noam's blog.a.lish

This came up in a thread at work and I had to mention it cause it's absolutely great... You can get yours from Amazon, I had no idea they sold food.

Would this be a good gift for a child? Wouldn't it confuse them a little?

Saw this on Facebook and was just amazed. I'm not sure how authentic the entire thing is but it's hot... very very hot.

Capoeira + Soccer @Rio = HOT.

Sure there have been a lot of posts about this deal, and now that I have time I read most of them. It doesn't surprise me that Google looks at this deal as "good for competition" and it doesn't surprise me much that Yahoo! top exec's rushed to agree on this deal due to the implications of giving up their "baby" (search). That said, out of all the articles I've read about this deal this following post has my favorite take on things:

Here's what I think of this deal - it stinks. Microsoft isn't marrying Yahoo, they're just getting her pregnant, setting her up in a nice apartment and telling her not to talk to any other guys.

Forget the flowerly language about how this deal "strengthens Yahoo's competitive position" (Yahoo press release) or "is good for competition" (Google blog post). Both are flat out lies. The deal crushes any notion of a competitive search advertising market and turns Yahoo's search and search marketing efforts into the undead.

Bottom Line

Yahoo has pissed off shareholders and a looming meeting - they can't ignore reality much longer. And reality says Yahoo's future is bleak. They continue to lose market share, they have serious brain drain and morale has never been lower.

I can't help but wonder what the digital advertising playing field would have looked like had Yahoo! taken the (first offered - they had the opportunity to buy DoubleClick before Google or Microsoft were even involved) DoubleClick Deal. Would that have given them the boost they needed? Would that have forced Google to compete against Microsoft in a bidding war to acquire Yahoo! ? Or, perhaps most realistically, would that have created a more even digital advertising war between the, then 3 now 2, major players in the industry.

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 couldn't be happier to see my team back in the finals after a hiatus of 4 years (that year was harsh as they lost to Detroit in 5). The Lakers made a couple of great decisions this year in trading for Pau Gasol and getting veteran point guard Derek Fisher (D-Fish). With Kobe receiving his first MVP award he has a chance to do what only Michael Jordan did... win MVP, win the NBA Championship, and win a gold medal at the 2008 Olympic games. I'll be happy with the first two...

A very senior exec at my office mentioned he might take me to a Celtics vs. Lakers game if it happened... let's keep our fingers crossed... and Michael, if you're reading this, start making some phone calls!

Ran into an interesting article which I thought I should share... The premise of this article is a programming language is as popular as the length of it's authors facial hair... crazy right? (excuse the pretty bad english)

One sight at [Bjorn] Stroustrup's face is enough to understand, that C++ much more successful then other languages.

Not the law is clear? There is a beard - there is a success. There is no beard - you are guilty.

Eifell, Scheme, Cecil, Haskell, Erlang - great languages, but no one except profs are working with them

The "catch" is in moustaches. Perl is the one more language widespread almost as the BASIC and having almost same bad glory. It has written Larri Wall. Look what moustaches he has.

The authors of others script languages have no moustaches. Ruby and the Python is better, than Perl, but meet where less often than Perl. There is, however, a hope for Van Rossum, suddenly will grow a beard. It is not necessary to count on Mr. Matsumoto - at Japanese the beard grows badly.

Could it be that the actual connection is between personal hygiene and nerdiness?

p.s. The follow up article can be found here

Watch out Bar, Miri is right behind you... The 25 year old model from Tel Aviv is one of many up and coming Israeli models. She finds men who cook very sexy... good luck.

A little something for JK.

Quicktime just not cutting it? Feel like you have to download a gazillion codecs? You don't. I'd like to introduce VideoLAN's FREE open source VLC media player (download it here). Turns out this bad ass media player does it all, just download, unpack, and you're ready to enjoy video and audio in a sweet wrapper.

Some key product points:

• It is a free cross-platform media player
• It supports a large number of multimedia formats, without the need for additional codecs
• It can also be used as a streaming server, with extended features (video on demand, on the fly transcoding, ...)

For you computer programming geeks wizards out there

Being an open source application has its benefits, Google's "Summer of Code 2008" picked up some projects and have many capable engineers working on new stuff.

The VideoLAN project was assigned 14 slots by Google. 10 of those went to VLC related projects and 4 to x264 projects. Official results are available on Google's website.

VideoLAN's main site http://www.videolan.org/ is a good source for more information such as product feeds and other interesting projects.

This article is more of a reference article but do read on if you're interested in Child Selector performance. I read this article and it pointed out some interesting things that I thought should be up on the blog... so here goes.

The skinny is that child selectors are a major performance issue.

This seemed to make sense, but to me I needed some sort of proof rather than just being told it’s that way by someone, so over the last two days I’ve tried two approaches to see if I can replicate the issue.

The first one was rather a half-assed idea that afterwards seems fundamentally flawed as a benchmark.

So I took a new approach which does seem to return some valid and rather interesting findings, particularly regarding Safari and Firefox 3 and how they react to child selectors and performance.

The tests show that there is slow down using child selectors over direct class name declarations in IE6, IE7 and Safari 3. Safari 3 being the most impacted by child selectors. Firefox 2 has some impact, and Firefox 3 doesn’t seem to be impacted at all.

That said, this is a very extreme test, it is not often you’d have 20,000 class definitions in a single page or that all of them would use 4 levels of child selector.

This article has been published under the influence (of beer-pong and beer-tap at work!)

This is kind of a javascript puzzler that I can't take personal credit for but I thought it was quite interesting.

What do the following evaluate to in Javascript:

  null < 0
  null == 0
  null <= 0

Think about it for a second before scrolling down to the answers. No really, try to solve it first.

while you wait for it... (Sia - The Girl You Lost To Cocaine)

Solution

  null < 0   --> false
  null == 0  --> false
  null <= 0  --> true

Solution Explained

If you got the correct answers and you know why they are correct you can stop reading now and give yourself a pat on the shoulder. I didn't get the last one correct and I wasn't sure why...

It turns out that "<" is the fundamental relationship operator in javascript. That basically means that hybrid relationship operators are translated by the interpreter to a "<" operation with the addition of other fundamental operators like !. So how does this make null <= 0 you ask? x <=y is calculated as !(y < x) and since 0 < null still evaluates to false negating that result returns true.

Ever had a boss or peer who types with two fingers? Has that ever bothered you a little? Do you have a boss or peer that thinks they're all that because they can type a gazilion words per second? Do you think you're faster than them?

Now you can solve all of your problems with one site. Give your annoying single-finger-typer the gift of speed typing, prove to your peers that you are the fastest typer west of the Nile. Take the challenge, I did.

Looks like type racer is based on open social which means you're going to see this on almost every social network you can imagine (think Facebook, orkut, igoogle, etc.)

I'm loving this game, and it's a healthy workout. The should have a "calories burnt" next to the wpm counter... that would be awesome.

Israel is officially 60 years old today. The last couple of years have been tough but Independence day is always a day of optimism, a day where the Israeli people remember what they went through to become an independent state and what challenges await.

Sunset over The tower of David in Jerusalem

A tiny country with endless talent, constant turmoil, and a full history celebrates today. Happy birthday!

Google Israel