tech2all.com

Source ZDnet Asia

Most organizations don’t have a formal apprenticeship program for software developers. There is no journeyman for software development.

However, most software developers today learn as much through their interaction with other developers as they learned during their formal education.

So if your software developers are learning how to be software developers through their experience at your organization, what are you teaching them? It’s time to evaluate what the software developers in your organization are learning.

The need for education
As an industry we still suffer from project failures, cost overruns, poor client satisfaction, and a general malaise. Failure rates for software development projects are wildly different depending upon who you listen to. Publicly reported rates vary from 5 percent at the lowest to over 70 percent. While neither of these numbers is particularly believable they illuminate the fact that there is still a problem. If software development was steadfastly producing quality software all of the numbers would be in the same range.

However, the mere fact that there are failures doesn’t indicate what the causes for failure are. Surely there are a variety of causes for project failures. Just as surely some of those causes are causes that are well understood by those at the forefront of software development.
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Website Gtalkr is a Flash-based web app designed to bring your Google apps (Gmail and Google Talk) together with Flickr, YouTube, and newsfeeds for an all-in-one media and communications mega-package.

Get:Google Talk Chat with your friends online anywhere, anytime. Gtalkr also allows you to search your conversations just like in Gmail. Flickr, YouTube Explore all that Flickr and YouTube have to offer. Watch a slide show of your favorite photos and better yet, watch and share videos right in Gtalkr!

Gtalkr is pretty cool – the integration of Gmail and Google Talk is nice (you can chat directly from Gtalkr), and the YouTube and Flickr integration is also attractive. Of course, there is obvious concern about passing your private information through an unaffiliated third party, though Gtalkr insists that your information is safe with them. There is also a Gtalkr notifier available for download (Windows only).

CNET publishes an informative question and answer regarding search engine usage and privacy – specifically, what information Google et al has on what you’ve searched the web for, and what they can do with it.

Q: Does Google collect and record people’s search terms whether they’re logged in or not?
Yes. Google confirmed this week that it keeps and collates these results, which means the company can be forced to divulge them under court order. Whether Google does anything else with them is another issue.

Given the Department of Justice’s recent subpoena to Google, it’s likely the police or even lawyers in civil cases–divorce attorneys, employers in severance disputes–eventually will demand that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and other search engines cough up users’ search histories.

Q: Has this happened before?
Almost. A North Carolina man was found guilty of murder in November in part because he Googled the words “neck,” “snap,” “break” and “hold” before his wife was killed. But those search terms were found on Robert Petrick’s computer, not obtained from Google directly.

Also, attorneys have already begun introducing searches conducted on Google, Yahoo and AltaVista as evidence.

Be sure to check out Lifehacker’s Privacy tag for more on anonymous web browsing and making your web searches difficult to track.

Web service coComment helps you track your blog comments and conversations, aggregating your conversations from across the blogosphere to one handy location.

Whether you’ve commented on a blog or you’re just following a blog-based conversation of interest to you, coComment can let you know what’s been added to a particular discussion in real time.

As many of you may know, keeping up with comments on Lifehacker can be a real pain, as we currently have one measly RSS feed for all of our comments. coComment looks like it could be an excellent way to keep up with those posts where the conversation started in the comments is just as important as the post itself. Unfortunately (for Lifehacker readers, at least), coComment currently only supports Blogger, MSN Spaces, MySpaces, TypePad, WordPress, and Xanga. Not crappy MovableType.

coComment is currently in beta and requires an invitation code to register, but having signed up for an email notification this morning, I promptly received an invite. If you’re interested in coComment, give it a try.