December 26, 2008

Live Documents - AIR app

After a long time, I checked out Live Documents' website and found they have released an Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) application called "Live Presentation".

I couldn't resist to check it out and hence started looking at it. I am impressed, it has neat user-interface though there is a room of improvement. Overall, Live Presentations is nicely done.

live-documents.jpg

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2008

Mobile AIR - When is it coming out?

I have been playing with a lot of mobile widget-platforms. Some of these are Yahoo! Mobile Widget (Yahoo! Go) and S60 WRT.

Both of these are good, but I like S60 WRT when it comes to building widgets for S60 (Symbian) platform. If I have to build widgets for different mobile devices (running on different platforms), Yahoo! Mobile Widget (Blueprint) is good option.

I have to learn new things, which is good, but I was wondering - why can't I use my existing skills (ActionScript + JS/HTML/CSS) to build things for mobile devices without learning new workflow and technology?

When are we going to see Adobe Integrated Runtime for mobile devices - Mobile AIR? Life would be lot easier, I could transform a lot of my ideas easily into applications?

Hope it happens soon, really soon.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 04:22 AM | Comments (2)

December 12, 2008

Slowdown or recession - how do you take it?

I am not an expert when it comes to economics and finance, trying to learn things with each passing day. I have been watching and reading news, listening to people who are good at the subject.

After having known the slowdown/recession details, I spent good amount of time thinking, reading the causes and effects. Not sure, if I should have gone into all those details.

I realize, more I read worse it gets, I get concerned, upset and distracted after reading layoffs, dead(dying)-startups and future. Ignorance is bliss, I guess that fits here, unaware of these details I was far more focused on what I do.

I am going to stop focusing on this whole slowdown/recession thing and just focus on how I can do things better than ever? How can I help my customers by providing better solution to their problems?

I am going to focus on building a team which is technically great, innovative, focused and very motivated.

Future means how well we do today i.e. foundations for tomorrow. If we do things better today, tomorrow is going to be alright.

By just reading and spending time discussing, I am not going to achieve much - I would rather spend that time improving processes, practices and culture in my office.

BTW! Our company is doing well and we have good amount of work, perhaps it's because not many from our team know about what's going on, hence they are focused.

I am optimistic.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 02:52 PM | Comments (8)

November 21, 2008

Flash Player 10 (64bit edition)

Adobe has made available a 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 (pre-release) on labs.adobe.com. I believe, it would work on GNU/Linux and Solaris.

Would it work on FreeBSD also? If yes, then a lot of my FreeBSD friends (in Yahoo and elsewhere) would be happy :-)

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 04:17 PM | Comments (4)

Flex Compiler Modules

In one of my projects, I was trying to use Flex Compiler Module for Apache. I was doing development on my Mac OSX and everything worked fine. As soon as, I uploaded application on server (CentOS 4.5, x86_64), it didn't work.

After some debugging, I figured out Flex Compiler Module binaries are compiled as 32bit would not work on 64bit version of Apache. I could have used some third-party wrappers or rebuild it again for 64bit, unfortunately Adobe has not provided source-code for these modules.

There was another problem, it seems this apache-module has dependency on glibc, the required version of glibc is not available for RedHat/CentOS 4.5. Now that's weird, even if I had source code, not sure I could build against 64bit of CentOS? Not even sure about CentOS 4.5 x86?

BTW! glibc seems to be an important library and one can not just go ahead and update for one requirement, it might actually break many other applications. Hence, I didn't upgrade glibc on CentOS 4.5 to the required version.

So as an alternative, I used Flex Compiler API by writing some wrappers in Java and then invoke API using PHP. But it seems there is weird licensing i.e. I need to have license of Adobe LCDs in order to use Flex Compiler API?

I have fallen back on pure PHP implementation, I need to figure out about custom logging.

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 03:47 PM | Comments (2)

Flex Learning Paths @ Adobe DevNet

Flex Learning Paths, a new initiative by Adobe Developer Connection. What is Flex Learning Paths? As it's name suggests, it's basically a way to point someone, new to Flex, to a relevant/right direct direction (design, development, architecture or management related).

I guess, it's one of the best moves in the history of Adobe/Macromedia Developer Network. It would really take away a lot of confusion and information overloading and cluttered user-interface.

The best thing, there is section for managers, wow that's time saver - now developers can just point their managers to that link :-)

Nicely categorized information can really save a lot of time and makes us very focused. I bet, you are going to like it too.

Flex Learning Paths
Flex Learning Paths Application (Beta)

I wish, Flex Learning Path can pick up information from some community driven wiki. Information on Flexcoders FAQ and CFlex are is great. I am sure, community can contribute a lot, of course wiki would require some moderation but again community leaders can be given that responsibility too.

That way, information on Adobe Flex Learning Path would be more useful and managers/decision-makers would take it more seriously when they see how other companies (community showcase) are using the technology and saying (company/start-up blog posts).

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)

OpenFiler - an opensource NAS

We wanted to have a scalable storage system. So I went ahead and checked out the cost of buying NAS from various vendors (NetApp, Dell, etc). I figured out, it was going out our of budget. Then I started learning, what it takes to build a NAS for a small teams like ours.

I started evaluating various FOSS NAS options for our office. I checked out FreeNAS and OpenFiler, finally decided on OpenFiler.

I chose OpenFiler for simple reasons - stability and production-quality. Whereas, FreeNAS has a lot more features, than OpenFiler, but doesn't look that stable. Perhaps, in future I might go for FreeNAS for it's various cool features (UPNP, iTunes streaming, etc).

We are using an old server based on Intel's Server Entry Board, Pentium 4 processor, one Gigabyte memory, one IDE drive and two SATA drives. Both SATA drives are under RAID 1 configuration using OpenFiler's software RAID. I am planning to get RAID controller card so we can use more disks.

