Karmona Pragmatic Blog

As I posted when I just started this blog – Almost 2 month ago I have decided to leave a promising (& cozy) career @ Mercury to join a challenging new-born start-up… called Delver.

This was an offer I couldn’t refused…

Delver is a venture-backed internet startup developing cutting-edge web application in the domain of Internet Search and Meta Social Networks.

It is more challenging, inspiring, interesting and exciting than I expected, imagined or I can put into words so you will have to join to understand… We are looking for top-notch algorithm researchers, .Net coders, mySQL DBAs, “Hackers”, QA experts and out-of-the-box thinkers… to join our unique development team (e.g. Pitz, Boo and Gabel)

Stay tuned (…)

The term “déjà vu” describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously.

“We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time – of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances – of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remember it!” - Charles Dickens

In recent years, déjà vu has been subjected to serious psychological and neurophysiological research. The most likely explanation of déjà vu is that it is not an act of “precognition” or “prophecy”, but rather an anomaly of memory; it is the impression that an experience is “being recalled” which may result from an overlap between the neurological systems responsible for short-term memory and those responsible for long-term memory.

In other words, “déjà vu” is yet another careless data inconsistency situation due to poor synchronization mechanism and hectic multithreaded race-condition incidents a.k.a. “Dark-Voodoo” bugs (e.g. “déjà vu” ;-)

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There are many ways in which the deja experience may manifest: deja entendu – already heard; deja eprouve - already experienced; deja fait – already done; deja pense – already thought; deja raconte – already recounted; deja senti – already felt, smelt; deja su - already known (intellectually); deja trouve – already found (met); déjà vécu - already lived; deja voulu – already desired; deja arrive – already happened; deja connu – already known (personal knowing); deja dit - already said/spoken (content of speech); deja goute - already tasted; deja lu – already read; deja parle – already spoken (act of speech); deja pressenti – already sensed; deja rencontre – already met; deja reve - already dreamt; deja visite – already visited and my recent favorite invention: déjà posté – already posted…

The sailing stones, also referred to as sliding rocks or moving rocks, are a geological puzzling phenomenon found in California, Death Valley. These rocks, some as heavy as 300 Kilograms, are mysteriously transported across a virtually flat desert plain without human or animal intervention, leaving erratic trails in the hard mud behind them, some hundreds of yards long. They move by some mysterious force, and in the nine decades since we have known about them, no-one has ever seen them in motion.

When I first read about it, I thought it is very much like the notorious (software-management-)waterfall milestones – no one really see them sliding until it was too late and then everybody could stare @ the erratic trails in the mud behind them, some hundreds of yards long…

Google recent outage brought me to this new karmona.com hosted home – powered by WordPress.

Alexa says YouTube Is now bigger than Google & that Orkut have reached 71% Brazilian users… (???)

I have merged the internet population data from the CIA FactBook (reliable source but not the most updated one) to a an (unofficial) Alexa toolbar users distribution and this is what I got:

Alexa collects data with its toolbar – Did you install it? (I didn’t…) which mainly have implication in regional bias as the distribution of Alexa toolbars is not proportional to the number of users in different countries and as it seems Alexa doesn’t do any “normalization” of the data to fix this bias and doesn’t have any official report on their toolbar distribution – Alexa on Alexa is unavailable (???)

“Alexa Reach” is relative – the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site rather than absolute number of users which is causing unexplained changes since the “total- distribution-pie” is changing all the time…

Alexa tracks “daily unique visitors” (a.k.a. “Alexa Reach”) and “daily page views” which isn’t like tracking unique (session-based) visits and I think that how many times did you refresh your facebook home page today (could range from 0 to 500 a day ;-) isn’t as interesting as the fact you did visit it today.So…

I don’t have a better alternative to measure other-people-sites-traffic yet (…) but I think Alexa can have much more interesting data by simply moving to more interesting counters (e.g. unique visitor), publish their toolbar distribution (a.k.a. Alexa on Alexa) and start doing some “normalization” with internet population data.

