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Facebook is a convenient way to connect with your friends and loved ones. Employees like to take a "facebook" break because the news feed from facebook offers some excitement and escape from the boring, monotonous working atmosphere in the office. However overuse of facebook could lead to reduced productivity. Do you have the tendency to browse facebook every hour or so?

[Breaking News: TypingAid 2.15 is released!]

 

Back to Pycon.

There is a humanitarian effort in Africa called 'One Laptop Per Child'. Two Indians from social service sector created a simple logic game that they think could help the children. It is to be bundled with the laptops. (I mistook their topic as about an AI application, but actually the game is about logical thinking.) A meaningful application with simple GUI programming in Python. Another valuable talk was given by a veteran. He actually took the time to summarize his 10-year experience with library creation. Creating and maintaining a successful library isn't easy. Success of a library is measured by the number of the users. No user = failure. It is then, the speaker suggests, advisable to start with a use case. Pragmatic, failure is prevented. The programmer extracts the necessary components to form a library and then generalize it to accommodate all other use cases.

 

Today 10/Jun/2010 is the opening of the 1st Python Conference in Singapore. I didn't attend yesterday's tutorial because I needed the time to prepare my talk. It was 8am when I arrived at SMU's Auditorium. The chairman Dr. Liew gave a welcoming speech. Before the speech, he amazed us with a 3D visual presentation of Pycon, showing the features of each participating Asian pacific countries. Then, Steve, the chairman of Python Software Foundation gave a speech. It was a pity I didn't see Guido van Rossum, the crowned dictator for life of Python. Steve gave a good talk with a steady and encouraging English which are characteristics of a stalwart. I didn't quite fancy his speech until he told us a story. On one occasion, he asked the creator of Ubuntu Linux what he felt about Python Conference (in US), who replied frankly with you people are good but complacent, meaning self-satisfied. It is always dangerous to be self-satisfied, and the best way to gauge an achievement is not by what has been achieved but by how far we still have to go. The story provoked some thoughts.

Nowadays there is an application for each need; it is just the matter of finding the right one in order to increase one’s productivity in the long term. Of course it is much better for us if we can find a free tool to do the job we need to be done, productivity is a good thing as it is usually related to money. The objective is that the less we spend, the more we produce. Here are some tools for you to consider:

 

Google Apps: Google is not only a powerful search engine, it is also an almost unlimited source of apps. At Google Apps you will find a lot of different apps for all your needs like doc creator and reader, RSS reader, calendar etc… just take a look to see the whole range.

 

Sometimes we run out of ideas of hot topics to talk about and we would love to have a place where we could find a list of hot topics. This is very useful for blogging and also for SEO where we want to plug our keywords in a hot topic. Here you are, some ideas to find hot topics to talk about:

 

Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that has a potential to increase team productivity. A few days ago, we published an early preview of Google Wave. Now a news article on LA Times came out after Google's private demonstration of Google Wave. They said more or less the same thing, that it won't be easy cleaning up a massive project with a deadline that's only two months away. Nevertheless, it is an ambitious project of its kind and deserves some support.

 

Last week, we got the chance to try out Google Wave, the next-generation online collaboration tool, through developer preview acccount. Google Wave project was launched in May 2009 with a promise that it will  revolutionize online communication. It may have caught your eyes, if you are looking for a collaboration software to connect your employees or collaborators and improve the productivity of your business process. It also can be used as a social-networking tool. It is now still in the development stage and open only to selected audience. Can they deliver?