Sincerity

Recently I find that my answers on Quora can be so long, that I might as well have written them as a blog post...

So I figured, why not just copy/paste them into my blog.

I answered the following question on Quora:

How can I have someone be sincere with me?

I have a hard time feeling that people are being genuine with me, given my well-renowned position and reputation. When I am surrounded by my closest consorts, I still I tend to have this feeling in the back of my mind that people are only acting the way they do to gain favor even though I know they care for me deeply, and it's eating me alive.

My Answer:

Tempted to start with "this is not the right questions. The right question is..."

But I won't. In Quora, you should either what a person asks, or not answer at all :)

So my answer to the question is "you can't". It's actually quite simple - YOU can't have someone be sincere with you. THEY need to be sincere with you, and you have little control over that. Except if you already know what they really think, in which case you don't really need to talk to them at all :)
But, trying to help you with what seems to be your struggle, I'm going to say this:

1) I think that your best way to tell if someone is sincere with you is by past experience. If they have always been sincere with you, then there's a good chance they'll be sincere this time around.

2) Number 1 brings out the question - so how can I tell if a new person is being sincere with me? Answer: you can't. Someone once told me that if con people were easy to spot, they'd be out of a job. I tend to keep this in the back of my mind.
I'm a lousy judge of character. I think most people are, especially the ones who think that they are good judges of character. This is, again, due to the fact that good liers are very experienced at misleading people. So the question I have in mind when a person I don't know tells me something is not "are they sincere", but more of "what's at stake here, if, god forbid, this person is not being honest".
I find this to be an excellent way to deal with people's sincerity question. It reduces the stress level resulting from this question that keeps popping up in your mind, and it actually creates a learning experience. If there's not too much at stake, you can assume that you don't know if the person is being sincere, and just wait to see whether they were or they weren't, and then learn from it a little.

3) Unless you are Barack Obama, The term "eating me alive" suggests that you may be taking this subject way too seriously. The guy at the store is giving you advice aimed at getting you to buy the product that gives him the best margin. Your dentist may be recommending expensive treatments that will help her redecorate her living room. Your boss may be giving you advice that is not only for your own good, but also for his own good. Your employees are doing good work not only because they love you, but also because they want your job one day.
It's OK. You have to learn to live with it. Respect everyone and suspect everyone, but don't be un-trusting. Don't be naive, but be a sucker sometimes, (knowingly, even). Getting screwed, when the price isn't too high, is a very valuable learning experience.
Make sure you are bothered by what's important

How to Ruin your Reputation by being Petty

I've been using an online backup service for many years now. I got introduced to the subject by Mozy, later to be acquired by EMC. They used to give everyone 2Gb of data free (they still do). When it finally became time to back up more than just 2Gb, I wanted to go on Mozy's paid program, but their software simply didn't work, and did not manage to back up more than 4Gb of my data. (they probably fixed it by now)

So I looked elsewhere, and found carbonite. They had unlimited backup for ~$4 a month. Same as Mozy, but actually working. Installed, turned it on, paid the annual subscription, and became a happy camper.

3 lovely years passed, where I even got the chance to restore once, and it was well worth the money spent (not to mention peace of mind).

My amount of data grew gradually, until one day not too long ago, it seemed like a good idea to get an additional hard drive. I went out and got a new hard drive, external this time (it was on special). I connected it to my computer and moved some data to it. Then I went in carbonite and found out that they won't back up data on the new drive because they don't work with USB drives. Say what? Why do you guys care what hardware I'm using? What am I supposed to do now, just not use the drive, or perhaps make sure all my important data is on the other drives? A bit of snooping around to find out that this weird policy doesn't exist in any other online service. Time to talk to Carbonite, my good old backup provider, and ask them if they can cut me some slack.

I wrote a letter to Carbonite's support, asking them to make an exception, because my new drive was just as important as my other drives. They said no. I wrote another letter saying "listen, guys, I really need to backup my data and I really like your service, but if you won't let me protect all of my data, then we cannot do business together. Please refund what's left of my annual subscription (more than half)".

