Contributed by Syed Awab Hasan

Actually, rather than waste your time, I would cordially like to inform you that the only thing you should have known before you became a software engineer is that you shouldn’t have worked towards becoming one. You just wasted your time. Just kidding!

When we human beings exist at the level in which our studies are at the Secondary school level, we have many aspirations about our careers, know a lot about it and generally believe in a lot of myths

Google is freaking easy. I’ll make one. For software engineers with an aptitude towards the internet and web development, a common misconception is held. This misconception states that making web applications that are highly successful, like Google, or even simple websites are really easy (heck, kids do it – you know that Zucky kid who made Facebook…). Believe me, it isn’t. Web development or programming is, in some cases, even more difficult than normal software development. What’s more a large number of other issues and disciplines arise here as opposed to mainstream software programming. You just cant create an overnight Google. However, if you learn, dedicate yourself, work heard, be creative and come up with innovative ideas you may just become the next ‘Zucky’ kid. The conclusion; software engineering involving the internet is just as hard or even harder than the usual non-internet development – it encompasses marketing, and a good number of other disciplines (even psychology!).

The worst paid jobs on the planet. Pakistan and other South Asian countries are famous as Outsourcing havens. Outsourcing may be the one reason why our software industry is alive today. However, it is highly competitive and sometimes pays little. Local, non-outsourcing work is even harder than that – that is if you manage to find a job. People don’t exactly consider software engineering as a credible discipline sans medical or even mechanical engineering. However, you should understand that if you work hard at university, involve yourself in hobby programming and stay in touch with the software industry and get good marks you may not have such a problem with pay or finding a job. Still, all engineers to be should be prepared for initial bad pays or lack of jobs.

Coding is not a mystic or mythical art. That’s right, to put it bluntly. Forget the movies in which programmers are continuously tapping keys on the keyboard (there are graphic user interfaces now for Linux that rival the designs of the Mac such as KDE and GNOME). It involves the writing of a lot of lines of code (and, sadly, no pictures) and then reading these lines again and again. A lot of boring rudimentary work particularly if C is what you are working on.

C. The Horror. This is more and more important in Pakistan. C (and in some cases languages even more primitive than C) are the introductory jumping point of programming. And C is difficult, tough and somewhat primitive. But it is important and if you don’t have the stomach for it, you won’t be able to proceed. But don’t worry – once you move on to Java, you’re interest will be elevated.

Code never ends. Software usually contains a large number of lines – good sized software have 100, 000, 000 lines of code (don’t worry, you wont have to write it alone). In short, there is a lot of code behind software. Why is this important? You should understand that a single misplaced word or statement results in a ‘bug’ that may have wide scale repercussions to the software. Furthermore, coding is a process that goes on and on. Software is updated. Updates are created and then checked for compatibility with the software. New concepts, languages and standards are introduced on a frightening scale. Coding never ends (unless you kill the software – discontinue it like Netscape Navigator).

Hacking isn’t what you think it is – that’s cracking. Some guy in some movie hacked into a government’s server and stole important secrets. Someone else crashed the traffic system. Someone crashed a website and added an offensive picture on the site. And the most common one, someone cracked the password of an email address. This is NOT hacking. It’s called cracking – and is not even programming. Good programmers frown at it and it is a form of ridicule. Plus, it’s highly illegal. In some cases it may be easy to install some software or script and crash someone’s computer but it is very difficult to destroy traces of your activity. And if you’re caught, it’s a prison cell for you. And no, all such ‘crackers’ are hired by some intelligence agency like CIA (only the very best and that depends).

Hacking is NOT easy. Hacking for programmers is better termed as Ethical Hacking and it more or less defines the actual problem solving process of programming – done in a challenging and satisfying way to overcome one problem after another. Think of ethical hackers as the scientists of programming. To reach such a level a lot of hard work is required. Years of sweat and more sweat. And it is enjoyed by some and not all.

Not all Software Engineers are geeks who wear glasses and stay in their rooms. Many software engineers, before going this way, assume that many good programmers are like this. That isn’t true. Many programmers look like the average person (although there are programmers whose descriptions fit these). Therefore, programming isn’t just for geeks – it’s for anyone with an interest in problem solving.

The, possibly, most boring job on this planet. Believe me, many engineers expect software engineering to be like a breeze of fresh air. It is if you don’t put your mind and soul into it. A large amount of work is boring, hard and repetitive. In fact, the truly challenging and interest part of programming is the problem solving, architecture and designing process – which accounts for some portion of programming. Otherwise, be prepared for a good amount of time doing boring work unless, as mentioned above, you actually like coding. If you do, consider yourself lucky.

