Programming

How Outsourcing Looks from New Delhi

I am really excited to blog on an issue which is so dear to my heart. Beforehand I must tell you that I have seen this industry from all the angles, I was a CCE in Convergys India (Gurgaon) and was working in a UK process so I have the real floor experience, then I worked as a feature writer for India's national daily The Pioneer and tried to analyze the ill-effects of outsourcing, like aping Western culture, sleeping disorders (insomnia and bad health) etc. If that was not enough many Indian ... (read more)

This post was written by Vivek Seal.

2006/05/30

This Weblog is Being Sent Overseas

For the next week, I've outsourced this weblog to Vivek Seal, 23, a technology reporter for Global Services in New Delhi, India. Seal recently posted a comment here touting the benefits of outsourcing: If a person from Bangalore is able to do a job in less than half the cost and with more efficiency then that rationally a best thing for all the parties around it. No matter what. ... All I wanna say is give India a chance to improve this world. We hear a lot of dire statements in the ... (read more)

2006/05/30

Outsourcing My Weblog to India

Vivek Seal, a technology journalist in India who writes for Global Services Media, has posted a comment on Workbench addressing American critics of outsourcing: I am a reporter from India and cover outsourcing scenario. I have few points for you people to get the exact picture and then make your conclusions about sourcing McDonalds customer care business to India: We do not have call centers using Skype to interact with the US or European customers. There are dedicated fiber optical lines with ... (read more)

2006/05/10

I voted today to expand the RSS Advisory Board to 15 members and choose them privately. After serving on the board when it was private and not exceptionally well-regarded by the RSS community, I think it's extremely important to operate in the open. However, the requirement to publicly evaluate and vote on new members chases off anyone who isn't completely flame-retardant. One prospective member with years of experience in RSS development withdrew his name from consideration when he realized ... (read more)

2006/04/10

Crunchitize Me, Arrington!

Michael Arrington, the publisher of TechCrunch and the human router at the center of Web 2.0, questions the work I did for Dave Winer on Weblogs.Com: I was part of the weblogs.com transaction and was also very dissapointed with Rogers Cadenhead's performance. I have no information on the second part of the dispute. Arrington was Winer's attorney on that project. I have no idea what he's referring to here, and he hasn't returned an e-mail on the subject. The entirety of our relationship was a ... (read more)

2006/03/18

New Tool Lets You Play Around with RSS

I've added a new tool to the RSS Advisory Board site that makes it easier to test different Really Simple Syndication element and attribute values in the Feed Validator. RSS Playground uses a sample RSS document as a starting point, letting you change the values and create a new document that will remain online for 72 hours. I used the tool this afternoon to see what the Feed Validator does when it encounters a feed containing RFC 2822 date-time values. Because this tool's being used to support ... (read more)

2006/02/19

Tracking Click Pings with PHP/MySQL

Earlier this week, Mozilla Firefox developer Darin Fisher announced that test builds of the browser include support for click pings, an experimental new HTML feature that makes it easier for web sites to track clicks on outgoing links: I'm sure this may raise some eye-brows among privacy conscious folks, but please know that this change is being considered with the utmost regard for user privacy. The point of this feature is to enable link tracking mechanisms commonly employed on the web to get ... (read more)

2006/01/20

Wikipedia Needs Women

Shelley Powers believes that well-known female technologists are less likely to find themselves in Wikipedia than their male counterparts: Why are there significantly fewer women? I think one reason is that we women are taught not to put ourselves forward. Men are complimented for tooting their own horn; making known their wishes; noting their own accomplishments. Women, however, are expected to be sweet, demure, and most of all, stay ever so slightly in the shadow. My take on her observation ... (read more)

2005/12/23

Spammer Messes with My Headers

A few weeks ago, I mistakenly believed that I had closed a PHP mail form vulnerability that let spammers use my web server to send mail. Another batch of penis enlargement and phentermine pitches were sent through my server last night, which I discovered when "rejected bulk e-mail" bounces found their way to me. A spammer exploited a mail script I had written that coded the recipient address like this: $recipient = "info@ekzemplo.com"; I thought the script was secure because users couldn't ... (read more)

2005/12/07

New Book: Programming with Java in 24 Hours

I just launched the web site for Sams Teach Yourself Programming with Java in 24 Hours, my 21st computer book since I began writing them in 1996. I'm not sure how this happened. I went to college to learn interpretive dance. This is the fourth edition of the book, updated to cover Java 2 version 5. I wrote the first in a 17-day haze in 1997, covering Java 1.1 and its class library, which is less than one-tenth the size of the Java 2 class library today. Over the years, the book has grown to 558 ... (read more)

2005/11/29

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