Click here to watch The Awesome Robots VS Transformo

Although the film is obviously low budget, the right choice of actors, combined with some good cinematography, makes this film entertaining to watch. I particularly enjoyed the part of the movie where Transformo, ‘transforms’ through a series of short but well-executed camera shots. Aaron Peterson, the producer, did a great job of taking a unique concept, and bringing it to life with the right cast and crew. I think his efforts and those of the cast and crew have created something unique and innovative. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

In an effort to update this blog more regularly and keep writing on a more regular basis, I’ve decided to write about innovative ideas in general, not just computer programming ones. As I’ve been building web applications that bring innovative ideas from many people together. As I continue to build sites that stimulate innovation and allow people to share their innovative ideas, I will be highlighting other people’s innovative contributions as well as my own ideas, which are hopefully innovative.

There are many at the top of their fields, who are very successful in their careers but whose lives lack meaning and substance. We should not neglect family and friendships or compromise our health or our integrity to make it “to the top”. True success is the measure of one’s life, not just one’s career. It is better to be a good person and an average programmer than to be an exceptional programmer and a lousy person. It is however, better to be both.

Achieving the best of both your professional and personal life is hard, but trying to achieve your greatest potential in your career while failing in other areas in life is harder in the long run and very unsatisfying. The trick to achieving excellence in both is to make a balanced effort all around. This requires planning, preparation and keeping our priorities what they should be. It may mean turning down good opportunities in order to give time to more important things. It also means that we will have to give up what we want now, for what we want in the long run.

Acheiving excellence is a process, something we must constantly work on and improve. We must give the best of ourselves, day after day to the things that really matter. By so doing, we can live a more full life, satisfying and meaningful in all aspects.

The less bugs a program has, the better it will be. In fixing bugs however, there exists the potential to create additional ones, which makes things worse. By performing regression tests you can avoid this hazard. By using good coding style and following good programming practices you can find bugs faster and stop some from happening in the first place.

Many software bugs and glitches are evidence of poor program design and structure, something that cannot be solved through simple bug fixes. Although proper planning and good requirements documentation can solve some of these problems, there are times we must go back to the drawing board and completely restructure a program. Unseen problems, additional features or misunderstandings can all justify restructuring part or all of a program. We should look at software as a constantly evolving organism that must be refactored in order to survive. Design flaws that are allowed to propagate through multiple iterations of a product will either require many hours to fix or cause the project to fail altogether.

Even the best structured projects will not perform well if they don’t contain good algorithms. Good algorithmic thinking and creation requires research, planning and time. With the proper education and research skills, existing algorithms can be fitted to work in your program, saving you time, money, and frustration. Sometimes a problem is unique enough, however that we must come up a good way of solving it on our own. Again education and critical thinking are invaluable in this process, but we must realize that good algorithms take time to create. Most aren’t thought up in just a few minutes, but take several hours or even days to conceptualize, refine and implement.

When used correctly, teams make these things easier to accomplish. Aristotle corrected stated that the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Good teams notice and fix bugs earlier and they use their collective knowledge to come up with designs and algorithms that would be impossible to create individually. Effective teamwork gets a project done quicker and better and is worth the extra effort it takes to manage and maintain.

Improving the software development process is about facilitating the improvement of the things mentioned above. It requires additional effort and planning, but the investments made early on in a project result in long-term gains. Productivity and efficiency are improved, along with employee satisfaction. Projects that would otherwise fail are made possible. You are able to take on new projects and challenges that you wouldn’t have considered before. Endless bug fixing, slipping deadlines and complaining are replaced with excitement and better products that get finished on-time. Improving the software process isn’t easy, but it’s a sacrifice worth making.

Here are a few potential online addictions that should be used with caution or avoided altogether:

Pornography - It warps people’s perception of women and love and has contributed to the disintegration of the family and the demoralization of society. Sadly, both women and men are being affected. Its changing men’s perceptions and making them want something that is fake and lacking substance. Women are trying to live up to these unrealistic expectations by changing the way they look, act and dress. Both end up dissatisfied and hurt. Its a dangerous and real addiction for millions of people world-wide and should be avoided at all costs.

Online Gaming - Many computer games are creating virtual worlds when different people around the globe can interact. Many of these massive multi-player games have almost never ending goals that force their users to spend countless hours trying to reach them. Additionally, your virtual character’s is constantly interacting with people who portray what they want to be, not necessarily who they are.

Social Networking/Texting/Instant Messaging - Although these can be good ways to keep in touch with people you know and keep up-to-date on what they are doing, they can be distracting and cause you to not spend as much time as you should forming new relationships or spending real time, not virtual time, with your friends.