Bugs, Bugs and more Bugs! I will kill you, you Virus. This will be the most annoying and brain eating part of software engineering. Debugging to remove vulnerabilities and fortifying your code to prevent attack of vulnerabilities or loopholes in your code. Prepare yourself for a good amount of time spent on this – to the point of giving up. Heck, after this, all those who may have entered into software engineering to create viruses or malware will detest the creators of such.

Bonus. In Pakistan, ‘Archaeological’ (primitive) programming is taught. Think about it.

The Buzzword ‘Open’, is being used by everyone and anyone in the world of innovation. Open source. Open platforms. Open standards. The company which knows the real meaning of Open is Google. Open for new and innovative ideas. Google has recently announced a big news for all the programmers out there. Guess what! Google has recently announced the release of open sourced programming language called Go.

It is a new and experimental language. Go is open source and its syntax is similar to C, C++ and Python. Incorporating their various elements in one Go, the reason of its cr3eation is to create faster and more dynamic programs.

“Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. In our experiments with Go to date, typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go is designed to let you move fast.

We’re hoping Go turns out to be a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing and a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, with some cool features like true closures and reflection.”

In its Go FAQ, Google explains the main motivations behind the project:

“No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. There are several trends:

- Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.

- Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation.

- There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript.

- Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages.

- The emergence of multi-core computers has generated worry and confusion.”

Go reflects Google’s ambition to create an empowering programming language. It could be used in making thousands of web and software applications. If you want to test this new programming language, your starting point is Go’s main page.

Droid is just the new beginning; Motorolla is all set to release 20 new handsets in 2010. Motorola’s rebirth is a new step towards a prosperous future. As the CEO Sanjay Jha quoted ‘multiple tens’ when asked on how many phones Moto is planning next year, and firming that to at least 20 when pushed.

“We will have two Android devices (for the holidays in the U.S.),” said Jha, adding that deals are already in place with two major carriers with more to follow. “We also have plans for more devices in the first quarter of 2010.”

The Motorola Droid is the first Android 2.0 smartphone. With Google already stating that it expects 18 Android phones to be released by the end of 2009, a target that seems like it will be hard to hit with only eight or so released thus far.

With Motorola claiming a new mark with its Android in market, it seems that Android will be the most important for the company as they will finally bring it back to the race. The Android launches “will get us back in the game in smartphones,” said Jha.

It is also believed that Motorola’s handset business depends on entirely on Android.  In its second quarter earnings results, Motorola said that its mobile device sales were $1.8 billion, down 45 percent from a year ago. The operating loss for the quarter was $253 million, better than the $346 million loss a year ago.

However, 20 new headsets mean a lot of choice for Motorola’s fans. So 2010 will be a year of a lot of options for the people who are anxiously waiting for Motorola to claim lost grounds.

The battle between the two rivals Microsoft and Google heated up as Twitter announced its deal with the two giants yesterday. Now tweets can be searched through these search engines very easily. Twitter has given access to Bing, so that it can detect and determine tweets coming from all over the globe.
So if you want to search for a tweet just type into the search bar and you will have your results. “Twitter currently presents tweets based simply on timeliness, Bing is experimenting with new solutions such as ‘best match’.”

Thus it will be showcasing the most popular Tweets of the moment. At the same time, it will also be allowing Web surfers to view Twitter messages that contain links to other Web content. Microsoft will filter Spam and other extraneous data. Three year old Twitter has become a part of every users life, and it is accessed by many and there is no restriction of time or place.

“Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous…Were you as fascinated by the 6-year-old boy floating away in a balloon as we were? Was it a hoax? We know that people are going to twitter more and more for information surrounding all the latest chatter … You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favourite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today.”said Paul Yiu, its head of search, on a Microsoft blog.

He had earlier announced the deal on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit. Microsoft stands face to face with its dominant rival Google which actually has more then 70% users across the globe. Although Microsoft has ruled the market since years. Today it has made an attempt to bing its users again and has offered them to search for desired tweets, produced by twitter users daily in real time.

