noam's blog.a.lish

You've probably noticed that I haven't blogged in quite a while. The reasons I have are, of course, excuses. In any event I think I will be back soon... very soon... like next week soon. So going back to these excuses reasons, I have been studying hard for an certification exam in... wait for it.... Java 5... yup, went over to the dark side, the VERY dark side. Studying took up most of my free time and I'm glad to announce that I am officially Sun Certified (or in other words... nailed it).

I realize this post is kind of boring but I studied my ass off learning this vile language... just kidding it's ok. I actually work in the Java-sphere now and as such I assume I might have some Java tips and tricks to share with you .NET people... So to just leave you with a taste for more I figured I'd post something "interesting", enjoy.

I recently caved in and bought a "real" camera. I own a Nikon SD850IS compact that's served it's purpose ever since my SD500 got stolen in St. Petersburg last year. After seeing my buddy Jacob graduate from a Nikon D80 to D300 I figured it's time to upgrade... and so I did. I am now the proud owner of my first DSLR the Nikon D60.

Now, I can't just post about my new camera and hobby and not show some photos I took... these are originals for the very first time on blog.a.lish, hope you enjoy them.

My other new hobby, drinking Orangina's

Weird woman in SoHo

p.s. If you want a copy, which is probably not likely I'd be more than happy to shoot you over the full scale image.

We went out to dinner tonight at a fancy restaurant in the meat packing district of New York. As we were waiting for our food I noticed a very familiar face, I wasn't sure if it was who I thought it was but then I was assured it was in fact Glen Hansard (yeah I was a little surprised he had a wiki page too). I felt compelled to walk over and talk to Glen, turns out he's quite a nice guy. Anyway, I walked back to my table and my brother said "wouldn't it be funny if his girlfriend (wife?), Marketa, showed up too and they were seated next to us?" well... turns out that's exactly what happened. I am still a little shocked that Oscar winners actually sat next to us and that absolutely no one recognized them.

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova in Once

I am a very big fan of the Academy award wining movie Once and of the soundtrack which I highly recommend.

I'm posting this from my newly installed Ubuntu instance. I've got to say it's pretty slick. I remember the days (mostly in college) where I used to install different versions of Linux (RedHat, Suze and others) and just hated every minute of trying to recompile the kernel to get my wireless card to work... it was a mess. Well, with very little effort (mainly due to help from You've been Haacked and Arcane Code) I am now able to play with Ubuntu 7.10 on my Vista box! The only issue I had was that the 64 bit iso didn't want to work on VPC 2007... which sucks... but I'll take what I got for now.

I've been playing with the curl command which is pretty powerful and I guess I should try to install the XGL + Compiz 3D Desktop and really work this bad boy. On a more .NET/C# note I'm going to install Mono and play around with it a little to get a feel for what they have and what they don't have... maybe this is a great 20% candidate.

p.s. On a completely separate note I just recently learned that the 3rd mouse button really comes in handy when using a tabbed browser, I don't understand how I missed this... read all about it here.

Israeli women are hot. You should really visit Israel to actually understand what I'm talking about. Here are two videos that make my point for me....

No wonder they call it the holly land

Can you handle this?

What a great way to start off the path of integration and forming one massive internet giant... Mr. Schmidt announces, on the official Google blog, that there may be reductions in headcount... ouch... I wonder if DoubleClick .NET devs are getting antsy...

I'm pleased to share the news that we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick today. Although it's been nearly a year since we announced our intention to acquire DoubleClick last April, we are no less excited today about the benefits that the combination of our two companies will bring to the online advertising market. .....

... As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount. We expect these to take place in the U.S. and possibly in other regions as well. We know that DoubleClick is built on the strength of its people. For this reason we’ll strive to minimize the impact of this process on all of our clients and employees.

I'm sure Mr. Gu and the boys have taken notice... a chance to recruit talent.

If you didn't know and missed the last total lunar eclipse until 2010... I ain't mad at you. Just don't let it happen again. Yesterday (Wednesday) a full lunar eclipse occurred and it was actually quite cool. If you're wondering what exactly a lunar eclipse is, it's a celestial event during which the Moon passes through the shadow of the Earth, temporarily darkening its surface.

Total Lunar Eclipse - 2/20/2008

What's even cooler is that yesterday we got a red eclipse. You may be asking "What makes the eclipsed moon turn red?" well Nasa explains that the answer lies inside Earth's shadow:

Our planet casts a long shadow. It starts on the ground--Step outside at night. You're in Earth's shadow. Think about it!--and it stretches almost a million miles into space, far enough to reach the moon.

Suppose you had a personal spaceship. Here's your mission: Tonight, at midnight, blast off and fly down the middle of Earth's shadow. Keep going until you're about 200,000 miles above Earth, almost to the moon. Now turn around and look down. The view from your cockpit window is Earth's nightside, the dark half of our planet opposite the sun. But it's not completely dark! All around Earth's limb, the atmosphere glows red.

What you're seeing is every sunrise and sunset on Earth--all at once. This ring of light shines into Earth's shadow, breaking the utter darkness you might expect to find there. Turn off the cockpit lights. There's a lovely red glow.

Pretty hot if you ask me... every sunrise and sunset on Earth wow.

p.s. I was "lucky" enough to play a little Capoeira last night under the eclipse... it was freeeeeeezing.

Those of you who know me know that I practice Capoeira. This week is probably the pinnacle of my Capoeira training for the past year. It all started on Tuesday with the Mestre Bimba Cup followed by 4 days of training with Brazil's top Mestre, Mestre Camisa and topped off with this years Batizado which will be held at Riverbank State Park Cultural Theater (679 Riverside Drive NYC 10031) this Sunday, February 10th from 1:30-4:30pm. You can purchase tickets here. If you want to see what Capoeira is all about, or if you are simply a fan of martial arts, come out to support us and check it out!

