Blogito Ergo Sum

Social Network Optimization

2011-07-09T10:53:00.000-07:00

I have no idea if there's a term for what I'm about to describe, so I'll just call it SNO.

Until fairly recently creating a website meant you had to test it on all supported browsers. So, a bit more work. Now even that's not enough. When people share a link to one of your web pages in Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. you suddenly realize that your content also has to be legible in another format, which, for lack of a better term, I shall call status format.

This is what happens when you post a link to this blog on Facebook:

Facebook chooses a title
They sometimes add description that's an excerpt from that page
They fish around for images and select a few for you to choose from.

Which means I now have to optimize my content, and test it, for Facebook sharing. And, of course, the way LinkedIn does it is totally different and you'll get some other image or a different description. And now Google+ as well...

This is fast becoming a pain for content publishers. The way each social network site parses your website to create its "status" version is not standardized. It's not really predictable, either. They can change it on a whim. The industry has to come up with some solution. Perhaps some HTML tags for each page, like share_photo, share_title, share_summary?

You know your SEO is good when

2011-06-01T01:29:00.000-07:00

You know your SEO is good when Google suggest your name based on the first letter alone.

As you can see, Amazon wins "a".

Here are the results for the rest of the alphabet:

Bank of America
Craigslist
Dictionary
eBay
Facebook
Google
Hulu
IRS
Jet Blue
Kohls
Lowes
Mapquest
Netflix
Orbitz
Pandora
Quotes
Redbox
Southwest
Target
USPS
Verizon
Weather
XBox
YouTube
Zillow

Gigantt's not there yet. Tough to compete with "Google" for first search result on their own engine..

הבעיה עם כיפת ברזל

2011-04-08T23:51:00.000-07:00

ישראל מעולם לא הגיבה להתקפות הטילים עליה באופן שתואם את הכוונה מאחוריהן. אנחנו מגיבים לפי הנזק שנגרם ולא לפי הנזק שיכול היה להיגרם. אם יורים עלינו 100 טילים ורק אחד פוגע אנחנו מגיבים כאילו ירו רק אחד.

זו הסיבה שכיפת ברזל לא תביא לשיפור בטחוני אמיתי. כמות הטילים רק תעלה כדי לפצות על אלו שיורטו. במקום לירות 100 טילים כדי לפגוע בגן ילדים הם יצטרכו לירות 200. אנחנו נגיב בכל אופן באותה המידה. כלומר, נחכה שגן ילדים יפגע ואז "ניכנס בהם".

יש נטיה אנושית ידועה לשמור על רמה מסוימת של סיכון איתה מרגישים בנוח. מחקרים הראו שמי שרוכב על אופנוע בלי קסדה מקפיד לשמור על רמת סיכון מסוימת ע"י נסיעה איטית ובטוחה יותר. אבל ברגע ששמים קסדה אוטומטית מגבירים את המהירות כדי בעצם לחזור לרמת הסיכון הקודמת. כאלה אנחנו. סתומים.

אז בואו נקרא לזה קסדת ברזל. סתם דרך לספוג יותר טילים מבלי להוריד את הסיכון האמיתי לפגיעה.

A standard for defining binary protocols

2011-03-12T08:46:00.000-08:00

In 2003 I had an idea - use XML to describe binary protocols. You see, whereas XML-derived language are described by schemas (e.g. XSD), there's not such tool for binary protocols. So every binary protocol has to be documented in its own proprietary way. This lack of a common way to describe binary formats/protocols makes it hard to implement tools that know how to speak these protocols, not to mention tools that automatically convert data between them. My idea was supposed to solve that.

Anyway, today I see that the w3c have come up with a new standard: EXI. At first I was like "great, yet another standard for passing information - just what we need". But actually it's really similar to the idea I had. It's basically an XML language that describes efficient binary protocols. From I gather (skimming through the standard for 3 minutes) they do something that reminds me of Huffman encoding of the data types and end up with a very efficient binary representation, but one that is has an XML spec. I hope this becomes popular.

I have no illusions that my idea had anything to do with this standard. But I'm happy to see it wasn't such a stupid idea after all. :)

The Start Menu

2010-08-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

Don't you hate it when you download some application on your computer and it installs itself under some obscure company name in the Windows start menu?

You visit a website and decided to download something - Video Editor 8.1. But since the default behavior of most installer creators is to put the shortcut under a folder with the company's name you find yourself scouring the start menu from top to bottom until you find Video Editor 8.1 hiding under Blue Fish Studios... jeez, I can't count how many time that happened to me.

People, if you're writing an installer for your application, unless you're either Microsoft, Google, Oracle or Adobe I don't remember your company's name, and I'll hate your program before I even start using because you've hidden it from me!