This is the response I got back:

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Customer Support

Date: Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:58 AM

Subject: User incident report [Incident: 110125-001173]

To:

Response (Leena G.)01/26/2011 05:58 PM

Hello and thank you for contacting Carbonite Customer Support.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused to you. At present, Carbonite only backs up local internal hard drives. For more details, please click the link below.

External, Network and USB Drives: http://carbonite.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1386

Also, please ensure that if you delete/move a file from your computer, Carbonite will schedule the file to be deleted within thirty days. This gives you some time if you realize you deleted the wrong file. For more details, please click the link below.

Retention of Deleted Files: http://carbonite.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1402

Additionally, we request you to please review our refund policy at: http://carbonite.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1496

As stated during our purchasing process, when selecting 'Confirm' you agreed to Carbonite's Terms of Use and acknowledged that you were aware of Carbonite's Refund Policy. We also give users the opportunity to run our free trial to try before they buy.

If you are having difficulty using Carbonite, please let us know what the issue is and we will be happy to assist you.

Please let us know if you need additional assistance.

Sincerely,

Leena G.

Carbonite Customer Support

www.carbonite.com

Back it up. Get it back.

For those of you not familiar with American English, let me translate:

Dear Customer,

Go F yourself.

Had you read our full TOS when you signed up with our service, you would have realized that you're making a mistake because if you decide to buy a USB drive, we would not back it up for you. Further more, we were nice enough to tell you upfront that if you're stupid enough to sign up to our service even after we told you all this, that you won't see a dime back. This is why it's called ann(u)al subscription.

True, you signed up with us 3 years ago, when USB external drives weren't as popular, and yes, you've been extending our service every year since, but hey - there was a checkbox there saying that you agree to everything, so take responsibility for your actions.

Just between you and us, you have about $30 left on your subscription. You've been our customer for 3 years now, so what's $30 among friends? Imagine you took us on a night out, or find some other way to live with the loss.

Bottom line: Carbonite could have allowed me to cancel my service, and could have refunded my 20 or 30 bucks, because who in their right mind would not allow a person to own a USB drive nowadays? They could have saved me the time of writing this post, and save themselves the embarrassment of getting a bad review from an old faithful customer.

Mental note: never ever refuse a refund to a customer who is not happy with the product and is giving it back.

P.S. I am on CrashPlan's trial now. They are 10% through backing up my data. If it completes before my 30 day trial is over, I will switch over to them. I'm losing $30, but my data is too important to be left for chance.

The @DimDim exit plan for you freeloaders

Warning: this is a bitchy post.

SalesForce.com acquired DimDim (online collaboration software) for $31M. First of all, congrats for that. We always love to hear when someone in this business gets rewarded for good work they've done. If you work for DimDim, now would be the time to stop reading, because that's pretty much the last good word you will hear from me during this post.

I was introduced to DimDim a couple of years ago, when I was invited to an online presentation that used their tool. The person who invited me was naturally a founder of a startup (it's what we do). I was happy and a bit surprised to see that someone offered a free option to run quick presentations, limited by features and number of participants, but good enough for most bootstrap joints to use when they needed to show-off their stuff. I installed it on my machine, of course, and gave it a shot too.
Since then I didn't actually use it much, since I didn't find it good enough for my own needs, but I have told many people and startups about it. In our lean & mean startup world, every penny counts, so instead of spending $50/month on other services, DimDim really did seem like a good, free, sane option for the occasional broke presenter.
Not sure how many free users DimDim had, but I believe that the "freeloaders" took their role in making the DimDim platform a very popular online sharing tool. Don't you?

Enter the ungrateful part of this evening. I read @TechCrunch as much as the next guy, but I got introduced to the fact that salesforce.com acquired DimDim through the following email I got from DimDim:

Dear Customer:

Dimdim has been acquired by salesforce.com. Your free Dimdim account will remain active until March 15, 2011. After that date, you will no longer be able to access your free Dimdim account.

Please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for additional information.

We appreciate your understanding, and we thank you!


The Dimdim Team
Pursuant to the Dimdim Terms of Use (the “Agreement”) governing the use of Dimdim Inc.’s (“Dimdim”) Site and Services (as defined under the Agreement) by you (“You”), Dimdim is hereby exercising its right to terminate Your Dimdim Account and the Agreement in its entirety. Dimdim will continue to provide Services to you until March 15, 2011. Following March 15, 2011, neither You nor Dimdim shall have any further rights or obligations of any kind under the Agreement, including the right to access the Site, or receive or use any Services. Dimdim thanks you for your business, and wishes you success in the future.

