*Fairy tales and anecdotes*
*Both dangerous for amateurs* [1]
When it feels like I'm boiling oceans I spin up Doomtree's Marathon. 6 verses of poetry with amazing beats.
.. and if you missed Doomtree at SXSW you can see them tonight. [2]
#nokings _crash y'alls server..._
[1] http://
[2] http://
It has a Dory-like system where listeners can up-vote the questions they want answered. I have to wonder if this system combined with crowdfunding could provide an alternate funding model for in-depth news reporting.
Even the SF Chronicle is exploring similar techniques:
http://
- First time I've seen Recruiters targeting expat folks. What next, will they contact my family to put pressure on me to move back?
- Including a Youtube video in your emails is a good way to get your message visibility in Inbox. Even if it's this dorky thing.
- It also appears that Target makes it's recruiters use their DJ name. In da house with *DJ Luke Doubler* and his sidekick *Talent Scout*.
http://
---
Paul,
My name is Luke Doubler and I’m a talent scout for Target Corporation.
I’m reaching out to you because I see that you went to the U of M and I’d like to see if you’d consider coming back.
I found your name on your GitHub profile (http://
Our corporate office located downtown Minneapolis has an engineer leadership position open in a very agile/scrum development team building products that will propel Target.com as the premier online retailer.
Would you be open to connecting Paul via phone? Your full stack development experiences appears to be exactly what we’re seeking. I can make myself available based on your schedule.
I look forward to connecting.
Today's inspiration: *Curiosity enabled Products*
So happy to work at a place that values and enables curiosity.
GPMAA and now Youtube Music generate curiosity. What's this song? Oh who's that? What are they saying? *Waynes World III*??!?
Google Search satisfies my curiosity.
And what do you know it's a song about curiosity: _I think about anything and everything, like a child_.
http://
_Je chante et je pleure, comme un enfant_
_Je joue à me faire peur, comme un enfant_
_Je pense tout et son contraire, comme un enfant_
_Je danse, j'ai le coeur à l'envers, comme un enfant_
https://
Digging into some Sharing patterns wrt to Reddit.
This reddit thread:
https://
Posted by some random user:
https://
Contains a link to a post by an Android Police author and prolific G+ user:
https://
That link in Reddit was clicked on 28k times (probably much more since these logs are only web requests..)
select top(request,15) as h, count(*) as c from
gfstmp_oz.tmp_oz_fe_weblog.20150927 where AppsFrameworkExtension.action_class = 'PermalinkedUpdate' and referer like '%reddit.com%';
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------+
| h | c |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------+
| GET /+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/T9fdFDBp1fd HTTP/1.1 | 28917 |
| GET /+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/hpc36iQuRSR HTTP/1.1 | 3665 |
| GET /u/0/108441771977176576567/posts/QQNFtAeEjTY HTTP/1.1 | 2088 |
| GET /100098741112799154035/posts/Lavu4mVTvpX HTTP/1.1 | 1899 |
| GET /+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/bA4ryjrT9MJ HTTP/1.1 | 1827 |
*Someone send Artem a cookie, or some G+ swag...*
https://
Pretty close to just adding this to my .bashrc:
alias xargs=parallel
I'm sure this will make some people nostalgic..
_Our October board report will be due in a couple days (Oct 7th) and due to the lack of activity with the project over the past few quarters (and general decline for even longer than that) I think it is time Shindig gets moved to the attic. Please respond with your vote, thanks!_
Whenever I do nasty Infrastructure work I repeat a BASF mantra about making the products that you use better...
Stronger, tougher, more durable, and yes, more colorful.
Today's inspiration: *Thunderball* by the Man in Black.
h/t to the CBC's Day 6 which covers rare Bond theme songs and likes SEO'd URLs.
I had a support call last night and it went really well.
Thermostat displayed E24 error code. The diagnostic tool on the web site was well done. I got to the end where a support ticket was opened. Called in and went through diagnosing the faceplate. At the end it wasn't the thermostat, the furnace had a faulty safety sensor that caused the fan to run and cut the voltage to 1v.
