Auckland: OECD’s most entrepreneurial city

Just came across a report in the New Zealand Herald which suggests that Auckland is OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) most entrepreneurial city in terms of number of entrepreneurs vis-a-vis the population.

13.5 percent of people living in Auckland have been considered “entrepreneurs”, followed by Vancouver and Melbourne.

Brussels and Tokyo are cities with least amount of entrepreneurs.

A common thread that I can see between the top three cities is that all three have a lot of social diversity in terms of people from different parts of the world. I guess migration would have played an important role in unleashing the entrepreneurial abilities of people, apart from the fact that certain cities provide frame conditions in which entrepreneurship can thrive.

More on this can be found in this article entited Auckland named OECD’s top entrepreneurial city.

Internet Usage in New Zealand

I recently came across a report on carrying statistics about internet usage trends in New Zealand. It is based on a survey conducted in September-October 2007 of 1430 New Zealanders.

Here are some interesting findings:

  1. 78% of New Zealanders use the Internet.
  2. 15% of users are online at home for at least 20 hours a week.
  3. 66% have broadband, 31% dialup
  4. 71% of users say the Internet is an important source of information, compared to 52% for newspapers and television
  5. 10% of NZ Internet users have a blog
  6. 77% check email daily
  7. 28% participate in social networking sites

The full report can be downloaded from the Auckland University of Technology website.

Reducing software defects: 10 things to keep in mind

I’ve been involved with software development for over 12 years now. Over that period I’ve been a developer, architect and a project manager in different software projects. So the following list of 10 things relating to software development (and the key issue of software defect reduction) made a lot of sense.

  1. Finding and fixing a software problem after delivery is often 100 times more expensive than finding and fixing it during the requirements and design phase.
  2. About 40-50% of the effort on current software projects is spent on avoidable rework.
  3. About 80% of the avoidable rework comes from 20% of the defects.
  4. About 80% of the defects come from 20% of the modules and about half the modules are defect free.
  5. About 90% of the downtime comes from at most 10% of the defects.
  6. Peer reviews catch 60% of the defects.
  7. Perspective-based reviews catch 35% more defects than non-directed reviews.
  8. Disciplined personal practices can reduce defect introduction rates by up to 75%.
  9. All other things being equal, it costs 50% more per source instruction to develop high-dependability software products than to develop low-dependability software products. However, the investment is more than worth it if significant operations and maintenance costs are involved.
  10. About 40-50% of user programs enter use with nontrivial defects.

More on each of these points can be found in this expanded article entitled, Software Defect Reduction Top-10 List, by Barry Boehm, USC and Victor Basili, U. of Maryland.

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Finally, Skype on my iPhone!

I’ve been waiting for an app that would allow me to make Skype phone calls from my iPhone.! And it is here… woo hoo!

It is called “Fring” (and it is now an accepted terminology to use the word “fringing”!).

It not only allows you to make Skype calls and do Skype chats, but also integrates with MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Twitter and a whole lot of other chatting services.

Check out the Fring site for more.

Installing it was a breeze. And the interface is really nice and simple. It uses WiFi to make Skype calls. So if your phone is connected to WiFi, you can make Skype calls.

Fring is also available for other handsets like Wi-Fi Symbian 8 or 9, Windows Mobile 5 or 6 and UIQ.

Online tool for creating Apache .htaccess files

Creating/modifiy the Apache webserver .htaccess files by hand can be a bit of a pain at times.

Today I came across a website that lets one generate an .htaccess file using a nice, Ajax-y web interface.

For example, to setup authentication, one has to create a user. You can do that by simply filling out a simple form like:

Create htaccess file

And this gives you contents that you need to copy across into your .htaccess file.

htaccess file content

Very neat and very useful.

You can use the tool here: Create .htaccess files online