http://bashar.alfallouji.com Talks around PHP, Computer Science and Stuffs Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:59:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This is definitely not PHP or IT related but is worth talking about :) The com department of the UQAM (Universite du Quebec a Montreal - Canada) has done an awesome and incredibly popular lipdub video. This LipDub has been produced during the integration week of UQAM with 172 communication ... http://bashar.alfallouji.com/2009/10/03/com-uqam-2009-lipdub-i-gotta-feeling/ Once again, Thanks Google for their tech talks. 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 ... http://bashar.alfallouji.com/2009/09/11/write-better-code/ Here is a very interesting video from Linus Torvalds on Git. He emphasizes on the importance and added value for companies to use decentralized source control. You better listen to this video or you just may end up stupid and ugly :) http://bashar.alfallouji.com/2009/09/10/git-or-why-should-we-use-decentralized-source-control/ If you ever worked in a software company, you most likely heard once someone saying "Hey, we can't do this, because this doesn't scale!" 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 ... http://bashar.alfallouji.com/2009/08/10/sorry-cant-do-this-because-it-doesnt-scale/ Recently, I have been working on building a new search engine.  After performing some searches on Google, I ended up watching a tech talk from Marissa Mayer. Marissa is vice President  (Search Products & User Experience) at Google. Just to give you a background here is a short summary of ... http://bashar.alfallouji.com/2009/06/15/more-is-better-is-that-right/ PHP Code Comparator is a command line script allowing to compare different versions of a library, framework or package. It will detect code changes in terms of class existence or method definitions. If you ever wanted to have a way to quickly identify what classes have been altered or methods have ... http://bashar.alfallouji.com/2009/05/29/php-code-comparator-detect-code-changes/ I recently heard about a funny contest handled by Microsft. The concept is really fun, and so is their web site (Check the video!). Here is a short description of the contest. Microsoft presents the Ultimate Battle: It’s a knock-down, drag-em-out battle between professional and student developers! And it’s your big chance ... http://bashar.alfallouji.com/2009/05/25/the-ultimate-coder-battle/ WolframAlpha is a computational knowledge engine created by Stephen Wolfram It basically generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base (composed of many trillions of elements), instead of searching the web and returning links.  I spent some time testing it and I gotta say it is awesome. So, no ... http://bashar.alfallouji.com/2009/05/21/wolfram-alpha-a-computational-knowledge-engine/ Some people just like to write as few line of codes as possible. Well, PHP can be tricky sometimes.. For instance, be carefull when declaring a variable and passing it as a parameter to a function or to a method at the same time. If that parameter is supposed to ... http://bashar.alfallouji.com/2009/05/17/php-can-be-tricky-sometimes/ I have decided to write a serie of posts around the Singleton design pattern. This first one will discuss the uniqueness aspect of a Singleton. What is a Singleton again ? In software engineering, the singleton pattern is a design pattern that is used to restrict instantiation of a class to one ... http://bashar.alfallouji.com/2009/05/17/typical-singletons-arent-always-that-single/