Good or bad product manager?

When I was studying, I came across two great books on software engineering:

• Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach by Roger S Pressman
• Software Engineering by Ian Sommerville

These books provided me with an awful lot of concepts and ideas that helped me a lot for the exams. But also for after-university life, at work.

How To Be A Good Product Manager is a fantastic blog about more insights and tips for to-be or existing product managers. It tells you what you could possibly do bad and what's the right thing. The good part of it is that it's not only from theories but also from past experience of the authors.

Perhaps a new material for students? Hmm, ...

RSS has changed the way I visit the Web

I've heard RSS for almost three years now. I tried reading feeds 2 years ago, but I was overwhelmed by the vast amount of information that I had stopped using it.

Then I discovered blogging: I read other's blogs. It's here that the interesting thing happens: I no longer get standard feeds from around the world which pour too much information that I don't read but I get friends' feeds and that keep me updated with what's happening at their blogs and which I'm interested to read!

As you can see, I'm using Google Reader. It's Web-based, meaning that I may bring my feeds on whatever computer I use: at home or at work.

Abortion should be legal

Nowadays there's a somewhat huge debate popping up again in Mauritius: should women (and girls, of course) be given the right to abort legally?

Christina has started a nice debate and it seems that in a modern society, it's the right of women and girls to abort. If they don't want to, they don't. And if they want to do it, they should be allowed legally.

This is a nice topic but as far as the discussion is concerned, people will always discuss. Now, it is high time that we take some serious action: legalise it! For God's sake! Let's not kill girls who have become pregnant, girls and women who've been raped, etc...

Discover Gaim: a multi-protocol Instant Messenger (IM) client

May I chat with friends who use Yahoo! IM or Windows Live IM on a Linux platform? That's the question I've been asking myself for the past few days. Luckily, there's some whole bunch of IM available to do this. I've been marvelled by Gaim: a multi-protocol IM client.

The main advantage as compared to other IM clients is that I may log on using the same client instance for accounts on Yahoo!, Windows Live and ICQ at the same time! Isn't that fantastic?! Gaim also supports other protocols as well.

I'm using version 2.0beta6 for Debian archives, the install package used by Kubuntu, from http://download.ubuntu.pl/_Edgy_Eft/gaim/2.0.0-beta-6/.

If you're using Gaim 1.5 for Windows, you might expect some problems: it would crash for Windows Live accounts. Just download an updated library dll at the project's bug tracker.

I've not yet tested if the problem persists for 2.0beta6 version for the Windows platform - a bit of laziness from me - yuk!

Happy chatting!

USB modem ZTE (ZXDSL) 852 install success on Linux

It's been a week now since I've successfully installed the modem's driver on my Kubuntu.

The tutorial at http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/materiel/zxdsl852 has a good explanation.

Basically, you need to have the latest kernel - i.e. 2.6.19 or greater as stated. I downloaded kernel 2.6.20 from http://www.kernel.org. Else, you have to mess with codes to add vendor ID's.

The tutorial at http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=85064 helped me in downloading all necessary packages and steps to follow to install the new kernel.

Then as stated also in the tutorial, I downloaded the firmware at http://ftp.linux.it/pub/People/md/warez/cxacru-fw.bin.gz.

I untarred the firmware and placed it in /lib/firmware/$(uname -r) directory, e,g. /lib/firmware/2.6.20/ directory.

Then I disconnected my modem from the USB port and reconnected it. After a few seconds, orange lights flashed, stopped, flashed, stopped , flashed and lit on!

Bingo! Modem firmware loaded successfully.

Then I created a connection as stated in the tutorial from Ubuntu.

Now each time I start my PC on Kubuntu, my modem's firmware is loaded automatically. I only have to pppd call zxdsl to connect to the ISP.

Huh, I didn't find a way to disconnect other than shutting down...

And I'm having fun....

This article also appears at http://www.lugm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5243#5243.