The main problem with these addictions is they warp the way you see the world or facilitate living a virtual life, instead of a real one. They can waste your life away by encouraging you to work towards achieving goals that are meaningless or unachievable. It is possible to find good entertainment on the internet, we just need to make sure our lives aren’t consumed by it. By trying to find productive ways to use the internet and by limiting the time we use it for entertainment, we can use this virtual world to enhance our real lives, not replace them.

People still want to carry and have access to their digital life while offline. Companies have made fortunes inventing technology that has allowed you to sync hand held devices to your computer like the Apple iPod or the Microsoft Zune. Up to now, this type of synchronization has been mainly entertainment and multimedia based and only one-way, allowing you to only download and replace information on the device, not upload information to your computer.

Handheld devices are starting to cater a more business oriented world by creating tools which provide more productivity and education, not just entertainment. Amazon, for example has just released the Kindle, a handheld reading device which allows you to download books and articles from the internet and then read them at your leisure, without an internet connection. Podcasts are also allowing people to share information that is educational and informative. You can catch up on the latest national news or learn a little bit more about internet safety while traveling in your car or working out at the gym.

The ability to upload information to your computer from handheld devices, like PDAs has been around for a while, but creating that information and transferring it from your computer to the internet has been a fairly difficult and manual process. Inventions like the iPhone are allowing handheld devices to connect directly to the internet. Creating information, however is still much easier and faster on a desktop or laptop computer.

New technologies are appearing which will allow you to use desktop and laptop computers to create information without an internet connection and then automatically sync it with the internet when you are connected. Adobe has released beta versions of their new technology called Adobe Air, which will allow developers to create these kind of applications. Zoho is creating an online suite of applications that allow you to do word processing and use other work related applications for free. The desktop versions of their applications use Google Gears, which allow you to work on something offline and then sync it with the online version later.

Improving synchronization between computers and the internet will increase productivity, even when you don’t have an internet connection. As we continue to increase the synchronization of electronic devices and computers via the internet, connectivity will increase. This will allow better collaboration by not only being able to download from the internet, but also upload and contribute something you’ve created, even while offline.

Anyone that has visited a third-world country can tell you about the primitive living conditions that exist. Many people live day-to-day, going daily from job to job as they find them, with many unemployed. Others depend on rain to happen at the right time in order for their crops to grow, with technologies like irrigation being pratically non-existent. Failure to find work and drought-like conditions have left many people, and their families out of food, shelter and hope.

Outsourcing and other similar activities can provide jobs and income to millions of people world-wide. We as Americans, however are afraid of empowering others with these kind of opportunities, the same ones that will help them get out of poverty and make meaningful contributions to society and make the world better, not worse. Things will improve as we become more flexible as Americans and don’t hesitate to offer opportunities for advancement to anyone, regardless of where they live.

Increasing the opportunities of others doesn’t have to decrease our own. The opposite can in fact be true. By increasing the earning power of others world-wide, we are also increasing their spending power. This increased spending power will allow others to purchase American products, which they could not afford before, which means more jobs for us.

More jobs, don’t mean the same jobs. As the world-wide economy shifts into a more global one, many current jobs will contribute less to society and be phased out. Our opportunities as Americans allows us the flexibility to get the education and training needed to make adjustments to our employment when the economy changes. Many people, however approach this changing society and economy with fear and keep pumping money into dying industries that can be better done by other countries, or are no longer needed at all. It makes no sense to employ people for employment’s sake alone when there are jobs in other industries.

Increased globalization also means improved relationships between companies. Good relationships between countries start with good business relationships. Increased business means increased revenue, employment and less conflict. The CIA estimates that roughly 30 percent of the people in the world are unemployed. Increasing the international exchange of products, services and information will help solve this problem.

When people are employed, they are more satisfied with life, are able to contribute to society and gain the financial stability which will offer them and their children better opportunities. It is much harder to involve employed people in conflicts and terrorism and significantly easier to recruit those who are unemployed. We can look in the Middle East for example, where the unemployment rate is estimated at 25% in Iraq and 40% in Afghanistan.

By making the world a better place to live, we are making our country a better place to live. Trying to protect our future as a nation by limiting our interaction and business with other countries just doesn’t make sense. An improved global state will mean that we have to spend less money on war and humanitarian aid, while increasing productivity and a lowering cost of living. Making trade free and increasing our business interactions and relationships with other countries will help make this world a better place.

Open-source has its downsides. Allowing anyone to look at the source code also allows anyone to find ways to exploit it and compromise the computer running it. In order to use open-source products safely, you keep upgraded to latest version and apply patches often. Many open-source products are also hard to install and are hard to use, due to poor user interface design.

The nature of open-source products is due mainly to the community of nerds who contribute to them. This is evidenced by the creation and maintenance of almost countless programming editors and IDE’s, like vi, kwrite, and eclipse and an emphasis on using the command-line in most linux and unix operating systems.

