Author Archives: liad

How (Not) To Repair A Phone With Water Damage

True story:

A friend’s wife dropped her iPhone in the toilet. Following our advice she put the phone in a bowl of rice (it really works).

An hour later her mom came by, saw the rice on the kitchen counter, realized its there for lunch, and poured it into a pot with boiling water.

The iPhone didn’t make it.

The rice tasted ok.

What Applications Do I Use on my new Macbook Air?

It was about time to upgrade my 2009 Macbook Pro, and the new 13″ Macbook Air seemed just the right upgrade choice (with 256 SSD drive, 8GB memory and OSX Mountain Lion).

First impression: the Macbook Air is blazing fast and it’s screen is superb.

A new computer is always a good cleanup time. I never auto-migrate from a previous machine, but reinstall everything from scratch.

So, this is a good time as ever to list the applications that made it to the new machine. I may have forgotten to install a few, but this is the initial list:

General:

  • Google Chrome. The best browser in the market.
  • Apple iWork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote). I tried using Microsoft Office in my previous Mac, yet they were running so slow I switched to the Mac alternative. I mainly use Keynote, which beats Powerpoint; Numbers and Pages are ok apps that do the work for me.
  • Dropbox. For all my file sharing needs.
  • Kindle. The OSX version of Amazon’s reading app, where I purchase all my digital books.
  • Task Paper. A very efficient note taking app I’ve been playing with recently.
  • Skype. I hate their application, which is slow and bulky, but I still need it as a communication tool.
  • Team Viewer. For the 24/7 support when my grandma’s computer starts misbehaving.
  • True Crypt. Open source disk encryption software. I’m paranoid about my data.

Coding stuff:

  • iTerm2. Excellent terminal emulator (you probably don’t need it if you are not writing code).
  • Textmate.  An excellent text editor for coders.
  • Sequel Pro. MySql database management.
  • Balsamiq. The easiest sketching app in the market.
  • SvnX. Source control.
  • Base. SQLite3 database editor.
  • Various Ruby on Rails stuff.

I think the most interesting finding was just how few applications I really need. In fact, I could achieve almost all my daily tasks with browser based applications alone. Once, changing a computer took at least a full workday of copying documents, configurations and installing applications. Today, it takes less than two hours. Unless you blog about it.

Does Microsoft Stand a Chance?

“Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!”.  Steve Ballmer’s stage performance was a massive Internet hit and emphasized how important is the developer eco-system for Microsoft.

Why are developers so important? Simply put, An Operating System (Windows, OSX, Linux) is a form of a marketplace, just like eBay. On one side there are developers (the “sellers”), and on the other side are the “buyers”, i.e., customers who buy software. The better the marketplace is (i.e., the higher number of paid transactions), the more sought after it would be and the company enabling the marketplace would generate higher revenues from operating system sales. Because operating systems are not compatible with one another, the history of computing shows that in many cases, the winner takes it all (Where are Novell, Sun, Silicon Graphics and their likes today? Mainly in Silicon Valley history books)

Two phenomena have reshuffled the landscape completely in the last couple of years – the rise of the iPhone (and Android) and the continuous momentum of the open source movement (that was ignited by Linux massive success). Suddenly, Microsoft lost its dominance and stopped being the first choice for developers.

In 2007 I founded Delver. What did we build our company with?

  • Windows workstations and laptops
  • Dedicates server running Microsoft Exchange and Active-Directory (so ridiculously expensive)
  • Microsoft Office and Microsoft Visual Studio – all very expensive products (licenses cost hundreds of dollars per employee, per year)
  • A combination of Unix machines and Windows servers in our production environment (I would estimate 80% of our codebase was Asp.net vs. 20% Java)

What products are we using in our current startup, Dynamic Yield?

In the office, we use

  • Google Apps for emails, documents and calendar
  • Dropbox for file sharing
  • Highrise for CRM
  • Eclipse code editor (Personally, I am very content with TextMate on my Mac)

In production, we use

  • Dedicated Dual-Xeon linux monsters (hosted in 100tb)
  • Amazon AWS
  • Cotendo (Akamai) as a CDN
  • Our customer-facing application was written in Ruby on Rails (by me! At least initially, I was quickly demoted to a CEO role once Igal arrived)
  • Apache servers (soon to be changed with nginx)
  • MySql database and HBase for our big data needs.
  • Code written in Php, Python, Javascript and Java.

Who is noticeably missing from this list? you guessed it right, the guys from Redmond. And the sad thing? we never even once contemplated using a Microsoft product for any of the tasks we perform, in the office or in our server farms. They are just irrelevant for our work routines, and that’s something Steve Ballmer should be very worried about.

Platform Wars

Epilog: there is one point were we spend a lot of time with Microsoft products – debugging and making sure our front-end code works well in the nightmarish IE 7 and IE 8 browsers.

And finally, because I really like (for real! no cynism) Steve Ballmer, here is a another great clip of his:

A Kafka Art Story Involving an Oil Painting and an Eagle

Sometimes, inheriting a piece of art can cause you lots of trouble.

NY Times brings a catch-22 story about the heirs of a NY art dealer who inherited a 1959 work by Rauschenberg called “Canyon“.

The story goes like this: Because the work includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, it is a crime to sell it. So, what’s the value for tax purposes? Well, it’s illegal to sell it, so they heirs claim it is worth $0. And what about the US tax authorities? Well, it is a masterpiece by a famous painter, so they appraised it at $65 million and demand a $29 million estate tax payment.

My recommendation on solving this:

Option 1:
Sell only the Canvas part of the painting for $65 million, in a “buy canvas, get free eagle” deal. And there you have it – you sell the painting with the eagle, in a fully legal way.

Option 2:
Cut the painting in two (including the eagle), send it to the IRS. Claim that you overpaid your taxes (estate tax is 45%), and demand the 5% back in cash. You just cost the IRS ~$3M in tax returns. FTW.

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