I’ve been on many teams and everytime I have had one or two people that can just never get on, this is one of the reasons that has powered this post. If you willing to put your ideas into other peoples hands you need to have people on your team that you respect and can have honest conversations with.

Thousands of projects are currently underway around the world and hundreds will go down because they’re al best of friends. This is something that I have learn the hard way, If your going to be friends with your employees or your team members you need to make a deal with them to make sure you keep your professional practices. Being friends with your employees and team members will through emotional problems all the time. For example, if your friends with someone and you need something in on time, (I guilty of this too) being a friend you could take an advantage of it being a little late. Late is BAD. There’s no disguising that fact and friends do have the ability to just misjudge or change terms of agreements.

The perfect team needs members that are dedicated to the idea and can bring valuable advice to the vision your project is moving towards. Its all good and well to be able to do the project on your own but as again I have learnt its always good to have another pair of eyes to look over it and advise on things. You may be the bees knees, the best or even well known for brilliant projects but even the people that are running and have deployed successful projects have always had someone to look over it.

Another essential thing you need in a project is a wide amount of skills and specialties, You may be able to do everything but if your managing it too its always better to deal out jobs to people that specialize in the field. For example if your making a website, your going to need

• CSS
• HTML
• Designer
• PHP/JAVA/XML ect…
• API detailer

Great team members always consult the other members about decisions and new features, for example before pushing out an update all members need to be happy with their proportion of the site. Being the project manager you should be able to see this. Andrew can give you more detail on this.

Trust is essential, you have to be able to trust your team members with the code and internal files. If you don’t know the developer they shouldn’t be in your team, or at least they shouldn’t have access to any important files. This is only a precautionary measure, treat your internal files like your bank account details.

If your reading this and your about to start a project, listen to what’s been said but remember… Its your project, you’re the real leader. Always give it your own opinion, these are only guidelines that have been resolved after screwing up many good projects.

Google has said that is sees voice search as a major oppuriunity for mobile browsers.

“We believe voice search is a new form of search and that it is core to our business,” said Vic Gundotra.

Google attempted voice search back in 2002.

In 2002, Google Labs introduced a service that allowed users to search with a simple phone call. The company admitted it “wasn’t very useful because the results were displayed on your computer and Google discontinued it”.

It was dropped after they concluded it was unusable. The companies vice president made comments alluding to a possible voice search at the Web 2.0 expo.

The company’s vice president of engineering made the comments during a wide-ranging discussion at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. SearchEngineLand editor Greg Sterling agreed: “If done right, it could be a valuable strategic feature for Google.”

The company has decided to pick up voice search for a second time because technology has moved on a lot since 2002 – Google also stated that since the iPhone was introduced, the accuracy of voice searched had improved 15%.

Also said at the Web 2.0 expo came the news that Google will soon be releasing a mobile version of Gmail. Also mentioned was a possibility of Google buying Twitter.

What do you think, would you use voice search if the technology became useable?

Source: BBC News.

After several years of Microsoft reporting and handing out updates to the massively popular Windows XP on the  14th of April, Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 will leave the mainstream support.

This is no doubt getting ready for Office 14 and the upcoming edition of Microsoft Windows, dubbed seven. Along with the release of Seven there will be a new server platform, new technology and new departments to   set up to cope with the problems.
The following products will be effected in the drop in support…

• Windows XP Home
• Windows XP Pro
  

  32-bit and 64-bit

• Windows XP Media Center Edition
• Windows XP Tablet PC Edition

As always the MS self help Dept is now online so your fellow windows users can help you. Netbook support(and low end pc support) will end June 30, 2010.

We cover here at Pure Elite the second qualifying session of this years Formula 1 season!

The second race of the F1 2009 Season kicked off today in Malaysia with 2 practice sessions of which Ferrari turned out out to be the quicker team with a 1-2 finish, closely followed by Vettel and Rosberg in P3 and P4 respectively.

So, lets go through it step by step shall we? (For the purpose of this article I am only going to take into account the 2nd practice session so as to simplify it for everyone).

Ferrari

Kimi Raikkonen P1 with a time of 1:35.707

Felipe Massa P2 with a time of 1:35.832

An all-in-all positive day for the Ferrari team despite the set back in Practice 1 as Kimi’s KERS system seemed to fail and blow up around Raikkonen in the cockpit, something that seemed to have been caused by a minor discursion on an earlier corner causing the system to short circuit, therefore not a major concern for Ferrari. Massa complained of some oversteer and understeer that he said got better as the day progressed and the temperatures rose on track, peaking at 42 degrees Celsius.

Red Bull

Sebastian Vettel P3 with a time of 1:35.954

Mark Webber P5 with a time of 1:36.026

Another great performance from young and upcoming driver Sebastian Vettel managing to take his Red Bull all the way up to P3, just behind the Ferrari’s, however only a tenth down on Massa. Webber and Vettel were both said to be very happy with the car, especially Webber after his poor showing at his home Grand Prix of Australia last week.

Williams

Nico Rosberg P4 with a time of 1:36.015

Kazuki Nakajima P8 with a time of 1:36.290

Despite coming P1 and P2 respectively in the first practice session the two Williams drivers were not able to match the Ferrari’s pace in the 2nd practice keeping them further down the grid than you would have expected from Practice 1. Both drivers were happy with the performance of the car and were said to be pleased with how the weekend was going so far.