Suggestions:
- The clunkiest part of the process was telling the rep my email address. Also the email I entered in the ticket was different than my Nest account email.
- Could we surface the diagnostic tools on the Nest App? Tried on mobile web and it wasn't working well so then I was running between my desktop and the Nest.
- There's a good opportunity to refer to HVAC repair technicians (Nest Pros?). I spent an hour calling around to find someone that would come out at 9pm in the evening. [Of course this is hard in general; Google search really failed here too. Yelp at least had an 'open now' filter on their business listings.]
In any case thanks again for the good support experience - I hope other teams can learn from it.
http://
Googlers sharing to G+ with googleplex URLs will see much improved previews. And yes, that means you can now start a G+ Collection of favorite Memegen links .
But it also means that many other internal sites support better sharing. For example, the devsite.googpleplex.com staging site you see below allows for testing G+ web integration before a prod deploy. It also means Teams, Ariane, EasyOKRs, YAQs and more don't generate random login.corp page previews.
That said, note that not all googleplex sites are supported. The default acl for Googleplex requires a Machine Cert, which G+ doesn't have. If you want your googleplex web app to work well with this new feature you can follow the guidelines here:
https://
Once that's done you should follow the G+ Snippet guidelines below to generates awesome preview titles/descriptions and images.
Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about this feature. Happy Sharing!
Yesterday 165 people clicked through to G+ from just from this Pin.
According to referrer analysis Pinterest traffic to G+ is starting to overtake Twitter traffic.
[Note: I dare you to find this video using Google Search. I used search.twitter.com to find this]
This is a new Facebook TV Commercial set to House of Pain's Jump Around. Of interest:
- square aspect ratio (on tv it's on a seamless white background)
- there is no opengraph markup on this page. No markup at all really.
- Except for meta tags for: https://
- It makes me want to see if it's possible to animate our own app UI at 60fps.
https://
50% increase in sharing actions.
https://
Share link replaced Copy Link in the Y release. The chart below shows both actions and the the combined activity.
The +1 button uses SVG to render the G+1 you see on the button. When I was adding the new logo I could tell that it was going to be much smaller. Turns out you can actually see the effects in our graphs. Over 512 bytes per response savings, which adds up at 100kqps. That's 50Mbps transit. [Can someone translate that to milliSWEs for me?]
In the future web-archeologists will analyze html to identify the age of a page by the widgets they include.
Here you have a web site built circa 2012 with the very rare plusone button with a G+ on a grey background.
Today's Inspiration: Bay Area Funk Compilations
If you're a Bay Area transplant like me you owe it to yourself to learn a little of the musical history of the place you live. I bought these on CD a while back and it had very educational liner notes. I wish we could get that into digital form somehow.
Sadly volume 1 is not available on Play Music. Volume II is. Recommended.
And here's some details on volume 1...
_On this first volume of Bay Area Funk 16 tracks represent the best of the infamous Bay Area scene. Ranging from the boogaloo and shing-a-ling sound of Marvin Holmes and the Uptights to the psychedelic funk-jazz of P-I-R-Square. The compilation covers the period from 1967 to 1976 and is packed with music from the key originators and characters including a 12 year old Little Denice produced by blues legend Jimmy McCracklin, rhythm and blues hero Rodger Collins, KSOL radio station director "Hard Punching" Herm Henry, and Sugar Pie Desanto, former opening act for James Brown who is still pulling back-flips on-stage even in her late 60s._
https://
Things are still a little rough but I'm finding value in the reports and the cleanup CLs it helps me generate. See the doc below if you want to play.
You can see an ugly sample report at
and here's a partial list of CLs that Cargocult generated:
https://
Fail to pay down your technical debt? Let _The Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation_ remove your OWNERS files.
I jest, I jest...
When I search for a Phone (say Sony Xperia) show the music videos where it's been product placed.
This Avril Lavigne vid must be the worst yet. The video starts with "oh, my new Sony phone is ringing!".
Also: I wonder if Forrester includes these payouts in total digital ad spend?
I didn't realize that the crazy Chiat Day "virtual office" concept happened in our Google LA offices.