Both Microsoft and Google have embarked on a journey where in the near future they are expected to offer all that real-time information to the masses from its most innovative sources. In the same way Google with a goal of creating the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world has followed the same deal and said,

“We are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results,” said Marissa Mayer, the vice-president of search and user experience. “We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months… Next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

In the midst of all this competition it is twitter which takes the lead. Twitter social networking and micro-blogging website came into being in 2006, and by 2009 it has proved itself to be the most desirable and the most wanted property on the World Wide Web. Giants such as Microsoft and Google have now chosen it for their own business purposes and in order to facilitate their users with something new.

Contributed by Faisal Shehzad

With the increasing importance of web presence many ways have been developed to promote a web site. I‘ll discuss on search engine because it’s the most effective and easiest way.

Announcing your arrival on search engines:

The tabs below go directly to the add URL pages of major search engines:

• Azoos

• AOL Search

• AltaVista

• Google

• Lycos

• Inktomi

• MSN Search

• Yahoo

1. Use META tags.

Most search engine will look inside META tags in your web page. Here is the example of how to use <META> tags.

<meta name=”description” content=”How to promote your web site.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”announcing web site, web submission, web promote, internet promotions, submit”>

These META tags should be put in <HEAD></HEAD>. In “description”, put the brief description of your page. In “keywords”, list the keywords that you think your visitors will find your site by typing those keywords. You can separate each keywords or description by using comma (,) as shown above.

2. Page Title

Infoseek will use your title as the priority in their search process. Name your title carefully. Try and thinki about which keywords your visitors will type to find your page. Yahoo also uses such page titles and the descriptions  which you submit during search.

3. Contents of your page.

Some search engines such as Excite will not read META tag but it will look at the content of your site. If you use image map, please make sure that you also have words as alternatives.

4. Don’t repeat the same keywords more than 5 times in META tag.

Lycos, will ban your page (by placing it down the list or not listing it) if they find that you are repeating words to improve the ranking.

5. Make sure that there are keywords in 3 places.

Yeah! Make sure that there are keywords in 3 places: META tags, page title, and contents of your page.

Search Engine Secret:

Only some people are aware about the time a search engine takes to submit and process.

Mailing lists:

• Yahoo maintains a huge resource of mailing lists.

Newsgroup:

• Deja News service is a great way to search Usenet newsgroups for particular topics.

• www.announce is a forum where people post new site announcement.

• There are also some more than hundreds news sites which are doing the same work.

Web Page Directories:

There are many directories growing every day around the world. Consider Yahoo. They maintain a huge resource.

Commercial service:

We no longer maintain the list of commercial submission services. If you’re interested in commercial service, please visit our sponsor, AAA Internet Promotion, to help keeping this site alive:)

AAA Internet Promotions offers a variety of web site promotions. The program is very interesting. You can ask for a regular directories listing service or even ask them to write PR letters sending to newspapers and magazines
to promote your site.

You can also find the lists of commercial submission services at Yahoo and web reference.

Miscellaneous:

• Give your site an award.

• There are many site, which can award your site as the best, and if you submit your site to them then there are many chances to be on top.
  

Free submissions:

• Gelon.net – Use this JavaScript to register you page in popular search engines.

• Submit Express – Free website URL submission to more 40 top search engines and directories

• Bizpromo.com – You can fill out one form and submit your site to all of major search engines at one time!

This work requires time and research. But if an individual is devoted then a site can be on top of many search engines.

Imagine if it took ten minutes to flip the page of a magazine or newspaper. Google has used all its might to make life easy and simple for those who want to read more and browse less. Due to the continuous experimentation of Google Labs now traditional way of reading is “back on the track”. Google has introduced to the world a magic bullet named as Fast Flip.

As the name suggests Fast Flip, is a fast and easy way to flip through and read news on-line without waiting for the browser to download each and every page. Everyday it takes a dozen of minutes to browse through a particular website and choose favourite sections. Fast Flip helps you in flipping through the web-pages in on go as if you were reading the pages of a newspaper or a magazine.

Many prefer reading through paper as browsing ends up being slow and consumes a lot of time.

“Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.”

You can easily view headlines of Google’s dozens of partners including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. The Google partners will be sharing with them the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. This will help the on-line publishers to bring up their best content in which might have gone unnoticed by the on-line users, and thus they will be able to read more as they browsing will be a lot more easier driving more ad revenue to publishers.

Due to low connectivity browsing can be frustrating for those who want their work to be done in a matter of seconds. With Fast Flip you can easily skim through the required news on the required publishers website, in one go, and choose one which interests you the most. You can even email it to your friends, you can save and like the desired page as well.

