Older blog entries for nymia (starting at number 1367)

E Pluribus Unum

Not sure how it would be written down, but I guess the sequence of events should start right after the last game ended. The reason why I approached the team captains who were there yesterday was to suggest a couple of ideas.

The first one was the establishment of a team captains club, a very exclusive club only for team captains. This club is autonomous with the authority to setup a league or tournament.

The second one was to move to the next level of practice. As of the moment, practice is basically limited to open gyms and on tournament day. Some players just get their stuff while playing. To get more playing time, team captains will setup a practice game against another team. Time, location and number of teams will be figured in. In a certain way, practice games will provide teams with the needed time to tune-up their players. A cheaper alternative to playing in the same intensity of competition found in tournaments.

Well, it turns out all the team captains agreed to the idea. They are interested in setting up an informal network. Every one of them agreed with no minor objections. This is cool, though. I would imagine a lot of good things will come out when team captains are unified under one club or even organization.

Sharing The Burden

Called up a quick meeting after the first game ended. Mentioned there are so many roles that need to be delegated. I listed the roles that can be taken up by each player, like each one must perform a duty in setting up the payments. On is set for sending out emails. Another is the phone brigade, while another is recruitment. In short, I'm throwing the work to my mates, letting them know the burden must be shared among members.

New Member

Mike came in early, seeing him enter the gym, he got introduced to the team. During the game he blended easily with others. He just played in there like he played with them many moons ago. At the end of the game, they were impressed with the firepower Mike brought to the table. Turns out the new recruit did his job pretty well.

Social Experiment

It looks like I got my hypothesis down to a point where it is stated properly. The next step is to carry out the experiment which will take 24 to 48 months. During that time, I will be posting actively in newsgroups trying to solicit feedback from the population. With the hope of gathering statistical information needed to produce a set of charts. Well, you ask what the social experiment is? I'll write about the details later as I move along the programmed path.

Another interesting task is to go to where tech heads (wireless/mobile) gather and socialize with them. The objective is to gather information as much as possible.

Volleyball Team

Decided to add one more player who I think will do a lot of damage. His ordnance looked pretty good, hitting at a high point with a steep angle. Pretty impressive, definitely a good player that can deliver the payload. It's going to be really interesting to see him play this coming Sunday.

Disbanded

One team organizer emailed me asking if he can merge with the team. They recently disbanded after having some misunderstandings. Quite common for volunteer based groups who vote with their feet. He is proposing a new team be formed to play in the Portland League which will start in April.

Bad Medicine

I was surprised to read the poorly structured polemic against Gnome. Reminding me of the saying when dark clouds hang above: Bad Medicine [2]. It gave me the impression that something is wrong in the volunteer based group. Internal strife is an indication of the coming dissolution, though. Not very good for the group/club as volunteers normally vote with their code and feet. Perhaps it is now time to use the broom? Kick some booties if you may?

Social Experiment

A question came up last night while thinking about the future of the team. The question was: Is it possible to leverage the methods implemented in setting up a winning team to another field of application, like a tech company? If so, how? What are the necessary tweaks needed to recruit the right people to work for a team? Where and when is the origin of the starting point?

So many questions, so few answers. Yet, I think the answer is out there.

Wireless Service

Things are moving well, I never thought the prototype framework will work on the first round of testing. Turns out the modules were coded and installed simply that all of them passed the simple test.

Nothing to lose, all to gain

I was surprised to hear my teammate mentioned "We have nothing to lose, but everything to gain." He said it in the context of competing with the best team of the league. He knew the team has the potential to get there and he said it like he knows each will do his job in making that happen. My reply to him was to take the challenge in a cool way. No pressures are there to force anyone to work hard, though. It must come from the individual himself. Each one motivated enough to know it takes team effort to play against the best teams of the league.

Cooperative Competition

I've thought about the concept of cooperative competition in relation to how groups and projects compete within the domain of Free Software and Open Source. My first argument is basically Sed Contra as this kind of competition will cause stagnation in the later part of the process. At the start of stagnation, competition will approach zero. As a result, developers will migrate to other interesting projects.

Destructive competition may be anathema since it can cause projects and companies to fall based on economic and social reasons. Though considered rude, this kind of competition basically mirrors the real world.

Wireless Age

OK, now it looks like the wireless bug really got me this time. It seems that I got a little excited while reading the K750i spec, though.

Anyway, I did some coding adding xhtml support for wireless phones. I'm planning on sending RSS feeds over xhtml so I can read them using n-gage.

xhtml enabled

Did some work enabling the site for xhtml. Took me a few minutes to search the web for information. Found it only took adding the content type to the list to set n-gage to browse the site.

