Aleem Bawany

TEDx Karachi

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.

Top 1000 Most-visited Sites on the Web

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.

The Express Tribune

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.

Understanding Abstract Classes in PHP

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.

Jang News: Advertising vs User Experience

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.

Online Strategy & Development in a Nutshell

Microsoft Innovation Center hosted the Microsoft Web Days session today where I gave a talk about online strategy and development (in a nutshell). Even thought it was in a nutshell, I slipped in some details which meant skimming over a lot of other things during latter part of the brief 30 minute presentation. The presentation covered frameworks, interaction design, business models, strategies, tools, trends and user experience among other things.

Tr.im Goes Open – Bad Move or Marketing Ploy?

Tr.im is a URL shortening services useful for applications like Twitter where the length of posts is restricted to around 140 letters and short URLs are desirable. Recently tr.im announced that it was going out of business and shutting down but soon after they reversed their position and Eric Woodward offered to bear the costs of operations out of his own pocket if donations fell short. A move that is probably even worse than shutting down.

Earnings Season

Earnings season is upon us. Today the DOW touched it's highest annual level of 9000 while the Nasdaq jumped 2.9%, it's twelfth daily consecutive gain. Following is a summary of interesting earnings highlights in the tech sector to show just where things stand.

JSON Serializers In .NET

I was introduced to the various serialization options in .NET while trying to build the JSON and XML filters for ASP.NET MVC. In this post I'll take a look at the different JSON serializers available in .NET and the reasons to pick one over the other.

New Features in Entity Framework 4.0 (V2)

Entity Framework 4.0 is just around the corner and it will bring some long awaited relief. I previously wrote and explained the issues around Persistence Ignorance and POCO as they apply to the Entity Framework. So obviously I'm quite excited about migrating from the interim EFPocoAdapter over to EF 4.0. Let's take a quick look at the new features in Entity Framework 4.0.