CTO, Software engineer and Team leader
Archive for August, 2009
URL shortening too long? j.mp is the answer
Aug 28th
First of all, what’ an URL Shortening service? URL shortening is a technique used very much lately on the World Wide Web allowing people to create a very short URL and make a web page available on it, in addition to the original address. For example, the page http://www.radupoenaru.com/handle-xml-with-namespaces/ has a length of 54 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 25 characters: http://tinyurl.com/mpjxqb .Half the size, same page pointing to!
But hey! Twitter allows only 140 characters – Need to save two characters in a tweet? You either have to use the SMS language – rework your wording by changing “people” More >
GPS vs aGPS vs WiFi vs GSM localization
Aug 26th
Each method presented has its strengths and weaknesses. None of these is the perfect positioning system, yet they all can collaborate in order to give the estimated position of a user.
GPS, the veteran of the group, has a plethora of satellites at its disposal, offering almost anywhere in the world a precision in meters. The devices which implement this technology are small enough to be inserted even in phones, smart enough to do their job or even more by tracking many satellites in the same time and eating less power, affording the usage of this service for hours in a More >
GPS – Global positioning system
Aug 24th
GPS is the oldest one from the frameworks available to the large audience. It isn’t the first positioning system, but it is the one with the most success and longevity. It started as a military project in 1957. Because of the cold war, once the Russians sent to space the first man-made satellite, a team of scientists started monitoring its radio transmissions. The crucial discovery was that, because of the Doppler Effect, the signal transmitted frequency increases as the satellite approached, and lowers as it continued moved away from them. This added to the fact that they knew their exact More >
SCRUM
Aug 23rd
- one of Agile processes
- use incremental framework for developing complex software
- managing new products
- considered more like a framework in which you can employ various processes and techniques
- Key principle: during a project the customers can change their minds
Manages complex processes by:
- Transparency
- The outcome of the product should be visible to the manager who is managing the outcomes. Also each process that affect the outcome of the product also should been visible to the managers.
- Inspection
- Various aspects of the process must be frequently inspected regularly so that quality of work and peoples can be seen.
- Adaptation
- If the inspection process find outs More >
Agile vs Waterfall
Aug 21st
Agile roots: Toyota Production System
Aug 19th
This methodology and set of principles has the root in the company with the same name. After the Second World War, the Japan and its companies were almost ruined both physical and financial. To recover the economy, they had to rethink all the processes of production in order to maximize their efficiency. This was required because not only that they lack financial resources, but even the loans that they could do as a country came with big price. In Toyota Company, a smart man called Taiichi Ohno, created a new way to build cars, focusing on creating as many quality More >
Agile – techniques, principles and methodology
Aug 16th
Because the software industry is so different than any other, the development model used prior of creating agile methodology was taken from the engineering disciplines, such as civil or mechanical engineering. Those disciplines put a lot of emphasis on planning before you build because the resources are very expensive and cannot be wasted because of bad synchronization or different physical characteristics like calibers, by example. The planning style is a predictive method that focuses on planning the future in detail. A team that uses these predictive techniques can report precisely what features and tasks are scheduled, both their order and More >
Agile Lab – Coining the Agile techniques
Aug 14th
The roots of agile programming as we know it can be traced back to 2001. At Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, a group of seventeen people met have fun, but also to find common ground on a issue that was too much discussed but no result can be achieved. They were the leaders of different currents of improving software creation techniques. They were adepts of Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming and other agile techniques, joined together by the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes.
More >BNR exchange rate
Aug 12th
In this global crisis, nothing is more useful than a good chart to watch your money as investment. That’s why I created a special page which collects freely available exchange rates from BNR (National Romanian Bank) and presents them in a graphical form. This way, the viewers of my website will always be on the edge with exchange rates, as soon as BNR posts them (usually around 13:00 GMT+2).
The main challenges were:
- Building a php script to parse XML, inserting the exchange rates into database. The lack of experience and debugging tools made a huge difference in development time. More >
cPanel: using Cron Jobs
Aug 10th
First – what is a cron job? It is a piece of software which can be run at specific times by the cron service. By example, one could set a cron job to update his application exchange rates from a server every day at a specific hour so its application will be up to date.
I used it because the Romanian National Bank doesn’t have a proper page to check for exchange rates – they present just the numbers, but no trends, no charts – nothing visual. Too bad for them! For me it is actually a good way to refresh More >