Dimdim, 900 Chelmsford St. Lowell, MA 01851
This email was intended for: | Remove

(Report Abuse) - Only if you feel this email was repeatedly sent to you without your permission.

Now let me tell you my take, or what I actually read between the lines:

Dear FreeLoader and Ex-Customer,

We just got acquired for $31M. We're rich. Richer than you will ever be. If anyone tells you that "freemium" models can't bring happiness, just send them a picture of us, fishing.
We did it all by ourselves, and we are extremely happy to tell all of you so-called "customers", who made us so wildly popular by using our free service, that you can go F yourself. We do not think you had any contribution to making us popular, and we don't think you are even remotely related to the fact that we are now filthy rich. As such, while the negotiation with salesforce.com was going on, we didn't think it was appropriate to demand, as part of our severance packages and all that, that our free service remains free, at least until people forget that the salesforce.com online sharing tool was once DimDim. In fact, you should be grateful that we're letting you keep the service for another two months. We award you with a valuable lesson - there is no free lunch in this world. We really wish we could see your face as you read this announcement, but we're a bit drunk from the champagne and generally have better things to do.

P.S. Aren't you glad our lawyers made sure we can terminate your account at will ? Oh, don't bother to get up, here's the relevant paragraph from our TOS, which you never bothered to read when you signed up to our free service.

Jokes aside for a minute, I would have done it differently. I don't believe in "exit strategies" per se, and I believe that you should always think about how to make a successful and sustainable product that people need, and hence will want to pay for. An exit is something that happens when another company realizes that you've done such a fantastic job, that they want you and your product as part of their offering. DimDim was big on the "freemium" model, and it's a big part of what made them successful. Dropping the free, and leaving the "mium" before the body of their acquired organization is cold leaves a bad taste in my mouth. DimDim is officially worth $31M - are you telling me that the "free" part has no part in this ? How much money is salesforce.com saving by cancelling the free service? Time will tell if this was the right business decision, but I, for one, think that this was the wrong moral decision.

"So long and thanks for that big fish that just ate us".

Impressions from TechAviv (or, "Just Do It")

When I was young, I had a foul mouth. Then I grew out of it and became a foul-mouth blog writer. Apologies for all the profanity in advance.

Yesterday was my first time ever in a TechAviv event. I've been a registered founder for about two years now. I always wanted to go to one of those gatherings, but somehow, while I've RSVPed many times, I never managed make it. There's always some important fire-fighting going on. Last night involved too many important people from the industry that I claim my company (zx900) is part of. It also had Mike Eisenberg on stage spelling out his Humus Manifesto, and to me that would have been like watching the movie based on a book that I liked. Going there got priority (and my wife OKed).
I have to admit, I’ve never had much chance to hang out in the Israeli startup/angel/VC scene, and so what I heard there caught me off-guard. The place kind of turned into a battle field with the founders on one side and the VCs in the other (and @Roi Carthy in the middle).
I decided to write a few things and offer a my perspective. I’ll most likely give reference to it in a comment on TechAviv’s board, and I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.

1. VCs invest in ventures that they think can make THEM (the VCs) a significant return on their investment. Statistics shows that only 1-2 out of every 10 startups makes it (i.e. doesn’t close shop). If they didn’t invest in your venture, there’s at least an 80% chance they were right. Probably more. No offense - it’s just statistics. Give them a break. You don't spend your savings on investments you don't believe in, right?

2. VC money is private. It’s not your tax dollars (shekels, whatever). They don’t owe you anything. They’re not the chief scientist. Just back the f*ck off. I was so lost in that discussion on Wednesday, along with some folks on stage (seemed like). I found myself sympathizing with the VC partners, which is funny, because I actually think most founders should stay away from VC money for as long as they can.

3. People have been burnt by taking an investment from the chief scientist. Remember that. Mike Eisenberg is not making things up. Don’t be caught off guard a year into the process. Having to close shop in a year from now because you've raised money in the wrong place wouldn't be more pleasant than not getting funded at all right this minute. Make sure you know what you're getting into.

