Programming

Most people, when discovering a new programming language, go for the classical "Hello World" test.

Not me. I go for bubble sorts.

A bubble sort is a program that sorts a list of numbers by comparing two adjacent numbers and swapping them if need be, then it moves on one position and repeats the process. Once all numbers have been passed through, the process is repeated from the start again.

All this is repeated over and over until the numbers have been sorted.

It sounds stupid, I know, but it is a nice way to test basic things about a language, like:

Input
Output
Loops
Decisions
Subroutines/Functions
Math

A simple bubble sort will, in any given language, allow you to use most (if not all) of the above, allowing you to quickly learn the basics of a language.

So, I just completed my first bubble sort in Python.
Next year Python and PHP will be part of my Unisa studies.

This is fun.....

Office 365

In a previous blog post I took a quick look at Office Online, a component of Windows Live. My review wasn't exactly glowing. I did however express the hope that it would lead to something greater.


Well, it seems it may have done, except Microsoft of course wants to make money out of it. It's called Office 365.


For a limited time there is a free beta available, but the interest is apparently so great that I was told there is no room for me at this time. They did promise to let me know when space becomes available, at which time a review will hopefully appear here.


Watch this space...








  

Free Lunch

It is said that there is no such thing as a free lunch. This remains true in my opinion even in a world that has the Internet.

This of course does not necessarily mean money. For instance, with Open Source software, the "cost" is in research, effort and the willingness to learn (not to mention the data cost of downloading it). The software might cost nothing, but you still need to give SOMETHING to obtain it and get use out of it. Once you have done that though, you reap the benefits of excellent software without an annual license fee. There is a saving compared to traditional software certainly, but you still need to do some work.

Another example is growing your own food. Much cheaper than store-bought food (even when you include input costs), but still you need to "pay" in effort, patience, fertilizer, water and research to get the veggies planted, keep them watered and healthy, and harvest them yourself.

I am then (as you can guess) a bit opposed to the idea of making money for doing nothing. In my view, get-rich-quick schemes simply must have a flaw somewhere. The fact that I am a naturally sceptic person also reinforces this belief.

So imagine my thoughts when I was approached online with the following:

"Get rich quick!"

"Recruit others!"

"Make R15K in one month!"

"Multi-Level Marketing opportunity."

"Not a pyramid scheme!"

Exactly.

The Internet, of course, offers much info in deciding if a particular scheme is as good as it says it is.

On further investigation, I found this:

"Pay in X amount per month to join"

"Get paid X/5 per month for every person you recruit"

"Interesting", I thought.

Now multilevel marketing is nothing new. A multilevel marketing scheme can actually work if:

A) It actually MARKETS something.

B) The product being marketed can stand on its own as a product (in other words, the agent must be able to make a living JUST selling the product, without relying on more recruits).

C) There aren't too many agents around causing market saturation.

There are examples of such companies actually succeeding. Think of Tupperware for example.

So, does this "Exciting New Opportunity" offer such a product? After sniffing around the web page, I found a small section that describes the product. 

"The product you receive is coaching and training – soft skills that will help you break through your barriers."

"The coaching that you will receive is NLP Coaching. Neuro Linguistic Programming has been around for 25 years and today NLP training and coaching is used widely in business to improve management, sales, performance and interpersonal skills."

Fair enough. But I have a few issues. Queue yet another bulleted list:

. The Coaching in my view is not worth the X amount being charged.

. You are asked to become an agent BEFORE receiving any coaching. You cannot simply become a client.

. The type of coaching, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, has many many enemies in the field of professional psychology.

. There is HEAVY emphasis on getting as many agents as possible to sign up.

. You as an agent will receive NOTHING for the coaching material being sent out. You are paid ONLY for the number of agents you have under you.

. If you really want to receive this training, there is a LOT of free material available on the Internet.

All this causes me to dismiss this as just a Pyramid Scheme in disguise.

Of course, the term "free on the Internet" also has its own conditions. No free lunch remember?

For one, you must expend effort and data fees to find the free material. The site offering the coaching has hosting costs to pay, and is supported by advertisements. You need to read through the material and apply it to your life. The list goes on.

Somewhere along the line you always need to offer something back to receive something.

