Fact - South Africans know how to moan.

In my view, this can be positive. As a nation, South Africans refuse to put up with situations that are injust, unfair or even simply unpleasant. But all the negativity expressed through the efforts to bring critical issues to the fore can be, well, a bit depressing. We have heard reams about the rise in (especially violent) crime, skills shortages, Eskom “load shedding” (power cuts), our politics (Zuma vs. Mbeki), SA’s quiet diplomacy policy regarding Zimbabwe, AIDS, rising interest rate environment (prime at 15% as of yesterday), slowing housing market etc. etc. etc…   

I (and many others) think it is time for a more balanced view…

A recent (wonderfully refreshing) letter posted by the Headmaster of St Stithians in Johanesburg, Dave Knowles, sparked my desire to search for some of the good news and to actively seek out a more balanced view on the situation.

Similarly Alan Knott-Craig (junior) of iBurst wrote a letter to his staff which was widely circulated.

I have also been encouraged by Trevor Manual’s bullish view on the South African economy (even in these tough times) and am still strongly impressed by the South African government’s disciplined fiscal policy (in spite my impression that many other world leaders have lost their heads completely - allowing debt to spiral out of control and simply printing money as a solution).

In our industry (ICT outsourcing services) the South African sector growth is phenomenal - up 11% year on year.

The vital point that I want to make is to simply echo what Dave Knowles said: “You see, to be a leader means to be a dealer, a purveyor and a deliverer of hope.”

Anyone who reads this blog is likely a leader in some field. At home, in the office, in your place of study, in your church. I want to encourage you to be a good leader.

Lead well by dealing, purveying and delivering hope. Wherever you are. Wherever you plan to be.

The new office boasts:

• 3 Meeting rooms (one large, one medium, one smaller) with projectors and conference call phones
• Large client waiting room with lead-on drinks area and bar (good reason to visit us - enjoy some gourmet coffee and flat screen satellite TV while you wait).
• Staff enjoyment and training areas - “chill room” (X-box room), kitchen/bar with seating for lunch times, company library with training materials
• 8 kilometers of networking cable with 120 points
• Plenty of new workstations and functional space
• Great climate control
• On-site server room for all our testing boxes
• High speed connection direct to our ISP
• VocalPulse VoIP PABX with softphones
• Walking distance from the Gardens Centre

Please feel free to come round for a coffee sometime.
For directions, see:
http://www.whitewallweb.com/contact-white-wall-web Well done to all involved and especially Steve and the rest of RAMP who have aided in making this move as painless as possible.

see http://www.personlplace.com

“This has been over a year in the making with the dedicated focus of a specialist team,” says Martin Gouws, project manager in the PersonL product development team. “We are excited about the power of the application that we have been able to produce and we feel that it will be an extremely useful tool for both job seekers and recruiters.”

“When we started out with creating PersonL, our hearts desire was to produce a software product that would aid the process of people being placed correctly in a new job,” says Peter Flynn, MD of White Wall Web, the PersonL product developers. “We used  the expertise of our partners to compile over 25 years experience in accessing people for placements and wrote clever business logic into the system which will match people not just according to their skills match, but also their aptitude and personality match.”

The software is built in Ruby on Rails and has powerful AJAX functionality to enhance the usability. Amongst the impressive feature set, the system also boasts CRM capabilities and keeps and audit trail of all correspondence and activity per candidate and per assignment.

The system is currently launched for “private beta” for intensive feedback and testing. Once the beta testing phase is completed, the system will be launched for a period of time for free beta. “Interested people can opt-in by going to http://www.personlplace.com/ and following the opt-in email instructions,” says Flynn.

“The system framework is also poised for the easy implimentation of social networking features - a number of which are on the development wish list.”

WWW is proud to announce that www.photoevents.co.za is up live. The system allows event photographers to publish galleries of images and then gove password protected access to the galleries to all those who attended the event. Logged in users can then order prints of the images and pay for them online. The prints are delivered to their door.

