I will present the core notions related to Text-Mining, we will see some of the existing technologies, their features. The talk will be focused on the added value and benefits that Text-Mining may provide to your application.

Date : 13 Mai 2010
Hour : 19h00
Location : École de technologie supérieure, Montréal

More information are available at : http://www.phpquebec.org/modules/piCal/index.php?smode=Daily&action=View&event_id=0000001121&caldate=2010-5-10

Hope to see you there.

Usually Google is good with user experience, however in that case I was surprised by that very annoying feature. I would bet I am not the only one who got annoyed by it.

The good news is that with the latest release (4.1.249.1045), you can disable that feature (Why is it enabled by default however ?).

To do that, go to Tools > Options > Under the Hood > Translate and deselect the box next to “Offer to translate pages that aren’t in a language I read.”

You may find the updated version on github :

http://github.com/alfallouji/PHP-Autoload-Manager

Documentation has been updated also (Please take a look at the README file).

The presentation slides are available here : http://www.confoo.ca/en/download or you can view some of them on Anis blog.

Thanks to a very good organization, this conference was a real blast. All went very smoothly.

I can’t wait for Confoo 2011 !

- Global State;
- Hard to test (refer to unit test post);
- Singletonite (I see Singletons everywhere);
- Violating the Single Responsibility Rule.

I could spent a few pages arguing and / or explaining those issues. Instead of that, I would recommend you to watch Miško Hevery’s presentations.

“Ok great,  I am  convinced. Singleton are bad. What are the alternatives ?”

Let’s suppose we have a class named article, that has a save() method allowing to persist this instance of an article (in a database or any kind of persistency layer).

/**
 * Singletons are my best friends
 */
class article
{
    public $title;
    public $text;

    public function save()
    {
        $storage = storage::getInstance();
        if(false === $storage->save())
        {
            logger::getInstance()->log("Sorry !");
        }
    }
}

$myArticle = new article();
$myArticle->title = 'I love sushi';
$myArticle->text = 'I really do...';
$myArticle->save();

What are the problems with the previous code ?

Well, first you can’t mock the storage object and therefore this class can be hard to unit test. Secondly, the save method has a dependency with two objects, those dependencies are hidden within the save method and as a consumer of this API, you would expect to be able to know what the collaborator and / or the dependencies of a class are without having to look at the implementation of some methods.

So, let’s get rid of all singletons !

/**
 * No Singleton, use collaborators instead
 */
class article
{
    protected $storage;
    protected $logger;

    public function __construct($storage, $logger)
    {
        $this->storage = $storage;
        $this->logger = $logger;
    }

    public function save()
    {
        if(false === $this->storage->save())
        {
            $this->logger->log("Sorry !");
        }
    }
}

// Having to instantiate "manually" the storage and logger
// is a actually a bit a pain
$storage = new storage($param1, $param2, ...);
$logger = new logger($paramA, $paramB, ...);

$myArticle = new article($storage, $logger);
$myArticle->title = 'I love sushi';
$myArticle->text = 'I really do...';
$myArticle->save();

We just need to pass the storage and logger objects into the constructor of the article object and now the article class is easier to test (easier to mock objects).

This LipDub has been produced during the integration week of UQAM with 172 communication students. It was made on September 10th 2009, the footage lasted approximately 2h15min.

Available on youtube / google video, it is getting more popular every hour / minutes (more than 750k views already) and it is creating kind of a buzz on the web.

They even got an interview on CNN.

Congratulation to them all. As an ex-student of UQAM, I specially enjoyed watching it.

Here is a video from Steve Souders named “Life’s Too Short - Write Fast Code”. This video talks about how to write efficient code and discuss speed optimizations techniques in Web programing.

Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book, High Performance Web Sites, explains his best practices for performance; it reached the top of the Amazon computer and Internet bestseller list. His follow-up book, Even Faster Web Sites, provides performance tips for today’s Web 2.0 applications. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug, with over one million downloads.

(Source : http://stevesouders.com/bio.php)

You can also find his latest book named “Even faster websites” at books.google.com.

You better listen to this video or you just may end up stupid and ugly

I believe “Scalability” must be on the top 10 list of the “buzz words” most used in the software industry.

It is usually considerated as a killing argument in a conversation. “If something doesn’t scale, then we don’t want it.”

One of the things that fascinates me about “buzz word” is that most of the time it has so many different definitions. Everyone has a tendency to give it a personal definition. Often, people will be too shy to ask for a clear definition. Therefore, it makes it even harder to be able to really understand what underlies behind it. So, What does Scalability mean ?

In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be readily enlarged. (Source: Wikipedia)

In my humble opinion, there are a few important keywords (in bold) in this definition that should be kept in mind when thinking about scalability.

I recently watched that video (I love google tech talks) from Cuong Do Cuong given during a quite old conference in Seattle (in 2007). Cuong is an engineering manager at Google (YouTube).  “He was part of the engineering team that scaled the YouTube software and hardware infrastructure from its infancy to its current scale. Prior to YouTube/Google, he held various software development and management positions at PayPal and Inktomi.”

Cuong shares with us some his experiences, the different issues related to scalability he and the team faced. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.