Open-source code and products have been used effectively in business and industry for years. This is particularly true about anything having to do with the Internet. A recent survey shows that the Apache Web Server is the most common server on the internet, hosting roughly 58% of active internet web domains. Linux and Unix are also used in many businesses, as a reliable and cheaper alternative to proprietary operating systems. Programming frameworks, like CakePHP, Prototype and Ext have also improved programming efficiency and allowed programmers to build better structured code using newer technologies.

Open-source ideas are also starting to affect other kinds of software that are built on frameworks, run on software or use ideas developed by open-source communities. Leopard, the latest release of Apple’s operating system has a new feature called Spaces. This feature has been known as multiple desktops in Linux operating systems for years. Proprietary software is also starting to follow industry standards that have been strictly followed in many open-source products.

The biggest challenge for open-source software is making it appeal to more people. This can be accomplished by making it easier to install, update and use as well as gearing them toward a more general audience. Take Mozilla’s Firefox web browser for example. Internet news sources say It is used by more than 15% of internet users in the United States. This project has such a significant community of users because it is easy to download and update, has good security and is easy to use. It also allows its look to be customized and has extensions that allow make it popular with developers and other tech-savy people. Other products, like OpenOffice and Fedora Core 7 are also making progress in making their software easier to install and appeal to more mainstream users.

Open-source concepts and technologies will continue to gain popularity with mainstream computer users and they improve and develop new features geared for less tech-savy users. As this happens, new technologies will be invented that will make computers and software better for all of us, without costing a cent.

These kind of announcements show that connectivity is increasing around the world. Technologies like these make it easier to talk to someone in India today than it was to talk to someone next door ten years ago. It is becoming increasingly easy to contact anyone, no matter where they are in the world.

This increasing connectivity allows relationships to be formed and maintained that before were impossible or very costly. For several years, people have been able to share information to the world through chat rooms, forums and blogs. Many times the character of the actual person remains unknown because the information they post may be very well prepared, or given no thought at all.

Virtual relationships, especially those based solely on a made up made-up character can be very dangerous. They can be created and discarded at will and can decrease the amount of time you spend working on real, meaningful, and lasting relationships. When your gaming avatar has more of a social life than you do, its time to log out and work on your own life.

Technologies, like cell phones, voice over IP, video conferencing and picture sharing allow you to share your actual life with others, not your virtual one. They can increase understanding between different cultures and allow people to share ideas and give support to others that can make a difference. It also increases the flow of information and allows people to have new opportunities for learning and education.

Connectivity is especially important in business. More connections allows companies to find resources they need faster and cheaper. It allows businesses to form partnerships world-wide, which facilitate the sharing of ideas and connects individuals in ways that will create new ideas and increase innovation.

Increased connectivity is good. It opens new doors of opportunity and innovation, both in personal and business relationships. Taking proper precautions and using good common sense allows this kind of technology to be used in meaningful and productive ways.

Read the official skype press release.

Technical Communication

This does not mean social aptitude or people skills. Although these can be helpful, great programmers must have the ability to communicate concepts technically in a way that their co-workers can understand. The lack of good communication between programmers and with management can mean the failure of a project or a company. Communication is essential to good programming.

Creativity

Programming requires creativity. Creating code is the process of taking a very abstract idea and converting it into a program that people can see and interact with. Programmers don’t live within the bounds of other engineers or scientists, the possibilities are endless. Good programmers must think outside the box to find new ideas and better ways of doing things.

Planning

Most programmers like to tinker and hack things together, but good programmers will resist the urge to start coding as soon as possible. They will take the time to make a plan, create a design and establish a good structure on which to build the rest of their code. Just as good architects build plans before buildings, good software engineers take time to plan and design before programming.

Education

Education is not only based on prestigious university degrees. Formal education tends to focus on the theoretical concepts; not always the practical ones. College and other training should provide the foundation, tools, and desire to continue learning after graduation. Someone with a degree may leave a university and become obsolete. Someone with a love for learning keeps getting better and stays in demand.

Eye to Detail

Programming requires a attitude of perfection. In order for a program to compile it has to perfectly follow the rules of the compiler. Good programmers will go beyond creating compilable code and make sure that the it does what its supposed to. Most times its the little things in code that create bugs or dangerous security holes that take days or hours to fix. An eye to detail catches problems sooner, avoiding more costly problems in the future.

Programming isn’t for everyone. It requires substantial effort, lots of patience as wells as the characteristics mentioned above. Great programming can come from India, China or the United States, it can come from someone poor or rich and it can come from a PhD or a college dropout. Slightly changing the words of Anton Ego in Ratatouille, I submit that not everyone can become a great programmer, but a great programmer can come from anywhere.