Brawn GP

Rubens Barichello P6 with a time of 1:36.161

Jenson Button P7 with a time of 1:36.254

Not the performance you expected from Brawn GP? Nope, not me either…The cars do not seem to behave as well in the hot, sticky track conditions of Malaysia as they did in Australia, why? They have a massive problem with understeer, can it get worse? Yup, it did for Barichello. From his performance in practice no one would have guessed that he was having problems, there is no word yet on how the problem manufactured. But at the end of it all Barichello needed a new gearbox and this resulted in the stewards handing him a 5 place grid drop off the start in Malaysia, this because, as the new guidelines state; your gearbox must last for four whole race weekends.

 

Behind that McLaren with Kovalainen came P9 with last years champion; Hamilton in P11. Apart from that its the usual drivers apart from BMW Sauber who did not do well at all in this practice or the previous. However on an in-team note Kubica did go quicker than Heidfeld on both occasions, not looking up for this season is it? BMW have tried to cover up their poor performance by saying that they did collect a lot of data on both Bridgestone tyre compounds, yeah… I got some info; BMW are SLOW on both tyre compounds.

Look forward to a full qualifying report tomorrow! Thanks for reading.

My favourite April fools joke so far has to be YouTube’s with its upside down site layout, of course as Australia is already upside down YouTube will appear the right way up for once, however YouTube does advise if you live in Australia and see the site upside down (…OMG =O) then you should, definitely move up into the Northern hemisphere. Something I’d personally recommend anyway; I’m not a big fan of a country that is hell bent on killing everyone who lives there with the poisonous spiders and toxic Kangaroo’s etc. Then you have the ‘outback’ and of course anyone who remembers that ITV show (that I can’t remember the name of ‘coz frankly it wasn’t that good) will know that if you even step one foot into the ‘outback’ you WILL be killed. By a murderer. In a truck.

Did I get carried away there?

Anyway… YouTube; they have decided for this years April fools joke to turn their video pages upside-down. So go visit YouTube now and take a look.. or if you’re to lazy look at the pic;

Something about the upside down font makes me laugh a little (,hence me using it in the title), probably noticed the ‘Tips for viewing the new layout’ which leads you to this (which influenced my Australia rant);

So which option will you choose?

1) Break your monitor?

2) Break your neck?

Or the biggy;

3) Face certain death?

To be honest you could just click take me back tot he old layout… but that’d be boring, wouldn’t it?

As a fellow digger myself, I thought i would quickly let you know that digg founder Kevin Rose will be interviewing the frontman from Nine Inch Nails.

You can submit your questions to him here: http://digg.com/dialogg/Trent_Reznor?FC=UATDTR1

Im sure Kevin will do a great job, although if your going to look through the 2500 posted questions, many of them are asking if he was “born a douche bag or was it developed”. Little harsh imo, but im sure the Digg Staff are “digging” and removing all of the bad shiz.

Google is huge in the UK and the US. China is an exception though, They only have 16.6% of the population using Google. The other 83.4% use another search engine called Baidu.com. Although Google is now trying to expand its market share in China. They’re planning to do this via music distribution, they have made deals with various music distributers and record labels to provide over 350,000 online Chinese tracks.

Google said it had no plans to expand its music service beyond China.

“This is the first serious attempt to start (monetizing) the online market in China. I can’t overestimate how important this is,” said Lachie Rutherford, president of Warner Music Asia Pacific and Asia chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).”

The industry for Google is also huge but as for monetizing its services in China this is a poor effort.

The next 48 hours for the blog here are going to be a busy few, your going to see alot of changes, posts and announcements. This is only because we’re once again expanding. Be sure to lookout for the theme revision on friday evening.

Thanks and please hang on in there…

I didn’t know the 2nd part would come so quickly, but what the hell! Lets go for it, so being as this is going to be a notepad lets add in the text box for out notepad. So lets assume the window size of your application is 500×500, you can, of course pick different numbers,but I’ma make it easy. So lets add some code, go to the xaml file and add in this code, in-between the Grid tags;

<Grid>
      <TextBox Margin="0,45,0,0"></TextBox>
  </Grid>

Once added it should look like so;

That will know have added you in a nice text box, and if you have your sizes all set up like mine you will also have yourself a nice looking little notepad with extended glass. However what good is that glass without the ability to drag or click it? It isn’t, therefore that’s what we shall learn next.

So underneath the textbox you just created add in the following code to create the area to drag and click;

<Label MouseDown="Label_MouseDown" MouseDoubleClick="Label_MouseDoubleClick" />

And that should look like so;

Easy enough so far, yeah? Well next up right click the first event handler, that’ll be "’”Label_1MouseDown”’ and then proceed to navigate to the event handler which will bring you into your cs code. Now in-between the tags of the event handler it has just directed you to add this code;

try
         {
             DragMove();
         }
         catch (System.InvalidOperationException)
         {
             return;
         }

That should look like so;

Now hit F5 to compile and you’ll see that all the glass you have you can now click on to drag it around the desktop. Up next is the ability to double click that glass and for it to maximise or minimize depending on its state at any one given time. So to do so go back to the xaml code right click the other event handler and navigate to it, this should take you just below the code you have just written. So add into the tags the following;

if (this.WindowState == WindowState.Maximized)
        {
            this.WindowState = WindowState.Normal;
        }
        else
        {
            this.WindowState = WindowState.Maximized;
        }

And that should look like so;

Now hit F5, after today’s coding you should have reached a state where you have the very beginnings of a notepad with glass extended into the client area, of course next time we shall make use of that glass adding in a title with blur and such like, but here’s what you should have for now;

 

Quick tip: Be sure to have a play with the textboxes properties to allow it be multilined, and also the ordering so the label isn’t always on top.

So I hope you all liked this post, be sure to comment, more next time.

Ciao.