Jawed’s Blog

I was reading an article about why projects fail and found interesting points and the following list has been inspired by actual mistakes encountered in real-world systems projects.

1. Don’t use a specific methodology because coding is all that is really important.
2. Create the project plan by working backwards from a drop-dead system completion date.
3. Don’t bother with a data model. Just build whatever tables you need.
4. Use a Technical Lead that has never built a similar system. Hiring such talent is too expensive.
5. Hire forty developers to make the coding go faster.
6. Selecting wrong tools and technologies for development
7. Three months before the system goes live, assign one junior developer to handle the data migration.
8. Skip the testing phase because the project is way behind schedule.
9. Change the system to support critical new requirements discovered during final development.
10. Buy a commercial, off-the-shelf package and customize it… a lot.

Read full article @ allpurposearticles.com.

Are you still looking for a WordPress Ads Management plugin, that manages all your ads and decide who will see them, depending on the rules: first time visitor or long time reader, search engine visitor, timeframe, ad view count, age of post, etc…

Then your search is over, check out Who Sees Ads ?, which comes with an advanced user interface to visually create your ads and display rules. Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, depending on user defined conditions. The association of an ad and these conditions is called a context, some of the display rules are described in the following image:

Here is the best part, it is a Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Compliant, that means it complies with Terms of Service of both the services.

• YPN: 3 ads per page
• Adsense (per page):
  • 3 ads
  • 2 search boxes
  • 3 link units
  • 3 referral units

If you haven’t used Who Sees Ads ? try it once and I bet you will love the experience and will not replace it.

I was reading an article about Reasons to write bad code !!, the author was sharing his experience about having problems with some bad code, written by his senior colleague. He further elaborated that his fellow wrote bad code to avenge his company for stress and frustration. But I don’t agree with it completely because developer alone can’t be blamed for his bad code and there might be very few exceptions that will avenge the company. My argument is; what the project manager, team lead or test team was doing when the developer was writing that creepy code. These problems could have been mitigated early in the project cycle if you had conducted peer reviews, implemented proper coding standards and verified them during testing etc.

You can’t develop quality product in tight schedules and stressful environment. Many companies often ignore long term consequences over short term gains. Quality is a company driven activity, unless company is not focused on developing quality product, people will continuously face such problems.

So what are good practices of developing quality in the code, here are some practices that will help you develop good code and quality product.

• Quality is a company driven activity. (Very important)
• You should allocate justifiable time for each activity in the project life cycle.
• Encourage peer reviews among the developers and team lead should be responsible to look after this activity.
• You should have a quality assurance team capable of doing white box testing, performance and load test etc.
• Follow good coding standards and verify those standards during testing and peer reviews. Automated testing tools for verifying coding standards save lot of time.
• Encourage your employees to learn new technologies, we all know older technologies have deficiencies and limitations.
• Company should try to integrate new versions of the technologies, its not always required but it helps.
• Unit testing must be compulsory for developers.
• When you have time review your own code, you will find few issues yourself. I personally experienced that when developers do load testing they improve their code a lot.
• Train your employees, specially inexperienced ones, on how to write good code and about good practices. To argue about code is bad, you must know what is good.

There might be more practices that will help you improve your code and skills. Please use comments to extend the list or argue about the practices .

Java 5 introduced foreach loop, a much needed feature since it was first relaeased. Java foreach loop provides code simplicity, readability and eliminates the repetition of code that we write for type casting and assignments, when we are iterating arrays and collection objects.

When used with generics nothing is more apealing loop than foreach. I was reading an article “What Java foreach loop can do?“, which describes every thing a developer needs to know about for eachloop.

As wordpress popularity is growing day by day and you see most of the new blogs using Wordpress. Its an obvious need to provide some sort of guidence to new commers about wordpress blogging. Like how to use wordpress in most effective way and make most out of this blog script.

I will discuss about the most common plugins, which I think you should be using from starting till end.

Wordpress Database Backup: If there is one wordpress plugin you absolutely need this is it. It gives you the ability to backup the core database tables and any other tables you specify. The backups happen on demand or on a nightly schedule. While it might be against TOS what I do is set up a dedicated gmail account for each wordpress blog. I then set this plugin to backup the tables every night and email the file to a gmail account. Viola a free daily incremental offsite backup.

Adsense Deluxe: A powerful way to control adsense from a master level on your blog, you can put adsense in your post without editing any single line of php code.

Google Sitemaps: The Google Sitemaps Webmaster Central program by Google is absolutely one of the most helpful things Google has ever put out. If you are fixing your own site or someone else’s there’s no better way to figure out what a search engine thinks about your site. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML file everytime you make a new post and ping’s google to tell them about it. It’s especially helpful if you publish on a predetermined schedule. Warning make sure you have the file permissions set correctly or this won’t work properly.

Related Posts: Automatically creates a list of related posts, for the post you are viewing.

Math Comment Spam Protection: This plugin asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question for proving that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot, e.g. What is the sum of 2 and 9 ?. It does not require GD or any special PHP extensions. Similar to the Did You Pass Math? plugin, but can be used with any theme and JavaScript or cookies are not required.

Akismet: This one actually comes with wordpress you only need to get a liscence to activate it. Unless you have need for spam in your blog this is one the most effective tools for stopping it. Very little actually gets through and very little gets flagged as a false positive. I have never used it because Math Comment Spam Protection works fine for me.

Autometa: This plugin will automatically generate and include HTML Meta Keywords and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post.

SimpleTags: is a WordPress plugin that will allow you to easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog entries. There are several plugins already available for this purpose, but they all require you to use custom fields within WordPress. The SimpleTags plugin eliminates this need, so you can now easily generate tags with your preferred method of posting, be it by email, a blogging tool like w.bloggar or from WordPress itself.

These are the plugins that will assist you to use wordpress effectively. There are hundreds of other plugins available but I think these plugins must be there when you install wordpress. You may want to view complete list of plugins from http://www.wp-plugins.net.

If you think that there are few more can be added to this list, just place it in a comment.