To quote Wikipedia on what a Batizado is:

A Batizado (literally baptized in Portuguese, and borrowed from the religious tradition) is normally an annual event for a Capoeira group in a region or country. The practice of Capoeira Batizados originates from Capoeira Regional, but has been extended to other styles.

Batizados are large events and are very important for the group organizing it. It is the point in the year where the new members will be baptized officially into the group and receive their first cords and where the other members depending on their progress will get a new one. A typical batizado will take several days and consist of workshops, the actual Batizado itself and a Troca das Cordas. Often many groups from more than one region will attend a Batizado for other groups. This allows for development of the game by contact with other players, teachers and styles.

It seems that lately I have been getting more frustrated with interviewees. I think mainly because I can't believe how people, who call themselves Software Engineers, with experience and CS degrees can't answer simple questions about the art they are supposed to be living every day.

I think I've mentioned this before but it never ceases to amaze me how engineers can't mention more than 2 collection classes in the System.Collections or System.Collections.Generic libraries. I really don't think that's a hard question. If you think it is, and you're a software engineer with a degree in computer science I recommend you start thinking of your next career.

Anyway... I read this interesting article at Codinghorror.com about how computer science should be taught. I have read these types of arguments many times, how CS curriculum's are too abstract or too disconnected from reality and I must agree. While I didn't go to an ivy league school I did get two degrees in CS and aside from maybe 3 courses (which I'm about to talk about) we really didn't cover anything that I have used since (I've been a professional Engineer for over 5 years now...).

The article addresses how deployment and source control are simply ignored by academia. Why do you think that is? I also know that many of the schools that consider themselves the "best" schools focus software courses on C and Assembly while only a fraction of it's graduates actually end up using these archaic languages.

I think the lack of realistic software engineering classes are the main cause of my frustration as an interviewer. I'm sure some of my questions may be hard but I don't expect an interviewee to answer every single question perfectly, I'm more interested in their thought process and ask them to "think out loud" when possible.

The three courses I mentioned before that I wanted to discuss briefly are:

• Software Practicum - this was my Graduate capstone course (which means I need this course to get my Masters so it was pretty important). In this course the professor basically proposed a project (in my case it was Microscopic Image Analysis Software) and we had to go off and create this product. We met weekly to discuss our problems and show our progress. To me, this was my first taste at agile programming. Sure it wasn't agile per se but it was close enough. What I liked most about this course was that we got to pick the language we wanted to code it in. We also were responsible for the documentation (only it wasn't all designed up front - agile...) and we had to present a usable user interface. There was a similar undergraduate course title "Software Engineering" where students had to come up with a game, design it, document it, and implement it. I think that due to the water fall nature of that course I was lucky I didn't take it.
• Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) - this was actually a pilot course given by the graduate center at CUNY. This was by far one of the most influential courses I took. The course spanned 2 semesters, the students were actually forced to go through an interview process to get accepted to this course and internships were promised at the end of this course. Naturally this seemed like a great idea to me, so I sent my resume and luckily got picked to become apart of this pilot. To avoid boring you to death I just want to point out the main things I learned during this class:
  • I got my first taste of Subversion, I had used Source Safe before.
  • We got picked by one of three major financial institutions to write a product and present to their board
  • I got my first taste of corporate America and saw how even the biggest financial institutions had terrible engineers
  All together this course was an amazing experience, and while I didn't score an internship I did get to present to the board of one of the top 5 investment banking companies. I think CUNY is still giving this course, so if you're a CUNY student I highly recommend it.
• Operating Systems - this course was terrible in general because the professor had not experience and she didn't know a for loop from an if statement... BUT the TA was amazing. He had us write a file system in Java. This was a course I took as an undergrad and it made me actually write code that I had to be able to deploy on the TA's box once I completed it. So that was my first taste of the deployment hell of our industry.

I'd like to see schools take more consideration when they build the curriculum's and make sure they have some real life courses that make you follow some sort of agile software development process in which you are expected to create a product that is ready to ship.

I'm ready for this.

a little scratchin' and we're off.

Catnip, that's right.

I'm bored with you.

I just realized 2007 breezed by, while it was successful it had its share of disappointment's and things I wish I could have done differently. I wish everyone a great 2008, may it be better than our best year and may we have time to do everything we need to do but more importantly everything we want to do.

I couple of songs to rain in the new year....

Just finished watching Next staring Nicolas Cage, Jessica Biel and Julianne Moore. While the movie was simply OK I couldn't completely ignore Jessica Biel's guns. Since her first days on screen on 7th Heaven through her role in Blade Trinity as Whistlers daughter Abigail Jessica has been working out quite a bit. Granted she is one of Hollywood's hottest actors (I wouldn't kick her out of bed...) but mama has to chill with the bicep workouts.

That said, there is a scene where Biel comes out of the shower with nothing but a towel and you have to wonder if that's in the script. It seems like every movie she's been in since Blade Biel has found herself in very revealing scenes. I have no problem with that at all but if she wants to be more than a hot-bod and a pretty face she might try to pull a Charlize Theron and go for an Oscar.

If you are still reading you're probably trying to figure out what the title has to do with the article... well... as I was reading through celeb-blogs I ran into an interesting picture I was hoping to get your feedback on. This is, in no way, a babe vs. babe but more like an celeb-ass vs. celeb-ass edition

So, left or right? Can you tell which is which?

I'm probably biased so I might as well throw in a little bonus for you... JB booty collection. Yawza.