Blog

Life goes on in Tehran

March 28th, 2008

An excellent photo blog by a former [Iranian] Los Angeles resident who recently moved to Tehran. Most of the photos are taken by his camera phone. Link

Google interview

March 23rd, 2008

Detailed accounts of Corey Trager‘s interview at Google. He didn’t get the job but he describes the interview and all the psychology before/during and after the interview very well. Link

From Pro-Phi-Psi:

I was reading Artima today when I came across this article on C++. The article talks about some new feature of C++ called rvalue references. I tried to read it until my eyes glazed over. I went back to the top to look for the tell tale reason, which exists in almost all publications on C++, for why I didn’t understand the article and why I didn’t care that I did not understand it. Here is the money quote: Rvalue references is a small technical extension to the C++ language….They are primarily meant to aid in the design of higher performance and more robust libraries.

Read more

My first mashup application!

February 10th, 2008

This is not exactly a big achievement – although it took a while to build (worked late on a number of occasions), I’m quite proud of it! I had to get familiar with Google Map’s API and understand the basics of screen (or data) scraping. For this I found a very good web site (oooff.com) which had great examples. If you know PHP you can pick this up very quickly. If you don’t know PHP, do not worry as you can either learn the basics of it pretty quickly or you can buy an already made data scraping too (search the web – don’t forget Yahoo!).

Here’s in my first mashup application – the flights information data is taken from BAA’s web site. Good luck!

Comparison of WAMPs – Part2

February 7th, 2008

Last week I installed WampServer (Version 2.0) on my work PC. Since then, I’ve played around with Apache/PHP and, to a lesser extent, MySQL. My initial thoughts are that this WAMP seems to include a lot of good support for changing the three modules’ core functionality which I had not seen in other WAMPs before.

For example, I wanted to install the GD library in PHP – previously to do this, I would’ve had to edit 2 or 3 INI files and restart Apache to achieve this. All I have to do now is click on the Wampserver’s little icon and select GD library in the PHP menu. Simple! For this (and also the ease with which it installed), Wampserver gets a big thumbs up from me!

Comparison of WAMPs

January 31st, 2008

A guide to WAMPs (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP installers) from Wikipedia – useful for geeks like me who want to have a ‘live’ web server (Apache) on their PC. WAMPs also install PHP (scripting language) and MySQL (simple database – very popular) so we can make complete web based applications.

I’ve used XAMPP before – I’ve just installed WampServer to see how this compares with XAMPP. Watch this space.

CodeIgniter

January 29th, 2008

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks, CodeIgniter could be the answer!

Crazy Iranian bike stunts

January 25th, 2008

Mamy Blue by the Pop Tops

January 22nd, 2008

I was listening to WMFU when they played a different more jazzy version of this song. I found the original on YouTube. This brings back so many many memories it’s unreal! Enjoy.

So have you got a great list of goals for this year? How do make sure that you keep moving towards those goals rather than finding the piece/s of paper where you’ve written them down at the end of the year and thinking “oh well, that would have been nice to have achieved that…”?

This is another list of how you can focus on your goals and achieve them. I guess it doesn’t hurt to read this guy’s article – it can only help..

🙂