Karmona Pragmatic Blog

10 Simple Facts I have learned during the last weekend

(P.S. I had ‘11 Simple Facts’ but I thought rounding will be better)

1. Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do (this is nice)
2. My Google trends experiment failed miserably (‘pritney spears scrum’ doesn’t count ;-)
3. The electric chair was invented by a dentist (I knew it)
4. 7 out of 10 IT projects “fail” in some respect (3 out of 10 is enough?)
5. I run 2 km in 10 minutes (*2 world record)
6. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words (Ironic?)
7. All of the clocks in the movie “Pulp Fiction” are stuck on 4:20 (…)
8. In a study of 200,000 ostriches, over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand…
9. I tried to contribute to wikipedia during the weekend and my contributions were removed automatically by the Wikipedia bot (/admins) due to spam, self promotion and notability violations??? (a.k.a. ‘criteria for speedy deletion’)
10. In Chinese the words for crisis and opportunity are the same (Wikipedia, “I’ll be baaaack!”)

* The 1st manned landing on Earth’s Moon was the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969 and the last one was Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972
* Current U.S. Vision for Space Exploration calls for a human landing on the Moon no later than 2019

2019-1972=47 (!!!)

Someone wise once gave this as a metaphorical example for a common engineers disorder, he called experience-anxiety-disorder, claiming that NASA stopped sending manned missions to the moon since they now know much more about the complexity and risk with doing this.

During the early seventies, it was a nice, naive working implementation but when NASA engineers started thinking about the next release they have built a five-decades-project-plan simply because they considered all the technological experience they have gained into large complexity buffers.

The Moral Lesson
Keep-it-simple can-do-approach and don’t over-complicate things with the long-tail-little-details when not needed or the project will take 5 decades to finish.

How do you know you are have an experience-anxiety-disorder?
If someone ask you to add a button to change the database schema and this make you feel a mixture of fear, apprehension, heart palpitations, nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath and headache.

What to do?
Sit down and relax, drink a cup of water and then add the damn button!

Last Long-Tail-Detail
Well… I don’t want to ruin this lovely moral lesson with the long-tail-little-detail but the real facts behind this 47 years gap were politics and money (as always) and not that NASA engineers got a severe experience-anxiety-disorder.

Google Trends (a.k.a. my experiment – part IV – Almost forgot…)

• Betty Casey
  
• Most Haunted Life
  
• Piercing & Tattoos
  
• Madonna
  
• World War III (…)
  

Oren and I, have decided to form an invite-only Scrum Clan.
We would like to tag Pasha Bitz (snapshot attached) as the 3rd clan member.

Pasha, please choose carefully, you can only tag one Scrum-Lover like yourself to this distinguish clan….

Good Luck!

P.S. The web 2.0 tag was added to this post since it is a genuine-user-generated-content-post especially made for Pasha

Google Trends (a.k.a. my experiment – part III)

• Clytie Lane
• Moon Bloodgood
• Deceptively Delicious
• Rotten Neighbor
• Melinda England
  

*** Experimental Post ***

Unique “foreign” languages support in Google:

Elmer Fudd, Hacker, Klingon!, Pig Latin and Swedish Chef…

Google Search Hacks

The most comprehensive Google Hacking Database I have stumble upon is located @ http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb.php and my personal favorites are:

• password | passcode | “your password is” filetype:log
• “phpMyAdmin” “running on” inurl:”main.php”
• “login: *” “password: *” filetype:xls

Google “Internals”

• Google robots.txt (Checkout closely this huge list of disallows… ;-) and sitemap.xml
• A Tribute to google Moms @ http://www.google.com/moms/ (???)
• Misspellings statistics on Britney Spears @ http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html (a.k.a. did you look for “pritney spears” :-)
• “answer to life, the universe, and everything” answer from Google

Google Trends

I have decided to start a little experiment with Google Trends – I will state the 5 hottest google trends in my next posts to see if it gets the searching crowd into my blog… I promise to keep you updated with my findings.
Here it goes:

• Anna Nicole Smith’s “Death Photo” (did you see it?)
  
• LG Verizon Voyager (a.k.a. the iPhone killer)
  
• Sputnik Anniversary (50th anniversary!)
• Cabbit (WTF is Cabbit?)
• Borscht Belt (Ha?)
  

Good Luck!