November 2009
46 posts
4 tags
Testing Hardware
The only piece of hardware testing software I’ve used back in the days is the Nokia monitor test suite. Now, Google has open sourced ☞ Stressful Application Test:
Stressful Application Test (or stressapptest, its unix name) tries to maximize randomized traffic to memory from processor and I/O, with the intent of creating a realistic high load situation in order to test the existing...
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Starting Your Own Business Does Not Have To Be... →
A little bit of optimism is good for the time you are preparing to create your startup.
People looking for VC funding instead of bootstrapping might disagree though with advise like: You don’t have to hit a home run or Don’t Quit Your Job Until You Are Ready, but others ☞ will still agree.
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Be more approachable in five minutes →
Very interesting managerial strategy. Somehow similar to Marissa Mayer’s open doors:
Aside from the official meetings, Mayer’s office door is open for an hour each day, so Googlers can go in, ask questions and get more advice on a project.
— ☞ TechRadar
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Getting the Best Results: Combining Expert...
After just returning to my last trip in US (read a couple of thoughts about it here), I am reading via ☞ Fred Wilson about two new services for finding hotels while traveling.
Oyster ☞
See the truth before you travel — thousands of undoctored hotel photos, and the world’s most comprehensive, professional hotel reviews.
or in Fred’s words:
Oyster, a web service dedicated to...
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Online Indentity: Tomorrow Belongs to What You...
our online identities are comprised primarily of three specific kinds of data:
Explicit or prescriptive data (i.e. the data that I input about myself: name, age, occupation, etc.)
Activity or behavioral data (i.e. what I do and say online)
Relationship data (i.e. my social graph and what my connections say about me)
— ☞ The Future Is All About Context
Facebook is already capturing all...
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Cross-language RPC: Protocol buffers, Thrift, BERT...
Protocol buffers (or ☞ protobuf) are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. The project have been released by Google who is using it internally for RPC protocols and file formats. Facebook has released a while back ☞ Thrift: which serves the same purposes. And people spent time trying to figure which one outperforms the other.
InfoQ has published an article about...
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“The process of producing a film, especially an independent one, is by its nature...”
– Do not be afraid to look outside your window as you may find exactly what you are looking for.
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JavaScript Notable News
dynaTrace Ajax ☞
John Resig (of jQuery fame) reviews an AJAX tracing tool for Internet Explorer:
dynaTrace provides some information that I’ve never seen before - in any tool on any browser.
JavaScript Framework Matrix ☞
An overview of the following JavaScript frameworks and their functions: jQuery, MooTools, The Dojo Toolkit, Prototype, Script.aculo.us, ExtJS, Adobe Spry, BBC Glow,...
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“ Whenever you feel you can’t do it anymore, you can do it at least twice the...”
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“ If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above...”
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“You must treat delegation of authority as an investment.
If You Want Something...”
– IMO the power and willingness to delegate comes with experience. The more you work with people the more you’ll discover the true powers of delegation: building trustworthy teams, productivity and efficiency.
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Cloud Computing Use Cases (pdf) →
If you are not familiar with all (buzz) terms related to cloud computing, you might start with this set of definitions and then read through the use cases in the linked paper produced by the Cloud Computing Use Case Discussion Group.
GigaOM has also published an article on ☞ strategic motivations for the cloud.
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Taking Google Chrome OS for a Test
If you are looking for a way to give Google Chrome OS a try, you may find the following links useful:
☞ Everything You Need to Know about Chrome OS
☞ Chrome OS like lightning from a USB key: we could get used to this
☞ Get Google Chrome OS Now
☞ How-to: run Chrome OS as a virtual machine
☞ Google Chrome OS available as free VMWare download
Once you are done, please come back and share...
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Notable: Collaborative Feedback for Websites →
An interesting tool for providing feedback about websites (design, content, etc.). The team behind Notable is also maintaining an interesting ☞ blog. You probably have already seen around the internet other forms of capturing feedback about the site, but most of the time those are just forms or forums integrations, while Notable seems to offer more advanced options.