Along with this new from of browsing, Google has also launched mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, so you can browse on the go.We are encouraged most of the time to read more and more news everyday. Many ignore as it ends up consuming a large amount of time.

Microsoft will be launching Windows Mobile 6.5 in this October on the 6th. Then onwards, Windows Mobile 6.5 will hit the retail stores worldwide. Because this time Microsoft has planned to surprise its users by providing them improved and advanced browsing capabilities with additional access to valuable services, including Windows Marketplace for Mobile and My Phone services. Windows Mobile 6.5 is said to have a redesigned Internet Explorer Mobile browser, built-in Adobe Flash Lite support for better rendering and completion of tasks.

Its “heavily retooled user interface”, emphasizes touch interactions. The start menu will take you directly to honeymoon pattern of icons which will enable the users to easily launch programs and move directly to their desired destination. Thus the users can enter voice mails, e-mails, and missed calls directly from the lock screen. With an updated version of Internet Explorer Mobile, Windows Mobile 6.5 enables its users play Flash videos from YouTube or Hulu.

Microsoft stated: “With the new version, users can change the look and feel of their phones with designer themes or a personal background and customize their home screen with widgets so the information they need is always easy to find.”

Todd Peters, corporate vice president of the mobile communications marketing group at Microsoft, said: “A Windows phone gives people a single phone that works for their whole life, keeping them connected to the people and information they care most about by harnessing the power of the PC, phone and Web.”

With the launch of its store Microsoft will stand face to face in competition with its competitors Apple, Nokia, RIM, Google, and Palm, who have already launched their centralized mobile application stores .

The store will enable its users to back up and sync their contacts, photos, videos, calendars, and text messages over the air. The service is somewhat similar to Apple’s MobileMe, and Microsoft has also  announced that is easier for users to switch devices, or replace a lost smartphone.

Microsoft has now decided to change the way we make use of Internet. Today, we are waiting for the time when everyone will be using their mobile instead of their PCs to perform tasks. Now we are waiting for its launch and reaction of users worldwide.

]]> http://www.codeweek.pk/2009/09/microsoft-windows-mobile-6-5-launches-this-october/feed/ 1 http://www.codeweek.pk/2009/09/integrating-youtube-with-twitter-and-facebook/ http://www.codeweek.pk/2009/09/integrating-youtube-with-twitter-and-facebook/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:00:12 +0000 Admin http://www.codeweek.pk/?p=1032

Contributed by Asim Zeeshan

There are infinite YouTube users out there and many spend a considerable amount of time on popular Google owned video sharing service. Regular users of Youtube also mark videos as “favorite”, “rate”, upload and comment on videos. Many users also share videos from Youtube to the popular Social Networking website Facebook and the popular micro-blogging website Twitter.  Most of the time, posting links to the video is more time consuming them watching the full length video itself, and if you are spending a lot of time on Youtube discovering interesting videos, then it becomes even more difficult to share every video among your friends and followers.

Well, today is your lucky day, because you can use the sleek new feature AutoShare by Youtube in order to share your YouTube activity among your Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Your Youtube activity includes, but is not limited to uploading a new video, marking a video as “favorite”, “rating” a video etc.

Let me show you how to achieve that;

Just login to your Youtube account and go to Account -> Sharing

AutoShare with Twitter

1. Make sure you are logged in to Twitter in order use this feature (if you have multiple accounts, then login to the desired twitter account)
2. Click on the twitter link and a new popup will appear (you may need to sign-in to your Google account, if asked)
3. Click on ALLOW on the new popup window.

4.    The popup will acknowledge your request and take you back to Youtube Accounts page.

5.   Viola! You are connected to your twitter account. Next time when you mark a video as “Favorite” etc it will be posted to your twitter stream.

AutoShare with Facebook

1. Make sure you are logged in to Facebook while you want to use this feature
2. Click on the Facebook link and a new popup will appear (you may need to sign-in to your Google account, if asked)
3. Click on CONNECT on the new popup window

4.     Select ALLOW PUBLISHING on the next page.

5.    Congratulations! You are connected to your Facebook account. Your Youtube activity would now be posted on your Facebook profile.

We hope this weeks TECHTIP has proved to be of help. From now on, flock your profiles with whichever video you feel like or whichever way you want to. Tell us whether this tip helped you. Comment if it did, comment again if it did not. We are waiting for you.

