Karmona Pragmatic Blog

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