The life and times of Jeffrey Forman.

Updates from April, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  Jeff Forman 5:37 pm on April 17, 2011 Permalink
  Tags: Boston ( 6 ), conferences, linux ( 9 )   

  Boston Barcamp 6, Day Two 

  Finally got this post out after having a bit of a busy week.
   

  Location based networking, anurag wakhlu (coloci inc)
  http://goo.gl/mxAtd

  • location based apps: where are you now? or where will you be?
  • where are you now: foursquare, gowalla, loopt, etc
  • where will you be: coloci, fyesa, tripit, plancast
  • interest based networking: the reason to talk to someone who is near you. tie an interest: sending someone a coupon when they are near starbucks. if they arent near starbucks, what good is a coupon?
  • proactive coupons: dont wait for a check-in. if someone is 2 blocks from starbucks, send them a notification for coupon. ex// minority report. walk by a billboard, recognizes you, tailors ad specifically to you.

  52% of US consumers willing to share location for retail perks.

  • foursquare background checkin? automatically check you in when you are in a close enough vicinity to a location
  • Do privacy concerns have a potential impact on services becoming more popular? ex// European privacy laws about broadcasting who you are, where you are, etc.
  • Have to trust your device that when you disallow authority to know your location, it actually does not broadcast where you are.
  • Trade off of convenience versus privacy. Debit card is a lot more convenient than cash, people are more than likely to give up privacy.
  • If you really want to not be tracked, you really need to disconnect yourself from the computer. Go cash only. Re-education might help. “You might already be sharing this info somewhere else, so what difference is it now that you do it via your phone?”
  • Tracking someone’s history via CSS visited tag. Firefox supposedly has fixed this issue where websites cannot do this anymore.
  • Using EZpass, who is responsible for giving a ticket if you did 60 miles in faster than 60 minutes? Using your location to know your broke the law.

  At the start, Anurag gave a wonderfully succint history of location based networking, highighting the current giants like Foursquare and Facebook Places. We talked about how the potential is there to enable your phone to alert you about consumer deals in your vicinity, having more of a ‘push’ aspect to networking, or your phone could alert you to friends being near as well. Eventually though, the attendants turned the talk into a big privacy discussion. Not necessarily as flame-worthy as it could have been, but still talking about how much of our information we want to broadcast and allow to advertisers. Broadcasting location and private information. Could the situation eventually get to the point like Minority Report where your phone is overtly/covertly broadcasting who you are to potential advertisers or other potentially nefarious people.

  Economics of open source

  • reputation is a kind of currency. ancillary benefits of ‘being known.’ ex// popular github repo, can get you a book deal, flown to conferences, etc.
  • are we cheapening what we do by giving it away? software produces so much cash for people. not everything is oss. still need people to customize it and apply.
  • discussion: can donations kill a project? the comptroller decides who gets money, and those who donate time but dont get paid feel slighted, and the project can take a nose dive.

  Content of presentation was a bit bland/dry, but the discussion was involved. War story: giving training away for free when a company charges for it. you are hurting the ecosystem by giving it away rather than someone paying for it. This was fairly interesting, delving past the common topic of software being ‘free as in beer.’

  Interviewing well as a coder round table

  • feel okay sitting there for a couple minutes thinking. Dont feel stressed to start writing code right away.
  • some questions to ask you to regurgitate syntax. what happens if you get confused between languages.
  • design issues “show us where you would add X feature.” stylistics versus code syntax.
  • code portfolios: employers look at your github profile. see the code you’ve written. if your code is ‘too good’, employer wants you to find bugs in their code.
  • how to practice your whiteboarding skills? codekata: short programming problems.
  • asking questions that there is no solution to. can you be an asshole interviewing?
  • be prepared for personal questions because employers will google you and find your personal interests
  • spin negative questions as positive: what do you see improving in your work environment?
  • questions back to employee: what do you hope to improve for our company?
  • if you list a skill in your skills list, be ready to whiteboard the code.

  Can the internet make you healthier? jason jacobs, runkeeper founder

  • convergence of health/athletic data and IT
  • virtual coaching: ahead/behind pace, in-app reminders to go faster or slower on their iOS app.

