KRIM : Web Application Software Developer

FOSS.my 2008 was really awesome for getting all these great people under one roof here in Malaysia. Kudos to the organisers. The buzz created around the event was truly priceless. Yoon Kit Yong's 'story from the trenches' was an apt opener to the 2 day event. Eventhough there has been many challenges, the community also has many friends. The song break also set the right mood.

Then it was the start of the 28 talks [1] lined up for the 2 days which were divided into 2 tracks. I was the first speaker on Track 1 which is done in the same hall. I had 15 slides and I thought I could get through 15 minutes (with a running flu and fever) and pass on to Taufiq for the remainder. When I got up to the stage and looked up, then I realised, "Wokay..... why is the hall still full of people ?" Apparently a lot of people had turned up for FOSS.my

I have been accepted to present about our experience in developing an internet intelligence application on the Drupal framework [1] at FOSS.my [2] on Saturday 8 November 2008 [3] which will be held at APIIT [4] in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Hope all goes well as I have a tender to submit on the Friday and my postgraduate project proposal to submit on the Sunday. So why not just take the easy way out and quit ?

I saw this problem on the OpenOffice.org forums [1]. Basically the user wanted to be able to key-in the zipcode value in column G in worksheet Sheet1, and have a formula that will automatically fill in the data for City and State in columns E and F. The data is available in another worksheet Sheet2.

Sheet1

 Sheet2

The VLOOKUP function is a favorite of mine and this is how it can be done to solve the above problem.

Someone asked me how to extract the last name in an MS Excel file. I do not use MS Excel, so I have included this following formula using OpenOffice.org [1].

If you need to have it all in one cell, then here it is:

=RIGHT(C1;LEN(C1)-FIND("*";SUBSTITUTE(C1;" ";"*";LEN(C1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(C1;" ";"")))))

Research and advisory firm, Gartner Inc identified social networks and web mashups among the top ten most disruptive technologies that will shape the future of information technologies [1]. Gartner defines a disruptive technology as one that causes major change in ‘the accepted way of doing things’, including business models, processes, revenue streams, industry dynamics and consumer behaviour. We are currently developing two products that belong to each of those two categories. What and why are we developing products that feature disruptive technologies ?

OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released on 13 October 2008 [1]. The demand for downloads was so high, that it crashed the web server [2]. I downloaded a copy yesterday ( 17 October 2008 ) and immediately started using it. I have been using OpenOffice.org since it's former StarOffice 5.2 days in late 1999. My family uses OpenOffice.org exclusively at home. There are three main reasons for me to use OpenOffice.org:

1. It is free and available meaning that me, my family and whoever wants to use can do so without paying for the software;
2. It uses an open data format that is now an international open standard meaning that it retains data consistency (very critical when I migrate data between different systems); and
3. I find that it is easier to use in a consistent manner meaning that related functions are accessible from the right click and sub-menus are not initially hidden. 

Does anyone else in Terengganu use OpenOffice.org ?

Lately, I have been using screen recording software as a tool for instructional videos. These type of software allows me to record what I do on my computer screen as a video. This is faster than writing and adding screenshot images. It is also better in showing the flow and actions to perform a particular task as an example. The disadvantage is that it can't be printed out. There are two free open source screen recording software that I use:

1. Istanbul on Ubuntu Linux 8.04 which records onto Oggvorbis format and easily installed using Synaptic
2. CamStudio on MS Windows XP which records onto .avi and .swf formats which have to be downloaded from www.camstudio.org

I have included video examples in the attachment:

I don't normally blog this often but while I was browsing the tagcloud on the Internet Intelligence Data Application (i-IDA) [1], I noticed that the term Education (which came next to Economics on our taxonomy) had grown significantly larger - meaning that there were more content which carried terms associated with Education.

Clicking on the term 'Education' leads me to a web page produced by i-IDA listing contents which had words associated with Education sorted according to date. Within this list, there was a report on the Malaysian Higher Education Minister praising Malaysia’s top local universities’ improved ranking in the Times Higher Education-QS (THE-QS) World University Rankings 2008 [2]. I visited the THE-QS World University Rankings website [3] and was very happy to see that my alma mater, the University of Bristol [4], is ranked top 32 among the world's universities. My wife's Australian National University is ranked 16, whilst my former correspondence's Cornell University is ranked 15 and another's University of Manchester is ranked 29 and another's Imperial College London is ranked 6. My sister's University of St Andrews is ranked 83, whilst her twin's University of Nottingham is ranked 86. So what does it take for these universities to be ranked in the top 100 of the world ?

Many people have asked me what was the purpose of developing the internet Intelligence Data Application (i-IDA) [1] ? So that I can provide a straight answer every time, I have put this to blog. i-IDA is a tool for collecting information published on the internet, processing it and providing an analytical presentation so that experts in the field can provide strategic insight. This is part of the intelligence cycle process which roughly translates as knowing what other people know. The United States of America's Central Intelligence Agency [2] and Federal Bureau of Investigation [3] are users of the intelligence cycle. One of the key feature for i-IDA is the tagcloud [4]. Other intelligent people have used tagclouds to analyse the speeches of Senator McCain and Senator Barack Obama in the run up to the United States of America Presidential Elections.