4. Even more people got burnt by taking VC money. Go read the TheFunded (but don’t believe everything you read). Getting an investment from a VC would put you in a spin - make sure you’re ready for that spin, as it will not be what you had planned on when you first thought of starting your venture. Be prepared, you’re not winning the lottery here, you’re acquiring partners who have a different agenda than your own. The fact that you both want a successful exit does not mean you see things eye-to-eye.
A VC pays a million dollar for 25% in your company, let’s say. You paid nothing, and you own a larger share. Do you think both of you translate the word “success” the same way?
Again, know what you’re getting into. VC is definitely a great way to go, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all.

5. If you’re a founder, this is important, so listen up.
In today’s world, you don’t have to have seed money to get started with many ventures ($10K is not seed money, guys).
There is an alternative. You WILL need to put YOUR money where your mouth is, you’ll need to work like a mule for many months, but if your idea is as good as your pitch says that it is, refusing to do these two things means that you’re full of of it. Look yourself in the mirror. Are you willing to risk something here, or do you just want to roll the risk over to some rich guy who you think will sustain less damage if things go south?
If you’ve already done all that, and still can’t get funded, perhaps you’re one of the 80%? Think outside of the box. Maybe that box is your whole venture.... You’re an entrepreneur, you’ll think of some other great idea if you put your mind to it. Don’t get caught up in your own idea. Think, launch, and if it doesn’t work out, think again, and launch something else. Repeat till you retire. Doctor's orders for sick people who need to constantly create new things.

6. And this is just to try and show that I’m not talking out of my *ss.

zx900 participated in launching a few different ventures this year (radiorec.fm, sprophet, jobsfor10, SearchGmailBySize to name a few). We cover the "actual work" part - we build the product. I’d tell you how much money was spent in building each, but I’m afraid I might lose your attention while you’d be rolling on the floor laughing. Statistics shows that none of these ventures will be successful, but we’ll keep going till we find one or two. We like it. We like entrepreneurs who put their heart where their mouth is. We partner with them, and we hack their product out the door. The discussion on Wednesday defined us as “hackers”. I disagree with the definition - I think that we simply prioritize correctly, but we’re here, and we'll do it for anyone with his/her head in the right place. Give us a call (no more sales pitch, I swear. Stay with me).
THERE IS a different way to do things. Any web venture, any mobile venture, any SaaS venture, any social venture, and 80% of any software venture can be launched in a bootstrap. It’s going to almost kill you both financially and personally to go there without raising money first, that’s true. But if you believe in your idea as much as you claim that you do, then go do it. You’ll launch, you’ll put that balloon up in the air, see what happens, get some traction, get wiser. And then you can decide if you even want to raise money, and if so how much, and who from. A wise copywriter once said “Just do it” (no idea how it relates to shoes)
Scott Tobin said on stage “we have $750M. Come see us”. I believe him. He’ll want to see you. But you need to bring something to show them, and PowerPoint is Microsoft’s product, not yours.

Get to work !

The nice story about hacking the new iPhone OS (or: hackers are nice people)

A short history lesson

Skip to the iphone story if you're short on time

I unlocked my iPhone again today, after the iPhone DevTeam came out with another wonderful way to "jailbreak" and unlock it. When I read the story about how they cracked the iPhone this time, I actually found it hilarious, to the point where I decided to blog about it, trying to keep it in layman's terms. Maybe my friends can laugh with me without understanding the fine technical details.

When I was young I wanted to be a hacker. Hacking into my bank's computer system and pumping my balance up sounded so much easier than actually having to work for money. So I read about what "hacking" is what hackers are, and surprisingly, one of the first sentences I read in a few different sources was "hacking is good, not evil". I got a lengthy explanation on the difference between hackers and crackers and how the very basic quality of a hacker is that whatever they do, they do it to improve things and not to harm anything or anyone. I believe this is true, especially in the case of the iPhone hackers, who are not looking for fame (they're anonymous) or fortune (they refuse to take donations).