I, however, do not mind working in order to receive something. I work for a salary. My wife I dig and till with our own hands to grow food. I search the Internet as well as printed media in my quest for knowledge. I pay a Tertiary institution to receive training. I pay data fees to use free Google services. Etc...

...and that's all I have to say about that. I am now off to eat my lunch, made with my own hands, on bread purchased with hard earned money.

Bing.

The last stop of my tour of Online Consumer offerings is from Microsoft is Bing.

Bing seems to be the catch-all brand for your more "traditional" web services. Services like Search, online maps, images and so on. I suppose the main difference between Bing and Live is that Bing does not require a login (although you can login with your Live account).

Many reviewers have said good things about Bing, and yet users seem to steer clear of it. Today, I will use it and see what it can do.

Firstly, MS have tried to create versions of Bing tailor-made for local use. Login to Bing USA and you will see local news, traffic and so on. However not all countries have received the treatment, and I am stuck with the "International" version. You are of course free to use whatever version you like, but if you use a version not meant for your country, the localised info will obviously not be of use to you.

The services offered on the US version:
Search
Image search
Videos
Shopping
Local news
Maps
Travel
Entertainment
Translator
A few other small services

The International version has:
Search
Image search
Videos
News
Translator
Maps

Being an "International" user I will use that version.

We start at search. let's say I intend to visit the War Museum on my next visit to Bloemfontein.

This is the main reason anyone uses an online service like this. Type in a thing you want to know about and there you go.
Here, I tried to search for the War Museum in Bloemfontein. The results are the usual stuff.

Not to draw a comparison with Google this early on, but a small map showing me where to find the museum would have been nice. Otherwise it worked well. As usual with other search engines, clicking on the links on top opens the same results. When I click on "Images", I get images related to the War Museum.

The Image page itself has a nice range of options in the sidebar, but most people will only gloss over them.


Now, are there any interesting videos related to the Anglo-Boer war?

Granted, this war is not exactly an international hot topic at the moment, and the museum is just one building, but given it's impact on an entire people (not to mention it's effect on worldwide politics of that era), I expected more than three hits. The controls on the left are a nice touch.

Another nice touch, clicking on a video goes straight to a "player" page with related videos. Funny, there are suddenly a lot more, but I take it these are from a wider search term than "war museum in Bloemfontein".

Now, how to get there? We go to maps.

I am naturally taken straight to a regional map as I open the page. I hack in my search terms and we get...

...no result, however the site does latch on to the city name, and at least shows me a birds eye view.
Maybe we should use a specific address? Didn't we get the museum web page from the initial search? We sure did. A quick copy and paste and...

..nope! OK maybe just the street name onwards?

Nope again!

Now this degenerates into a block-by-block search for the bloody street name. A few minutes later and...

...found it. That grassy spot in the middle, there, THERE! ...see it? Yes, that's it!

OK, so maybe special buildings with no street numbers and with an entire street all their own are kinda hard to find. Now we need directions.
I decide that I will first spend time on Naval Hill, so I need directions from there to the museum.
I right click on the museum and choose "directions to here", same on Naval Hill and choose "directions from here" and I get what I ask for within seconds.

I don't know the city that well, but it at least seems like no directions were given that require special powers, like flying from bridges. This should get me from A to B with little fuss.
A VERY nice touch here is the ability to modify my route by dragging any part of it.

So what are my conclusions? Well, I'm really not sure. Al you need is there, but it just hasn't got the same "flair" if you will that Google has. Still, if you really want to use Microsoft (or if your company is one of those that have a MS-only policy) it will serve you well enough.

I'm sticking to Google for now.

Crap, I suppose I will have to do a Google post as well. Where will I find the time...

Windows live services - the rest

OK, now to cover the rest of the Windows Live services available on live.com. The next post will deal with Bing, the "other" online services brand from MS.

In the previous post I started with Office Live, since the point was to investigate how people's lives are moving from the PC to the web. Today's post will deal more with things that have always been online, or have been online for a while.