It is interesting to note how...
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Best iPhone Apps For Creativity According to... →
Read more articles from the iPhone apps reviews series.
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Creating a Real Brand
Brands are wonderful assets when they capture the essence of a product, service, or event succinctly, meaningfully, and with endurance over time.[…] But when branding becomes a fad, it can reduce communication.
[…]
Branding should start with an authenticity test. (nb avoid putting “lipstick on a pig”)
— The Downsides of Branding by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Discover your...
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Tracking Application Usage →
A Windows desktop only application for tracking application usage and presenting different statistics. I am using ☞ RescueTime which runs on all platforms and has a cool web interface.
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Data Mining Toolkits
I just discovered two data mining toolkits:
Massive Online Analysis (MOA) ☞
Massive On-line Analysis is an environment for massive data mining.
MOA is a framework for data stream mining. Includes tools for evaluation and a collection of machine learning algorithms. Related to the WEKA project, also written in Java, while scaling to more demanding problems.
bixo ☞
Bixo is an open source...
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A Thought about KV and Column-based Solutions
This is just a quick thought I had this morning: KV (key-value) storage solutions are excelling at item-based read/write throughput, but suck at everything that involves range queries. The column-based storage solutions might probably not have the same read/write throughput, but have a better chance at offering range queries.
I’ll probably have to check this by looking at some of the...
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What Software Do You Run on Your Mac?
I didn’t know about the ☞ i use this website until now. i use this seems to be a Digg for software. For the same purpose of discovering new great software I was visiting from time to time the ☞ wakoopa website which builds a recommendation list based on what software you are using.
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How-to: get music, videos, and photos off your... →
I was looking for such a step by step tutorial for quite a while (well, I haven’t researched it too much either).
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E-Readers Reviewed
O’Reilly has been publishing a series of articles on the currently available e-readers:
Sony readers:
Getting to know the Sony Readers: ☞ part 1, ☞ part 2 and ☞ part 3
☞ Using the Sony PRS-505
☞ Using the Sony PRS-700
Barnes&Noble’s Nook: ☞ part 1 and
☞ part 2
I hope the series will continue with other e-readers as I have found a ☞ Wikipedia page on e-readers listing...
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Using InstaPaper to Improve Blogging Habits
It has been a while since I’ve looked at iPhone apps that allow access to web pages in offline mode and that’s only because I’ve been quite happy with the combination of ReadIt Later and Yummy (you can read more about how I use them in this post Yummy and Read It Later).
Anyway, in my attempt to improve my blogging habits I thought I should set up a different flow that would...
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Ommwriter: A Mac Writing Tool
Ommwriter seems to be an alternative to ☞ WriteRoom (some seem to ☞ dislike it or it might be just a way to get blog traffic)
Ommwriter is a simple text processor that firmly believes in making writing a pleasure once again, reinvindicating the close relationship between writer and paper. The more intimate the relation, the smoother the flow of inspiration.
Update: Considering I am...
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London VC: European Startups Need To Work Much... →
BS
The things mentioned in the article are just effects and not causes. Plus it is completely wrong to compare an area (or some distinct spots) with the culture of a continent.
On the other hand, I do agree that Europe should change quite a few things before being too late.
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Your Startup: Bootstrapping or Venture Funding?
In some parts of the world (f.e. Silicon Valley, London, Israel, etc.) the question of bootstrapping or venture funding comes up pretty soon in the life cycle of a startup. Anyway, answering this question is one of the most important decisions that entrepreneurs must make and as the startup environment is expanding fast the same question will have to be answered by entrepreneurs in areas with a...
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LinkedIn: Platforms, APIs and Openness
LinkedIn has firstly mentioned a platform API a few years ago, but until now access to it has been granted only to partners (remember those 8 applications that you could install on your LinkedIn profile). I assume they have realized that this “closed” API will not bring a lot of applications and that APIs are meant to be open to be both useful and used.
While I cannot find the references right...