Estimates vs. Commitments

2010-08-03T20:07:00.000-07:00

The best way to make sure you never again get an honest effort estimate from the people in your team is to hold them to whatever estimate they gave you last time.

Estimates are deceptively similar to prices, in that they represent the cost of getting something done. But there's an essential difference between prices and estimates - you can't haggle over an estimate. And you shouldn't want to. That's like haggling with your cake on how long it should stay in the oven. It's just not helpful.

There is always (by definition) an amount of uncertainty built into every estimate. That is, after all, what makes it an estimate. You can chip away at this uncertainty by planning ahead in greater detail, or by confronting risks as early as possible, but you can't eliminate it altogether. There's always that essential gap between estimation and knowledge that's unbridgeable. What's left is intuition based on the experiences of past performance. Any reasonable estimate always incorporates that remaining gap as some inexplicable buffer that does not lend itself to further analysis. Accept it. You want this buffer there, and you want it to reflect as honestly as possible the amount of remaining uncertainty in the project.

When you hold people to their estimates you're giving them all the incentive in the world to artificially inflate them (and they will do so, even subconsciously). Past estimates need to be treated as what they are - historical answers to questions about uncertain matters. All you can do is learn from them and move on by trying to predict better in the future.

Getting estimates right relies on the interests of both sides - the receiver and the estimator - being completely aligned. Haggling destroys that alignment. Some people believe that haggling - purposefully lowering an estimate and holding people to it - can get people to work extra hard. That's like thinking you can get your plumber to finish his job quicker by paying him less. That's not how you conjure up motivation.

If there is inefficiency or procrastination in your team - those are problems to be handled on their own and you shouldn't sacrifice your ability to estimate in an attempt to combat them. People procrastinate when they dislike doing what they need to do - solve that problem by designing a work environment in which people actually like their work. People hesitate to begin working on a challenging task when they don't quite know how to tackle it; the uncertainty makes it very easy to rationalize doing it later. Solve that problem by cultivating an atmosphere that allows people to start with the hardest part of the job; that tolerates experimentation; that makes it painless for people to admit when they don't yet know how to do something and gives them enough time to learn. These are all tough, real problems that cannot be dealt with by just demanding they go away. You can't fight inefficiency simply by not allocating time for it. All you'll get is the same degree of inefficiency over a shorter time span with less actual work.

An estimate isn't a contract. Its relation to the world is "read-only". As such it has no influence on the price of work. People who are interested in good, honest estimates should start by divorcing them from any form of commitment.

Muslim "Facebook" Fail (Madina.com)

2010-07-16T01:30:00.000-07:00

So I'm signing up to this new Facebook-for-Muslims. You know, for shits and giggles.

Anyway, I know there are some cultural differences when it comes to polygamy and such, but come on, people:

You can be both single, married and engaged if you're Muslim??

That's some advanced logic right there. Guess I'm out of my league.

If you're wondering, the form was submitted successfully...

But wait, it gets better. I tried to change my password and got this:

I guess the lord is to be thanked that successful form submission, given how funky and inconsistent their DB has to be by now.

Next I'm going to try to married and divorced at the same time. Who wants to be one of my wives? Come friend me on madina.com!

User-Defined Literals, a new feature in C++0x

2010-05-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

Going through the latest draft. There's going to be a way to define your own custom literals.

For example:

long double operator "" w(long double);
std::string operator "" w(const char16_t*, size_t);
unsigned operator "" w(const char*);

int main()

{
1.2w; // calls operator "" w(1.2L)
u"one"w; // calls operator "" w(u"one", 3)
12w; // calls operator "" w("12")
"two"w; // error: no applicable literal operator
}

Could come in handy...

German Sensitivity

2010-05-22T13:05:00.000-07:00

My grandmother has been receiving, for the last few decades, a small monthly payment from the German government. Compensation, you know, for trying to exterminate her.

She recently asked me to translate for her this letter they sent. It's in dense official German and printed in small letters she can't really read. The letter informed her she was given a new identification number. It is to be used in all future communications with them.

Get it? They're assigning holocaust survivors identification numbers. How efficient...

How to protect all your Google searches

2010-05-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

Google started allowing people to search using https.

Every one should configure this as their default search method. It's very easy to do.

Why should you do this? Because:

1. Your searches will be much more secure from any snooping 3rd parties.
2. The more encryption there is in the world, the better. It makes it harder for "bad guys" to filter out the "uninteresting" communication when they eavesdrop. (think of it this way: if all communication was encrypted it would be much harder for hackers to choose what to intercept)
3. Why not? You won't notice the difference (but hackers will) and it doesn't change the way you search.