Enter the iPhone DevTeam. A bunch of folks, people don't know who they are, who decided one day that Apple is being unfair by making everyone take "their way or the highway". So they "jailbroke" the iphone, and made it into a better device - one that is open and can work exactly how its owner wants it to, without having to go through Apple's approval. Then they also unlocked it and made it usable on any GSM network, and not just AT&T. By that I'm pretty sure they didn't only help the people, they also helped Apple. I bought my first iPhone only because I knew I can use it anywhere in the world. The hackers helped Apple increase sales and footprint.

For some mysterious reason Apple has been after those hackers since day 1. They are constantly patching the holes that the hackers use to make the iPhone a more usable device. There's a cat and mouse game between the hackers and apple that has been going on for years now. And the last story of how the hacked the iPhone AGAIN after OS 4.2.1 was released by apple is quite funny.


The story
It started off with Apple closing all known holes, making it quite hard for the hackers to allow people to use their phone outside of the intended network (AT&T in the states). Seems like the hackers got a look into the newly released operating system, and said "kudos, apple, this is going to take a while". So they thought "how can we still help all these poor people who happen to have bought a phone recently and are locked in the unlockable OS?". You see the problem is, Apple wouldn't let you downgrade your phone. Once you have the version 4.1 installed, you cannot go back to version 4.0 or 3.2. You can only go up the version number scale. This means that while there is no known hack for version 4.1, you are pretty much stuck in the locked state.

Well, I guess suddenly someone remembered that the iPad (not iPhone) actually has operating systems starting with the number 6. Not only that, but the iPad actually has a known hack. So what they did was, instead of creating a hack for version 4.2.1, they created a hack that takes bits and pieces from version 06.15 (the ipad version), including the version number itself, merges into any iphone version, creating a mongrel that looks like it has the number 06.15, but is actually an iphone OS that can be unlocked. While installing this on the iPhone, the iPhone does not reject the new operating system, because it checks and sees that 06.15 is greater than 4, or 4.2. Problem solved, and Apple can (again) kick themselves in the head while thousands of iPhone users got control of their device again.

Surely the next iphone version will explicitly make sure that it is not taking the iPad OS in the back door...

Tom won again, and Jerry is looking for new ways to catch him.

תסתמו

טוב, נראה לי שמישהו צריך להגיד את זה.
מתנחלים - אני מכיר כמה חבר'ה על הכיפק מעבר לקו הירוק, אבל בגדול אני חושב שמי שגר היום מעבר לקו הירוק הוא במקרה הטוב נודניק, ובמקרה הרע פנאט.

מכאן ועד לקחת את החוק לידיים ולהחליט שאני כאומן לא מוכן להופיע בפני אזרחי המדינה, שומרי חוק, יש דרך ארוכה. אין כל ספק שהאמנים הם שהתחילו את כדור השלג המטופש הזה. אם הייתי רוצה לשמוע את הדעות הפוליטיות שלהם, הייתי מצביע להם בכנסת. אני לא מעוניין בדעה הפוליטית לא של בעל המכולת שלי ולא של השחקן שעומד על הבמה בהצגה שעליה שילמתי ממיטב כספי. אמנים צריכים לעסוק באמנות, ולא בפוליטיקה, וכמו שאין לכם בעיה להופיע בחו"ל, ולא צריכה להיות לכם בעיה להופיע במצרים או בעזה, ככה לא צריכה להיות לכם בעיה להופיע באריאל, או על הירח, כל עוד נותנים לכם חמצן ואבטחה ראויה.
כמובן שהפוליטיקאים עצמם לא טומנים את ידם בצלחת ובמקום להרגיע את הרוחות, ישר טיפסו על עצים ועשו רעש גדול.
שורה תחתונה רציתי לומר לכולכם - פשוט תסתמו. נמאסתם. כולכם. כן, גם את

Change MySQL Engine for a bunch of tables (or all of them)

Prepare for another very technical / boring morning blog !

I needed to change an entire MySQL database from MyISAM to InnoDB (that is, change all tables in the schema). After Googling for how to do that in a bulk, I found... nothing (didn't look very thoroughly, though...)

I was contemplating doing it manually, as there weren't too many tables in my schema, but I finally caved in and the Engineer in me won and went looking for an our of the box solution.

