I have attended a number of conferences in Karachi and even spoken at a few but today’s conference at TedX was in a separate league. What made it so interesting is that like all things TED, it was diverse. There were speakers from the creative arts, business, energy and technology. The crowd was equally diverse and the talks were very inspirational because the speakers didn’t hold out–they really spoke out. The event was extremely well organized with each of the 18 minute talks carrying a carefully rehearsed and condensed theme.

It felt like the cirque de soleil of conferences with a healthy mix of audience engagement, ranging from an abrupt ovation for our country with a national anthem who intent was to rebase the audience back to our country’s patriotic roots, to motivational talks which engaged the audience in a 30 second breathing exercise and acknowledgement of people in adjacent seats–all designed to underline the prominence of “presence”, “awareness” and connecting. The topic on energy for a change focused on solutions and the Thar coal mines, whose 4% reserves are enough to sustain the entire country. Micro-finance seems to be another recurring theme in the financial and charitable circles and there was plenty of quantification and empirical evidence of it being implemented and working in Pakistan. All talks came from people who are out there on the field, accomplishing these things.

The talks had plenty of substance and mind fodder. It’s easy to get pigeon-holed into our respective trades so it was a good change to get a richer, broader perspective from people across the various walks of life.

It’s a shame that it will be another year before the next TEDx, but I’m hoping there are other forums in between that continue the discussion.

Google’s just released list of “1000 most-visited sites on the web” is a real treat and quite interesting to analyze. It has to be one of the most accurate lists given Google’s massive network reach. The list contains Unique Users (UU) and Page Views (PV). Besides Orkut, Google has not listed any of it’s own sites in the list so Google News, Google Search and GMail may very well be in the top 1000 but absent from this list. I also calculated the Average Page Views (APV) to show how many pages each user visits on average on the site.

What on the onset seemed quite trivial actually turned out to be quite hard. The Express Tribune launched just 2 days ago with a stunning paper and a web portal to match. Building large scale systems like The Express Tribune news portal and turning it around in 6 months requires a team of determined masochists and some really quick thinking.

Abstract classes are an often misunderstood feature of PHP object-oriented programming (OOP) and the source of confusion when considered versus an Interface. The obvious reason for using an Interface is that a child class can implement multiple interfaces but extend only a single abstract class. However, if multiple inheritance is not required then people often go with abstract classes just because they provide the option of later adding base functionality within the abstract class. This is not entirely unreasonable but the reasons for creating abstract classes should be more than that.

The Jang News website is one that just keeps getting worse with each passing day. It’s lacklustre and shows absolutely no concern for its readers or the news that it serves. The website is a big hoarding with no less than 19 advertisements on the website’s front page while at the same time carries less than 100 words of actual news. And it looks really ugly to boot.