  The more data you have over what you’re doing physically, can help you react. How am I doing against my peers? This was interesting, since Jason sees his company’s first product ‘Run Keeper’ as the jumping off point to more athletic-body sensing applications. The point was raised about what point does the app which suggests a certain pace while running, dance the line of being medical advice. I think it is a good point, that the app needs more information about your health before suggesting a certain distance or pace for exercise. I’ll be curious myself as I use the app more, how I am improving athletically.

  Overall, I found the signal-to-noise ratio of the unconference to be very high. For my first Barcamp, I would suggest it to all technically-inclined folks who just want to let their interests and imaginations plot the course of which talks they attend. I know I will be a repeat attendee.

   
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  Jeff Forman 7:13 am on April 10, 2011 Permalink
  Tags: Boston ( 6 ), Internet ( 3 ), linux ( 9 ), ops   

  Barcamp Boston 6, Day One 

  Having never been to a Barcamp before, I knew the overall structure of the conference, but was curious if I would actually like it. Truth be told, I found it full of content, without a lot of fluff, even for the talks I sat in on where I had no prior knowledge. My notes follow, thanks to the great OSX app Notational Velocity hooked up to Simplenote. My overall thoughts in italic after each post.:

  how to give a presentation people love and learn from
  break presentation into 7-10 minute chunks
  then transition 7 minutes into the talk to another topic, to keep people’s attention
  insert emotion, a story. rather than just X happened.
  (For a talk to be this meta, a presentation about giving presentations, I was not hooked. There weren’t any real nuggets of information here that made me sit up and say “Wow, I haven’t been doing this in the presentation I make.”)

  how to run a startup like genghis khan, by @wufoo

  • work like a nomad
  • build an audience first. protect your audience. make the audience part of the show.
  • make developers handle support requests. once devs get same question two or three times, they go in and fix the code so they dont get the question again.

  (Presenter absolutely killed it. Engaging, fast talking (without mumbling), great slides that presented the information in clear and sometimes humorous ways. Made me think more about engaging the people I am trying to convince to my way of thinking)

  android developer: war stories and antipatterns
  yoni, lead android dev at scavngr

  • dont code splashscreens. more of an iOS thing. if you have to preload data, show a progress bar in the app already open
  • dont force orientation (landscape/portrait). support both
  • dont assume their screen size. use relative layouts

  (I went into this talk curious and with no prior experience or knowledge of writing an Android app. I don’t even own an Android phone. This was much more a round table, with those devs in the room very willing to share their experiences and war stories. I found they really had good experiential tips, rather than “This is the best practice” and moving on.)

  ask a plasma physics grad student anything
  (I must say this was completely over my head. The student at the front of the room, from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, seemed to know his stuff and was genuienly interested in challenging the audience. What blew me away was the knowledge of the audience, asking very pointed questions with what sounded like real science to back it up.)

  building fast websites, making users happy (@jonathanklein)

  • google injected 400ms delay into search page, dropped 0.76% searches/users over time.
  • phpied.com/the-performance-business-pitch
  • faster sites rank better in google. site speed is part of search ranking.
  • what’s load time? server side generation time, client side render time. 80-90% of load time takes place on the client.
  • best practices:
  • reduce http requests: combine css/js, use image sprites (one download and cut up into multiple images).
  • minify css/jss: strip comments out and white space. (yuy, java library). will rename variables into shortest name possible
  • gzip all text: html, css, js
  • for graphics, use png8 (restricts you to 256 different colors in the image)
  • jpegs can be saved at 75% quality
  • image compressor: smush.it (from yahoo dev network), lossless compression.
  • measuring performance
  • google webmaster tools, http://www.webpagetest.org
  • yotta, firebug, yslow, page speed, dynatrace ajax edition

  (For an ops guy, I was really interested in this talk. Jonathan blew through his material at break-neck speed, but covered the topics and answered questions without feeling like the talk was broken up. Some really good information through his experiences, and things I would like to dig into more myself.)
  

  nosql round table

  • some are relational, others are key value
  • redis, redis + resque
  • cassandra
  • mongodb
  • why nosql over mysql? no schema, lack of migrations from version to version. being able to store different things. replication (single threaded)
  • keeping mysql in sync with nosql layer about: broadcast updates from mysql over rapidmq(?).  nosql service grabs update from mysql.
  • solutions that they discarded:
  • cassandra: v0.6, latency spikes between nodes. node would get flagged as awol. cascading failure because data gets rebalanced. use “hinted handoff” to prefer the direction of the failover. supposedly better in v0.7. documentation is messy.
  • in the cloud or in a dc? mostly EC2. local storage with evs slave.
  • search via solr