Here's how to configure Chrome so that every time you search it goes through https.

1. Menu -> Options -> Basics -> Manage (default search engine).
2. Click Add and copy paste the following values into the boxes:
2.1. Name: Google Secure
2.2. Keyword: Google
2.3. URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s
3. Click Ok.
4. Now choose "Google Secure" (it's what you just created) and click on "Make Default". That's the important part.

Now Chrome will always use https when you search from the search-bar.

Week-day names in YouTube videos

2010-04-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

Random statistic of the day: how many YouTube videos have week-day names in their title?

The big winner is Sunday. Wednesday is in last place.

What does all this mean? It means playing around with Google Chart API is fun.

Goat-drunk

2009-06-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

Goat-drunk – (adj.) Made lascivious by alcohol.

According to the redoubtable Thomas Nashe, the author of The anatomie of absurditie, Christ’s teares over Jerusalem, and many other important works of English literature, there are eight types of drunkards, of which the one who is goat-drunk is seventh, although it is unclear what the order signifies. Since the OED has seen fit to include only a few from Nashe’s list I have decided to include it in its entirety, so that you may never be at a loss for words when confronted by a drunk of any sort.

Ape drunke – “he leapes, and sings, and hollowes, and daunceth for the heavens”.
Lion drunke – “he flings the pots abut the house, calls his Hostesse whore, breakes the glasse windows with his dagger, and is apt to quarrell with any man that speaks to him”.
Swine drunke – “heauy lumpish, and sleepie, and cries for a little more drinke”.
Sheepe drunke – “wise in his owne conceipt, when he cannot bring forth a right word”.
Mawdlen drunke – “when a fellowe will weepe for kindnes in the midst of his Ale, and kisse you, saying; By God Captaine I loue thee, goe thy waies thou dost not thinke so often of me as I do of thee, I would (if it pleased GOD) I could not loue thee so well as I doo, and then he puts his finger in his eie, and cries”.
Martin drunke – “when a man is drunke and drinkes himselfe sober ere he stirre”.
(See above)
Foxe drunke - “when he is craftie drunke, as many of the Dutch men bee, and neuer bargain but when they are drunke”.

From Reading the OED.

Storage vs. Developer Cost

2009-06-09T01:12:00.000-07:00

As developers we often find ourselves tempted to optimize storage use. We almost can't help it - if something can be made to take up less storage space with a "little bit" of extra work, you can bet on us developers jumping at the opportunity.

But is it worth it? How do you weigh the time spent on optimizing storage against the cost of simply adding a few more HDs?

The answer: hourly cost of a developer in GBs of storage.

So let us calculate.

The average developer in the US makes more then $70K a year. He/she costs a lot more to the employer, mind you. Divide this by about 2000 work-hours per year and you get $35 an hour as a lower-bound for average developer cost per hour.

Now, what does storage cost? How much does 1TB of storage cost these days? Or more accurately, what's the marginal cost of adding another 1TB of storage to your company's network? Well, unfortunately the answer isn't so simple. It all depends on what types of storage you want, how secure it should be, how robust, and of course speed, latency, the type of network access, etc. For sure, the high-end storage solutions are expensive. Rediculously so. But my intuition tells me most teams can definitely settle with something saner.

So consider a rack-ready NAS solution that can hold 8 SATA drives and give you 1GBit ethernet. These start at about $1000. A single 1TB SATA drive is about $100 (though prices are dropping as I type this, and, no, wait, it's now $90). So if we want 8 of those the whole thing costs less than $2000, and with RAID-5 with 2 spares we would get 6 TB, so that's about $0.33 per GB.

Thus, assuming my napkin-math isn't seriously off, the average developer costs 105 GB per hour.

That's 1.75 GB per minute.

Keep this in mind the next time you decide to spend half a day worrying about keeping those "huge" debug symbol archives of the product's old versions, or about whether or not you should be backing up the entire DB as part of the release procedure.

Explain to your manager that the time it would take you to convince him to approve the purchase of more storage space probably costs more than the storage itself.

Save time, buy storage.

choco-chip cookies

2008-04-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

- Before -

- During -

- After -

Google Reader for wide screens

2007-10-03T07:24:00.001-07:00

I updated my userscript to deal with Google's updates.
It works now.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/6415

Assaf

A C++ FOR_EACH macro

2007-08-14T22:37:00.001-07:00

http://wtw.tw/papers/foreach.html

I'm Feeling Lucky

2007-07-29T05:45:00.001-07:00

When's the last time you used the I'm Feeling Lucky button on Google's homepage?
I was sure they'd taken it off a while ago. It makes sense for them to do so; I'm sure it costs Google a lot of money to have a button that essentially lets you skip all the ads on the results page.

