• You can become a successful developer without a degree
• University broads your mind
• What about a scientific career?
• Students life is just fun

It’s a popular and ranting debate whether one has to take a degree or not to become a successful programmer. One side of the debate always say that you can do without having a degree and people come up with examples of people who for some reason didn’t obtain a degree but became quite successful.

Well, let’s admit that is true. You can become a good programmer without any formal training.

Will you miss something in this case?

Yes, you will.

Programming is not only about web and/or enterprise application and constant ranting about design patterns, there are many areas, for example, bioinformatics, text processing and etc., that really require having some fundamental knowledge that you can hardly obtain by reading blogs and books. Of course, if you are are really talented and smart you can learn it all by yourself, but still finding without having a degree a job in those fields can be particularly problematic, since they are dominated by people from academia.

As a person who is taking a Master’s degree I must say that it just really broads your mind, since I learnt about different areas of current researches that really impressed me.

It is also pretty amusing to observe how people who are talking about ditching a degree in favour to career overlook the scientific career. Sure, a scientific career mightn’t be the thing you’ve been dreaming of since your childhood, I think it only starts to be interesting when you at university. So, not going to university is just a way of cutting yourself from one of career paths.

Moreover, one shouldn’t forget about a social aspect of student’s life that is really full of fun. Going into industry after finishing a high school might sound mature, but it also looks like sacrificing youth for something you can always catch up later. While you cannot catch up with the Sun, “but it's sinking… but you're older.Shorter of breath and one day closer to death”.

Recently I have received a nice present from Microsoft (yes, I do receive some cool stuff from them, since I’m a Microsoft Student Partner) – a Microsoft webcam.

I must admit I’m not an expert in web cameras, although I’m using my laptop built-in webcam very intensively, since I’m living in the UK now away from my parents who are in Russia and whom I call each day with Skype. Anyway, the video quality of my built-in web camera is pretty awful, but I wasn’t aware of that before, I mean there was a noise and the video at times wasn’t very smooth, but I didn’t pay much attention to that.

However, after unpacking and installing the Microsoft camera, I was simply blown away by the video quality. They claim this camera supports HD with 720p, but since I’m not in the HDTV bandwagon, I can’t tell you what it is, you’d better ask Wikipedia about tis. Anyway, the quality is superb, moreover it supports different resolutions up to 1280x720.

Before (with my laptop built-in camera) the video looked like this:

But now it looks like this :-):

Please, note I haven’t adjusted any settings and the resolution is just 640x430.

Also, the camera has good auto-focusing, meaning that if you move around, back and forward it will automatically focus, to illustrate this feature, I placed a sheet of paper in front of my two cameras. I bet you can guess which image belongs to which camera.

Moreover, the came has a built-in microphone that appears to be even better than my cheap external Logitech mike.

The only glitch I have found so far is its fixing mechanism, I mean perhaps it fits perfectly regular displays, but I don’t think the fix fits my laptop very well, although the camera fixed on it, but I have a fear that it’s not fixed firmly enough.

To learn more about this lovely camera follow this link.

Recently I was looking for a free backup tool that would keep my important documents online and in case any problems with my laptop, I could easily recover them.

I could use my own hosting space, but I thought it wasn’t convenient to manually upload the documents I was constantly working on. So, I decided to look for some automatic solution. Basically, I need the following things:

• Ability to save the data online
• Ability to perform automatic synchronization, i.e. when I change a file on my local computer it should get automatically updated on the remote storage and vice versa.

Thus, such things as the built-in Windows utilities that required you save your data on external devices or network drivers wasn’t the thing I was looking for. Moreover, various online services like SkyDrive was still not the best choice, because they just provided an online storage, but didn’t give any mechanism of automatic file synchronization. I also had a look at Live Sync this service was very close to the thing I was looking for, but unfortunately it could only synchronize data only between connected devices, but it didn’t have any online storage. Anyway, I was given an advice to try Live Mesh.

At a first glance Live Mesh is nearly identical to Live Sync, however it has one, but significant difference – it does provide an online storage of 5 GBs which was pretty enough for me.

So, what do you need to do to start backing up important data with Live Mesh? First of all, you need to sign up with it. After that you’ll get an access to Live Desktop where you can create folders and upload files manually. Sure, manual file uploading isn’t the best thing to do and you can download an utility which reside in the system tray and will monitor all the changes of the files you set to synchronize. However, it’s not very clear how one can download the necessary software, in fact, you should select “Add Device" from the main menu.

After installing the software, you can just select the folder which contents you want to backup in Windows Explorer.

And every file you create or edit will be automatically added to your online storage.

Generally, I’m very happy with Live Mesh and would definitely recommend to give it a try. Also, don’t forget that it’s presently in the beta phase, so many features are to come, for example, software for mobile devices, while now you can install it on Windows and Mac.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 is an indeed great application. But when it comes to adding a new e-mail account one can simply feel frustrated, simply because every message received from that account will still be stored in the default account. I remember I was having a hard time after switching from Mozilla Thunderbird to Outlook when adding my e-mail accounts.

Hopefully, there is a workaround – you have to add a new data file and assign it to your newly created account.

So, if you want to a new e-mail account, go to Tools –> Options, open the “E-mail” tab (it must be open by default)

and click “New…”, the next steps are pretty clear, you just configure your mail account.

However,a very important steps still awaits you.

You must create a data file for your newly created e-mail account. So don’t close the “Account Setting” windows, select the account you’ve just created and click on “Change folder”.