About the author:

Asim Zeeshan is CodeWeek Technical Content Manager and is also working as a Senior Software Engineer. He is a PRO GEEK, collecting every new gadget in the market. If Asim does not know how it works, then it is not worth knowing.

Contributed by Rafaeel Akbar Chaudhry

Google Chrome has become one of the robust browsers out there in a short span of time. Google Chrome has been applauded for its clean user interface, speed, and features. Though it is claimed to be one of the fastest web browser available, but it is still in beta and lots of features are missing. Users who are not satisfied with the Google Chrome browser features have an advanced version of Google Chrome named ChromePlus to play with.

ChromePlus is a browser build on Chromium with all the features of Google Chrome and aims to provide the most easy-to-use browser based on Chrome. ChromePlus is produced by Maple Studio. Along with all the features that Google Chrome browser sports, ChromePlus comes with some added features such as mouse gesture, super drag, IE tab, context menu download support, etc.

Key features of Google ChromePlus:

ü  Double click tab to close page

You don’t need to locate and click the small “X” button on the tab to close it. In ChromePlus, you just double click the tab area and the page will be closed for you easily.

ü  Super drag

Drag a link in the page with your left button and drop it somewhere else in the page. This can create a new page (tab) to open the link; Dragging and dropping a block of text in the page will create a page and search the text with your default search engine.

ü  Mouse gesture

Mouse gesture is the arrow trace on the page while you hold on the right button of your mouse. In ChromePlus, you can make efficient commands with easy mouse gestures. Practiced mouse gestures can save you quite a lot of time and make you feel more fun.

ü  IE tab

Some web pages uses IE controls and thus can only run in IE currently. IE tab is designed to visit these pages. Just pay attention to the icon in the right of location bar.

ü  Download Tools Support

Download Tools Support – if you have installed NetAnts, Orbit, IS, FlashGet3, FlashGetMini, NetX, WebThunder, or Xunlei, you can simply choose any of them to download a particular file. Right-click on the download link to see the supported tools.

Most of the ChromePlus features are available in some form or another within other browsers. The IE Tab functionality is also available in Firefox which renders an Internet Explorer window inside your browser to give you access to those IE optimized sites without leaving your preferred browser. It’s not all that much considering all the potential you get from full-on add-ons (which are already beginning to find their way to Chrome, but it’s a decent feature boost if you’ve been wanting any of those particular tools added to Chrome.

ChromePlus is freeware and currently works on Windows only. It can be downloaded from http://www.chromeplus.org . However, users of 64 bit machines have reported problems on installing it on their Windows 7.

About the Author:

Rafaeel Akbar Chaudhry is a telecom engineer by degree. He’s a serial entrepreneur, a social media analyst, a pastime blogger and an IT consultant. He’s also currently chairing the Lahore chapter of IEEE Graduates of the Last Decade (GOLD) and has won IEEE Region 10 Leadership Award during his student life.

We know you are always signed in on your YouTube account during office hours. Now we do not need to instruct the MIS or IT department to block every link that leads to YouTube, because YouTube, the free video streaming website is making arrangement s in order to make you pay-per-play as you watch the published movies.

YouTube is in talks with Hollywood’s studios Lions Gate Entertainment, Sony Corporation’s movie studio, Time Warner’s Warner Bros and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer who already have advertising revenue-sharing deals with it. The discussions are still in process and the deal will totally depend upon the decision of the pricing. All the above mentioned studios will come up with their own terms and conditions but will receive 60 per cent of the total revenue earned, with a floor of about $2.40 that could vary depending on the age of the title.

“While we don’t comment on rumour or speculation, we hope to expand on both our great relationship with movie studios and on the selection and types of videos we offer our community,” said YouTube spokesman Chris Dale.

YouTube plans a three month trial in order to test the world’s response on the rental service. If succeeds, then the plan of renting videos will help Google return to its old business. Besides providing a free look at the short clips, Google Video had earlier sold the rights of viewing free movies and TV shows, before it bought YouTube for $1.76 billion, nearly three years ago. After selling its rights Google jumped directly into the YouTube business and built its pool of audience all over the world by providing them with YouTube’s totally free service.

YouTube did more than any other to build an online video sector. Now its urge to become a major player in Hollywood is justified when we observe the increasing number of online Web video services providing top quality viewing experience to their audiences

Some believe that in order to earn profits or even generate decent return, a considerable amount of ads should accompany the video. However, Sales done by Warner bros on-line have proved to be of great success. On-line sales have enabled them to boost profits and have not hurt the physical rentals at all.