DeveloperZen.com - Musing

Scott's latest post reminded me that I have a Google GuestMap too.
So go sign in to my GuestMap and let me know who you are (and where you're located )...
You can also read the map's GuestBook without watching a map...

Bill Gates already wasn't a fan of Apple's commercials, so I wonder what he'll think about the the latest installment where Apple makes fun of Vista's User Account Control pop-ups.
It just so happens, that the commercial debut comes as Gates appears at the RSA security conference in San Francisco...

Technorati : Apple, Humor, Mac, Microsoft, Security

I accidental came across the link to http://www.codeoasis.com/ when it was displayed as part of a blogger's description in bloggers wepart at http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/.

This text from the site made me smile:

These highly capable, extremely motivated individuals have chosen to lead a different life-style than that of the recent frantic years of the high-tech industry. They chose to live in the desert - allowing them to give the right attention to every line of code, while maintaining a healthy work-load.

Living in the desert and dedicating yourself to code... sounds like the geek version of monk orders doesn't it?

But if I can be serious for a moment, these guy's portfolio page looks pretty good and its actually nice to see some new companies with a different philosophy than what we're all used to...

When I think of it, its not much different than Palo Alto where high-tech companies can't build tall buildings and they're all spreaded around in many buildings surrounded by trees etc.

I'd rather Palo Alto over the Israeli desert though

Channel 10 (Israel) just showed Nimrod Harel's magic show where a guy apparently caught a bullet shot at him by some model with his teeth. The show ended with screen display saying the bullet catch is a very secret trick that requires special physical skills known only to very few...

Special physical skills known only to few?! Maybe that can fool the model that had to do the shooting in the show...
These guys really have to try harder because just Googling for "bullet catch" takes you to sites that explains the link.
Even wikipedia has this an entry with explanation and history of this trick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_catch

Nevertheless, don't try to follow up on this post at home!
Only those who posses special secret typing skills and vast knowledge of the world's web of information may attempt this dangerous task...

Technorati : Magic, Nimrod Harel, Social Networks, Wiki

There has been a lot of tagging around the blogsphere lately and I'm glad it didn't skip me
(because it means someone actually reads this blog ).
Anyway, I've been tagged by Eran so here's 5 things you probably didn't know about me:

1. Like Eran, I have never actually completed any formal degree. I've been studying at the open university since high school and I've got about 4 classes to take to finish a CS degree but I haven't been able to pass courses since I joined SAP. Hopefully I'll be able to get some academic work done on 2007

2. I'm the youngest person at work. I'm the youngest in the whole Duet team (probably not just at the location in Israel) and maybe in the entire lab in Israel (I've been at SAP for 2 years now and have yet to encounter anyone younger so that makes me pretty sure...). I'll be 25 on February 27th by the way...

3. I'm, a Monty Python addict. I know all the sketches and I've got most of the "flying circus" episodes on my HD. I wanted to go to Spamalot at Broadway but I was too late and couldn't get any tickets.

4. Although currently working at SAP on enterprise software (and liking it), I've always wanted to work in the gaming industry (which pretty much doesn't exist in Israel). I do hope I'll be able to fulfill this dream (or should I say, Goal) someday...

5. After the army I took a bartender class. I even had some gigs as a bar tender. My home contains amounts of alcohol that could stock up a small bar. I don't tend to drink much at home but it is nice to have all the materials available if I ever feel an urge for a cocktail... I'm also fond of cooking and I think the two relates.
The thought of creating food\drinks by mixing ingredients, spices etc.... Its art

Now on to passing the torch to 5 more bloggers:

• Ariel Ben-Horesh who hasn't written a single word on his blog ever since he opened it almost half a year ago. Now you have to write something!
• Dror Engel who hasn't written in a while...
• Lior who tends to write interesting stuff (and some nonsense too) at blogs.microsoft.co.il and haven't been tagged so far as far as I could tell.
• Yossi. Everyone else tagged him so I'll just join the tagging party...

I can't think of anyone else to tag so I'll stick with these 4. Anyway, if you haven't been tagged and reading this post makes you feel like writing 5 ridiculous bullets about yourself consider yourself tagged!

Have a happy 2007 everyone!

Technorati : blog, tag-you're-it, tag-you-are-it, tagged, tagging, weblog

Its been quite around here for a while but now I'm back!
India was great, California and New York were awesome and now I'm back at Israel with lots of new ideas and stuff to write about so expect some interesting posts on 2007

If anyone is interested in photos from my trip around the wold you can check out my Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekampf/

I decided to move my entire photos archive to Flickr so I got a pro account account and started uploading.
After almost 3 days of continuous uploading I've got most of my stuff, including all the photos from my trip to New Zeland up there so check it out...