This is what I came up with (don't laugh) :
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', TABLE_NAME, '` ENGINE = InnoDB;') FROM information_schema.`TABLES` WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = '';

Run this from your MySQL command line, control-mouse-select the result (so that you can get just the text without the frame) and paste into your favorite MySQL client. Voila.

And the Geek Oscar this morning goes to....

Hope you find this useful

Saving Power (??) - Yet another morning blog

I got an email from MicroMiser today announcing their latest version. This reminded me that I actually have Micromiser installed on my machine, so I decided to open and it up and see what gives.

I found the image on the right here.
Turns out Micromiser saved me $2.46 by now, and more importantly helped save the environment, yadayadayada.

For those of you (all of you?) who didn't know this, MicroMiser makes some fancy technology that should help companies with large server farms save on their energy by doing some voodoo magic that you can read about on their website. As a bonus, they are giving away that same technology for free for personal computers.

So,
It's a free open beta (registration required). And just in case these guys make more than just a window with random "you save $X" messages - you should probably install it and feel better about being a tidbit greener.

P.S. Thanks to @Ehud who introduced me this cuty as part of the effort to convert me to Linux. Too bad the Windows version came short-after, dude.

How is it that...

I just tried to make my kids' computer usable by one, M. Wife.

She needed primopdf, so I installed it for her. Then it didn't work. Nothing would print, no errors, nothing.
After playing with it a bit, taking the "push all the buttons" approach, I finally managed to get an actual error message in place of the nothingness:
The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135)

Copy/paste in Google. Voila. It shows up a zillion times in almost any app you can think of, and the explanation - the dot-Net framework is missing. OK, so now I'm downloading the thing, and we'll be back up and running in no time. I guess my kids never needed the .Net framework.

Now I gotta ask a series of how is it questions :
1) How is it that M$ expects the .Net framework to be so mighty popular, and they still haven't implemented a decent error message of "please install the .Net framework" if it's not found ?
2) How is it that MS themselves did not use the .Net framework for Office 2007 ? (I have office on this machine, and it worked without it). Not good enough for them ?
3) How is it that when I write "download .Net framework" in any search engine including Bing, I get v2.0 as the first result, whereas v3.5 only comes second, and v3.5sp1, which is the newest one may or may not show up depending on which search engine I use?

So many stupid questions, so little time...

Google pulling the plug on IE6...

Hip Hip ! (if you didn't hooray, you must have been asleep in the last couple of years. Or maybe you're not a web developer)

I just got the email below. Finally someone picking up the check, if not Microsoft, then at least their rivals ;)

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team


Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Great stuff on Google Docs

This morning I opened up Google Docs and got this message.



This means that you can use Google as a repository for your documents in their original form (docx, for instance). Sort of like a G-Drive for office documents. A first step in the right direction, I guess (I'm really waiting for a functional G-Drive that would work like DropBox).
Note that when you upload a doc to Google Docs now, you can uncheck a box that says "convert to Google format. That's all there is to it.

Good work G-folks !

My blog posts technical ranking

Tech-rank: 1

I figured I'd rank my blog posts between 1 and 10 on a "technical" scale, one being completely non-technical, 10 being hard-core stuff that even programmers may not find interesting if it's not exactly in their area of expertise.
I'll just add it up there, on the post itself, if I remember.

Morning blog1 - Windows 7

Tech rank for this post: 5

I read a blog post from someone who suggested that instead of reading emails in the morning, or reading the paper - you should maybe write a blog post. I figured that's not such a bad idea. I've made a habit out of making note of every subject worth blogging, so that I remember to write that blog post later on. In recent months I've been working 18 hour days, so blog posts weren't exactly my priority. Seems like I should have plenty of items to write blog posts about, but when I went over the list just now, many subjects seemed kind of old.

One of those subjects was "Windows 7, good and bad". I remember that this issue went through my head after I installed W7 Release Candidate on some relatively old machine that had to be reinstalled. I could immediately see that this IS something different - not another Vista (as a side note - I nicknamed Vista "the new ME" -named after the notorious Windows ME, yet another operating system that everyone skipped and went directly to Windows 2000).

The first thing I noticed about Windows 7 is that its name fits its Hard drive footprint. After you install Vista, 7Gb of your HD are gone (if you really must know why it's called that way - I found this post from the team). Not so long ago, 10Gb was acceptable, and 20Gb was plenty. Well, these days are over, and in the age of smallest HD being 160Gb, that's fine.