I'm reading _Tog on Design_ (1996) since it contains so many eerily accurate predictions mixed in with some totally wrong ones.
More details here: http://
Till then there's plenty of interesting Tog reading...
https://
When I walk into the office I see row after row of screens, empty and lonely. I want to change that. I want a world where ambient passive consumption helps eliminate the blank screen.
Solving one piece of this puzzle is Malika's intern project. It starts with rich, compelling, G+ Android Daydream support. If time allows we may be able to add interesting things like:
* Interactive hooks, voice action (Choose your own adventure!)
* Whisper/Copresence support
* Kiosk mode, add QR codes or NFC support
* Vendor support,
* Rich Video/Audio
If you're looking into something like this we'd love to hear more. (I did some searching and didn't turn up much other than http://
*Autoawesome CLs* - Project Cargocult
I'm going to formalize/automate all the dirty hacks I use to generate hundreds of CLs. Wish me luck, and I'd love suggestions/feedback.
Driverless cars / sentient station wagons circa 1984
http://
Just got the final Second Opinion report and I'm quite impressed. [See http://
_Finally, if one can outpace the innovations in cancer that are taking place right now, survival may actually be substantially better._
If you're considering this service please let me know. We're happy to share our report, just ask. For everyone else here's an outline of what's included.
Expert Selection Process 2
Letter from Physician Case Manager 3
Summary of Clinical History 4
Questions to the Expert 20
Report by Vijayakrishna K. Gadi, MD, PhD 21
Report by Komal Jhaveri, MD 28
Curriculum Vitae for Vijayakrishna K. Gadi, MD, PhD 33
Curriculum Vitae for Komal Jhaveri, MD 37
Legal Terms 40
Not sure what's more annoying -- waiting 1.5h for Kaiser to burn radiology CDs or realizing that I actually didn't have a working CD *reader* at home.
Managed to get something working:
Parts:
- 1 SATA<->PATA converter from old server
- old ATX power supply
- my trusty Rackable home server, w/ internal AHCI adapter
- An ancient Sony CD drive. [Broken]
- A CD drive pulled from an old AMD K6 tower [working]
And of course 1 of the CDs is defective and I'll have to get that again. oof.. CDs deserve to die.
*Free to be you and me* [in 2015?]
[apologies for the banjo earworm...]
Just finished the Unconscious Bias self study. It brought me back to age 9 and how these songs and videos (and other positive experiences) formed who I am.
I wonder what a 2015 version of FTBYAM would be like? The ideas are good, but it feels really dated. Who'd be today's Marlo, Rosy, MJ, or New Seekers?
... was my response to Julie's oncologist giving us the bad news that she has breast cancer that has spread to her bone marrow. It certainly explains the bleeding, the bruising and the anemia which required multiple transfusions.
No treatment plan yet (tests, and more tests..), but it looks like my future will involve lots of WFH where H == hospital. I'm going to do whatever I can to improve the 1-2 year survival time odds.
I'm interested in hearing from you if:
- You have dealt with Kaiser's Cancer care and treatment. tips please!
- You have 2nd opinion referrals.
- You have a Caregiver story -- how did it impact you and your career?
Thanks again to everyone that's offered support and flexibility. Googlers are the best, most supportive people in the whole world. Proud to work for this company and with you all.
I don't have my #firstgoogleremail - but I do have the email that started the ball rolling towards my eventual employment. Seven weeks later I started at Google.
*Date*: 8/7/10
*Subject*: Interesting moves
_I'm intrigued the recent social moves coming out of Google and wonder if there's some part for me in all of this, either from the inside or from the outside._
_Truth be told, I'm not getting my "change the internet for the better" satisfaction at the moment even with the independent time I spend on Opensocial/Shindig/OAuth._
_Would you like to have a short chat in the next week or two?_
*Thirteen Ways To Save Orkut* February 2004
_With its integrated personal, social, and business functions, Orkut has an opportunity to outstrip it competitors—but only if its creators make smart choices that support the genuine needs of real people._
http://
*You might be a Googler if...*
You start writing a postmortem when you arrive at the ER.
