Just came across a report in the New Zealand Herald which suggests that Auckland is OECD's (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) most entrepreneurial city in terms of number of entrepreneurs vis-a-vis the population.

13.5 percent of people living in Auckland have been considered "entrepreneurs", followed by Vancouver and Melbourne.

Brussels and Tokyo are cities with least amount of enterpreneurs.

A common thread that I can see between the top three cities is that all three have a lot of social diversity in terms of people from different parts of the world. I guess migration would have played an important role in unleashing the entrepreneurial abilities of people, apart from the fact that certain cities provide frame conditions in which entrepreneurship can thrive.

More on this can be found in this article entited Auckland named OECD's top entrepreneurial city.

I recently came across a report on carrying statistics about internet usage trends in New Zealand. It is based on a survey conducted in September-October 2007 of 1430 New Zealanders.

Here are some interesting findings:

1. 78% of New Zealanders use the Internet.
2. 15% of users are online at home for at least 20 hours a week.
3. 66% have broadband, 31% dialup
4. 71% of users say the Internet is an important source of information, compared to 52% for newspapers and television
5. 10% of NZ Internet users have a blog
6. 77% check email daily
7. 28% participate in social networking sites

The full report can be downloaded from the Auckland University of Technology website.

I've been involved with software development for over 12 years now. Over that period I've been a developer, architect and a project manager in different software projects. So the following list of 10 things relating to software development (and the key issue of software defect reduction) made a lot of sense.

1. Finding and fixing a software problem after delivery is often 100 times more expensive than finding and fixing it during the requirements and design phase.
2. About 40-50% of the effort on current software projects is spent on avoidable rework.
3. About 80% of the avoidable rework comes from 20% of the defects.
4. About 80% of the defects come from 20% of the modules and about half the modules are defect free.
5. About 90% of the downtime comes from at most 10% of the defects.
6. Peer reviews catch 60% of the defects.
7. Perspective-based reviews catch 35% more defects than non-directed reviews.
8. Disciplined personal practices can reduce defect introduction rates by up to 75%.
9. All other things being equal, it costs 50% more per source instruction to develop high-dependability software products than to develop low-dependability software products. However, the investment is more than worth it if significant operations and maintenance costs are involved.
10. About 40-50% of user programs enter use with nontrivial defects.

More on each of these points can be found in this expanded article entitled, Software Defect Reduction Top-10 List, by Barry Boehm, USC and Victor Basili, U. of Maryland.

I've been waiting for an app that would allow me to make Skype phone calls from my iPhone.! And it is here... woo hoo!

It is called "Fring" (and it is now an accepted terminology to use the word "fringing"!).

It not only allows you to make Skype calls and do Skype chats, but also integrates with MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Twitter and a whole lot of other chatting services.

Check out the Fring site for more.

Installing it was a breeze. And the interface is really nice and simple. It uses WiFi to make Skype calls. So if your phone is connected to WiFi, you can make Skype calls.

Fring is also available for other handsets like Wi-Fi Symbian 8 or 9, Windows Mobile 5 or 6 and UIQ.

Creating/modifiy the Apache webserver .htaccess files by hand can be a bit of a pain at times.

Today I came across a website that lets one generate an .htaccess file using a nice, Ajax-y web interface.

For example, to setup authentication, one has to create a user. You can do that by simply filling out a simple form like:

» Continue reading "Online tool for creating Apache .htaccess files"

Adobe Devnet has a security advisory on the upcoming Flash Player 9 update. The advisory lists a few very important changes to the security model in Flash Player which can possibly impact your existing Flex and Flash applications. The changes are primarily to address the vulnerabilities of the earlier versions of Flash Player (9,0,115,0 and before).

There are four key changes that can possibly impact existing applications:

• A socket policy file will always be required for all socket connections
• A policy file will be required to send headers across domains (This will possibly affect some of the Flex apps that I work with)
• The allowScriptAccess default will always be "sameDomain"
• "javascript:" URLs will be prohibited in networking APIs, except getURL(), navigateToURL(), and HTML-enabled text fields

» Continue reading "Important Flash Player Security Update - Check your applications"

Today I needed to use Groovy to create a dump of all MySQL databases on the MySQL server running on my local machine.

So I looked at my earlier blog entry on how to dump MySQL databases using the "mysqldump" command.

So when I issued the command create a dump from console, the contents of the database are dumped to a sql file as expected.

// Works in command line

mysqldump --all-databases -u [username] -p[password] -C > alldatabases.sql

As you might know, it is fairly straight-forward to execute shell commands from Groovy. You simply put the command in quotes and call the execute() method.

However, when I issued the same command using Groovy, the command did not work... well, at least not at first.

» Continue reading "Dumping MySQL databases using Groovy"

I just saw that Universal Mind Cairngorm extensions for Flex are now set up on RIAForge (thanks Andrew).

We have been using the UM Cairngorm Extensions at Straker Interactive (where I work) for ZoomFlex since about six months.

One of the features that I really like about the UM extensions is the ability to combine together event-business logic. Given that any real-life application (like ZoomFlex) has quite a few commands, having a separate Command class for each command can become quite overwhelming. The ability to aggregate command logic into context-specific command classes is very useful.

» Continue reading "Cairngorm extensions from Universal Mind"

Just found this blog entry that speaks of why New Zealand is a great place to do business. Some of the reasons mentioned are:

• At 30%, the corporate tax is lower than or equal to most developed countries’.
• Our GST is only 12.5%, in most developed countries it is 15-25%.
• Workforce participation is 68%, very high by international standards.
• ACC provides no-fault income insurance, meaning businesses to not have to go to massive expense insuring themselves against litigation by injured workers and hiring lawyers to defend themselves.
• Ease of doing business is New Zealand is second in the world only to Singapore.
• This is the least corrupt country in the world.
• Corporate profits were up 60.5% in just six years from 1999 to 2005.
• Only 0.54% of businesses failed last year.

Plus it offers a great lifestyle!

On the downside, Internet connectivity less than average, but is getting better every year.

But if you can be happy living on a large, very pretty island, New Zealand is the place for you.

I came to New Zealand five years back and have been working in the area of software development, and have enjoyed every minute of being here.

Today I wanted to give ColdFusion 8 debugging a try.

So, I started followed the instructions on how to setup the enviornment for debugging. After installing ColdFusion 8 extensions for Eclipse, I went to enable debugger in ColdFusion Administrator. The CF administrator instructs that:

You must specify this debugger port in the JVM settings of your application server, for example: -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005, and restart the server.

If I was using JRun, I know that these options can be added in the jvm.config file.

But as I use JBoss, it took me little bit to figure out where I need to make these changes.

» Continue reading "Setting JVM options on JBoss for ColdFusion 8 debugging"