Being such a negative person, I had to find something bad to write about W7 - hence that "complaint" about footprint above, but honest to g-d, other than this W7 turned out to be my next XP (as opposed to Vista being compared to ME).

The UI finally makes sense (Mac anyone?). Seriously. Check this out:

(note there's a new Windows+tab app switcher that does this 3D effect of switching between windows)
I always wanted a Desktop that looks this cool. W7 finally takes you there very easily. I'm even persuaded not to turn off all the fancy animation bits that hurt performance. A quad-core with 4Gb of memory has its advantages. If your machine isn't that strong, the OS will decide on its own to deactivate some of the fancy-shmancy stuff.

I could go on forever, but this morning blog would become afternoon blog, and there are plenty of other reviews of W7 out there.

Just a couple more notes -

The new paint

1) I am not usually an early adopter when it comes to OS, because I need to be productive, and don't have time to deal with v1 kinks. In this case it so much happened that I started to use virtualization on a large scale, and had to move to a 64-bit OS just in order to make better use of my RAM. My brother persuaded me that there's a good chance the 64-bit version of W7 works better than the XP one, and it actually made sense to me. I installed it knowingly, thinking that I'd run back to XP if anything goes wrong. It has been up there for a few weeks now, and for all practical purposes - I strongly recommend it to anyone with a reasonably modern machine (Dual core, >=2Gb RAM). Incidentally, I don't recommend the 64-bit, unless you truly know that you need it. It works fine, but if you're not a hard-core programmer, don't bother. 95% of the software is still 32-bit anyways. Most work fine on 64, but why bother having a bi-polar machine.

2) I know that it's really hansom, but we've always been to look at what's in the box, rather than the box itself. I can honestly say that finally the UI starts to make sense to me. Windows, to me, has always been about working AROUND its UI, rather than simply using an enjoying it. I've got plenty of productivity tools installed on XP machines, covering up for things that Microsoft just didn't do so well. I'm talking about trivial stuff like the windows explorer, notepad, clipboard, and a whole bunch of others (can you smell that next blog post coming?). With windows 7, there's a bit less of that, and a bit more usage of the tools that come out of the box. That's one nice thing.
But the nicest thing for me is that the entire UI and its behavior makes sense. My taskbar never gets filled up, and yet I can find all of my open programs easily, and this whole quicklaunch toolbar thing finally makes sense in its new form (again, behavior gracefully "stolen" from Mac).



Bottom line - go get one.
If you're a startup that fits MS relatively loose standards, you can get it free, along with every other piece of Software M$ usally sells for thousands of dollars. It's called Bizspark, and it's a good subject for another blog post.

Enjoy.

Bing not f@#$ing ready for Israel

My sincere apologies to all those who don't read Hebrew, but here's an explanation:

I entered the Hebrew word for "Movie" in Bing.
The fourth result read "Porn Movies". Then there's a very graphic description of what you'll get if you click the link, which I will not repeat in full. Suffice it to say it talks about a bathroom, a man, a semi-converted transgender, and certain body parts of both parties involved, all located below the waistline and above the legs.

I won't include a link, but if you write Hebrew, just enter the word סרט in Bing.

Let's see how quickly Microsoft removes this obscenity. It has been there for at least a few days now.

Yuck.

The POJ Stage

I just came up with a new software phase - The POJ phase.
The way I see it, in software you have Alpha, Beta, Release.

Alpha means what Beta used to mean before Google set up new standards. It means the software may break unexpectedly, but it mostly works.

Beta means what Microsoft used to call "V1", and sometimes "V2", and sometimes even "Vista". It's a product that works. Every software product has bugs, even after 10 years in the market. The standard that Google set for all of us is that Beta should work pretty much flawlessly.

Release only has significance in the MS world, and it is the equivalent of most of everyone else's Beta in recent years. It means the software should work flawlessly in its normal course of usage. Some previously unknown bugs may pop here and there in extreme cases.

This blog is not about that. It is about a new phase I just named POJ - the Piece of Junk Stage (I wanted to name it FPOJ but it's hard to pronounce and not very polite).


