Synthasite is renaming to Yola! ?
What a name ?
Must give it to them, way better than the old one, and much more Web 2/3 – ish !
More on Vinny Linghams’ Blog
DevDays is coming up this week on Thurdsay here in Johannesburg, and finally I get to see what all the fuss is about.
DevDays ’09 brings you the best of current developer technologies, along with a preview of the most exciting technologies to hit the Developer space in a long time.
The event will offer more sessions, this year, than ever before. We’ll be talking about the full spectrum of Microsoft developer technologies, all that you’ve come to expect of us, like Silverlight and LINQ. We even have a few surprise topics up our sleeve.
More info here, don’t think there would be any space left 😉
Microsoft has released the latest for their Extensions of their Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 for Visual Studio 2008 .
This release has seen alot of work going into it where the team went to talk to the community to find out what they liked and what they did not like in the current(before this release) extensions. You can read more on Paul Andrew’s blog, who is the Technical Product Manager for the Sharepoint Developer Platform at Microsoft.
Some of the new feature that we will be seeing in this release are :
- Probably my favourite, The user Guide is now installed with the extensions, and you don’t have to go download it separately.
- Deployment step logging is now included.
- Ancillary asseblies for example for business logic can now be added to the Sharepoint Solution WSP.
- New project item template for Sharepoint RootFiles items
- Command line build, package and retract commands are included enabling continuous integration and build servers.
and a nice tutorial for getting started can be found on Kirk Evans Blog as well.
I’ve been running Google Adsense advertisements on my blog for about 3 years now. During this time I’ve loaded new templates, jumped from my old blogspot blog to my own shared hosting account and loaded WordPress, and experimented with different layouts.
I found these simple steps provided by Darren Rowse (from Problogger.net) on the Inside Adsense Blog.
Basically he provides ways for you to experiment with Adsense namely:
- Ad positioning
- Number of ads
- Ad Design
- Ad Sizes
- Ad Formats
- Which content converts
As you probably know I’m totally addicted to diving (casual, not the technical type).
I found this book on Kalahari today of which I’ve read quite some good reviews. Looks quite thorough with real life experience by the authors of the destinations.
The dive spots of Southern Africa is an indispensable guide to all levels of divers, broadening their horizons on places to visit and dive in southern Africa. Through extensive travel and diving, Johan and Amilda Boshoff bring you valuable information on over 300 dive spots in southern Africa. Important guidelines on each inland and coastal dive destination include accommodation, facilities, traveling tips and dive conditions. Complete with photographs and illustrated maps of each dive site, all reefs are star rated to cover depths, marine life and other essential information for the diving community.
I love diving, and will take any chance I can to go for a quick dip over a weekend. One thing I’ve always wanted, was a cheap, but reliable and high quality underwater camera that I can use to take some snaps of our excursions underwater.
Thats when I found this 5 megapixel camera at Mantality for under R2k.
Definitely worth subscribing to somegreybloke YouTube Channel .
Personality Test (Online Survey Parady)
What you can find on the Internet
Facebook Translations application is an application where you can translate your view on Facebook to almost whatever language you’d like.
The translation project is a collaborative community project where the members of Facebook can help translate the pages and vote on the best phrases and words in your own language.
I change my Facebook to Afrikaans, and went to look if I can help out with the translation process.
First, get yourself the Application here -> http://www.facebook.com/translations/
Secondly, click on Go Translate at the top
On this screen you can find Untranslated phrases and words and also Vote for submitted phrases, and vote for what would be the most fitting translation of certain phrases.
I’ve had a look and there are already 2600 tranlators(/users) for Afrikaans, isiZulu has around 60 and so the list continues.
It is very strange to read Facebook in Afrikaans, but keeps you proud of your heritage and language.
Was amazed not to find Klingon on the list of languages…
What do you think of the Facebook Translations ?
If you don’t want to help with the Translations, you can still change the language at the bottom of the Facebook page and select on of the languages.
Zlatan posted a very interesting post about Sharepoint and by using Google Trends, how they are already positioned very well amongst the industry leaders.
So if you are interested in Sharepoint, head on over to Zlatan’s blog and have a read on his latest post.
First with Tahoe, then SharePoint 2003 since its release hasn’t really raised too many eyebrows worldwide. As brilliant as they were as web content management platforms, they found it a bit harder to compete and make proper presence in Enterprise Content Management market, and be part of the revolutionising enterprises and bringing Enterprise 2.0 conceptual architectures.
However, ever since the release of SharePoint 2007 Microsoft has been galloping into Enterprise Content Management market and taking over lion shares of customers from known and established brands such as OpenText Livelink, IBM Filenet, EMC Documentum, Oracle ECM (formerly known as Stellent) etc. Companies with more foresight, such as OpenText and EMC, formed stronger partnerships with Microsoft in this space. For example OpenText’s official strategy was to position their flagship ECM offering Livelink with SharePoint 2007 as a front end, saying that “…well Microsoft controls the front end of everything and there is no reason to compete with them in that space…..”. OpenText was also the first one to certify SharePoint 2007 as DoD 5015.2 compliant simply by putting behind Livelink’s powerful Records Management offering.
Clever strategy to secure companies dependency on crucial OpenText technology well in time before the expected “BOOM” of SharePoint Server 2007.
All they were really doing is buying more time as Microsoft planned to make their backend offering just as powerful.
Besides better than usual Document and Records Management, Collaboration and Social Networking functionality Initial Enterprise offering of SharePoint Server 2007 featured InfoPath Forms Services as Electronic Forms offering (ECM people will know what I mean by this) and Excel Services as rich analytical, information gathering and reporting platform. Soon came integration with SQL 2005 Reporting Services (Service Pack 2 I believe) to further bolster reporting capabilities of SharePoint 2007 solutions and give Reporting Services more dimensions to work in (Collaboration, Workflows/Processes, Alerts, Better controlled Security and Distribution etc).
Before you knew it DoD 5015.2 compliance for SharePoint 2007 Records Management came out eliminating further dependency on being complemented by more established platforms to provide full enterprise solutions.
Last two updates have actually put SharePoint in front of the pack.
By incorporating PerformancePoint Server 2007 (now known as PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint), state of the art platform that takes users beyond Business Intelligence and plunges them into new age of Performance Management. This offering is not yet rivalled by any single ECM offering on the market although rival Performance Management offerings exist, separate to their ECM offerings, such as IBM Cognos, Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System (formaly Hyperion) and SAP Business Objects.
Dave Duarte posted a post titled Top Tips for Living in unpredictable times.
an extract from his post:
Here’s Taleb’s Top 10 life tips, drawn from Appleyard’s article:
1. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2. Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3. It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5. Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6. Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7. Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8. Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.
9. Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW, but you need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10. Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.