The system was built by WWW using Ruby on Rails and has some saucy AJAX components.

See the invitation to photographers below:
______________________

Dear Photographer 

It is my great pleasure to announce a new service being offered to event photographers in South Africa. 

We have currently launched a new online web portal for event photographers and their clients. The site: www.photoevents.co.za is an online photo ordering system designed to help you and your customers share and print their favourite photographs of an event. In addition to this; you the photographer will be able to recoup profits from your client’s reprints. 

There are no hidden costs or registration fees to use the site (it is 100% free) and you will be able to earn 30% of the total revenue of your printed pictures. 

I would like to invite you to run through a demonstration of the site: 

First click on this link: 

1. www.photoevents.co.za
2. Then click on the demo tab on the left hand side.
3. Then click on demo login and you will be taken to the front end of the site where I have loaded some sample photo galleries for you to browse. You can click on the galleries and the albums inside, order pictures and run through the shopping cart. 

As you can see all your photographs will be watermarked and only low resolution thumbnails are loaded onto the site to fully protect your pictures. The utmost care will be taken with this. Also, unlike in the demo login all the galleries will be kept private and you will only be granted access if you are on an event guest list. As events can often be intimate affairs I think this will help to ease your client’s minds about putting their pictures online. 

Obviously as you will see once the client has ordered their pictures in the requested sizes they will printed by Peldon Technologies on the highest quality Sony Dye Sublimation printers and couriered to the client’s door and you will receive a cut of the sale. Simple easy and no fuss. 

I would be very interested to see what you think of the site, any suggestions you might have and if you might be interested in working with us in the future. 

I’ve decided to share some of my views on what I think are the pertinent issues this year, and the goals to achieve to that end. Thus, my top personal ‘Web Development Resolutions’ for this year are:

1. See the Year of the Web Standards?

With Microsoft finally being pressured into releasing a standards-compliant Internet Explorer, subsequently revealing that IE8 has passed the Acid2 test in an internal debug build, and hinting at a release sometime in mid-2008, we can finally glimpse the possibility of bringing web standards (at least in terms of CSS/XHTML) to the masses. Additionally, Firefox 3’s ability to pass Acid2 natively (better late than never!) as well as Opera’s Kestrel builds with exhaustive CSS3 support (on desktop, the Wii and mobile phones), means we’ve never been able to reach as many platforms or people with the same features before. I believe this to be a ‘watershed’ year, where we’ll either see the myriad of Web Standards take off, or if they prove to be fundamentally flawed (they’re already proving difficult to implement), this may well be the beginning of complete dominance from other proprietrary solutions like Flash. There’s an emerging school of thought that standards are discouraging quick progression through lack of competition. I strongly disagree, as if one looks at the greatest problem plaguing the web, incompatibility, a look back into the past reveals that rampant browser competition in the late 90’s (IE Netscape days) resulted in far too many different proprietrary solutions for the same thing - something that still haunts us today.

2. Bridge the divide between the Client and Server Model

Although we’ve seen various frameworks like Ruby On Rails make our lives easier when dealing with user interfaces (especially AJAX), we’re still dealing with several different representations of the same data - on the page HTML, in the DOM, in the application code, in the database. Wouldn’t it be great if the client-side UI object was the same as the server-side one? Why do we need four or more languages and data models to work on the same platform? In my opinion, anyone who can conclusively create a single solution (which I believe is achievable), will elevate web development to the undisputed champion of cross-platform, accessible and efficient software design. I’ll race you there…

3. Go Mobile

Well, by now everyone is quite familiar with that prodigy of effective marketing, the iPhone. I’m sure most of you have considered the possiblity of making your applications work on it’s cut-down Webkit browser. However, consider the number of users you could reach if you could tap into the several hundred million cellphones worldwide with an internet connection. Recently I made the rather serendipitous discovery that Opera Mini 4 - which runs on any decent J2ME phone - was able to [mostly] run our AJAX-intensive WTimer application, which we hadn’t put a single second of mobile development time into. Surely, uncovering the workings of this browser will enable us to bring rich applications to not only the iPhone, but to the millions of normal mobile users out there.

