Ten ways to increase your programmers’ productivity from ZDNet.co.uk

Maintaining productivity can be a struggle, yet there are a number of ways to remove the obstacles that may be keeping your developers from working at full capacity

Programmers are expensive employees to hire and employ. They make better-than-average salaries compared to other office workers with similar experience and education levels. Needless to say, with the cost of developer time being what it is, it makes sense to take steps to improve the efficiency and productivity of your development staff. Here are 10 tips to help you do just that.

1. Minimise distractions
Most managers are aware that programming is a job that requires long periods of intense concentration. What they don’t realise is they are not doing a very good job at letting their team focus on their work.

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Two lectures from Randy Pausch

Recently I’ve watched two very inspiring videos from Randy Pausch.  I’ve certainly learnt a lot from his two lectures……and I’ve decided to put it up here to share them with everyone.  Hope he will inspire you too 🙂

Q. Who is Randy Pausch

A. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management

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VIM 101

Ok…so VIM (born in 1991) is not exactly new…at least its not new to students who have done TELE301 in the past. If you have never used Linux before, its quite hard to get your head around it at first. I still remember the first time I saw VIM in the Tele301 lab…my first impression was:

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Reference Material for INFO 404 Practical – 2008

If you are doing INFO 404 this year and you are preparing for the Practical Test, you might find the following links to be quite useful.

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Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?

Found a very interesting article today:

CrossTalk – Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? – Jan 2008

– – – –

Chinese translation (although the title might be misleading): http://news.csdn.net/n/20080109/112571.html

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20 Top Success Tips from Donald J. Trump

After seeing the list…I can’t agree more with the items listed…so I’ve posted here to keep reminding myself 😀

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Exams are finished! Am FREE :D

Exams are finally FINISHED! Can’t believe another year has gone by so fast 😀

Here are the papers that I am planning to do next year:

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Will be back after the exams!

My last two exams are just around the corner

COSC346 is on next Tuesday

and

COMP212 is on next Friday

So I won’t be updating my blog until my exams are over

But I will be back 😉

—

Good luck to all those people who still got exams 😀

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University of Otago Online Enrolment for 2008

2008 is just around the corner, so if you are coming back next year, make sure you get enrolled for next year asap.

The fastest way to complete the enrollment for next year is to use the Online Enrolment Form on Otago’s website: http://www.otago.ac.nz/OnlineReg

Good luck with your exams and see you next year 🙂

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FREE courses from UC Berkeley on YouTube!

Have you ever wondered what the lectures are like in Berkeley? Well, here is the chance for you to watch some FREE videotaped lectures from the University of California, Berkeley.

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A lap around Visual Studio 2008 – Dunedin .Net User Group

A lap around Visual Studio 2008

Dunedin 11/10/2007

Gather at 5:30pm, starting at 6:00pm (finishing 7:30pm)

Presented by Darryl Burling | Developer & Platform Strategy Group |
Microsoft New Zealand Ltd

Explore all the new Visual Studio 2008 features, from language
enhancements; improved designers; Web and smart-client development
tools; to Visual Studio Team System, a suite of software lifecycle
management tools poised to transform how you deliver software for
Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and the Web.

Catering: Pizza and drinks will be served prior to the presentation commencing.

Door Charge: Free

Venue: Centre for Innovation, University of Otago (downstairs seminar room)

87 St David Street www.otago.ac.nz/about/campuses.html

Register: http://www.dot.net.nz/Default.aspx?tabid=34
(For catering purposes, please register if you are planning to come)
NZ Dot User Group: http://www.dot.net.nz/

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Some tips on using Vyatta

In the past two days, I have spent quite some time in the G02 networking lab using Vyatta. Vyatta is a really powerful tool yet very easy to configure. Here are some of the things that I have learnt (“experienced” is probably a more suitable word) while using the Vyatta on the lab machines…hopefully history won’t repeat itself 😉

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C++

It might sound strange…but its true…I didn’t know I really like C++ till I handed in my assignment last week. Right now I am spending an hour or two everyday in the lab to learn as much C++ as I could 🙂

Here are some of the things I have learned this morning @ the Linux Lab:

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(Video of)C++0x – An Overview by Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup

I found this on my Google Reader last Sunday. Its a video of Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup himself giving a “lecture” on C++0x. If you are a Computer Science Student or you enjoyed using C++, you should really check this out:

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We had a lecture on Firefox!

Robert O’Callahan, who is a long time contributor to the Mozilla Firefox, came down to Dunedin and gave us a very good lecture (@ Archway 4) on Firefox!!! I have a say I am a big fan of Firefox…and this lecture gave me a good understanding of what is going on behind the scenes…how web browser is built and how we can help. Its “uncommon” and “rare” to have someone from the industry…specially someone with so much experience to actually come and talk to us…so I recorded (basically) the whole lecture!

Robert’s blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/

He gave us (who is doing Cosc346) a piece of advice (words might not be exactly the same):

Grab a project that you are interested in, dive in and work towards your goal. You might be lost in the code for a few weeks, but you are surely gonna learn something afterwards.

Thanks Robert for your great lecture, wish you guys @ Firefox all the best 🙂

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We are on the University of Otago Information Science Student News Page!

Last week our Microsoft Imagine Cup trophy finally arrived by mail (thanks Paul and Ryan)…Chaks, Jen and I went to the commerce building one afternoon and handed the trophy to Professor Martin Purvis, the HOD (Head of Department) of Information Sci.  We took a few pictures at the time…but didn’t expect it to be online in such a short period of time 🙂

Student News : Second placing in MS Imagine Cup makes local newspaper

http://www.business.otago.ac.nz/infoscience/modules/news/article.php?storyid=61

Thanks my team mates for all the hard work they have done 🙂

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(Networking) Abbreviation of the day (2)

Recently I have seen the term VPN quite a number of times, both at work and at lectures. For our second assignment for Info334, we have to analyse a company’s currently network and write a report after that. Since we need to connect a few remote sites together, we need to use something safe and secure to connect them together over a very long distant…but what can we use?

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(Networking) Abbreviation of the day (1)

If you ever read a book on networking, you will find that there are so many abbreviations used in the text…chances are after you read a few more pages, you will not remember what does *** stand for 😦 So I decided to start something called (Networking) Abbreviation of the day to help me remember / understand these the abbreviations used in the networking world 🙂

SONA – (Cisco) Service-Oriented Network Architecture

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Networking Quiz

Doing networking paper is fun…it forces you to learn a lot of the underlying stuff that you use in your everyday life. Remember the famous question? “What is a subnet? Can’t believe you guys doesn’t know this…oh la la!!!” 😉

I was reading the CISCO book (Top-Down Network Design) and found the following info on page 117. So I thought I should post something here to remind myself (mostly) and other people who is doing the paper (Info334) about these “magic numbers“. They are “famous / well known” protocols that are based on either TCP or UDP…can you remember their port numbers? (They might be in the final exam 😉 )

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MSDNAA – Free Microsoft software for students taking Info Sci papers (@ University of Otago only)

MSDNAA provides University students with FREE Microsoft Software from Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Project 2007 to Operating Systems like Vista Business, XP Professional and Windows Server 2003.

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