I didn’t drink coffee most of my life (although it could be really handy during my army years or right after my daughters were born) but last year I decided to start drinking this bitter-black-magic and yesterday I bought my very first coffee-maker…

I bought a Bialetti-Moka-Express which was claimed (by Bialetti…) to be the world’s number one coffee-maker (I was customer number 200,000,001) and made my very first espresso two hours ago…

This tiny “espresso pot” (a.k.a. moka in Italy) is a simple device that uses steam pressure to force water through a strainer to make espresso so I did feel a little strange putting this tiny pot directly on the burner of my stove and I didn’t really believe it will produce the bitter-black-magic, but it worked like a charm and with very little experience I manage to produce a pretty damn good espresso!

Years of Italian experience have produced a 20$ state-of-the-art coffee-maker which re-defined simplicity… (especially when I first thought of buying a 1500$ one-button coffee-maker monster engine)

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Bialetti Moka Express @ http://www.bialettishop.com/MokaExpressMain.htm
This is how you do it @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huC3E1c4SBs

According to Alexa (which isn’t the most accurate thing in our planet :-), Orkut users are mainly Brazilian, leading with 71% share!!!, India with 13.2% in the honorable 2nd place, US goes 3rd with 3.3% and taking the 4th place is Pakistan (?) with only 2%…

I was really relieved to see that according to Google fight (which is the 2nd most accurate thing in our planet after alexa :-) Brazilian still like Football more than Orkut.

Loren Baker tried to explain the Orkut phenomena with: “Orkut sounds like Yakult or “iogurte” (yogurt)… Everyone drinks it in Brazil when they’re kids…” a.k.a. “Are you stupid?” – one of the amusing comments below his post…

Google’s “Black Sheep”:

• According to Kasie Hunt, USA TODAY: “Osama bin Laden fan clubs build online communities using Orkut” (!!!)
• Brazil Fed Up With Orkut (…)
• Police planning to ban Orkut in India (a.k.a. honorable 2nd place with 13.2%)
• Believe me there is more… (just google it and you will see :-)

So Google’s 3-year-old social network Orkut isn’t behaving according to the Google family expectation a.k.a. “why can’t you be more like your big sister Gmail?!”

Who knows… Maybe the new SocialStreem “treatment” (& Blogger integration) will help Orkut to grow-up and maybe it will only help it to grow-up in Brazil…

“We have used MySQL far more than anyone expected. We went from experimental to mission-critical in a couple of months.” – Jeremy Zawodny, MySQL Database Expert, Yahoo! Finance

Did you know that YouTube, Flickr, Linden Labs, Technorati, Facebook, FeedBurner, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, Digg, LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Yahoo (Finance) and many others have all selected MySQL as a database backend for their web operations?

e.g. Flickr is using MySQL to store ~2 Pb (1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabyte); storing more than ~470M photos with more than 4 billion queries per day…!

Coming from an enterprise software company delivering products which only integrate with the highest-end (perceived) commercial databases, I didn’t have the pleasure to try MySQL but recently I do… I am still in the very beginning of my learning curve and until now it have been a real pleasant surprise – mainly due to the database’s speed and ability to easily “scale-out” on low-cost hardware (sharding).

MySQL have the disruptive technology “smell” all over it and my premonition is that it will increasingly evolved to be “good enough” for a larger and larger segment of the market…

I wanted to share two name proposals I got from my colleagues in my new “we-will-change-the-world” startup:

Scottie Marmona – a.k.a. my-alter-evil-(manager)-ego (our scrum-master suggestion)

Scrumotika – a.k.a. scrum-practicing-moti-karmona (our DBA suggestion)

I must admit, I am not completely sure what to choose and if I should change it now or take the risk waiting for better options…

Before getting into the Java vs. Net battle lets start with some other options ;-)

If you like challenges then you must try the brainfuck language which was created by Urban Dominik Muller and noted for its extreme minimalism – 240 bytes compiler download here

e.g. you can easily print “Hello World!” and a newline to the screen with the line below:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.——.——–.>+.>.

If you favor comments then you might consider using CPL which was created out of a need for advance commenting features, not found in any other existing programming language (e.g. nested comments…) @ http://sourceforge.net/projects/c-p-l/So…

Without copy-pasting a word – I think the best references to the Java vs. Net debate are:

• http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/java/news/farley_0800.html
• http://www.adtmag.com/print.aspx?id=10993
• & nothing like a good flammable Slashdot discussion to get under-the-hood of this debate…

…Personally, after many years of Java-Java; I really like .Net-ing for the past year… especially after watching Steve Balmer, “Developers dance” @ http://youtube.com/watch?v=NSIMeRtVebM