MIH SWAT

Agile software development methods have reached great popularity among technology-based companies around the globe, arguably due to their effectiveness at managing the project stakeholders’ expectations and goals. However, this positive outcome is directly related to the team members’ ability to carry out the planning phases. And unfortunately the minimalistic theory frequently observed in agile processes tends to result in poorly written user stories.

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I must confess that Jono Bacon actually caught me by surprise. While I was following the creation process of the book (O’Reilly invited UG leaders to send feedback) I could have never imagined I would one day have something so useful for someone who deals with communities on a day to day basis. In this universe Jono is a well known figure, with vast experience in managing and participating in online communities, which credits him as a perfect candidate to write a book like this one.

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One of the most fascinating presentations I attended last OSCON (you can read my review here) was entitled Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript by Jonathan Stark. Jonathan is a consultant for mobile applications, a frequent conference speaker and often quoted when media speaks of trends for internet and mobile.

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Recently I went to Luke Welling’s presentation entitled “PHP in the 21½th Century” at OSCON. He mentioned something interesting that got me thinking, something he calls “The Smarty Trap”. This trap occurs when someone decides to write a template engine with “a simple syntax that designers can understand” – it starts with some includes and printing a variable here and there. All goes well until he realizes he needs looping, so he builds loops into the language. And so it continues until the template engine is as complicated as any other programming language.

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The 12th edition of O’Reilly OSCON (Open Source Conference) took place from 19 – 23 July in Portland, USA. In its first few years OSCON’s main goal was to help big companies realise the value of open source. Since that dream has become a reality, OSCON now focuses on defining, maintaining, and extending the identity of what it means to be open source. It’s also an excellent forum for discussing what future possibilities lie ahead.

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Drizzle is a relatively new project with the aim of producing a lightweight relational database system based on MySQL.

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There are many things that affect the performance of a web application. A typical web application is normally shown as something like this.

In actual fact, there are multiple layers within each section that can affect the speed of a web application and bottlenecks can occur at almost all of these layers. There are a few techniques that can be used to improve the application’s speed. In order to fully understand the reasoning behind these techniques, a better understanding of the way things work is needed.

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When searching the web, search engine results pages (SERPs) traditionally contain three bits of information about a page:

1. The page title.
2. The description of the page (found within the meta description tag) or an excerpt of the page containing the keywords you searched for.
3. The URL of the web page.

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In my previous post about graphical models, the basic idea behind graphical models were discussed. The question now,  how does probability theory and graph theory interact in graphical models?

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The launch of the iPad caused yet another wave of Apple hysteria around the globe, not least in media and technology companies such as ours. Having used the device now for almost two months, I find that it has added a new dimension to my views on what convergence means in the technology and media industries.

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