So. Many. _Areas for Improvement_
#protip if you're going to need dental/medical treatment do it in an area where lots of old rich people live. #medicaltourism
Note: All is well now, we extended our stay and Julie is recovering.
Some feedback on Collections after actually using them for realzies:
- The aspect ratio of the cover image is really hard to deal with. You can't crop regular images easily and you can't letterbox easily.
- I'd like to make a collection as 'Draft' so I can get it looking nice before I send it out to the world.
- I'd love to see a 'People mentioned this collection' in the sidebar. [and other aggregates, like places, hashtags, maybe a word cloud?]
- I wish I could back-date things. Or at least allow for manual ordering.
- What about Pinned/Hero Post for a Collection?
- Will public collections have non-obfuscated URLs?
- Do we filter these oddball urls for naughty words?
*Ursquake* March 2010
@113057531893316771155 states
_The social web is revolutionizing the world, and this is our chance to create what will be the most useful and most used set of socially connected products in the world, with the best user controls on privacy and data portability. We have an incredibly strong starting position. It’s rare that we’re being given an opportunity to have such a big impact in such a short time, so lets seize it!_
Not sure where to get feedback for this so tossing into the ether...
I've been getting many PM interviews for Technical Hat; I wonder what others think of this line of questioning?
- We have a SMB with 1000 devices and 20 servers
- These machines generate log files (1st question, does candidate know what a log file is?)
- Your product needs to meet the needs of the following users
- Sysadmins need to be able to diagnose problems, do postmortems.
- Auditors need to enforce rules on system usage
- A security team wants to detect intrusions, malware etc.
I then ask the candidate to ask clarifying questions and try to get them to give me any/all of the following through progressive probing:
- Min viable features of the product
- Do they suggest graphs? notifications? email alerts?
- What about user provisioning? Admin features?
- What kind of UI? Web? Mobile? Command line?
- Search?
- A high level technical design showing how the we get from Logs -> UI
- Push vs pull?
- Where/when does parsing happen?
- Technical
- How do you store the data? How do you transform it? Batch?
- What database? How many QPS?
- Redundancy? Failover?
- On site / off site?
- Insights
- Does the candidate understand privacy/security concerns? (Mention wipeout, retention for the auditor use case)
So far I've gotten some decent responses, but most fall into the run reports on files and store those.
For the good candidates we are able to progress to phase II where we design for a multinational fortune 500 scenario.
So WDYT? Good question?
PMs? How do you think you'd do on my question?
Was discussing potential for location-based sharing and remembered this gem. Despite all the sucky things happening I'm still excited about what's possible in the future.
My first dev job in 1991 required that I do at least 4h of phone support and 4h of walk-in support a week. Feeling user pain and answering the same dumb questions over and over made me a better developer and also led to a bunch of innovation:
- Mainframe Mail Woes? Develop SLIP/PopMail, give away on floppy
- Xmodem problems? Add hqx attachment support.
- Need access to Apple's techinfo CD? Get it via Gopher.
- Indepth howtos? Publish newsletters like you see below.
You don't have to answer the phone to help people today. You can engage externally on mailing lists, on G+ and more. Just remember to follow the guidelines in http://
About a year ago I did a one-day seminar called _Managing Through Change_. It was actually pretty good and helped me understand how the human brain treats stressful transitions.
Sadly the course isn't offered, but there is some pretty decent self-instruction available here:
https://
https://
After today I think I should get this..
domain name appears to be available too..
Hi Paul,
Long time no see! Hope all is well with you. Have been trying to reach someone in engineering at Google to see if there might be interest in acquiring my company. Would be cool to catch up sometime, please let me know what you think!
Here's some more info regarding our company / technology:
....
XXXXX is fully bootstrapped, we have no debt and no additional shareholders (just the two of us). The company was recently incorporated, so a transaction would be straightforward. We are both versatile generalists in our respective fields with lots of experience innovating hands-on as well as managing teams. And we’d love an opportunity to demo our tech with anyone who’s interested!
Replacing static HashSet<String> with Java 7 string switch?
