Tag: Programming

Programming

Freelancers and Consultants Must Read This

Sohaib Athar7 Comments

FreelanceSwitch.com is a blog full of insights and resources for the freelancers and consultants of the world (For those wondering about what's the difference between the two, this link provides a good explanation). They conducted a survey last year, and published the results of the survey today. You can download the survey results here. 

A few statistics in the 50+ page report that I found very interesting are:

  •  32.6% of freelancers earn less than they can from full-time employment.
  • 80% freelancers would prefer more money.
  • Only 22% of the freelancers work less and earn more compared to their prior job-oriented careers… and yet
  • 88.9% of the freelancer are happier now that they are freelancing.

Some more interesting statistics, particularly for the Pakistani Freelancers

  • Referrals account for 89% of new work (so keep your clients happy)
  • 15% work comes through blogs (start a blog duh)
  • The hourly average rate for softwre developers is around 73$ (stop charging 13$ per hour Pakis, its the lowest rate in the world (besides Bulgaria and Indonesia) in the survey.
  • UK freelance programmers charge the highest rate (158$)
  • Of the industries categorized in the survey, software designers and programmers earn the most.

Let me know if you find anything else of interest in the survey pdf.

Oh, and do join the Pakistani Freelancers group on Facebook if you are one. 

Memory Hungry PHP Applications on Shared Hosting

Sohaib Athar6 Comments

If you run your WordPress on a shared hosting server like hostmonster.com / bluehost.com (which have excellent service by the way), and have several memory-hungry php applications or WordPress plugins installed, you must have run into an "Allowed memory size exhausted" fatal error a few times. For me it happened yesterday while uploading a mere 12MB of images (1MB per image) and trying to ask the NextGen Gallery plugin to discover them and generate thumbnails. WordPress ran out of memory after 32MB and died with the above exception.  Though one can't ask a lot from a 6$ per month hosting provider, and since 32MB ought to be enough for everyone (hehe), I decided to spend some valuable time in trying to find a workaround to the limitation, before deciding to dump the NextGen plugin. Here's what I found out: Read more “Memory Hungry PHP Applications on Shared Hosting”

Brainnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnns

ReallyVirtual

Its been one year since I started working with the Blue Brain Project team. Dr. Felix Schürmann, the Project Manager of the Blue Brain Project, informed me last week that the project is officially entering its next phase very soon, which has got me pretty excited.

Meanwhile, here's what the rest of the world of Brains (aka. neuroscience) has been up to recently:

PS. On the number of 'n's in the post title (18), I became curious how people actually spelled brai(n)+s, and spent the next 5 minutes charting out the Google hits. Here are the results:

brains-google-hits

Happy Birthday LOGO

ReallyVirtual

logo-square

It was LOGO’s 40th birthday a couple of days ago. Interestingly, last week, I installed the free version from Microsoft on my laptop and played for a few hours with my son (who is four, has his own computer and prefers playing games to watching TV). We made lines, triangles and squares with turtle graphics, and he grasped the idea of turning and moving the turtle quicker than I expected – I hope its in his genes.

Read more “Happy Birthday LOGO”