For the first time in the last few days I decided I'll try using it. I do most of my searches in the FireFox search toolbar, so at first I rolled my own search engine customization using this site . Then I noticed that the Google Toolbar in FireFox already has that feature (you can use IFL as your search engine instead of plain Google).

I have to say, I'm hooked. I now realize that most of my Google searches are basically just "jump to" navigations using keywords I already know would find me the right page. You want to go to Slashdot.org? Just type slashdot in the IFL box and you're there.
Only occasionally do I actually "not feel lucky" and I find myself switching back to plain Google search. But most of the time, even when Google's #1 result isn't exactly the page I was looking for, it's a very decent substitute.

This makes me wish Google could tell me what keywords will get me to certain pages. In other words, I wish I could ask Google "what's the shortest/easiest thing I could type to get to ____?".

Anyway, this guy's dead wrong about the IFL button. It may be the case that the majority of Googlers don't use it, but that's no reason to take it off. I think it would be better if Google figured out how to get people to use it more, if anything. I feel stupid, not having used it for all those years.

Outlook Sux

2007-07-23T03:31:00.000-07:00

Cleaning my inbox, I selected about 1000 files and dragged them from my Exchange inbox to a local archive folder. It took forever.
Half way into forever I decided to check what's taking so long, and Process Explorer told the truth:

Outlook is creating a begillion tmp files (probably per email message) and deleting them at a rate of about 7 per second. Ugh!

Who needs Cibus?

2007-07-19T04:17:00.000-07:00

Lunch at Mobixell:
http://flickr.com/photos/assaf_lavie/archives/date-posted/2007/07/19/

I'm a Genius!

2007-03-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

Disposable coffee cups are a pain in the ass, and they're bad for the environment.
Unlike mugs, they don't have a handle and are uncomfortable to hold.
Washing your mug though is a pain in the ass too.. a real time waster.
What can someone like me do, who hates coffee cups AND the environment?
The answer: Disposable coffee cup mug.
Behold!

The mug-cup. I call it the "mup"!
All the advantages of a proper mug, without the hassle of cleaning it. It also says a big "fuck you" to the environment. It says "yes, I have a mug, but I choose to use a disposable cup nevertheless. What did the environment ever do for me??"

Sean Lennon in Tel Aviv

2007-03-11T01:17:00.000-08:00

Sean Lennon did a concert last night in Tel Aviv, in Hangar 11.

Stanford

2006-09-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

Landed in SF last Friday, after 143 hours in the air and a stop in Toronto.

I'm staying in Joni's apartment near Stanford university. I'm also renting a car.
The first day I visited the Campus with Doron on bikes, and in the evening had dinner at Google (delicisous) with Joni and Lior.
The campus is absolutely gorgeous. There's also a big bookstore inside where you can also buy lots of stuff with "Stanford" printed on it. I bought a t-shirt. Also 2 books.

Photos

California

2006-09-11T21:18:00.000-07:00

For my trip to California my blog is getting a new look-and-feel. Stay tuned for photos and updates.

p.s.
Some of you asked me why there are no pictures of me at my Flickr photo gallery page. There are, but you just can't see them unless you're logged on to Flickr.com as my "friend/family". The reason I don't make these photos public is that I don't want people to be able to Google me and see all my photos. Sorry for the inconvenience.
But you should sign up with Flick anyway, cause it's a great site for sharing photos.

Amsterdam

2006-08-02T09:09:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I was in Sdom (Amsterdam) and had lots of fun.
A few things struck me:

Amsterdam is full of foreigners.. I hardly saw any dutch people.
It's more than a bit filthy (or at least in comparison to Germany..)
It's a paradise for perverts - no matter what your sick pervesion is, you are sure to find at least 3 shops that will cater to your needs on every street. (e.g. I saw plastic sheep sex dolls for sale.. nuff said?)
It's expensive as hell.
The combination of legal drugs and museums with classical art is something worth further examination.

For those interested, here are Videos and Photos.

BiBiS - German Language School

2006-07-27T08:32:00.000-07:00

I'm taking another language course now in a school called BiBiS. It's smaller than Goethe and only works in Bielefeld.
The people are very nice and come from all over the world (but especially Poland!).
The course is 3 weeks - 2 are already over. I'm in the advanced class now where everybody speaks better German than me. It's a bit hard, but a fun challange. I'm learning like 40 new words a day (15 is supposedly the recommended amount) and it's about as much that I'm able to squeeze into my brain.
I uploaded photos of the students at school, and at a disco, so check them out here.