Has anyone investigated whether Java 7 switch is more memory efficient than HashSet<String> or ImmutableSet<String>? I think it might be. Read on....
I ask because HashSet is one of the more bloated java collection classes. It uses 32 bytes for each used entry + an array for the capacity. For example the follow
ing HashSet uses 128 bytes (2*32 + 16 * 4):
private static final HashSet<String> FOO = new HashSet<>();
foo.add("a")
shpub note --category=googplus --syndication=https://plus.google.com/107786897865850743842/posts/VPYQiMunRRY --published="Mon Dec 29 12:22:44 PM PST 2014" --name="" - <<EOF
Replacing static HashSet<String> with Java 7 string switch?
Has anyone investigated whether Java 7 switch is more memory efficient than HashSet<String> or ImmutableSet<String>? I think it might be. Read on....
I ask because HashSet is one of the more bloated java collection classes. It uses 32 bytes for each used entry + an array for the capacity. For example the follow
ing HashSet uses 128 bytes (2*32 + 16 * 4):
private static final HashSet<String> FOO = new HashSet<>();
foo.add("a")
foo.add("b");
boolean isFoo(String s) { return FOO.contains(s);}
We can replace that with:
boolean isFoo(String s) {
switch (s) {
case "a":
case "b":
return true;
default:
return false;
}
}
Java 7 transforms this code into something like this:
switch (s.hashCode()) {
case -1234:
return s.equals("a");
case -55999:
return s.equals("b");
default:
return false;
}
Which maps to a tableswitch or lookupswitch. Squinting it appears that you'd need the following for each entry:
tableswitch:
per-entry: hashcode + result value (8 bytes)
equals test: 4 opcodes (16 bytes)
So it would appear that you have 24bytes/entry.
Performance would be limited by the JVM/Dalvik/Art implementation of tableswitch which can be O(n)
Also obligatory reference to:
http://
Farewell.
After a 4 month battle against cancer we made that hard yet logical decision to end the fight. Tommy didn't visit Google often, but he always enjoyed the attention, laying in the grass, and walking the trails nearby.
Thanks to everyone that put up with my last minute cancellations for vet visits and the extra time I spent tending to his needs in his final months.
The next time you ignore a few deadline exceededs ask yourself: Where are the people affected on the participation curve. Often they're the ones with thousands of blocked people, tons of posts and +1s and *your most valuable users*. Call 'em whales if you like, but do not ignore them.
_[from a survey I received from TiVO today]_
We are considering creating a special segment of the TiVo Advisors panel to explore TiVo subscribers' usage of mobile technology and how it relates to your enjoyment of TV and other media. Everyone who participates in this exclusive segment of the panel will receive ongoing rewards based on actual participation (not a monthly sweepstakes).
This ground-breaking research will help us understand the ways mobile, television, digital, social, and other media are viewed, used, and shared by TiVo subscribers. Your participation will have a direct impact on how entertainment and information is delivered to consumers today and in the future.
To participate in this exclusive group, you will be required to download and continually run an app on a qualified mobile device (up to three devices per panelist). The app runs in the background of your device (in other words, you do not have to interact with the app to receive rewards).
Qualified devices include:
Android™ smartphones and tablets that run Android version 4.0 or greater, and are not rooted;
Kindle Fire HD, but not the first generation Kindle Fire;
iPhone® 5, iPads® and iPod touch® devices that run iOS version 5.0 or greater.
Earlier iPhones are not supported at this time.
The app is a small mobile application (about 3.3 megabytes) which is not intended to interfere with your web, app, wireless phone, or battery usage. Once installed, you should never need to re-activate the app.
At this time, we'd like to get your initial thoughts about this idea. If we choose to proceed, we'll send out more information in the next few months.
*Wanted*: Location start and end in Calendar
I think we can do a better job of mapping travel in Calendar if we allowed Events to have *begin* and *end* locations.
For example, I have a GBUS entry in my calendar. Part way through my ride I'm getting cards telling me time to the start point.
I quickly scanned buganizer and didn't see an FR there -- but I think this would really help for happy hour.
-----
Another crazy idea -- according to the https://
