Thoughts

Last weekend, IBM Egypt in cooperation with ITI  and other parties organized a 4 days hackathon in the theme of applying big data technologies to solve national problems in Egypt . The organizing parties involved: Information Technology Institute (ITI) that hosted the event and highly promoted it, in belief of the value of such activity towards the national development of the country, as well as allowing its students, among others, a chance to refine their skills, gain hands on experience on real world critical problems and a chance to make sounding success stories. IBM, Beside the national target, IBM has ongoing cooperation with ITI. and the event was a good chance to promote IBM Technologies, specially in the national projects domain. possible success stories would have high ROI for IBM. Government representatives from few domains that were target of the hackathon theme. The representatives brought sample amounts of data, and their domain experience about their fields...

Few years ago, Facebook launched their "7 years look back" videos. where any Facebook user can go to  https://www.facebook.com/lookback  to find a video generated for him, showing highlights over his historical activities and photos, beautifully animated along with a nice background music, and it went viral. everybody like to watch and share his highlights. Nowadays, something more of that kind is up.  Facebook launched "Thank you" videos. Facebook users can visit  https://www.facebook.com/thanks  with a list of friends on the side. Upon selecting a friend, a video will be generated with a wonderful theme and soundtrack showing highlights between you both. with generic thank you words. The content is usually photos where  are you both tagged in, or posts made by one of you where the other is tagged. Of course starting with your spouse by default :) The wonderful part is that you can go through the list, and see highlights of you and different people...

I couldn't find a clear quick intro on getting siege and bombard in action, so I'm writing one here. Siege is a load testing and benchmarking utility that has been available for quite a while, It allows you to hit your web application on a specific url (or a set of urls in a file) with specific concurrency and size settings.  siege summarizes the measures of the test outcome including: Transaction rate (requests/sec) Actual concurrency (even if you hit with 200 concurrent connections, your server might be responding with just 80) Average, longest and shortest response time example: triggering 200 concurrent users, each hitting the url twice siege -c200 -r2 http://www.modsaid.com/ summary: Transactions:         400 hits Availability:      100.00 % Elapsed time:       38.44 secs Data transferred:        0.26 MB Response time:       10.09 secs Tra...

2 days ago Linode finally announced their new VPS Hosting offering with doubling the RAM and moving to Fast SSD storage SSD Storage will allow much faster operations for both setup operations, compilation and ongoing running services. And the new memory upgrade is considered a drop in the pricing to the half, since people can now use the same server Ram with half the price they used to pay. The smallest Instance offered by linode is now the 2GB Instance with $20/mo as stated in their pricing list: Plan RAM SSD CPU Transfer Outbound Bandwidth Price Linode 2G 48 GB 2 cores 3 TB 250 Mbps $0.03/hr | $20/mo Linode 4G 96 GB 4 cores 4 TB 500 Mbps $0.06/hr | $40/mo Linode 8G 192 GB 6 cores 8 TB 1 Gbps $0.12/hr | $80/mo Linode 16G 384 GB 8 cores 16 TB 2 Gbps $0.24/hr | $160/mo Linode 32G 768 GB 12 cores 20 TB 4 Gbps $0.48/hr | $320/m...

Github services github.com allows you to activate some service hooks on your code repository. Hooks include lots of interesting functionality like posting email notification about commits among others. At eSpace , we use github.com as our code repository, and redmine as our project management tool and issue tracking. We wanted commits to reflect automatically in the project management tool, which will keep the whole team feeling the progress directly. All service hooks are open source, you'll need to add them to  https://github.com/github/github-services  by Forking  https://github.com/github/github-services implementing ur new service or patch sending pull request to the original repo Redmine service hook A service already existed for redmine to cover the following need: For code browsing to work well in redmine, it was found that the best way to do it with git, is to let redmine watch a local clone of the repo... upon pushing new commits to github...