Build you own multi-touch pad

June 1, 2008. Filed under Random.

Multi-touch has become the trend of designing new electronic devices. It all started big with the advent of Apple adopting the technology in its iPhone & iPod Touch.  While the latest marvel Microsoft Surface has stunned the success of multi-touch technology.

Here is a very simple, low cost and easy way to develop your own multi-touch pad.

Build you own multi-touch pad.

30 Best CSS Examples

May 1, 2008. Filed under HTML&CSS, Programming.

The best way to learn CSS is through trying out or learning from what others have tried. Recently, I chose the later to understand CSS better. Of the many lying out there on the internet, I found this link the best suited for different approaches of modern CSS techniques

30 Exceptional CSS Techniques and Examples

Hope these 30 exceptional CSS examples would guide you to something new and interesting .

Compiled PHP Applications

April 28, 2008. Filed under Programming, Web Services.

As the Web has evolved, it has changed from a collection of static pages to an environment filled with randomly and dynamically changing content. In producing dynamic content among all the web technologies PHP has been the most developer-friendly programming language. PHP generally runs in a web-server taking PHP code as its input and creating dynamic html pages as output.

PHP like many other web technologies is an interpreted language. When a web page is requested from the web server, the php code associated to the page is interpreted and executed on a fly and as a result dynamic html is produced. For every php web request a new process is forked and that process takes care of interpreting the language which is called process based execution. As a fact forking a process is a very costly system operation and as the load on the server increases the time of execution and memory becomes inverse. In addition to this interpretation of the language also consumes some time. For a web application with millions of page views all the above operations can make the web server unresponsive/crash.

To solve one part of the latency, i.e., interpretation, we could make use of PHP compiler. PHP Compiler compiles a PHP web page into its corresponding DLL. DLL is nothing more than a C executable file. Anytime , there is only one instance of the DLL loaded in the memory while different resources uses just its memory images for execution which would make them more memory efficient. And with this DLL approach we eliminate the interpretation stage of the php life cycle thus saving some latency. In addition to saving latency and better memory management, there are lot more advantages:

1. Does not require a interpreter to be installed or packaged. No need of mod_php in the Apache server.

2. Compile complete source tree in a single executable.

3. Once compiled, irreversable to original PHP code.

4. Embedding the compiled code into a micro web server serves as a offline web application.

5. Creating common libraries can be shared between different applications on the same server.

Since the code is hidden we can easily distribute the code with out worrying about code getting stolen. Packaging online web application into offline web application using a micro web server would be a big win for internet companies.

Note: RoadSend is one such PHP Compiler that could help you with your web application performance.

CSS Position-ing

April 26, 2008. Filed under Programming, Technology.

I always was ambiguous on how css position property actually work. I went on a journey on the internet to find answears for some of my questions. Here is where I landed

Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps

The modern design techniques like these have made the internet page lot lighter with just using div’s. I would agree that many complicated html page’s today on the internet are/can be achieved through div’s. I would recommend every web developer to make it point that they understand the most important position property in CSS.

Philosophies of Application Design

April 25, 2008. Filed under Entrepreneur.

Here is a great article on “The Algorithm and The Crowd“.  It reflects on the real world philosophies on how the entrepreneurial crowd is divided and hints on what exactly needs to be taken care of. I found it interesting and thought provoking. Thus, sharing with the rest.