Wireless Service

Still writing a lot of code trying to get a simple platform going. Setting up a wireless service is probably a team effort. I'm just at that point of realizing it will take two to five developers to get a simple wireless service up and running.

Volleyball

Turns out a few more players want to join and play. I told my teammates about the issue that there are LOTS of players wanting to join. I stated my opinion my ideal team is six players only. But it was overturned by many, claiming the club needs to absorb more people. Obviously, they want a BIG club, though, which I find too worrisome.

Someone said it is OK to let the team grow and accomodate more people. That's the only way, the more the merrier. My point was to make sure the team gets enough playing time so we can concentrate on getting first place. Expanding will not help the team. It may be good to have two teams, though. But one team with eight to ten players will not work.

The issue is still up in the air, we just talked about some of it, but did not agree on anything. Anyway, I'm just giving some of them a hard time by delaying it. I'm sure the club will grow and more players will join the team.

We also talked about the visitor who took the gold away from the home team. They came from Seattle, Washington. Fielded a lot of awesome players in the court, which made us look like the visitors. Someone mentioned there will be more out-of-state visitors coming as news are spreading about the competition level here in Portland is good.

Middle Tier Objects

Started writing some of the middle tier objects. Figured they can be tested this afternoon, though.

Series 60

During the weekend, while coding and learning the API and architecture of Series 60, figured there weren't enough usergroups out there for the Series 60 while browsing the web. The closest one was a S60 usergroup for sharing S60 apps, bitmaps, vids, ringtones, etc. But there was no groups for developers.

Thought it might be good to setup an S60 club as a place for developers to go to. Although I'm not too sure there are a big number of developers out there.

Petty Argument

Got into a petty argument with my old man, about the misuse of the Latin word audit. I argued the word lost its meaning and is now used to mean something else. I cited several misuse of the word in the accounting and technical journals were the term audit was improperly used. The petty debate went on until I finished sipping Sangria.

My old man fired-back with his own versions, he cited several phrases which I never heard before, all of them not related to the word audit, he simply took the conversation and ran with it. Pretty interesting phrases which he said adds value to his argumentations during a cross examination. I charged him with a non sequitur right on the spot.

Opus Galileo

Also found the documentary aired on a certain channel about Galileo's doomed defense of his work (Dialogo) [1, 2], considered heretic by the council. It was my first time to hear actual words spoken in most of the scenes. Very interesting stuff.

Videoke

Just downloaded the PowerVideo Karaoke which is a tool for composing videoke songs. Not sure exactly how will it pan out, though. One word: FUN.

N-Gage C++ Development

Finally got the Nokia Series 60 C++ SDK installed. Was able to walk the tutorial, setting up the build files before compiling the executable. The program loaded into the emulator, a text showed up with the words: Hello World!

Also got the tutorial for setting up the build to spew out VC6 project files. I was able to load the project in VC6 before compiling and running it. The emulator loaded automatically within the IDE. That's just simply smart.

Currently walking through C++ sample code downloaded from the sample pages.

WAP: QA Stuff

Currently doing QA work, making sure the .wml code will run on most wireless phones. I've been using wapemulator and so far the wapsite is holding up pretty well.

N-Gage: C++ Development

Started downloading the C++ SDK for N-Gage QD. Not sure exactly how the workflow goes, but I would imagine it is the same as the Java Midlet package, though.

Volleyball

The team made some very good impression on the volleyball community here. I got one email from a guy who wants to be part of the team. Word is spreading out about the team's reputation and pretty soon a lot of good players will be calling to play for the team.

WAP it good - Devo

Just for fun, I played around in tagtag.com doing some simple pages. Turned out building a wapsite using tagtag was easy. I was able to create a sample wapsite on URL http://www.tagtag.com/latini

Also got the volleyball team's wapsite up and running as well. This is interesting as I've never used cellphones to access wapsites, though. I wonder what kind of comment will I hear from the team once they see the volleyball wapsite.

Not only that, I was able to setup a wapsite for the company I work for. It now has a wap directory where customers and employees can go to using their cellphones. I demoed several pages of static and dynamic pages. The $BIG_MAN was happy to see the wapsite.

Push Technology

Did some light reading on Push Technology on wireless networks, about how to implement push services to customers. This is interesting stuff, though.

WapBlog: Novus Verbum

Played around with the WapBlog(tm) idea. Currently writing some scripts that will test some cases.