I was just exploring the new Google Trends and I found some interesting search pattern.

"With Google Trends, you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often."

First, I decided to compare different programming environments and see which one is the "trendiest" (Google Trends: Java, .NET and ABAP):

This clearly shows that Java a lot "trendier" than .NET. It also shows no one uses ABAP
It also shows that India is way ahead the other countries which shows, in my opinion, the power of the software industry in India.

On the same note, I decided to drill down into the specific technologies and\or languages in the .NET environments and see what results I'll get there (Google Trends: .net, asp.net, C#, vb.net):

Again, India is way ahead the other countries. We can also see that C# is more popular that VB.NET.

And to conclude, I decided to check which one of the world's top software factories has the most hype on the net (Google Trends: Microsoft, Oracle, Google, SAP, IBM):

Google is by far the "trendiest" company on the net and I can't say its a surprise. I wonder what makes SAP so strong in India compared to other countries...

Technorati : .net, C#, Google, IBM, Java, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, abap, google trends, trends, vb.net
Del.icio.us : .net, C#, Google, IBM, Java, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, abap, google trends, trends, vb.net
Ice Rocket : .net, C#, Google, IBM, Java, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, abap, google trends, trends, vb.net

I found this very neat site for generating Technorati tags (as well as Flickr and Del.icio.us tags):
http://www.egmstrategy.com/ice/technorati-tag-generator.cfm

According to CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/pf/pay_hike_jobseeker/index.htm?cnn=yes

Guess I'm in the right job

2006 has started and its time to look and the goals and challenges I'm facing this year.
At SAP we have a process called PF (Performance Management) where each year we define our goals for the year with out managers and then review them during the year and at the end of the year to make sure we meet the goals we set for ourselves. And this process seems to work well, so why not use it outside of work too?
So, before defining my own goals I did some reading to find out what other people think of the subject.
One of the interesting posts I found was at lifehack.org about 10 ways to achieve your goals quicker and basically it says:

• Make all your dreams real by first identifying and then focusing on specific, tangible targets for what you want.
  
• Maintain at least one clearly defined goal for every major interest and role in your life.
  
• Set your goals so they are directly aligned with your life's mission, purpose and passion.
  
• Create goals high enough to ignite your spirit and inspire you to take action.
  
• Write down all your goals in specific, measurable detail.
  
• Absolutely, unconditionally commit to hitting each of your targets.
  
• Share your goals with others for mutual accomplishment.
  
• Set a whole series of related daily, weekly and long-term goals, complete with starting times and completion dates.
  
• Take 10 minutes every day to imagine how terrific it will feel when your goals are actually realized.
  
• Take an action step toward the attainment of at least one goal every day.

So, I decided to define my goals in several categories which are "Personal", "Blogging" and "Professional":

Personal Goals

• Living alone. My partner is living this year and going back to live at his parents.
  I will be staying in Ra'anana to live alone which is probably the biggest challenge this year...
  
• Read more books. And not just books about Computer Science\Math\etc.
  I have already started working on this by specifying reading lists (see Reading List #1).
  
• Exercise more. Whether its Gym or playing Squash, just do something at list twice a week.
  
• Travel. I plan on going to New Zealand for a month on March and I hope there will be
  some more traveling around the globe this year (maybe even sponsored by SAP )

Weblog Goals

• Avoid being a "links blog". For a long time all I did on this blog is link to other's material (posts, articles etc.).
  While this is useful and sometimes interesting I do not intend for this blog to simply be a list of links.
  I have a lot to write about and I intend to do a lot more actual writing a less plain linking this year...
  
• Get a wider audience. If I plan on writing things I want to have people reading mu stuff...
  I'm not sure if its an actual goal or just wishful thinking but I intend on trying to get some attention to
  my little spot on the web...
  

Professional Goals

• Continue my work at SAP.
  
• Start putting some effort into school! Need to finish the CS degree by the end of next year...
  This means I'll have to finish ~8 points this year.
  
• Get the main entry point to my personal web site (www.ekampf.com) designed and working.
  
• Continue doing presentations etc. for the IDF on my army reserve. Need to keep myself valuable
  so they won't send me to do guarding duties
  
• Get back to working on graphics (Managed DirectX) related projects
  
  • Continue Sharp3D.Math
    
  • Continue Sharp3D engine?
    

