Rastin Mehr

So far 2 people have reported that they have been typing the domain name www.rmdstudios.com and apparently that website has been hacked. We would like to remind you that we do not own that domain name and despite the similarity in name, we have no associations with the website and it’s owner what so ever.

Our company address is Singular www.rmdstudio.com and not plural www.rmdstudios.com

We only wanted and need one studio, why would we ever consider many of them? And by the way, we do take web security very seriously 🙂

Modern social networking applications use a Social Engine at the heart. Older Social Networking websites such as MySpace.com may not have such a clean cut architecture, however the core of the system sort of behaves more or less as a Social Engine does.

A Social Engine is in charge of managing people profiles, search, privacy, messaging, notification, requests, and most important of all Social Graphing.

Social Graphing is just a fancy technical name for the relationship among the people  described as “Friends” or “Contacts”, in other words it is the “Network” in Social Network. It is the reason that people join such a websites so they can be perpetually in touch with each other and stay informed about each other’s activities.

Currently there are two models of social graph implementations in the existing social networking websites:

1. The Lead, Follow, Mutual Model used in the more modern systems (Twitter and Digg) due to its more flexible and generic nature.
2. The Enforced Mutual Friend model which is more stiff and specific. It was used in the earlier social networking websites and some of today’s websites such as Facebook are still stuck with it.

We are about to explain these models, and please keep in mind the best social graphing model is that one that is Most Flexible and Most Generic in the same time.

Continue reading Social Graphing Models used in the Social Networks

This is the 100th post from a dyslexic mind who thought he could not write to save his life, so for all of you avid bloggers out there, please don’t laugh! This was seriously an achievement for me.

I must say that Twitter has contributed a lot, and all those microposts of 145 characters pushed my mind to write a few more words. I also learnt that I don’t have to write full blown articles all the time, so in 2009 if my post is too large to fit on Twitter, It’ll qualify to become a blog post.

So Happy New Year! We know it is a bit late, but we have been recharging our batteries and reviving ourselves from the hard work we did in the last few remaning weeks of 2008. A lot of good things happened last year such as the Anahtia Social Engine Project, starting to develop iPhone Apps, moving our office to the heart of Yaletown Vancouver, and much more.

to mark the 100th post we would like to mention some of the popular rmd studio blog posts here:

• What is Business System Analysis?
• Not all programmers can develop software
• Computer Programmers’ Skill Set
• To Better Protect The Democratic Internet
• Engineers Vs. Architects
• When Corporate IT Resists the Open Source
• Bringing back the Zen to programmers

So what else is new?

A lot actually. In a nutshell here is the list

• Anahita Social Engine project is growing fast and it is now Google Open Social compliant. Within 60 days, we are about to launch a client project which has more than 200K users, and it is powered by the Anahita Social Engine. We are going to launch the support and distribution website for the Anahita project this year.
• We are now developing iPhone Apps too! We are about to release our 2nd client project which is a Medical Calculator. Do you have an iPhone project, please bring it on. You know that millions of iPhones have been sold and millions more will be sold this year right? You can also sell them on the iPhone Apps store and make money! That’s right, there is business model right there. So bring on those projects, and we would be happy to help you
• We’ve received many encouraging responses for the RubberDoc project, we are also overwhelmed by large number of support requests ( here and here ), which means we have to setup a system so we could get paid for the hours spent on the support, or else we won’t be able to do a good job keeping the users happy. We will be further improving the Joomla RubberDoc extensions mainly becuase some of our prime clients such as SPARC BC are currently using it.
• New rmd Studio website and blog are being developed, we need to upgrade and improve our websites as we do every new year.
• rmd Studio is Blessed to be working with such a great team of associates such as JenTekk Web Solutions, Peerglobe Technology, Joomlatools, and Rockettheme.

[tags]rmdstudio, newyear, anahita, rubberdoc[/tags]

Here is a little tip to make your price negotiations easier during the 2009.

As technology experts we often like to use every opportunity to remind our clients that we are on top of things and perfectly able to take care of their problems.

It is a bad idea that while we go through their list of requirement to say:

“Oh that’s easy!”

“Oh that only takes 20 minutes”

“Oh that’s just a (insert fancy technical name) that’s fine!”

Because then client will be having a difficult time justifying why on earth they should be paying you big bucks for jobs that are too easy, take 20 min to implement, and use technologies that are common place!

The reality is that:

Easy jobs will still take up some time to be implemented and the Client is billed for those hours.

Once tunned into the work mode, Programmers, Designers, and those who are in love with their work often don’t realize how fast time is passing, so several hours actually do feel like only 20 minutes.

So next time that we see an “easy” list of requirements, it would be better to say, “Sure, we know exactly how to do it, how much time do we have for this?”

Trust me! Your price negotiation will  go through a lot smoother!

[tags]tips, consulting, price quote, business, negotiation[/tags]

Congratulations Johan Janssens for being the most valued person in both Joomla and Mambo project.

“His work on Joomla! is excellent.”

“Johan is responsible for the development of the Joomla! Framework., he lead the Joomla! project to become the succesfull project it is today.”

“Johan is the man behind the amazing architecture design of the only PHP based CMS with a solid development framework.”

Packt Publishing has announced the names  of most valued people in different open source content management system projects. These names have been put forward by the core development and community members of these projects. Johan has been the former Lead Architect and Project Manager in the Joomla Core development team.

Currently Johan Janssens is the Managing Director and Lead Architect in Joomlatools. He and his team are responsible for amazing projects such as Nooku an amazing content translation solution and also he has done great framework contributions to our ongoing project the Anahita Social Engine framework.