Opera Mini on NOKIA 6500

I bought a NOKIA 6500 slide and was very interested to see how the Opera browser would work on it. I had once worked with a colleague from India, Deepak who now works for Opera. He had given me enough reasons to at least try it. So I decided to go for Opera Mini. But getting it to work was not so straight forward. In this post I will explain how I got it to work step by step.

From my service provider I got the web settings such that the default browser started to work. Well, Opera cannot be so far away now…So I downloaded Opera Mini to my laptop and transferred and installed it on the phone. But when I started Opera I was surprise to see the "Failed to connect to the Internet". In this article the cause for this problem is explained in detail. In short the reason is that the service providers use an internal Access Point setting which results in no Access Point being available in the phone. So the solution is to create your own Access Point with the settings found on the internal Access Point used by the internal browser. The disappointing thing is that the mobile phone manufactures do a terrible job of documenting these things and also the opera mini settings page does not list Sri Lankan service provider details plus nokia.com does not also have Sri Lankan network details.

1. Menu > Configuration Settings > Personal Config. Settings >
   
2. You will be able to see the existing web connection or access point. Write down all its details.
   
3. Now under Personal Config. Settings choose Options > New > Access Point and provide the details
   
4. These are the details I provided
   
   1. Account Name - MyAP
      
   2. Data Bearer - Packet Data
      
   3. Under Bearer Settings provide exact same details you found under Bearer Details in the default browser access point.
      
5. Now under Menu > Configuration Settings > Preferred Access Point provide the name of the AP you just created (MyAP)
   

After that Opera Mini (Or Other Data Applications) will start to connect to Internet.

Zeitgeist Addendum

I have watched the second part of the Zeitgeist, "Zeitgeist Addendum". This is more focused on the naturally corrupt and faulty nature of the worlds current monitory system, specially the Banks. Also in the last section of the movie it devotes it self to explaining the solution. Discussing solutions and possible actions was very interesting as it gives us more courage to do something about it. The final section introduces the viewer to the 'Venus Project' which proposes a very different and at this point of time very radical social system, which is driven NOT by money, but by technology. I propose every one to watch the 2 Zeitgeist documentaries to get a fresh perspective of what's happening around us. The awakening I got after watching these 2 is somewhat similar to what I got after watching the first Matrix movie.

PS : A better quality version of Addendum can be obtained via Torrents.

Efficient Outsourcing

The business model at Eurocenter is 'Extended Engineering'. Although the fancy term might give u the feeling that it's actually another term for 'Out Sourcing', it's not. We try to be partners of our client which in most cases is an ISV, Independent Software Vendor. Our ISVs are from Scandinavian countries and we tend to work with them not for a project or 2, but for a long time. We already have several clients who had been working with us for more than 3 years.

Although one of the strengths of Eurocenter is its commitment to delivery once a project is signed off, a recent whining I get from one of the clients is that time taken for us to sign off a project is too much. This is due to the fact that we like to resolve as many grey areas as possible in the scope to prevent scope creep and unhappy situations with the customers late in a project. Mind you our projects are usually small in size, roughly 3000 hours and completed within 6 months or so. But what I noticed is even for a project which is smaller than this we take around 1 month of back and forth discussions to finally agree and start the project.

This is not healthy for an ISV who's looking forward to cut down on his Time to Market by partnering with a company like Eurocenter. We have tried framework agreements where the client basically agrees to pay for a certain number of resources for an period of time (6 months) which is kind of Time & Material job. But this is more suited for projects where customer manages the resources and provide them small grained tasks as oppose to whole projects. The typical advantages customer gets by working with a company like Eurocenter is that the emphasis in quality and process. But in a time & material based cost structure this is not captured and the customer can't expect the same quality & process benchmarks as a fixed price complete project. In case of a typical product development (Which builds a specific product for customer) we follow the fixed rate model where we scope & estimate prior to sign off. This is where the initial delays are seen, when we try to agree on scope & estimates.

One of the models we came up in our discussions recently is a model where as soon as the client gets the idea of a product/project and wants it to be done by us, 1 or 2 resources from us can start working on the project while also scoping and estimating. There is always a % of actual project work which can be done before the scoping is not completed. There is a risk of the project not progressing after couple of weeks. What we have agreed is to share this risk with the client. So for the initial work that we do on this project will be billable to the customer on a time & material basis. This gives the client time to go through scope & estimates properly while knowing that he's not impacting the final delay of the product by much. On the other hand we get to provide our resources with billable work which is both good for the company and satisfying for people. In the current fixed price model we end up having 2-3 resources doing non-billable work for a few weeks just because customer hasn't yet signed off a project rather than any other technical problem. Of course the client and the outsource company can't do this if they have met for the first time. You need to have a certain level of trust and confidence on both parties for a model like this to be a success. We plan to employ this tactic soon and see how it goes with matured clients of ours.

If the model proves to be a success it can be one of the most efficient models of outsourcing. while managing the risks.