  (Another one where I went in having nothing but curiosity, since noSQL is one of the popular buzz words these days. Very engaged audience who shared war stories, both good and bad, implementing noSQL solutions in their workplaces. Left me with a stalk of websites to dig into.)

  agile development war stories

  • problems it tries to solve: waste. business approach.
  • more collab between business and engineering. dont just throw the ‘stories’ from biz over the wall.
  • focus on testable behavior. how can we test each iteration? should be part of the original story.
  • be smaller, quicker, more iterative. ex// dont go off for 18 months planning your solution. business might change underneath you
  • people do “agile but..” and tend to modify the methodology.
  • burn down?
  • should tasks stay <1 day? sounds a bit unreasonable, since “speeding up the server by 20%” is unable to be done in one day. task size should have a reason.
  • average sprint time: 2 weeks
  • do a code review before the planning meeting. so estimations on a piece of work can be completed in the meeting. ex// dont trace the code for the 1st time in a meeting.
  • software to track scrums/managing stories: soft2, scrum ninja, team foundations studio (windows), white boards, index cards on a wall, ibm rational, pivotal tracker (good for distributed teams), mingle from softworks.

  (Another highly-concentrated buzzword round table where I was more curious than anything. Some real good information about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to managing time and projects. Lots to read up on here, and see if I can apply it to my daily work life.)

   
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  Jeff Forman 8:57 am on April 3, 2011 Permalink  

  Boston Pillow Fight 2011 

  The wife was off doing some graduate school work for the afternoon, so I took the camera and headed down to the Boston/Cambridge Pillow Fight in Cambridge Common to see exactly what all the hoopla was all about. Apparently this is an international event. I was not dissapointed. The Facebook Group for the event had over 3700 RSVP’s, and there were half as many photographers and on-lookers as actual participants.

  One of my favorite pictures from the event:

  

  Pillow Fight Warrior

  Album for the event on my Picasa Web Album.

   
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  Jeff Forman 12:26 pm on April 26, 2010 Permalink  

  Wine Riot 2010 

  I have been meaning to write this post for a few weeks, both as a recap of the event, and as a reminder to myself of the wine I want to keep a lookout for.

  For those not familiar with Wine Riot, it’s basically a beer festival/tasting, but with wine. A bunch of retailers, distributors and vineyards themselves come to the event and give samples of their product to attendees. This happened to be the biggest surprise for me. Having been to several beerfests previously, I am used to the brewer themselves being there. This gives patrons the ability to speak to the people behind the product. You can really learn a lot from those people, all the nuances and thought behind a new series of brews, and upcoming products. Wine Riot had a much higher percentage of distributors and wine purveyors on-hand, as opposed to winemakers themselves. To the best of my memory, I don’t remmeber speaking to more than a handful of actual winemakers or people from the actual vineyard. In total, there were about 50 booths set up in the Cyclorama in Boston’s South End.

  Below is the list of wine I vaguely scribbled as myself, M, and some friends made our way ‘around the world of wine.’ In no particular order.

  • Oyster Bay Marlborough Pinot Noir 2008 (New Zealand)
  • Esporao Reserva White 2008 (Portugal)
  • Sequana Vineyards Dutton Ranch Pinot Noir 2007 (California, Russian River Valley)
  • Corvidae Wine Co Wise Guy Sauvignon Blanc 2009  (Washington, Columbia Valley)
  • Corvidae Wine Co “Lenore” Syrah 2007 (Washington, Columbia Valley)
  • Charles Smith Wines Kung Fu Girl Riesling 2009 (Washington, Columbia Valley)
  • K Milbrandt Syrah 2007 (Washigton, Wahluke Slope)
  • K Viognier 2009 (Washington, Columbia Valley)
  • Terra Rosa Old Vine Malbec 2007 (Argentina)
  • Porta Wines Syrah WInemaker Reserva 2008 (Chile, Acongagua Valley)
  • Terra Andina Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 (Chile)
  • Yellow+Blue Torrontes 2009
  • Herdade do Esporao Touriga Nacional 2007 (Portugal, Alentejo)
  • Podere San Lorenzo Rosso di Montalcino DOC 2007 (Italy, Toscana)
  • NV Mionetto Moscato Dolce (Italy)
  • Corelli 34′ Malbec 2008 (Argentina, Mendoza)
  • Cahteau Lacombe Noaillac 2006 (France, Bordeaux)
  • Domain La Croix Belle Champ du Coq 2007 (France, Languedoc)

