TechBytes | Technology Bytes

Life is really moving in the fast lane for me, and Im pretty sure for most of you readers too. I login to social-networking platforms after weeks and I cant recognize most of these faces (even though they are my friends). Its proven that Humans tend to recognize people by face more quickly then names and email addresses so whenever someone puts on a new face (uploads a new profile-picture), I have hard time getting to know them.

Well, I thought today, I have been developing in facebook application for so long now – Why not put online a few hours to fetch Facebook Friends data via API and keeping track of who did what? (status updates) and who changed his/her profile picture? So last night I was up, as usual, and I put together a small script in PHP that fetches my friends’s list, processes newcomers, checks for updates (pictures and statuses) and posts them into a database. Now I can track who updated his profile picture and what was their previous profile photo. Also, I can invest in another 1 hr to create high-level-summary everyday for ME

Do you do something of this sort? I’d love to hear your story

My first IPv6 address is 2607:f358:1:fed5:2::178

IPv4 pool (the ip address range as we know today) will dry by the end of this year or mid-next year. SO IPv6 is here for all our future needs

Thanks to BuyVM.net for my first VPS with IPv6 address.

I asked my client to buy a Linode for some testing purposes and I tried it for the first time. I must say, Linode is blazzing fast. Downloads are touching 8M/sec and speed, performance is as if its running on a VM on my local system.

Update: Now its been almost a month running Linode and I strongly recommend this VPS company.
Update 2: If you plan to signup for LINODE, use my referral link, it will give you the same price but it will help me a lil http://www.linode.com/?r=587d6a71720a4606811a5710431462642c56bc21

The first day I applied the theme that was on this blog most (almost all) of 2009, I knew I had to change it someday because it was too heavy. The only reason I liked that theme was how it differentiated between two posts on the homepage.

Anyway, I have been spending quiet some time during the last few days to update my blog and use widgets (for the first time on WordPress platform ) etc and I hope I have chosen a nice alternative to my previous theme, although I am pretty sure that some of you will still think its almost the same as the previous one but its not.

My Facebook account got surpended today right after I got this PM from Saad Tariq, a friend of mine.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am going to start on a small system for internal use and I wanted to re-think my choice of CodeIgniter because it does not have templates or ORM. Guess what, I landed with KohanaPHP. It sounds very tempting that a new MVC Framework based on CodeIgniter with new features (especially ORM) is here but the documentation is really really poor.

I tried googling for a book or tutorial and I was really disappointed to have found none. I tried Amazon.com for a book but no books. Looks like I have landed in some weird space that might be good looking but I need to get my hands dirty in the code to learn it and at the end of the day, it may seem that I have lost a lot of hours on this new Framework. Lets give it a try!

Update: As of today (28th July, 2010), I am working on YII, its good, powerful and blazing fast. It has all the feature of CakePHP too.

Well, my initial estimates were wrong. I thought I could retweet the posts and Twitter would give me accurate results. The problem is with twitter results. They are giving me wrong and irrelevant results.

Also, when I ask Twitter to only send me “positive” tweets, it sometimes does not mark most of the positive tweets as “positive”, in fact they are not marked at all. So there are the “positive” tweets, “negative” tweets, “questions” and “unknown” (or “unrated”) tweets. A quick look at these tweets and I can see many of them as good ones that should have been retweeted but they were not.

To get over this situation, I need to have an admin panel where I can see statistics and possibly “approve” the negative / unrated tweets.

Having previous experience working in Zend Framework, CakePHP and CodeIgniter, I would prefer to build it in Code Igniter. I will keep this page updated with more info.

I moved from Warid to Ufone in April, I forgot to mention that. Thanks to MNP the move was smooth and easy.

Now let me tell you why I moved. First of all, there are billing issues in Postpaid. They have two SMS packages

• Zoom Limited SMS Package offering 750 messages per month and
• Zoom Unlimited SMS Package offering 7,500 messages per month

When you activate any of these packages (for the first time) the package is charged double. So e.g. you activate Zoom Unlimited and it costs approx Rs. 300 per month so it will be charged twice, once as ACTIVATION CHARGES and second as monthly charges (WTF!!)

Read the rest of this entry »

I thought it was a good news for pizza lovers like me but it wasn’t.
Me and my friend visited the Domino outlet in Link Road branch on 06th June 2009. Let me give you an account of what I saw and went through there.

Four tables and chairs similar to those in Kindergarden. Plus there was no one to show you the way AND all tables were pre-occupied. So as soon as one table got free, I jumped in while my friend was still at the counter ordering the pizza. We always ask for less vegetables and extra chicken topings. We did the same here too.

After 15 min someone called my friend’s name if his Parents were here to pick him up from school (lol, yeah!) and he was stunned at first then he moved to the counter, they handed him the pizza in a box. He asked “Excuse me, I am a Dine-in not a take away”, she replied Yes sir its a Dine-in. She also handed over ketchup sachets and two thick papers to use them as PLATES (WTF!!)

We opened the box on the tables and the first look of the pizza seemed if it was really DRY, it was clearly not deep-pan pizza. There were LOTS of vegetables on it and we thought for a second if we accidentally ordered a vegetable pizza (if they had one that is) but it was not. This was out order. Clearly the presentation was very poor but we planned to eat it since we were hungry.

There are no plates, forks, knives etc in Domino so you have to use your hands as fork/knive and the paper they gave you as a plate.

Just when we took a couple of bites off this dry-and-vegetables-full-pizza two of the Domino workers on the floor started a fight and they were swearing each other. For a split second I thought I was in some market, standing near a street hawkers but then I realized even the street hawker has plates so I am not there, its Domino.

One more thing that I must mention here is that my pizza didn’t had any chicken pieces on it (apart from the 4-5 microscopic chicken pieces), I looked to my sides and I noticed nobody has it.

In short, I was really disappointed and wasted my money in Domino. And I could have got more money for value from a shawarma or a plate of Gol Gappas.

Moral: Don’t go to Domino just for the sake of trying it. If you want to eat good Pizza then go for Pizza Hut M.M. Alam Road, their Pizza is great as always.

Yaller is one of my best DestroyTwitter theme. If you do not know about DestroyTwitter, it is a twitter client that runs on Adobe Air platform, is available for Windows and Mac alike.

Find below a screenshot of the theme when applied. (Credits to DestroyTwitter)