The future looks good!

What a nice change from the norm- where corporate web sites only have bios for the most senior execs. We’ll be keeping an eye out for more about pages citing devs. Can you suggest any?

It shows guts to provide email addresses and links for to one of your most valuable resources – developers. But these days if you don’t turn your colleagues into stars someone else will.

I can remember when I once interviewed at Virtusa, Keith Modder, an MD there, said something which went a long way to impress on me how much they valued their engineers. To paraphrase him “Everday at 5.00pm when the guys leave work, the value of this company goes down to $0. Bottom line we know our priorities.”

Talking of WS02, it’s  good to see the faces of some of the guys I’ve had an opportunity to work with in the past including Thilina, Ruwan, Ishan and Chamil.

BTW: Chamil, you need to fix the link to IT Ambalama from your profile.

I saw this bumper sticker on a car today: Don’t act like a BOZO, that’s what we have politicians for.

Our mates at NewMobile.com have got news on a new handset from Samsung. This is the i310 and comes with an 8Gb hard drive. Samsung are really throwing the punches at the moment. Their Samsung i320 QWERTY phone is already thinner and smaller than the Motorola Q, plus their i300 got uprated to a 4Gb HD with the i300x.

The new Samsung i310 comes complete with an 8Gb drive, Windows Mobile 5.0, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash, MicroSD (TransFlash) memory, TV-output, USB 2.0 (which can be used as external connection), stereo speakers, a digital amplifier and – yes – Stereo Bluetooth A2DP. We should see the real deal at CeBIT 2006, which starts on March 9th.

The Samsung i310 should be available here in Europe during the second-half of this year.

Link – NewMobile.com – Samsung gets ready for CeBIT

• Source code formatting (especially C# and VB.NET)
• Uploading Images (BlogJet supports this too)
• Saving offline versions
• Plug-ins for spell checking

  1 		private void btnTwo_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
  2 		{
  3 			btnTwo.Visible = false;
  4 			btnOne.Visible = true;
  5 			this.BackColor = Color.Red;
  6 		}

Some of the missing stuff though are:

• Images are not being resized
• The Categories are not displayed on a dropdown, instead I need to click on the Categories button to open up a dialog. Shortcuts keys anyone?

UPDATE: I’m giving up on PostXING just after my first post, in fact I’m already editing the PostXING post using BlogJet. Here are my reasons (in addition to the ones above).

• I need to take an additional step when including images in the post.
• The PostXING UI is not as responsive as BlogJet (FYI: PostXING is written in .NET)
• I need to download additional plug-in to get the spell checker working.

Models, wearing chocolate covered outfits and jewelry, eat chocolate backstage before a fashion show at the opening of the Salon Du Chocolat exhibition in Beijing Friday, June 10, 2005. The three-day event is being promoted as China’s first chocolate exhibition, featuring 20 of the world’s top chocolate makers, some of whom contributed to the edible dresses on display in the fashion show. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

I need to see how I can coax Madura into making one of these for me, hmm… with him being in ‘luvy duvy land’ these days I might have to go with Harsha on this one.

Link (via Slashdot)

• Gmail – 2.3 GB
• AOL – 2 GB
• Yahoo – 1 GB
• Hotmail – 250 MB

I wonder what the guys at MSN are up to. With all the MSN Spaces, photos and all other features that they provide, they definitely must be having something up their sleeves.

Radiant and incredibly tactile, Lundgren Monuments are designed for the individual who defies definition, and in the setting of a memorial park or cemetery they are glowing beacons that stand out amongst the traditional stone memorials.

Link (Thanks, Kirsten!)

New rules make hiring foreign nationals more difficult than ever

I recently spoke with Frida Glucoft, a leading immigration lawyer and a partner and chair of the immigration practice at law firm Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp. She tells me that changes made by the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) during the past three months will limit many companies’ ability to hire and retain new IT employees. If you typically hire recent computer science grads who are not U.S. citizens, you should listen up.

As of December, filing fees for H-1B visas have gone up more than 1,000 percent, from $185 to $2,185 per applicant. But you might as well add on another $1,000 for what’s called “premium processing” of the visa application. Premium processing guarantees 15-day turnaround; otherwise, processing can take between four and six months, according to Glucoft.

If you think your company can afford to wait six months for some hotshot software engineer, consider this. Last year, as they do each year, 65,000 H-1B visas became available on Oct. 1. When the 65,000 are gone, employers have to wait another 12 months for new visas to become available. All of last year’s visas were spoken for by Oct. 3.

Here’s another interesting glitch. The Department of Labor announced a new program on Dec. 27, 2004, which went into effect March 27, 2005. Called PERM (Program Electronic Review Management), it is the first step in applying for lawful permanent residence status — also known as a “green card” — as part of the greater Permanent Labor Certification program.

Case law suggests that non-U.S. citizens who want green cards need about two years of work experience even if they have a bachelor’s degree. Work experience with an applicant’s first employer, however, is considered on-the-job training and does not count.

So, if you have an employee working for you on an H-1B visa who has just graduated from a U.S. university and you want to get that employee a green card, you can’t. Employees who want to stay in the country on a more permanent basis have to change jobs; time served at their first employers counts only toward green-card status after they’ve taken a job with a second employer.

Finally, here’s another beaut. Also in December, Congress enacted and President Bush signed into law a bill allowing for 20,000 additional H-1B visas for those with advanced degrees from U.S. universities. This added 20,000 additional visas to the existing quota of 65,000.

The law was to take effect on March 7, 2005, Glucoft said; however, USCIS has issued a statement that it will not accept these cases until further notice, pending “publication in the Federal Register.” So, we have employers ready to hire workers, we have workers who may have given notice to their current employers, but now everything is on hold.

Policies such as these will certainly encourage offshoring. Why go through the expense — including not just the visa fees but also the legal fees needed to process the visas, the time it takes to get new employees trained and up and running, plus the uncertainty, delays, and lack of permanency of investments you may have made in hiring foreign workers — when you can just contract a company outside our borders and still get most of the benefits of having the best and the brightest working for you?