And why did I think this new term? Because I just tried using Google Wave. It's not Alpha or Beta or Gamma, It's in the POJ phase.
The POJ stage means "I can't use it for what I think the author intended me to use it for". The software can even work pretty well technically, but I just wouldn't be able to become a beta-tester of it, because it's missing important features, or important things break.
In the case of Google wave the first and most annoying problem of it is that I have to keep it open all day (and it's not easy on the RAM, CPU and browser, mind you). I don't get notifications when a wave has changed via email. Neither do any of the people I tried to surf the waves with. This is a killer - I update a wave, then go on to send an email to people telling them to look at the wave. That's when a short cry comes out unintentionally - WHAT A POJ!

Other things that bother me:
Other people can see what I write, and the "draft" box is disabled. Can you tell from this blog I'm a bit impulsive, and sometimes write nasty things? I do that over email too - but before I hit "Send", I hit Ctrl+A, Del, then I write a more polite version of what I wanted to say. It's my therapy and no one gets hurt. If people could read the initial versions of my polite answers to them, I'd be committed in a psychiatric institution. Well, now they can. Not good.
Kudos on the technical implementation, Stephanie (one can only imagine what it takes to perform this technically, assuming the whole world may be using Wave). But what the !@#$ were you thinking?

And why isn't reply working for me? I guess it's just a bug. I can only reply to my own messages - if I try to reply to other people, it comes out as new message. But that's a bug I can live with. There are others, I'll keep them off this blog an in the bug report (where is it, by the way?)

The Call for action:
Google - let's move out of the POJ stage, and into the Alpha stage, A-Hoes :) Please.

The before and after...

A recent micro-discussion on facebook prompted me to create and upload this.

My before and after....


For the brave of heart - Click the pic to enlarge...

Believe it or not, there's a 40 pounds (20kg) difference between the left and the right halves of the picture. There's also a 5-7 years difference, and the kid on my shoulder on the right side is the little brother of the baby on the left (and please don't call child services on either one...)

Large text file editing GEM

Whenever I find a hidden gem utility, I feel like I need to share.
Granted - I'm a utility freak. I have it on my todo list to post a few on utilities that I use, but this is for later.

Today I just wanted to mention one utility that I bumped into.

I was on a 45 minute call with someone who sent me a log file to view, and for 30 minutes out of the 45 was trying to view a 0.5G text file, crashing all possible programs - notepad, notepad++, word, wordpad. The guy on the other side of the line said he opened it with Textpad, but that's commercial and for text editors I really think there's enough good free stuff out there.

Then I entered "view large text files" in Google, and among all sorts of suggestions to split large files, on one of the sites, in one of the comments I found this amazing piece of software called "Programmer's File Editor", or PFE version 1.01 (catchy...). Found it here: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/

This software took less than 2 seconds to open this file, that all other software crashed after a few minutes of cranking at it.

The interesting bit is that this software works on Windows 3x... It was written in 92 by a guy on the Lancaster UK University staff, and was last updated in 99. There's still a note in the readme asking you to report any Y2K bugs if you find them...
Amazingly, it still not only works like a charm, but it is extremely fast and efficient opening files that are larger than what used to be the average memory size of computers back when it was written (maybe that explains why it's so efficient...)

If you're looking for a solution to open huge text files - I highly recommend it. In fact - go download it right now. Who knows when this 17 year old will vanish from the web completely...

Things are getting warmer....

Wow.
Check out this little link on Yahoo answers. It's part of the new pact, I guess.

Is it just me, or did someone just turn off the A/C ? It's getting really HOT.

Speechless

This is a lecture given by Seth Godin.
If you're in the business of making products - watch it. Invest 60 minutes of your time, and you won't regret it. If you don't have time right now, come later. If you can't afford 60 minutes at once, watch it in parts.
Watch it.

Today, in our "knock it off" series... MS annoyance.

Yes, I realize that the line that breaks case REALLY IS unreachable code, due to the "return" statement right above it, but seriously! Do you honestly expect me to omit the break statement? Would you consider that good practice ? (Damn, I just noticed I forgot to add it for the default block...)

I vote for MS removing this annoyance from the IDE, and allowing programmers to always have a break after case, without pointing a green finger at them.

Who's with me !?