Author Archives: Tech Admin

How The IT Giant Competes In Ads

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Reading ads from IT companies is always interesting. When a company grows big or the company is already a big player in the field, marketing and PR work in many occassions turns to be quite important, just like how a company emphasizes on outstanding product development during its early age.

Recently, I was so busy with my projects and hardly found time to read latest news or info from my mag and journal subscription. Surprisingly, in this May/June edition of Oracle Magazine which I just read, I found this very interesting ad in one page of the magazine.

Oracle Magazine ads May/June 2007

Hilarious!! This is not an ordinary ad. This is a direct-confrontation wrapped in a sweet ad candy.

I don’t know other parties’s reaction, but it will be fascin-IT-ing to see how IBM or Microsoft responds to this challenge.

Big companies always have their own creative mind.

IBM To Bundle PHP Apps With System I

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I got an email from my colleague about IBM’s plan to bundle PHP apps with System I. About System I itself, it’s a new business system with multiple OS support (IBM i5/OS, MS Windows, Linux, and IBM AIX 5L) and hardened security. System I is the successor of legendary AS/400 machine. More info about System I can be found at the homepage: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/

IBM is looking for proposals from PHP developers to get a list of prospective apps to bundle. This is an interesting opportunity for PHP developers to show off their talent and skills. This offer is regional. Please contact your nearest IBM office to get more details about this offer.

Zend Framework 1.0, First Stable Release For Your Commercial And Enterprise PHP Web Apps

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zf_logo.pngJuly 1st, 2007 is a monumental day for Zend and their developers. It’s the day when Zend Framework 1.0, the first stable version of the framework, was released to public. What’s with the fuss?

It’s important for a business entity (eg. company) to make sure the business process run smoothly and profitable during the whole cycle. A lot of components are involved in company operation which determine company success, one of them is software (yes, we’re talking about modern companies). For technology-driven company, software provision and implementation is crucial. Software is not only for administration use, it solidifies and improves business process.

Now we’ll get the scope smaller by emphasizing software lifecycle processes on companies which provide web-based service or consider web existence as business image. Serious companies follow certain standard in its operation. By using standard, it will be able to measure the whole process and assess whether the operations succeeded and desired outcome achieved. Talking about software cycle, there are several evolving models used to reflect the software cycle, from the old Waterfall model to international standard ISO/IEC 12207.

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The GPL Myth: Opensource Is Free Of Charge

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GNU Not Profitable?This is the first part of an article duo about open source. This article is inspired by recent policy stipulated by the Joomla team that all joomla modules and components must comply GPL license, the license Joomla has been using since the announcement of its first official release in 2005.

Personal Impressum

In 2004, I attended a one day seminar about GPL license and the spirit behind open source community entitled “Free Software: Past, Present and Future”. Richard Stallman, the father behind GNU, took the lead as a key speaker. It was an interesting session. Besides the material, Stallman himself was an eccentric person for me. He came and did speech with long hair, t-shirt, and torn jeans. He reflected the word “freedom” itself. Did you see a glimpse of the word “renegade” coincidentally?

Free Is Not Totally Free

The word free has different meanings. If one cares to look up all definitions in dictionary, free is limited to certain terms although it generally means no limitation. From this interesting fact, let’s dig what public assumption is about free software.

In daily practice, free software is often associated with freeware. In fact they are a bit different. Citing wikipedia, freeware is copyrighted computer software which is made available for use free of charge, for an unlimited time. The keyword here is “free of charge”. This is the critical point which oftentimes misleads users with free software.

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Zend Framework On the Way: Sample Application For Academic Purpose

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Can Zend Framework do you a favor? Does it taste different flavour? If you ask me, the answer is yes.

As Zend Framework (ZF) is on its steady pace to the first stable release, more and more applications are [being] developed on ZF. This is also intriguing me to create some applications which are driven by ZF.

Fortunately, I was offered to create a system for managing final projects in my past department (it’s now recognized as School of Informatics and Electrical Engineering). Considering this as a perfect chance to show properly designed academic software and as a pilot project for other ZF-based applications, I took the opportunity and started developing the application.

Frontend view

Figure 1 Sample user’s frontend view

The application itself is mainly another CRUD application with some remote calls to fetch academic data located at different servers. The remote call API is customized to suit the department’s need. Currently it still relies on POST and GET based supplied parameters. However, it’s likely a custom XML API will be developed to handle the web service.

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