Kristo Vaher

API-centric design

Web development has been slow to catch up with desktop programming over the years. Large part of this reason is because web is built around HTTP, which is technically a ‘stateless’ protocol. But modern web applications are often anything but stateless and consist of layers upon layers of session handling and asynchronous requests to overcome the inherent weaknesses of HTTP. One of the better principles for handling all this mess is the API-centric development.

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Wave Framework

Wave Framework is an open source API-centric PHP micro-framework. First release of Wave was in February 2012 and the code has been through refactoring, multiple patches and bugfixes since. Wave puts strong emphasis on API-based web development. The project has gained some recognition on Google+ and today has more than a thousand followers. The name ‘Wave’ comes from the use of ‘www’ prefix across the system which looks like symbolic waves.

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Website weight loss?

A skilled young developer posted this recently on Twitter:

Well, yes, base64-encoding and embedding the image into HTML is one way to reduce HTTP requests, but honestly, why would anyone do this?

This article will describe briefly how base64 encoding is done and what benefits it might have.

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Waher-style Theme

If you are using Windows and use Notepad++ as one of your main source-code editors and happen to be a web developer then you might just love this.  I originally developed this for personal use for I was unhappy with other themes or found them a little inconsistent across different web development languages. By now I have used this theme in Notepad++ for more than a year now.

Thanks to this being shared in reddit, Twitter and Facebook, it has been downloaded more than ten thousand times in one day.

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Introduction

The somewhat controversial book by world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow was published in September 2010 and is the latest popular-science book spearheaded by Hawking. Having read his previous works, I took the opportunity to read and review this latest book as part of the Tallinn University course ’21st Century concepts in information and meaning’ by Jaan Teng.
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Hierarchy of a tree

The following is a final essay written for Emanuele Bardone’s course Philosophy of Cognition and mainly focuses on comparing Computational Theory of Mind with Distributed Cognition theory.

When it comes to cognition and how mind works, or both how and why we tick the way we do as I like to call it, there are two known theories that are more known and are subject of many debates: Computational Theory of Mind and Distributed Cognition Theory. Both of these theories are essential parts of modern cognitive sciences – studies of the process of thought – and how we make decisions in the environment that we exist in.

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Electronic Payments

E-payment systems and bank services are everyday and common in Estonia, but both developers and companies, who implement e-payments to websites, tend to ask large sums of money for solutions that should be relatively simple. Having developed e-payment systems for years, I had not put together a single solution for this very common problem until now, when Estonia has adopted Euro as its main currency. This solution is released open source, under LGPL license.

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Keyboard smileys!

I must admit that I have read far too many articles on interactivity in recent weeks. But this has given me a couple of thoughts I would like to share. I dealt with interactivity in one of my recent posts in relation to a course I am taking in university, but I am now going to tackle the other side of the coin: the less ‘academically correct’ personal side. If we consider interactivity a property of technology that attempts to mimic and support – in the long run – as closely as possible interpersonal relationships, then this can have a serious impact on how we communicate and keep in touch in general. We have only recently been introduced to such a world, but it will be our children who will grow up in this new ‘network of emotions’, where we share private details of our lives with not only friends, but also strangers and have that impact on their perceptions of us.

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A world within a world

This post is inspired by a video shared with me by a friend and an ex-colleague which brings attention to the fact that as we get surrounded more and more by technology, we often miss the magic of life, things that are there, with us, at arms length, yet what we may never notice by being ‘connected’ to online world with our handheld devices or computers in general.

Will our children not know the smell of new books?

Will our children never develop a crush with someone whose online profile they have not glanced at before?

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The Thinker

In the recent weeks I’ve been puzzled about how much I tend to approach various matters related to my course materials using methods outside the box, often turning to philosophical explanations. Part of it is driven by how theoretical my courses have been so far, in comparison to what I was used to during my bachelors studies. Another part is because I have lived and breathed the world of technology and internet, especially in the recent handful years, more than I ever did before. It has become a small part of who I am and is closely tied to my aspirations in life.

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