Software Development Outsourcing Issues
1. Insurance
The outsourcer should have adequate public liability insurance against loss or liability through injury or damage.
2. Third party suppliers
The arrangements as to which party (purchaser or outsourcer) will hold and which party will administer the terms of any agreements currently in place between the purchaser and other third party suppliers. It is advisable to transfer the Maintenance contracts to the outsourcer unless the outsourcer has agreed to provide maintenance services for all equipment and software.
3. Software licenses
Where third parties supply software used to provide outsourced services, the appropriate licenses must be obtained. Any licenses currently held by the purchaser that relate to services being provided may need to be extended to cover the activities of the outsourcer.
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The 50 Best Adobe Illustrator Tutorials from 2009
Smoothly Shift Winter Colors While Creating an Icy, Vector Landscape
50+ Top Design Blogs Highest Ranked Posts in 2009
Yahoo has a nice little Site Explorer search that allows you to request a specific website URL that displays results of the highest ranked articles/pages on a specific website.
Based on my Twitter list “Top Design Blogs,” I searched each of the blogs in this list in Yahoo’s Site Explorer and compiled a Highest Rank List of 2009 below.

How to Create a Cool Anaglyphic Text Effect with CSS
Written by Chris Spooner
Anaglyphs are those amazing 3D images that are created by offsetting two of the red, green and blue channels, and are viewed with those nerdy looking 3D glasses with different coloured lenses. I don’t know if this effect works for real, as I’ve unfortunately misplaced my 3D specs, but it’s a pretty cool text effect nevertheless! Let’s take a look at how a similar style can be created for sprucing up your web designs, while taking into consideration semantics and avoiding the repetition of any markup.
Converting your PHP app to MySQLi prepared statements
These are the steps you need to take to convert to prepared statements.
Step 0. PHP 4 is dead. Upgrade to PHP 5
All of the code in these samples is PHP 5 only. I will be using SPL and MySQLi, which are installed primarily on PHP 5.2.x installations. PHP 4 cannot be made safe, so it’s time to upgrade. This is non-negotiable in my view.
If you’re using register_globals, you have to stop. Do not use a function to register them for you in PHP 5, it’s time to do proper input validation. This will actually take you longer than converting all your queries to prepared statements.
Accepting the Google OpenID with PHP OpenID
If you are using the PHP OpenID library (which is also used by my OpenID component for CakePHP), it is possible that you get an “Invalid OpenID” error when you try to login with the Google OpenID (https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id), or any other OpenID that uses “https”.
In this case, the following steps might help to fix this issue:
* Ensure you have Curl and OpenSSL installed
* Enable the Curl and OpenSSL extensions in your php.ini (on Archlinux this file is found in /etc/php/):
extension=curl.so
extension=openssl.so
* Restart your web server
Now the error message should disappear and you should be able to log in with the Google OpenID.
15 Clean & Effective Email / Newsletter Designs
Iconoclast
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10 Outsourcing Trends to Watch in 2010
It was a long year of intense ups and downs in the IT outsourcing industry. Consolidation among vendors and interest in remote infrastructure management increased, while overall outsourcing demand and IT services pricing decreased.
The market for IT outsourcing is expected to rebound a bit in 2010, say industry watchers. For instance, more than 75 percent of the service providers polled by EquaTerra in the third quarter of this year reported continued growth in their deal pipeline, which was up 10 percent from the previous quarter and 34 percent from the same period last year.
But don’t expect too robust a revival. Outsourcing consultancy Everest predicts that although suppliers will see a resurgence in demand for IT and business process outsourcing services in 2009, growth rates are unlikely to return to pre-2008 levels.
Both suppliers and outsourcing customers could be in for a bumpy ride in 2010. Here are 10 trends to look out for as the IT services industry finds its feet in the “new normal” of the post-recession.
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35 CSS-based Layouts that Look Awesome
1. Magnifico
20+ Tools for Quick and Clean Code Development
Developing websites is much more than just a pretty face, and depending on what typed of features you’d like to implement on the site, there’s a lot of coding that goes into it. Many times designers turn to a WYSIWYG tool, however tools of that sort are more limited to advanced code. Being able to code a site using a variety of tools lets you simplify the coding process while you take a big bite out of saving time.
Below we’ve hand picked 20+ Tools for Quick & Clean Code Development that will help you code much faster and in an efficient manner.
AJAX
MiniAjax






