For sometime now I’ve wanted to share my thoughts on knowledge management as a philosophy for education, human interaction, and conflict management. Furthermore, whilst reflecting on the topic, I came across many Quranic verse and examples of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) presribing a knowledge management approach. This post will, hopefully, be the first in a serialized format.
What is Knowledge Management?
The first Google’d definition of knowledge management defines this as:
Knowledge management is the name of a concept in which an enterprise consciously and comprehensively gathers, organizes, shares, and analyses its internal knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills.
There always been a difference between information and knowledge. Information is but raw data, whereas knowledge is processed data, data that has become useful to the individual and the organisation.
Knowledge management recognises this value and its shape:
Firstly, knowledge is held by individuals, not by systems. Individuals are therefore valued for this knowledge that they have that is useful for the organisation.
Secondly, this knowledge is not taught or academified. Rather it is the result of experience. Furthermore, from experience, individuals learn techniques and processes to be efficient, more productive.
Thirdly, this knowledge is very often not shared or documented, often causing duplicates, and repeats of trial-and-error processes.
Knowledge management, therefore, in recognition of the value individuals have to the organisation (and society), encourages the sharing and documentation of this knowledge to make the entire organisation as such more efficient, productive and competitive, particularly within the Global Village environment that we live in.
In forthcoming posts, I’ll focus on implications on the lack of knowledge management, particularly in relation to generation gap issues within the Muslim community.
Its official that Adobe has bought over Macromedia for an estimated $3.4 billion dollars. But it certainly isn’t a buyout, or because Macromedia is struggling. On the contrary, both parties state:
The combination of Adobe and Macromedia strengthens our mission of helping people and organizations communicate better.
Macromedia’s director will also join Adobe’s board. From a developer’s perspective, and simplistic at best, it does raise exciting possibilities:
- Creating Images in Photoshop and exporting with layers to Flash
- Editing Videos in Premiere, and then compiling them into a DVD with Director
The whole is better than the sum of its parts…
Today at work, I have the unenviable task of working with icons. You are given a small block (20×20 pixels) to depict an idea and concept – and believe me, its tough. Fortunately, I’m not responsible for creating the icons – thats the graphic designer’s role!
My task is to help export them from Corel Draw in a ‘least distorted’ view because big they look brilliant, small can be unrecognizable. Fortunately, we managed to persuade the team to try the icons in PNG format.
To be honest, I wasn’t a ‘fan’ of PNG, and came to “know” via Fireworks that you have PNG 8 and PNG 24 which behaved much like GIF and JPEG respectively. It is only when I got introduced to what Fireworks calls PNG 32 that I began to be impressed.
Why PNG?
PNG supports transparency like GIF. But like JPG, you can have transparency in 24bit pictures. The mistake I made was to confuse the fact that in GIF, one colour is allocated to be transparent, and I thought the same was the case with PNG.
I was wrong! In PNG, you are allowed to have various colours of transparency – in lay man’s terms, so you need not bother with what colour your matte is. Technically, it is called the Alpha Layer.
So this is the huge interest in PNG. You have a 24 bit image, with transparency, and without the need to specify a matte colour.
PNG and Internet Explorer
PNG is wonderful, but seemingly discouraged because PNG Alpha transparency is not currently supported in Internet Explorer, without additional coding.
Microsoft points to a style that needs to be added to PNG images. The good news is that there are JavaScript workarounds for this. Simply Google for IE PNG to get some websites. My personal favourite is http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/.
Simply include, and experience the magic of PNG.
Isn’t it amazing what can stump you when you busy programming. I was working on getting a discussion forum thread to appear in a tree format, and in doing so, had to ‘clean’ up the text.
The steps I took was:
- Strip HTML Tags – strip_tags()
- Take the first 50 letters of the post - substr()
It worked well, except for one thread – which for some reason just wasn’t displaying at all and giving javascript errors. The PHP function ought to work, and was working in all the other cases.
The problem…
I got alerted to this by reading one of the user notes in the PHP manual. PHP’s functions do not clean the unicode line break \r \n, so you have to this manually. Else when you echo your javascript, the line breaks will appear, effectively messing it up.
A quick way of cleaning up the line breaks are:
$text = preg_replace("/(\r\n|\n|\r)/", "", $text);
I'm a Web Developer living in Cape Town, South Africa. Interests include: PHP, JQuery, ExtJS, Adobe AIR, Linux, Ubuntu, WordPress, Human Rights, Usability, Multimedia