Leveraging Google to build your business

I read a nice post this morning about building business with Google by Eric at 過労死 Death by Overcoding.

It covers many aspects that may be involved in administering your business needs, such as:

• Domain registration/host/email/office apps
• Phone Management
• Blog
• The Application
• Payments
• AdWords
• Analytics
• Integration/Optimization

I recommend reading it to anyone who is starting up a web business. Following the steps mentioned in that blog post can be a real timesaver. And you do not need to hire an admin to do it all.

Firefox 3

I, like many others, downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday. It was an attempt for a Guinness World Record titled Spread Firefox. The result was more than 8 million downloads in a single day. Quite impressive!

I did not have time to install it yesterday as I was on a holiday, busy attending Google Developer Day 2008. See my photos on Flickr. I met there with few fellow developers, like Dmitry Baranovskiy, who you can see speaking at Web Directions South soon and Carlos Mari, Director of Carlos Labs.

So I installed Firefox 3 today. I must say that I am quite impressed with the browser itself and with the ease of upgrading. I expected few hiccups on the way but it was all smooth.

Out of my 31 add-ons installed on Firefox 2 only six do not work. The six that no longer work are:

• AutoCopy
• ColorZilla
• EROnline (Exit Reality)
• Firebug
• Google Browser Sync
• Link Alert

I am going to miss AutoCopy and ColorZilla dearly. I am sure that Exit Reality will release a new plug-in real soon.

And for Google Browser Sync - it's a real shame that this is discontinued. But I knew this in advance, therefore I backed up my bookmarks and returned back to my favorite Foxmarks

In case you wondered what add-ons I use and currently have installed, here is a list:

• Download Statusbar
• Dummy Lipsum
• Dictionary English (AU)
• Dictionary English (US)
• FlashGot
• Forecastfox
• Google Earth
• Google Gears
• Google Notebook
• Greasemonkey
• Html Validator
• IE Tab
• Live HTTP Headers
• MeasureIt
• meebo
• Mouse Gestures
• Operator
• PDF Download
• Personas for Firefox
• Quick Locale Switcher
• Redirect Remover
• Total Validator
• User Agent Switcher
• Web Developer
• YSlow

Happy browsing, everyone!

PS: I also installed Skype 4.0 and it is very sleek!

To Vista or Not To Vista?

Sysadmin in our company posted a message regarding Vista installations. I found it very funny and quote him here with his permission:

On a related note now that Vista has been officially released, and inspired by some helpful pages that others have produced I thought I'd preempt the inevitable requests for installation and come up with the following decision-tree to see if you qualify for an upgrade:

It's all crystal clear now :-)

Project Automation

I just finished reading Pragmatic Project Automation (How to Build, Deploy and Monitor Java Applications) written by Mike Clark.

This book is very well written and an easy read. I picked it from the shelf in our Atlassian library two months ago. I read it mostly in the mornings and evenings on the train commuting to the office. I must say that even my trips take only 20 minutes, in those 20 minutes I managed to read just enough to get me started thinking about software processes that we have in place and how to improve them.

There were many things in the book that I was quite familiar with. I have already used Ant, written unit tests, created scripts that build new releases. Although I was familiar with many of these aspects of project automation, there were new ideas, other angles of application of the automated processes I've never thought about. I was quite interested in reading the chapters dedicated to installation, deployment and monitoring. I have faced the dilemmas of these stages of software development and I was quite curious to find out how the author solved them.

This book is truly inspirational. In a sense it is a cook book for project automation. It's easy to follow and proves useful to a novice as well as experienced developer.

I will put this book back on the shelf in our office. It's worth sharing and I will highly recommend reading it to anybody who wants to automate almost anything in software development.