Estimarea traficului →
Shared by alexpopescu
Papers on traffic analysis/analytics
Daca esti interesat de afaceri online pe langa problemele legate de monetizare ti-ai pus precis si intrebarea: Cum pot estima …
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iPhone Tumblr App 1.1 Finally Available
It looks like the new iPhone Tumblr app version 1.1 is available now on the AppStore. I have already installed it and I’m gonna compare the list of new features with my wishlist.
“
The first missing feature I’ve noticed is the lack of photo upload for text posts. I still had to rely on the old trick of creating a private Image post and then reference that image from the text...
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The NoSQL Environment
Jonathan Ellis (Rackspace) has published a ☞ review of the options available in the NoSQL space. If you are interested in getting a better picture of this NoSQL environment you’ll probably find these other articles useful: quick reference to alternative data storages and alternative data storage status quo
Make sure you check
myNoSQL a NoSQL blog featuring the best daily NoSQL news,...
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Twitter And Facebook Turn Everyone Into An... →
I’m actually afraid of this happening. There is already too much noise, but when things will get easier to push such sort of things, then I really hope very advanced filtering options will be possible.
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QCon SF 2009: First day
The first day of QCon San Francisco 2009 is over. The morning keynote room was looking great:
Here is the list of sessions I’ve attended today:
Scaling Your Cache and Caching at Scale (Alex Miller)
Project Voldemort: Scaling Simple Storage (Jay Kreps)
Hadoop (Philip Zeyliger)
Evolving the key/value Programming Model to a higher level (Billy Newport)
My notes on these session will...
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A NoSQL Taxonomy
Steven Yen included in his ☞ presentation (pdf) the following NOSQL taxonomy:
key‐value‐cache
memcached
repcached
coherence
infinispan
eXtreme scale
jboss cache
velocity
terracotta
key‐value‐store
keyspace
flare
schema‐free
RAMCloud
eventually‐consistent key‐value‐store
Amazon Dynamo
Project Voldemort
Dynomite
SubRecord
Mo8onDb
Dovetaildb
ordered‐key‐value‐store
...
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Build Web Site Mockups Online with Mockingbird →
Remember what I’ve written about the Cappuccino web framework? ☞ Mockingbird seems to be an online version of ☞ Balsamiq or ☞ FlairBuilder
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“My lesson: don’t take your superstars for granted. Find ways to Roll out the...”
– Never really heard or seen this policy applied before. My company might come close, but has still few things to learn.
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The AppStore Broken for Non-US Accounts?
For the last couple of days I’ve been having problems getting any new paid apps on my iPhone 3GS from the AppStore. My account worked for a long while with no problems, but there seems to be something broken right now (I have double checked that my account/card/etc is correct, so that’s definitely not the problem).
I have contacted Apple support, but according to this ☞ thread they...
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Apple Wouldn’t Risk Its Cool Over an Ad Gimmick,... →
I know some will call this evil, while others will say it’s genius. It only depends on which part of the fence you are and how much is at stake.
What I hope will happen is that once this will get implemented (and I’d say it will get implemented quite soon), is that some sort of control on the quality of the advertising will be in place. And not a centralized one, but rather a...
About Half in U.S. Would Pay for Online News,... →
I cannot stop wondering what the result of such a survey would be for Romania. While I think there is a “rich amount of free” content available, what I think is missing is the quality (including here originality, depth, proper and verified data, attribution).
Don Dodge: Thanks Microsoft, Hello Google →
I know that getting a new job is usually exciting, but making this kind of comments about the products of the company you’ve been evangelizing for the last couple of years makes me wonder where is the truth…
October 2009
66 posts
Couple of thoughts on traveling
Don’t plan anything around the estimated arrival time. Trains, buses, subs are usually on time. Unfortunately I cannot say the same about flights that involve connections. Or at least not about the flights operated by British Airways. I thought I am quite a lucky person, but every time I’m flying BA, they figure out a way to make things go wrong. It doesn’t matter if it is the...