Apart from Office live (a recent addition), live.com offers:

• A Home screen called the "Today" screen.
• Mail
• Calendar
• Document and Photo storage and sharing
• A public profile you can share with friends
• Connect to your friends profiles and receive updates
• Synchronisation between your Computers (if you install Live Essentials on your PC)
• A web page service where you can create and customise your very own piece of the web

First, the Today screen and general notes:

Notable things:

• The whole service looks like it was meant to be seen and used as a unit. The various pages for mail, calendar etc don't feel like they are separate from the rest. However you can link directly to the individual pages if you wish.
• You have an impressive 25GB of storage for your profile, including docs, images, mail and so on.
• As with most MS online stuff, it all works better with Silverlight installed, although working without it is not that hard.
• The Today screen allows you to add "services", panels displaying Facebook, games, info, and so on.
• A small slide show can be created in the top right corner.
• A menu appears on top, taking you to the individual services. Hovering over a link produces a dropdown showing quick-links to features of that service.
• You can apply themes for that personal touch.
• A mobile app is available for most smartphone platforms, allowing you to access all of this on the move.

Let's start with Hotmail:

Standard stuff really. Your ordinary modern webmail service that does exactly what it says on the box. The calendar and contacts screens are part of Hotmail and are therefore reachable from the side menu.
You can do pretty much all the usual things here, like create extra folders, set up mail rules, block spam, and tie in your other webmail accounts (if any) so that all your mail appears in one place.

Contacts can be imported, and the contacts screen allows for grouping and categorisation of contacts. Of course your mail contacts also tie in with the Messenger service.

The Calendar works well also, with day, week, and month views, as well as the Agenda view which professionals will like. You can create more than one calendar and share them. you can also subscribe to the shared calendars of others.

Notable things:

• The whole thing looks very friendly and shiny.
• Easy to use.
• No real surprises. Everything just works really well.

Photos:

The Photos service is just a basic photo storage and sharing service. You can upload photos and display them in albums. You can individually set the public visibility of each photo, and those who view them can leave comments.
I's a nice Facebook-y way of sharing those holiday snaps with your friends. There is also a nice online slideshow player for when you want to page through your friend's collection.
Like Facebook, you can tag yourself in a photo, but you cannot tag your friends. Presumably they can tag themselves in your pics.
Lastly, a link on the photos landing page takes you to your SkyDrive status. Skydrive is just a simple page allowing you to manage your storage, and it will show you how much you are using and how much you have left.

Public Profile:

If the Public Profile screen doesn't remind you of Facebook, it should. MS is definitely going after the social media space with this one.
You can post your thoughts in the "Share something new" box. Your photos can be shared in the Photos page mentioned above. You can list things in your profile like your favourite things, your star sign and all those other things people mention online that they would never mention in Meatspace.

Oh, and although this page features a test account, there is one true thing about me on here. Can you spot it?

It doesn't look as compelling as Facebook, but then again I haven't used it long. Someone with lots of friends using live.com might be a better judge here.


Sync:

I cannot comment about this one really, since I have no real use for such a system at the moment. The idea is simple enough though.
You install Live Essentials on all your computers. Then you choose files that must be synced, and the service will ensure that file changes are synced between PCs.
Sounds real handy, but I doubt if a home user will use it. Corporate Road warriors will love it to bits though.

Spaces:

Here I ran into a brick wall.

I went to the Spaces page. I was greeted with a simple page that prompted me to create my first web space.
Then it asked for my mobile number (for confirmation purposes).
Then it complained because my number is not American.
It then asks me to choose my country and operator.
Then I realised my country was not listed.

At this point I had to stop. If my country is not there, I cannot choose my Operator.

No alternate way of proving who I am, so "NO Web Space For You!". No idea therefore how good the service is. It is clear that MS does not want people outside of their list of nations to use this just yet. Hopefully mine falls under "Coming Soon!".


Conclusions:
Microsoft, as usual, were a bit late in the game with these types of services. Hotmail is of course the exception as it is one of the oldest web services in existence.

Everything about these services falls under "No surprises here, everything just works really well".

If you want a web service that simply works well and doesn't let you down, I suppose live.com is not a bad choice at all. The only real complaints I have are:
Service is a tad slow, but not unbearable.
Web spaces does not want me.
Some of the more unusual options (like viewing mail offline, or syncing files) are not possible without a Windows-only client side program.

Next post, we will deal with Bing.

Office Online: How does it stack up?