4. Put old browsers to rest

Anyone else tired of dealing with IE6’s (or worse) compatiblity issues? As I aluded to briefly in our Heroes 2007 Conference, I’ve proposed a possible plan to tackle this knife in the side of web development:

• Educate and Upgrade - Politely nag people using old browsers to upgrade to new ones. The trick is to work out a method that doesn’t detract from the value of the site itself. Perhaps via a notice, which links to a tailored, step-by-step guide on how and why to upgrade. If we can roll this out on a large scale, then hopefully we can knock down the figure of 40%+ IE6 users, and spend more time doing real coding.
• Fix - There are a number of great scripts like Dean Edward’s IE7.js that can upgrade and fix a limited number of browser defects. Improving on these and chucking in some resetting CSS for example, could ease the pain of dealing with these browsers in the mean time.
• Embed - With layout engines like WebKit introducing experimental features like offline databases, we may just be better off in some situations with tying applications into an embedded desktop application (eg. Fluid) and forcing clients to download and use them, virtually eliminating the problem altogether.

Perhaps with a plan like this, we can start developing websites and applications that break through the limitations of browsers that are nearly 10 years old. In conclusion, I’m very excited about the possibilities for the direction of web development technologies this year, but also feel that a lot of juggling of the elements and ideas will need to be done to master it. We must persue every avenue to come up with solutions that help us move forward…

“The only real failure in life is the failure to try.” — Unknown

How do you feel about these issues? Any comments you have will be appreciated. All the best to everyone for a fantastic 2008!

Strong language, and we have heard it before, but we have seen that where there is smoke there is a fire… (yes that link is ironic). I think in years to come, Google’s (and Wikipedia’s) dominance will certainly become a major issue for various reasons.

Your thoughts? Conspiracy or looming reality… Do no evil? Absolute power corrupts absolutely? (it was difficult not to reference Wikipedia for these. I confess, I did use Google.)

Enjoy

Each end of year conference is a culmination of the year’s learnings and industry developments and takes place over two days.

This year WWW plans to do something a little different. “As we have grown in both size and knowledge, we have realized that our conference content has a lot to offer others in the industry,” says Peter Flynn, MD of White Wall Web International. This year, the conference is being opened up to invited and paid guests and the content tailored to be of interest to this new group of attendees. “In 2008 we are planning to host a full paid conference, so this year’s (2007) conference is a bit of a “hybrid” as we gear up for next year’s event.”

“We are excited because we having some great guest speakers. In addition, we will be unveiling some exciting new plans for 2008.”

On Day One, technical topics will be discussed on topical issues in the field such as Agile Development, continuous integration, infrastructure considerations when implimenting AJAX and lessons learned running Web Application Development projects.

On Day Two, management, leadership and vision-casting topics will be discussed including “Getting Things Done,” the dynamics of personal goal setting, finding your strengths and others.

“We are opening up the conference to others in the industry who may have an interest in the subject matter and/or an interest in working with White Wall Web. We already have about 30 attendees and the venue can take up to 50, so places are limited.”

For full information on the conference, topics, speakers, venue etc. have a look at the full brochure.

The conference cost is R600 ex VAT per day and is taking place on the 10th and 11th of December 2007. Day One is very technical in nature, Day Two covers issues of leadership, management and vision-casting for 2008. Attendees can opt to attend either or both days.

Interested people should call 021 462 4969 and ask to speak Bianca. Alternatively email info@whitewallweb.com. Please RSVP by the 28th November 2007.

Update 28th Nov: We have had numerous sign ups from as far afield as Nigeria. There are a few places left still, so remember to get your bookings in today…