  My biggest surprise was the Yellow+Blue Torrontes, a wine served from a plastic container, almost like Franzia’s popular low cost wine in the square box. It was surprisingly good for the connotation that boxed-wine has.  Overall the event was worth going, especially because I was able to use a Groupon I purchased, saving me $10/ticket from the normally $30/ticket price. Local restaurants Upper Crust Pizza, Legal Seafood, and Redbones BBQ were among others selling food at the event. Given a Groupon being offered for next year, I highly recommend the event for those interested in wine, and will return myself.

   
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  Jeff Forman 7:31 pm on February 6, 2010 Permalink  

  Holy Dim Sum 

  I was down in Chinatown a couple weeks ago having shabu shabu while my mother was in town. I was waiting for her to arrive, and wandered over to an area of the neighborhood I don’t normally frequent (the East side of Surface Road for those curious)t. I came upon Hei La Moon, a resturant I had frequently read about via local food blogs and forums. I grabbed a menu and noticed that the dim sum list was at least 20-30 deep. It’s a big place, one massive room, with pictures on the front doors showing carts weaving their way through a packed weekend lunch service.

  Two weeks later, M and I, along with another couple friends who have become our restaurant seekers-in-crime, descended upon HLM at 12:30pm on a Saturday afternoon. To say this place was busy is an understatement. Now I don’t pretend to speak any Chinese, but that’s all I heard among the hostess shouting out numbers to parties waiting to be seated. (Being the stereotypical white male, I have heard the adage that a restaurant with ‘locals’ to the cuisine is normally very good, so I was psyched.) Without waiting more than 5-10 minutes, we were ushered through the throngs of people and incredible number of staff pushing carts to our table. I looked around and all I saw was a sea of people and staff, working the crowds entering and exiting, ushering food between tables, and turning tables over for the next party.

  Within 30 seconds of being seated, we had a cart off to the side of our table, with a waitress offering us various kinds of dumplings. This is all from memory, as I was not able to either take pictures nor write down any of what we had due to the intense commotion of the entire dining room. (In no particular order)

  • Beef Ball
  • Tripe
  • Peking Duck
  • Tofu skins
  • Pork knuckles with thick wonton noodles (the latter were incredible)
  • Steamed shrimp dumplings
  • Steamed Pork buns
  • Sticky rice with peanuts
  • and others I am unable to remember.

  This was a new experience for me, having never had ‘cart service’ dim sum. Waitresses did speak English, but over the din of the dining room (it was incredibly loud, but still possible to carry a conversation at your table), we ended up just pointing to things we wanted and that we hoped had the food we expected in them.

  There were some hits, like the peking duck, tripes, and wonton noodles. Each had a distinct flavor, never bland, and perfectly cooked, even though they had probably been sitting on the cart for several minutes making their way around the dining room. And there were some misses, although few and far between. Only the beef balls and sticky rice received less-than-rave reviews. We found those dishes to be very single-note, with not much interesting flavor. The beef balls tasted more like meatloaf, of which I am not a fan. The sticky rice had boiled peanuts, which surprisingly added no peanut flavor to the dish. We drank hot tea throughout the meal, but I must imagine cold water and soft drinks are available. Flagging down a waiter or waitress was not a problem when we were looking for more dishes, most of the time they came to us before we were done.

  Needless to say, we were full, but not stuffed, after polishing off the food we had ‘ordered.’ The one thing we were unsure of was just how much money we spent, given that the dim sum menu has no prices. After giving them my credit card and hoping for the best, a bill of $44 came back. We were blown away that so much food came from $11 a person. While not an every weekend trek for us from the near suburbs, we will definitely be back to try more of the menu and experience the frenzied atmosphere of Hei La Moon.