10 Golden Rules for the IT Services Sector

From the years I’ve spent in the IT services field, I’ve come to the conclusion that the following are the 10 golden rules for this sector:

  1. It’s always Extra Super Damn Urgent!
  2. Client deadlines are an illusion. Yours are painful obligations.
  3. Your one hour meeting scheduled for today will take place 3 weeks later on a weekend and will last all day long. What else do you have to do anyways?
  4. Final Client Validations are as valid as your wet dreams.
  5. A year long project starts today, is due next week and you shouldn’t expect any input from the client yet.
  6. You and your life are included with the sold service. Yes, “slave” is the perfect word.
  7. No project ever ends. once it begins you’re stuck with it forever and ever and ever and ever…
  8. No need to estimate how much time you need to finish a project. The client already knows when he wants it.
  9. Ever heard of that rule “The Client is King”, tattoo it somewhere and be prepared to literally live it every day of your useless life.
  10. The client knows your work better than you, so just follow the damn orders.

Well, ok, maybe it’s not that bad. It’s actually a lot worse!

God help me please…

Morfix


Melingo, Ltd., a company that has provided advanced search capabilities for complex languages, has just introduced Morfix CL, its English-Arabic-English Cross-Language Search with Embedded Translation (demo, IE only). What that means is that English-speaking researchers can search through Arabic material without knowing any Arabic at all ? and see a results page with a translation of each Arabic word or phrase.

Melingo, a subsidiary of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., is carefully positioning its Morfix technology as a complement to other search engines. The company is concentrating its efforts on aiding the search process and not on highlighting the process of machine translation, which it says is still very inaccurate. Melingo claims that Morfix CL represents a breakthrough in Arabic language analysis and a boon to intelligence agencies and businesses, which today process growing amounts of Arabic data with limited numbers of qualified human translators.

Check out the demo of Morfix.

I think this is definitely cool.

Rising violence, harassment directed at Muslims

A report released yesterday suggests that harassment and violence against Muslims are on the rise in the US, fueled by pro-war attitudes, religion-based anti-Muslim rhetoric and lingering fears from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it received reports of 1,019 anti-Muslim incidents during 2003 — a nearly 70 percent increase from the previous year and the highest number of civil-rights complaints from those of the Islamic faith in the nine years the group has been tracking them.

According to the report, titled “Unpatriotic Acts,” hate crimes against Muslims jumped 121 percent that same year.

So, where are the world leaders on this issue?
Too busy fighting anti-semitism?
Or is it ok to hate Muslims these days?

Google Drinking Game

So someone has finally come up with what looks like a fun Google game.

Google: A party game for three or more players.

Pick a player to go first. The player who goes first picks two words, which are fed to the Google search page. After this, play passes to the left, and each player adds a word. Words may be misspelled or made up. If a search turns up no hits, the player who added the last word is out and should take a drink.
The last player in the game, or the first player to reach a search with only one result, wins.
Play resumes with the person on the left of the previous winner. Count points however you want.

Fore more info on the game and it’s rules, go here.

Mirinda Sky Raining

The sky has suddenly turned Mirinda Orange and started raining mad bucketloads of water mixed wth red dirt.

All of a sudden, I feel like I’m living on Mars instead of on our blue Earth.

I wonder what the hell we have done to our dear planet to have stuff like this happening?
Is it normal or have we gone on and screwed things up big time?

I even hear some of my co-workers jokingly asking if it’s the end of the world.
Don’t think so, but well if we follow this same rhythm, believe me, we’re not that far away from it.

I’m quite sure some places will get flooded and that the street taking to my place will be even shittier than usual.
Our street is a really amazing one. They fix it and all is perfect. Not a week passes by and they’re back destroying the poor thing. Then they leave it like that for a few months until enough complaints pile up to start annoying them. That’s when they come back to fix the street again.
But, wait, the cycle goes on and a week later they’re back again…etc.
We’re currently in one of the ultimate destruction stages for the street.
And believe me, this rain isn’t going to make it any better.
I’ll just have to use the other way home today.

National Census & Us

Two guys from the national census people passed by on Friday.
I was still at work but my wife had already made it home so she was the unlucky one who had to answer all their questions 😛

They had a list of around 50 questions targetted at knowing how many people lived in the household, their ages, education level, occupation, …etc.
They also asked a lot about what we had and didn’t have from cars to dishwashers to cellphones …etc.

What I found interesting are the questions about how many cellphones we had, how many regular phones, if we used the internet, how many daily hours we used the internet for, …etc.
I would be really interested in knowing the results they get for that. Shame the information collected is confidential.
Still I think they might release some general statistics and numbers.

Anyway, I hope the results come out to be good and that the government pushes even more for cheaper internet and telecommunications services and keeps encouraging wider adoption of new technologies.

Must Reads

> What We Have Become
An excellent blog by Lawrence.
One other thought on the “it’s just a few bad apples defense”. Why should the Arab or Muslim worlds care whether the torture and killing of their compatriots or coreligionists is the policy of our nation or the work of a few rogue elements? On September 11, 2001, the US was attacked by 19 members of al-Qaeda, a small rogue element on the very fringes of Islam, which enjoyed no significant public following in any Arab or Muslim country. And what was our response? … [Full Article]

> Racism at Core of Iraq Invasion
UN Observer
There is an arrogance in the West that everything Western is superior, exemplary and ideal for all cultures. In 2002, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Belusconi said that Islamic culture was inferior to the advanced Western civilization. This school of thought is prevalent throughout every sector of US society and has been nudged on by the various

Brits Can Torture Too

Not to be outdone by their fellow US partners in liberation, it seems UK soldiers are trying to be even worse to Iraqis.

British military officials confirmed Friday that they are investigating new allegations that their soldiers abused a prisoner in Iraq.

Photographs in the Daily Mirror show an Iraqi being battered with rifle butts, threatened with execution, and urinated on by British troops.

The Mirror told how the man was later driven away from the Army camp, still hooded, and thrown off the back of a moving wagon.

“We are not helping ourselves out there. We are never going to get them on our side. We are fighting a losing war,” one of the soldiers told the paper.

[Via Je Blog, Antiwar, CNN]

Americans torment and denigrate Iraqi prisoners

CBS TV says it has “dozens” of pictures showing a wide range of maltreatment.
Taken by US troops, many of the pictures show American troops watching in apparent approval. CBS says the pictures it obtained show a wide range of abuses, including:

– Prisoners with wires attached to their genitals
– A dog attacking a prisoner
– Prisoners being forced to simulate having sex with each other
– A detainee with an abusive word written on his body.
– An Iraqi standing on a box with wires attached to his hands and told he would be electrocuted if he stepped down.

The Sgt Frederick said he and his fellow reservists had never been told how to deal with prisoners, or what lines should not be crossed. He said he never saw a copy of the Geneva Conventions.

So he thought as a “civilized” US soldier that they could use cruelty, maltreatment, assault and indecent acts against prisoners.

[Via CNN, The Age, Je Blog]