Once again php|architect hosted the php|tek conference, a yearly event held in Chicago. Tek has a reputation of being one of the most community-centered conferences, and true to its reputation this year’s conference promoted a variety of social networking activities alongside the usual conference sessions. The presence of various key players in the PHP ecosystem (Core Developers, Community Leaders, Products leaders and various representatives and evangelists from leading companies) was definitively a highlight for me.
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06/9/10
php|tek 2010: A conference for beginners and veterans
06/1/10
My take on the iPad
For the past few weeks, MIH SWAT has had the chance to test Apple’s new iPad. Highly anticipated by IT professionals and geeks all over the world, it was aimed to fill the gap between a mobile phone and a notebook.
I have an iPhone and a MacBook, and combined they serve my every need: iPhone with its mobility, GPS, 3G and huge collection of apps; and MacBook Pro with regular desktop performance and relatively small weight. So I wasn’t convinced about the existence of this gap. Even Steve Jobs, in his daring keynote, classified the small and portable laptop as “useless”. Ouch.
A week later, however, I began to see the gap.
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05/20/10
Microsoft StreamInsight
I went to the Microsoft Tech Days conference 2010 earlier this week. The main focus of the conference was Sharepoint 2010 but there were some other interesting topics covered as well. The one topic that I found very interesting was about StreamInsight. StreamInsight is a new complex event processing (CEP) component that ships with SQL Server 2008 R2.
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05/4/10
Unboxing the iPad
Today the Cape Town SWAT team was very excited to get delivery of two shiny new iPads. Tyrone volunteered to unbox the much-hyped gadget while I took a few snaps to chronicle the occasion. Tyrone’s debt for getting the first whiff of that delicious “new apple product” smell is that he has to do a full review post next week. In the meantime though, here are some photos of the unboxing to whet your appetite…
05/3/10
In a Facebook world, what’s a social network to do?
It can be argued that Facebook is now the de facto online social network with almost 500 million registered users, with only a few countries such as China (QQ), Russia (Vkontakte), Japan (Mixi) and Brazil (Orkut) left where it is not the dominant social force. Facebook has been especially successful in expanding geographically via local language implementations and is now taking this further by also extending users’ social graphs and activities to the wider web through its Open Graph tools (announced at their F8 conference last week).
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04/23/10
An Introduction to Graphical Models
Life is full of uncertainties — what the weather will be like on a specific day, what time we will arrive at work, or even just whether the cup of coffee in front of us will be any good. Each possible outcome of an ‘event’ – whether that event is the weather, which road to take to work, or which candidate we will vote for in an election – has a certain probability of realising. For example, the probability of it being a sunny day in December in Cape Town is much higher than it being a cloudy, rainy day.
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04/19/10
Google’s New Twitter Tools
Search giant Google rolled out two new Twitter products last week – Google Replay and Follow Finder. This is particularly interesting in light of Twitter’s recently revealed explosive growth. Just last week the Micro blogging platform disclosed it has 105 Million registered users growing at a rate of 300,000 users per day!
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04/7/10
Vacancies at SWAT
Would you like to work at SWAT? The Cape Town office currently has vacancies for a PHP/WEB Developer, Senior Mobile Developer and SCRUM Master/Tester. If you are interested in any of these positions or would like to know more, please send your CV, salary expectation and availability to Ayesha Isaacs
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03/29/10
Are CAPTCHA’s enough?
We have all seen CAPTCHA’s on the various web sites we visit. Something that never occurred to me though is that it seems that there is a whole industry built around circumventing or cracking CAPTCHA’s. Read the CAPTCHA topic on Wikipedia or do a Google search on ‘CAPTCHA cracking’ and you will find many articles on the topic.
There are various methods that are implemented to automatically crack them that range from using simple OCR software to using neural networks. I have also read some articles that mention that they can be cracked with JavaScript.
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03/18/10
Tipping Point for South African Internet
South African’s woke up to the exciting news today that MWEB, one of the countries’ largest Internet Service Providers, are launching long-awaited uncapped broadband packages.
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