Future IT Practitioner : Ethics

Ethics in a profession will describe professional behavior among professionals. Further it will describes an individual’s behavior towards to his or her profession. Because misbehaving of few professional will disrupt the profession as whole. Hence professional bodies like BCS, IEEE defines “Code of Ethics” for their members.

In both “Code of Ethics” we can see common areas they tried to address.

1. Public Safety
   We have responsibilities to protect the public in many ways. Special due care should be paid for designing, developing and maintaining critical systems.
   Therac -25  and London ambulance service failure  are two incidents that come into play.
2. Avoid Discriminations
   This is a wide area to talk about but, basically we should not less favorable because of race, skin colour, religion etc.
3. Professional Obligations
   Here it addresses, our competency level, integrity with other professionals ,avoiding conflict of interest etc.
4. Legal Obligations
   This has wide scope that will differ from country to country. But we should know legal legislations for the country that we are going work with. Examples for common legislations of misusing computers, regarding confidential information, discriminations , consumer protection etc.

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Code of ethics of
+ BCS http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.6030
+ IEEE http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/iportals/aboutus/ethics/code.html

Copyrights © Kelum Ganegoda 2009

Related Posts: Future IT Practitioner

Future IT Practitioner

It is crystal clear that our current society became information society. Throughout the world organizations and individuals are now starving for information. This happens purely because of following factors,

• Expansion of IT
  IT is no longer an isolated unit in an organization. It is link into other units with helping out for their work.
• Evaluation of technologies
  Inevitably Internet, ERPs, SOA, SAAS (Software as a service) etc.

By considering all the facts, IT became truly global profession. All IT practitioners across the world have contributed and contributing to this global profession.

Even though, IT is global profession it has no limitations as a profession like other prominent professions, Medical practicing, Lawyers, Accountants etc. What I’m trying to say is, for an example, no control of entry for IT, like, doctors or engineers. Although this type of control of entry is necessary but it’s too late to implement at the moment. We know, UK and USA had put enormous efforts for this, unfortunately those were not work out.

On the other side, if we put such control of entry, sometime it wouldn’t get as much expansion as the present.

Since you and me contributing to this global profession, as professionals, we have sort of responsibilities. May be, those responsibilities will become practices throughout the professionalism. Mainly we can categorize them into 2.

1. Ethical practices
2. Competency

Generally ethical practices are enforced by a professional body, like BCS, IEEE etc, to its members. For this global profession, I think, all practitioners should adhere to general ethical practices. Professional ethics, sometimes, will help to sharpen up our competency level.

Copyrights © Kelum Ganeogda 2009

Related Posts: Future IT Practitioner : Ethics

Update Progress with AJAX UpdatePanel

In this post I will demonstrate how to create update progress with UpdatePanel, a similar one that we can see in our gmail, like following,

Following key things to be addressed.

1. It should be on top-center of the page
2. It should be on top all other HTML controls
3. When scrolling it should be placed on relative position of the current scroll position.

To achieve this we can use many alternatives but I would use a simple approach.
In addition to the UpdatePanel, I will use </div>, CSS style and javaScript.

Here we go.

1. Add a div tag within body element.
   

   <div class="divProg" id="divProg"></div>

   Note that id and class attributes are necessary.
   
   
2. Add following css class to the web page or style sheet file. Keep in mind, without position: absolute; z-index: 10; css properties this won’t work as we expected.
   

   .divProg
   {
    position: absolute;
    left: 0px;
    top: 0px;
    width: 100px;
    height: 0px;
    z-index: 10;
    border: 1px none #000000;
    visibility: hidden;
    background-color: #FFF1A8;
    font-weight: bold;
    padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px;
   }

   
   
3. Now we want to display div on top-center of the screen as well as move its top position relative to the current scroll position. To address this we will creates following 3 javascript functions.
   To get current Y position of scroll,
   

   function getScroll_Y() 
   {
           return document.documentElement.scrollTop;  
   }

   To set current top position of div,
   

   function setDivTop() 
   {
   
           if (document.getElementById("divProg") != null) {
               theDiv= document.getElementById("divProg");
           }
           else {
               return;
           }
           theDiv.style.top = getScroll_Y() + "px";
   }

   Write a function to toggle display for the div.
   

   function displayDiv(display) 
   {
       if (document.getElementById("divProg") != null) {
           theDiv = document.getElementById("divProg");
       }
       else {
           return;
       }
   
       if (display) {
           var width = document.body.offsetWidth;
           var height = document.body.offsetHeight;
           if (!width) {
               width = window.innerWidth;
               height = window.innerHeight;
   
               if (!width) {
                   width = screen.width;
                   height = screen.height;
               }
           }
           // To center the div, we need to deduct its half of
           // width from half of screen width. So we set div width =100
           // in css, so that deduct by 50
           theDiv.style.left = width / 2 - 50;
           theDiv.style.top = getScroll_Y();
           theDiv.style.height = 25;
           theDiv.innerText = 'Working...';
           theDiv.style.visibility = 'visible';
   
       }
       else {
           theDiv.style.visibility = 'hidden';
       }
   }

   
   
   
4. Now we want to handle request start and request end events. we will be able to use following code with assist of ajax extension library.
   
   

   // Requests Events
   // ============================================
   var prm = Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance();
   
   prm.add_initializeRequest(InitializeRequest);
   prm.add_endRequest(EndRequest);
   
   function InitializeRequest(sender, args) {
       if (prm.get_isInAsyncPostBack()) {
           args.set_cancel(true);
       }
       displayDiv(true);
     
   
   }
   function EndRequest(sender, args) {
       if (args.get_error()) {
           alert(args.get_error().message);
           args.set_errorHandled(true);
   
       }
       displayDiv(false);
   }
   
   //===============================================

   
   
5. Set page's scroll event,
   

   <body onscroll="setDivTop()">

   
   

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