Related Links:

• 12 Habits in 2006
  
• 10 ways to achieve your goals quicker

Technorati : blog, blogging, goals, life hacking, lifehacks, performance, performance management
Del.icio.us : blog, blogging, goals, life hacking, lifehacks, performance, performance management
Ice Rocket : blog, blogging, goals, life hacking, lifehacks, performance, performance management

One picture is worth a thousand words:

I've accidently looked into my FeedBurner account and I've noticed a feature which allows me to set FeedBurner to automatically add my Amazon Associate ID
to any Amazon link on my feed.

This gave me the idea to implement this as a content filter in my dasBlog.
The basic idea is that when writing posts I could write the following syntax: $amazon(<ASIN number>,<Title>)
And it'll translate to a link to Amazon which contains my Amazon Associate ID and has the specified title.

To do that in dasBlog you have to define that the following regular expression: \$amazon\((?<asin>[\w\d]+),(?<title>[\w\s\d\(\)\']+)\)
Will be replaced by the following: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/${asin}/erankampfshom-20/">${title}</a>
(Unless you want me to get all your credit, you have to replace my bold associate ID with your own ).

Here are some examples as to how this works (not that I've omited the $ sign from the samples to make them visible):

• amazon(1740597664,Lonely Planet New Zealand (Lonely Planet New Zealand)) - $amazon(1740597664,Lonely Planet New Zealand (Lonely Planet New Zealand))
• amazon(1584503521,Game Programming Gems 5 (Game Programming Gems Series) (Hardcover)) - $amazon(1584503521,Game Programming Gems 5 (Game Programming Gems Series) (Hardcover))
• amazon(B0000A0MFJ,Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life) - $amazon(B0000A0MFJ,Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life)

"Kitty" is a street cat I've recently adopted.
He was also chosen to test Flickr's blogging ability and become the subject for the first-ever post from Flickr

Manual Update:
Apperantly Flickr does not set the Post's title correctly (this was originally posted by Flickr without a title and fixed by me)
and does not support categories

After hearing a lot of the buzz around Flickr I decided to open my own gallery and try it out.
Having an online web storage for photos could prove useful on my trip to New Zealand...
You can find my gallery at http://www.flickr.com/photos/93825643@N00/

Since both Flickr and dasBlog support the Blogger API, I can blog directly from Flickr which could be a useful feature...

I've noticed on Dror's blog that there's a new skype out there.
According to the web site it was actually released on January 5th.
Anyway, I've installed the new skype and you can now contact me:

Note to self: I should buy a Microphone and\or an Internet Camera already...

One of my goals for 2006 (full list on a future post) was to read more books and especially ones that do not directly relate to my work (meaning that books about programming and software development do not count). So here's a list of what I plan to read on the next 1-3 months:

Technorati : lifehacking, performance, performance management
Del.icio.us : lifehacking, performance, performance management
Ice Rocket : lifehacking, performance, performance management

Check out my ego calculated by the egoSurf engine:

Recent Google Result:
Recent Yahoo result:
Recent MSN result:

I've got 6 invitations to Messenger Live! I'll give them away to the first few who'll comment here...

Update 15/1/2006: Got no more invites left. Will update as soon as I get more...

Update 5/2/2006: Got 5 more invites.

I've purchased www.developerzen.com to act as my blog's domain name.
The www.ekampf.com domain name still acts as my main domain name and developerzen.com will specifically point to this blog.

Speaking on buying domain, I bought this domain at Yahoo. These guys are selling domain names hosting for 2.99$ a year, thats crazy...

Its the last day of 2005 and I thought I'd dedicate a post to summarize this year.

Job & Career

• 
  
• I left the IDF (!). Finally, After 3 years of service as 1 year as a part time consultant it was time to move on. I quit the IDF thinking about becoming a full-time student for a year and finish my degree but when I started getting job offers I knew that just staying home to study is not my thing...
  
• Got myself a new job at SAP Labs Israel.
  
• Moved into a new office at a building next to the main SAP building. I like this office a lot more than the ones on the main building.
  
• Got the "Mendocino" preview out, and on time!
  
• Dedicated about 2 weeks to army reserve duties. This was actually a great learning experience as I got the chance to lecture about .NET to a crowd etc.
  Building a good presentation and going through it is not as easy as it seems.
  
• Got held back on my CS degree studies. Lack of motivation, time and will.
  I'll have to do better this year (when I think of it, I can't do worse) and get this degree over with at last...

Finance

• 
  
• A new job and a new salary I now earn more than 4 times what I was making as a student in the IDF.
  