OpenFiler boots from USB flash-drive, to make this happen it took some extra effort, Thanks to h@nnes. FreeNAS provides images for flash-devices, so it's lot easier to boot FreeNAS from USB flash-device. BTW! Booting OpenFiler or FreeNAS from USB flash-drive would save one IDE/SATA port on motherboard, which can be used to plug-in another harddrive for better purpose (not for booting small NAS OS).

Anyway, we are using Intel NAS Performance Toolkit to benchmark our NAS server. We are also doing a lot of tests (semi)manually. The idea is to cover all cases and also come up with disaster recovery strategy.

I would post more details on our findings/benchmark-tests, so it helps you, if you plan to go for it.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2008

Apple Service - my experience

My macbook has started having problems now, after 29 months. It had some problems around an year back but I got it fixed at a local reseller more on personal terms than professional (via Apple Support).

Apple has great products but any great product without good service is of no use. Specially, now I am in a city where I would not find any Apple reseller or service-provider. I don't want to travel to New Delhi or even Lucknow, there is no certainty that things would be done in time or would be done at all. I am not sure, if local service-providers are trained enough to do quality service?

Apple needs it's own centers.

Anyway, it seems Apple is yet to grow in India. Perhaps, they would, since their products are quite competitive with other brands in India.

BTW! My macbook might qualify for battery-extension program, but Apple tech support and customer relationship deny that. They say, your macbook is too old (29 months) and battery should be replaced, oh that means I am going to pay at least 4-5 K (INR)?

BTW! I am quite impressed to see HP's support in Kanpur, if not India. They are amazing, we have got some 4-5 HP notebooks and it's really impressive to see how HP has been good to us. They don't even keep our notebooks, if hardware procurement is required and it might take days, they would rather call us as soon as hardware is available and replace things on spot. That's nice thing, they really understand how important a notebook is to it's owner.

I was avoiding to write about Apple Service, but I couldn't resist specially after being denied to the support I am supposed to get, even when I explained them how hard it is to get service done here.

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 11:38 AM | Comments (3)

November 13, 2008

Support Creative Commons - Donate

If you ever liked and appreciated how Creative Commons has made this world a better place by bringing all the good things (creativity, freedom, collaboration, etc) - Then why not support it in this crunching times?

Please donate to Creative Commons.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2008

Long time and no post

I just thought to post an update about me, yeah shameless stuff :-)

I am busy doing some interesting flash/flex and web projects. I have been playing with PureMVC, flex parser/compiler code and other stuff.

A part of schedule goes in streamlining processes (development, recruitment, HR, etc) in a company, which my brother and I co-founded some years back though it's known as different name but seed is the same :-)

Whatever time is left goes in building new office space for our team. We would be moving to new office in couple of days. I hope, our team finds this new office relatively better. I hope, we would be more productive and have fun.

You can check out my flickr-stream to see how it looks, photographs are little old.

More pics

It's done using limited budget and customized furniture, not modular workstations; unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a local vendor, for modular workstations, who can do it in our budget. When we do well in coming months, we might put some good modular workstations/cubicles.

Things are not easy in this part, Uttar Pradesh, of country. It seems, government is not really interested to support businesses/entrepreneurs. Corruption seems to be at it's peak in various government departments, which makes it harder to do things right way (without bribe or favours). Bribing seems like to be an integral part of the system here, but if you are determined and know laws, you can get work done without it, though things might take longer (sometimes very) to get done.

I believe, we are fortunate enough to be in an industry (Software, Internet, Web - in general, IT), where location of business doesn't matter as long as we have three things - electricity, internet and talent pool. I might be missing something in the list.

We have managed to take care of electricity by having good electricity-generator, though it costs a lot per day, considering we have to pay minimum electricity bill to government even when consistent power supply (around 5-6 hours power cut everyday + random power cuts).

Internet is not a problem here, BSNL is doing good job and I find, it's only goverment department that is relatively better than others.

The last one "talent pool" is something missing here in this city "Kanpur", or rather entire state "Uttar Pradesh"? I guess, there are not many companies here which can attract and retain good talent. Another thing is temptation to move to better cities like Bangalore, Pune and Delhi for better jobs or life? I think, it's good idea to do and get more exposure - one must do, it makes you better and allows to see the world outside of the city.

So it's challenge for us to attract good talent or create talented people. I believe, recruitment of smart people (freshers or experienced) and training are going to be the key. I have stopped expecting to get any experienced person, so I am going to fall back on hiring people with passion, integrity and aptitude. Training is going to be the one of the important things in this company.

I believe, we would be able to build a good, if not great, culture in coming months. I don't talk about compensation, it might not be the main factor for passionate people but such people should be appreciated in all possible ways (recognition, great work, great compensation and any other thing). We do pay the best in the city, AFAIK, we would keep doing that.

I am learning a lot of things and life is full of challenges now - I feel I am more motivated now than ever. It's a journey, that's going to be exciting.

Wait a second, did I tell you what we are doing and plan to do?

We are into graphics-design and development services (RIA/Web-app development and design - logo, identity, user-interfaces, illustrations, web-layouts, promos, flash-animation, etc) right now, but I am personally more interested into products, hence we are going to have a part of budget for R&D activities, where we would encourage people to create reusable libraries (be it code or design), internal-tools, experimental/fun projects using upcoming/existing technologies, etc - these can be used in our service projects. I believe, we would be able to turn some of our R&D activities into products in coming future.

That's it for now - if you have read this far, thanks for doing that. Please leave your suggestion, those would really help me in this new journey of mine.

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 12:59 AM | Comments (23)