For my next few blog posts, I have decided to look at how each major company is approaching the new Online world.

This is all-encompassing. Users do not care whether something is EC2 clouds, HTML5, Ajax or whatever. So I cast my net wide to include "online things users have access to, that make their lives easier". There! Besides, we will deal with Enterprise Cloud offerings (such as Microsoft Azure) in another post.

This post will be about Microsoft and how it's online consumer offerings stack up.

As mentioned in my previous post, MS has been late out the gate with online services (just like they are always with any other new concept). This has always been deliberate, either because MS has underestimated the value of a new service, or because they prefer to look at what others are doing and better it.
This strategy comes a long way, from a time before the Internet. In a world without the Internet it is indeed a winning strategy.
In today's world however it has cost them time and time again.

One ongoing success for them has always been Office. It has been said in the past that if Windows were to fold and the entire world took to Macs, MS would still remain the richest company in the world because of Office sales. No one would say at this point that online editing packages are as good as Office on a PC, but it has also been said that most users do not need all that power. So, if you were a user, at home, faced with high-priced MS office on the one end, and a choice of free online editors on the other, would you choose the new online offering from Microsoft?

So I opened my Windows Live account and sniffed around. Sure enough in the office section I found this:

This is a kind of "workscreen" to get you started.

(Of course by the time I took the screenshot, I had started experimenting already).

Being an online service you do not expect to find enterprise level stuff here. Just Word and Excel. The inclusion of Powerpoint was therefore a nice surprise. Of course things like Access will be missing. OneNote was also a surprise, since most consumers won't really know what it is, but I suspect MS gave a nod to corporate road warriors with this one.

General points:

• The look and feel is very similar to Office 2010.
• Silverlight is required for proper operation. Since it is available for Linux it is not too much of an issue.
• Features seemed the same across all browsers and systems (an amazing feat for Microsoft).
• Copy and paste between the PC space and the Browser space is possible.
• Once you have opened a document, you can click a "breakout" button in the corner to open the document in a separate window. Since opening a document closes the Office workscreen, this feature comes in handy.
• Hovering your pointer above a document in the workscreen gives you some options for opening, downloading or sharing the doc.

On a whim I decided to start with Excel. I duly opened three spreadsheets in Three different browsers (over two operating systems) to compare usage. Chrome and IE8 on Windows, and Firefox on Linux.

This is what I found:

• IE8 had trouble with performance (even clicking on a cell took 2-3 seconds reaction time) whereas Chrome and Firefox were near-instantaneous. I suspect Gears had something to do with that.
• No graphing tools available. 
• Only embedded tables can be inserted. No graphics.
• No right-clicking on cells.
• Basic editing functions like Summing were missing, or the formulas for them had to be entered manually in the formula bar.

The last one irked me a bit. I expected things like external data links and Macros to be missing (and they are), but a simple Sum button is in my view a requirement even for an online spreadsheet. Without them, Dad will have a very frustrating time managing the family budget.
I suspect that MS expects you to Click the "Open in Office" button for the full experience.

Conclusion: Usable for quick work, but becomes cumbersome after only a short time.

On to Word:

This is what I found:

• All browsers seemed to perform about the same with online Word, namely Slowly.
• Basic Insert tools available, such as images and tables.
• A basic right-click menu is available.
• Styles and Formatting available.

Conclusion: Generally about as good as Wordpad, in other words more than good enough for Grandma.


On to PowerPoint:

What I found:

• A Presentation Theme Wizard greets you when you start a new document.
• The same applies for each new slides.
• Editing is not freeform. You cannot simply insert graphics or text everywhere. Instead the template for the current slide constrains it.
• As can be expected, advanced editing features like timings and sound are missing.
• You can view and play presentations full screen.

Conclusion: A chore to use. Might see heavy use as a quick stop-gap player, but even basic editing falls short in my view. Not even Junior would want to use it for school projects.


I did not look at OneNote really, since it falls outside the scope of an ordinary user.
Other productivity items such as Mail and Calendar are of course already covered by the Windows Live service, as well as instant messaging, document storage, sharing and so on.

