured data
• Microsoft .NET Services – Access controls for security, enterprise bus for inter-application communication and hosted workflow execution
• Microsoft Sharepoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services – Providing access for developers to Sharepoint and CRM Services

Following resources should give you more information on the Azure Services Platform:

About Azure Services Platform

Azure Whitepaper

Another Amazon product hosted on Amazon S3. Amazon Window Shopping is a really creative product from the ‘amazing’ minds.

It gives the pleasure of window shopping across various categories - like Books, Videos, Music etc. The interfacing is very cool and the keyboard navigation gives a realistic feel. Also possible are previewing a movie or listening to MP3, all using keyboard buttons.

You should try it! Sure you will not regret!

Jazoon ‘09, an international conference on Java Technology, is scheduled to take place between June 22-25 2009, at Zurich.

In addition to attending the conference, there are several ways in which a Java Developer can contribute to the event.

• Technical Long Talks
• Technical Short Talks
• Jazoon Rookie
• Jazoon Cutting Edge
• Birds-of-a-feather sessions

…are events, in which one can contribute.  To know more about registration and submission, dive here. Don’t forget that the selected speakers can travel and attend the conference, free of cost

An excellent post on how to effectively present, coming from none other than – Seth Godin

In short, following thumb rules can help making a good presentation.  For more details, refer to the original post here.

• Don’t hide something related to the topic of the presentation
• Use a remote and microphone for larger audience
• Don’t use Powerpoints with lots of slides and bulleted points.  Be really, really concise and use big-clear-fonts, big pictures, few words to express big-ideas!
• Make it really short – as short as 10 minutes!

Awesome post!

 

Many of us know about Google Gears as Google’s innovation to store web data offline, that can be viewed even in the absence of an Internet connection.  But Gears is much more than that.

What is Google Gears?

Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser. (as described by Google).

In other words, Gears enables web applications to use some features like local data storage,   natural interaction with desktop etc., that were enjoyed primarily by Desktop based applications.

What are the features of Google Gears as of version 0.4?

Local Server Module

This module enables web application to cache HTTP resources like images locally and serve them without requiring a Network connection. 

Applications manage the cache using two classes – ResourceStore and ManagedResourceStore.  ResourceStore is for caching ad-hoc URLs using Javascript and ManagedResourceStore is for caching set of URLs declared in the “manifest” file and updated automatically

The Local Server intercepts all HTTP/HTTPS requests and serves them when all of the following conditions are met:

• URL is cached in ResourceStore or ManagedResourceStore
• Store’s enabled attribute is set to “true”
• If the Store has a “requiredCookie” attribute, then the request must have a cookie that matches

The enabled attribute determines – whether the resources are served locally or from remote server, when the network connection is available.  To read more on the Local Server Module – you can go here

Database Module

Another powerful feature of Gears is the ability to access the Database on the desktop.  This can greatly improve application performance, as database access plays a major role in network latency. 

Database Module provides an API, that enables the Javascript to store browser-local data storage onto the Database.  Gears uses the SQLite database.

Security is ensured by making sure that the web application cannot access data outside of its domain.  A web page with a particular scheme, host and port can access only resources with the same scheme, host and port.   Thus, a site using Gears:

• Can access only databases created for that site’s origin
• Can only cache URLs and use manifests from the site’s origin  

Data storage and retrieval follows regular SQL statements – thus there is no learning curve here.  To know more about the Database API, reach here

WorkerPool Module

This API allows web applications to run heavy and long running Javascript code in the background, without blocking the main page’s script execution, mimicking the background processes in Unix.

I/O operations and heavy computations are some sample operations, that can be optimized using WorkerPool API. 

WorkerPool is a collection of processes; and not threads.  Thus, they don’t share namespace or execution state.  These processes are independent of each other and interact by sending message objects.  Also, the workers do not inherit script code from their parents.  To know more about the WorkerPool API, reach here

New in 0.4

• Geolocation API, that provides access to user’s geographical location
• Blob API for handling blocks of Binary data.  This is particularly useful for caching images.  We can expect an implementation on Picasa
• Access to files on the client machine through Desktop API.  Comes handy for document management web sites, where online documents can be stored on local disk for offline access.  Also useful for providing Desktop shortcuts for web applications
• Localization of Gears to 40 languages

With Chrome now out of the box, we can expect more enhancements with Google Gears.  It is a great leap towards making Operating Systems redundant on the desktop.

---

To know more about Google Gears - http://code.google.com/apis/gears/

Hope you found this article useful.