Now click on the “New Outlook Data File…” button and give it a name. WARNING! There is a temptation to give it a meaningful name like “your_name@your-domain.pst”, but don’t do that! Outlook will create a file, but won’t be able to assign it to your account for some reasons, so call it “yourname_yourdomain.pst”.

After that you’ll finally be able to give it a meaningful name.

Then, you can click Ok. And you newly created e-mail account will have a dedicated folder, so all the mail sent to that account will lie in its folder.

I must admit perhaps I was too rude when I was describing the glitches with IE8 Beta 2 usability. First of all, it was beta which purpose was to demonstrate new features and gather feedback, but no to present a completely finished product. Second, it were my own thoughts, but still IE remains the most popular browser on the Net and people must find it useable, since they use it.

Anyway, Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 is available now, which means that there won’t be any new functionality in the release, however if they find any bugs in the current RC, they will fix them and make RC2 available for public.

So, if you want to submit any bug report of feature request, I strongly advice you take part in the Microsoft Connect program that allows you to send feedback about their beta products, including Windows Azure, Windows 7, IE8 and many other products. Just navigate your browser to connect.microsoft.com, sign-in with your Live ID and choose an appropriate program. It’s advisable to search through the database before submitting your bug report or a suggestions, because it’s likely that other people have already spotted that bug and complained about it or came up with the same feature request.

Participating in such programs and sending feedbacks allows Microsoft to make better products that you will like ;-)!

It’s the Christmas day today, so I want to congratulate everyone! Be happy :)!

Well, it’s been a very long time since I posted anything. That’s certainly wrong. I must correct myself ;-)!

Anyway, I want to tell you that I had a great opportunity to visit a meeting of Microsoft Student Partners from Russia in my city. I must admit it was an incredible event. I met so many people who are really passionate about technology. They are eager to tell people about great technologies, as well! It’s a great think that we can gather all together and get to know each other :)! I must thank Microsoft for that :)!

Well, I apologize for not posting anything for such a long time. Anyway, I’m happy to announce that I’ve become a Microsoft Student Partner. I took an active part in the Microsoft User Group in my university that was organized by other Student Partners. I decided to apply for this program and my application was accepted.

Now I’m responsible for organization of student IT events related to Microsoft products. It’s very challenging and interesting activity. And I’m happy with it now.

You can learn more about this program on this web site, you can also apply for it there.

There is a preview version only, but the release version will come soon, I think it looks very promising.

Here is a quote from their blog:

Microsoft is opening up the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression sites to the community, so that technical professionals can better connect with each other, share knowledge, and succeed. Tagging - and especially social bookmarking - are essential ingredients for making this happen.

Back in May, just before TechEd North America, we released a preview version of our new social bookmarking app for MSDN, for TechNet, and for Expression. Since then, thousands of technical professionals from around the world have begun using it to save their web favorites online, share them with others, see what other technical pros are favoriting, and connect with others.

We also got a lot of great feedback on the app itself (thank you!) and I'm happy to say that in early September, we plan on releasing a full version of the app - v 1.0. Here are some new things to look for:

• Subscribe to Tags or People: Find a tag you want to follow? Or a fellow bookmarker that bookmarks really good stuff? With the new app, it will be easy to get an RSS subscription for that tag or person (as in, click the orange button).
• Browse & Find Users: Search or browse to find people by their display name (e.g., mine is "johmar") and other criteria.
• Import Tools: Recognizing that a lot of people already have favorites saved in their browsers or in other social bookmarking sites, the new app will provide a tool for importing your favorites from Microsoft Internet Explorer and from Delicious.
• Bookmarking Widget: If you have your own blog or other website, our new bookmarking widget will make it easy for people to bookmark your pages directly to their social bookmarks on MSDN, TechNet, or Expression. You'll get traffic from Microsoft when your bookmarked page is published in "social feeds" on our global sites.

Availability in 12 Languages: With the September release, the social bookmarking application will be available in Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

http://blogs.technet.com/johmar/archive/2008/08/21/preview-full-release-of-social-bookmarking-on-msdn-and-technet.aspx

I seem to be among the first to add their bookmarking widget to my blog. Actually, I have to create this widget on my own, because their widgets will be shipped with the 1.0 version only.

Here is the code of my widget:

<a href="http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/bookmarks/en-US/action/Create/s/E/?url=___URL___&ttl=___TITLE___">
    Bookmark on MSDN
</a>

Everybody knows the benefits of the open source software. Of course, the main benefit is the availability of the source code and the licence that allows us to perform he modifications and to distribute the derived product. The availability of the source code makes us think that the source code should be perfect. However this is not always true.

Don't get me wrong. I really love some open source projects. In addition to great features, they have neat code that can be used as an excellent learning material. Even Microsoft understands that. CodePlex and MSDN Code Gallery are good examples of that fact.

However there are project, very popular projects, I must admit, that simply badly written. I've been developing with PHP for many years and I ran into really popular, but no so well written applications. I don't imply that it's a fault only by PHP applications, I just had a lot of experience with that.

That may sound really ridiculous, because when the source code is open, many people can read it and make better. However sometimes it doesn't happen, people prefer to concentrate on adding cool features that is right, but on the other hand it makes the code unmaintable and bloated.

That is really a paradox. I think it can be explained by the fact that the open source software is built mostly by the enthusiasts who love to do what they like. I mean that is far more interesting to introduce brand new features rather than to worry about the quality of the source code.

I might be wrong on that though. So, I want to hear your opinion. Have only dealt with well written open source projects? If you have an experience with poor written ones, what do you think is the cause of that?