So, does Microsoft's online tools meet the needs of the general user? The quick answer is no. A longer answer would be: Yes, but only if you want to get a quick job done. Grandma can write a quick letter to the bank, but Dad will find managing the family budget a bit of a strain. Mom will have no trouble writing emails to her sister in Live Mail (after all it has been running for how long?). Junior could write his book report, but Big Brother's term paper will take years to get done, and his graphs just won't have that "zing" to them since he will have to import them from elsewhere.

What about business users. Absolutely not. Tempers would flare in the office real quick. The only ones who would like this service are those wishing to view a doc online on the road, and most companies already have document management systems for that.

One final point. This is all still very new for Microsoft. Although this review may not be glowing, I would like to add that this might all change in the next few months, as MS adds more stuff and gets user feedback. All of what I've said here might be null and void in a year's time. I suggest you give this service a second look then, and I think I will do the same.

Living Online

Been giving a lot of thought to computing on the web in general.

A lot of hype-ish names surround this concept, but I suppose "cloud computing" is the most well known. Not sure if this is an accurate description of the concept, but there you go.

The idea is simple. Instead of having apps installed on your PC/phone/tablet/whatever, you open a web page.

This page is typically built on technologies like HTML5, Ajax, Flash or others. On these sites, you can create documents, edit pictures, compose music or whatever it is you do.

These sites usually only provide functionality sufficient to casual users. A professional photographer won't be trading in Photoshop for Pixlr.com soon.

However, as time goes by, browsers, plugins, scripting languages and other web technologies grow in capability (and version numbers).

One company that seems hell-bent on building an entire empire based on such tools is Google.

With Google, I can create a simple web page (or blog!) and publish it. I can create online collaborative documents with Google docs. I can create dynamic online meeting spaces with Google Wave. I can run my entire Network Application Infrastructure in the cloud with Google Apps. I can read email and store over 7GB of it in the cloud using GMail. I can search for a map. I can get directions. I can ask my cellphone to trace my location and display it on a map somewhere,  or on my web page for all to see. I can do professional GIS work with Google Earth Pro. I can create 3D drawings. The list goes on. All with Google tools.

Oh, and I can search for stuff as well...

The best part of all is that most of Google's products are free, most of them run purely in a web browser, and all of them (even the paid ones) are Open Source.

Their goals stretch to the mobile space as well. Google seems to be aiming for an eventual full Web 2.0 experience on your smartphone. Of course the Android platform (made by Guess Who) is at the forefront of this effort. Let it not be said that Google does not know how to leverage their position in the market.

And Google is by far not the only company with such aspirations.

One company however, seems to be very late in this game. Microsoft. Even the tools they are releasing right now seem to betray the fact that they don't quite have a handle on this "free online" world yet.

However it should be interesting to see what they do in future.

For interest, this is how I use Cloud Computing and Web 2.0 concepts in my daily life:

LinkedIn (Maintaining professional relationships)

Facebook (Connecting with friends)

Gmail

Google Calendar

Pixlr.com (online image editing and retouching)

Blogger ( heh! )

Google Maps

Google Latitude

Google Docs

Panoramio

Those are the major ones. I use others from time to time of course.

It is safe to say that our online lives will only expand, and that the OS you use will become less and less important.

Companies like Microsoft fear this idea, and will probably try to chain users to their desktops for as long as they can.

However companies like Apple and Ubuntu relish it, and are busy planning for it. Don't believe me? At the last MacWorld, not a single minute of any Keynote speech was devoted to MacOS or desktop machines. It was all web and mobile.

Of course no company does this because they feel Altruistic. They wan to make money. Maybe I should spend a next post on how they do this, and how they lure (and try to lock) you onto their tools.

Should be interesting.

Consulting

So I am doing Hi Impact Consulting as part of my studies this semester.

The High Impact Consulting idea is one I believe in. I have seen how running a monolithic project produces results in comparison.

Hi impact consulting and project management is based around the idea of running IT projects as small incremental changes to a system, rather than implementing a “Big Bang” approach. Smaller projects can be set up and planned in days, implemented in an equally short time and the impact should be immediate and obvious, whether it is of benefit to users or just the system.

This usually entails a single consultant (or a senior tech in a consultant role) with a small team under him. The whole thing should not take longer than a few weeks.

Should be exciting to pick this up again.

Marius