wikked thoughts by Waqas Ahmed

Newsmap is a flash based application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator in the form of a treemap.

Check out more work from Marcos Weskamp.

Posted on March 31st, 2004 under Web. Comments: None

Harvard professor scams $600,000, then hands it to 419ers. Article on The Register.
Xu would not, however, admit that he had himself been played like a cheap violin by the Nigerians. “The scammer’s been scammed,” said detective Blair. “He wouldn’t acknowledge he’d been scammed. I tried to tell him he’d been scammed, but he never caught [...]

Posted on March 31st, 2004 under Life. Comments: None

There’s a profile on my company’s founder and owner, Basit Hamid on outputlinks.com

Posted on March 30th, 2004 under Work. Comments: None

Microsoft has a two page data sheet up for resellers and partners serving as a competitive guide to OpenOffice.org.
This open source product includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also [...]

Posted on March 26th, 2004 under Work. Comments: None

Eric Sink of SourceGear has a new article on MSDN in the “business of software” series. This one talks about the function of proactive sales in a small ISV (Independent Software Vendor).
This part struck me as very relevant based on my current experience:
“Reason to Have a Sales Guy - #3:
Your product is no longer being [...]

Posted on March 25th, 2004 under Work. Comments: None

This will turn out to be a statistics obsessed month…
Brightmail has useful charts showing spam statistics for internet email. Note the linear increase in spam in the past year. Of course it will have a ceiling, but not before it becomes cripplingly expensive in terms of server resources and time to deal with it.
In the [...]

Posted on March 24th, 2004 under Web. Comments: None

“According to the election-year bluster of politicians and pundits, the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries has become a problem of epic proportion. Fortunately, this alarmism is misguided. Outsourcing actually brings far more benefits than costs, both now and in the long run. If its critics succeed in provoking a new wave of American [...]

Posted on March 24th, 2004 under Work. Comments: None

Now, this article on hard disks thrown away or sold while still containing sensitive information is food for thought.
“In fact, only 10 percent of the drives I purchased had been properly sanitized.
Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year’s worth of [...]

Posted on March 23rd, 2004 under Tech. Comments: None

These statistics are very interesting, at first glance.

As a program manager I often have to deal with decisions that include extending or dropping support for a particular platform or resolution. Information sources like DAS and the Google Zeitgeist are only indicators of trends, but still very valuable ones. I’m particularly relieved to see the trend [...]

Posted on March 23rd, 2004 under Web. Comments: None