• "Work for 12 month a year, earn for 13" was the moto I tried to go by this year.
  I made some good investments on the stock market and made about 16%-20% profit (waiting for the bank report for an exact performance result) which means a lot more than a month's salary. I will certainly have to raise the bar for 2006...

Personal

• 
  
• I had a 1 week snowboarding vocation at Val Thorens (France).
  
• Moved to my own place at Ra'anana.
  
• Started playing Squash from time to time.
  
• Started reading books. Ones that are not directly related to my work like all the programming, game development etc. books that fill my library. The current objective and to read at list one such book each month and I think I'm keeping up with it so far...

Overall, it's been a tough year with lots of drastic changes and I hope 2006 will easier on me and on all of you too

Technorati : goals, lifehacking, performance, performance management
Del.icio.us : goals, lifehacking, performance, performance management
Ice Rocket : goals, lifehacking, performance, performance management

After reading this post at Dror's blog I decided that paying ~5$ a month for 3GB of storage is an awsom deal so I just signed up for a year.
This deal includes a free domain name registration so maybe I'll register a new domain name in addition to the already existing ekampf.com (I also need to find out how to point ekampf.com to the new host).

Anyway, brinkster still got their 50% off deal for another day so you should check it out if you're interested...

(Oh, and please use me as your referral if you decide to buy by using the following link )

Update (1/1/2006)

Turns out that on the Pro. package brinkster only support 1 (!?) ASP.NET application root which means I can't run my blog, gallery, etc.
Brinkster support claim I have to purchase the Developers package in order to have support for more than one application root.
The Developers package costs more than 2 times the Pro. package and I do not see any reason to pay that much when all I need is 3-5 application roots
on my current package.
I've sent an angry mail to Brinkster support but currently the situation doesn't look too good. Guess I'll keep my current host for now...

Update (4/1/2006)

Brinkster cancelled my account and gave me a refund. I got no response about the reasons why I left.
Too bad for Brinkster...

Ok so I found out whats the new link for my Google GuestMap.
You can find it in the following link:
http://www.mapservices.org/myguestmap/showguestmap.do?id=ekampf

Here is a screenshot for your convenience :

I got tired of editing Html in order to update my homepage so I switched to TiddlyWikki which allows simple html editing and fits perfectly to be used for my homepage.

I've also cleaned up my gallery of all the spam comments it conatined (2mb of spam!) and blocked comments to keep it clean.

I've been getting less traffic latelly, especially search engine referals.
The category reorganization last month probably broke some search engines links... I hope the site will get reindexed soon and back on the horse...

A new version of RSSBandit (1.3.0.38) has been released. Its my RSS reader of choice and I haven't seen anything better so far...

The new features include:

• NNTP Newsgroups support
• Atom 1.0 support
• Improved UI (and a new logo )

Download the new release here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=96589&package_id=103276&release_id=374130

Saw this on Oren's blog and thought of giving it a try too...

Which File Extension are You?

The Mendocino preview release is due soon and we're now entering crunch time!
This means long nights of debugging, integrating, LiveMeeting pizza\chinese food eating await...
Rejoice

About 2 weeks ago a friend of mine from the IDF asked me to come and give a two days presentations series about the new features in .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2005.
I liked this challenge... I never had to present to so many people (He said there would be at list 50 but I guess it was more like 30 or so...) and keeping such a crowd interested for 2 days of lectures (and finding out what to talk about in the first place) should be an interesting experience...

Here are the main topics I've presented in those two days:
1. What's new in C# 2.0.
2. Productivity Tips for Using Visual Studio .NET 2005.
3. Test Driven Development and Unit Testing.
4. Smart Clients - New Windows Forms 2.0 features.
5. Smart Clients - Mendocino and software trends (including Office12 demonstration)

Three important presentation rules\principals I've learned:

1. Know your audience.

Yes I know this is mentioned everywhere but I've learned how important this really is during the presentation of one of the soldiers who decided my presentation
of the new features in C# wasn't good enough because I dropped features such as Covariance\Contravariance and the global operator.
Be sure the crowd was fascinated by this new Covariance\Contavariance feature...
With no concrete demo or some real-life sample, and referring to the C# specs document to answer question it really fails in giving any information or arousing some interest.

2. Humor

A presentation is more than just some bullets on a PowerPoint slide. Humor and stories which relate to the material presented add life to the presentation, keep the audience focused and entertained while helping to convey the idea presented.
For example, in one of the PDC presentations I was watching as a preparation, the presenter made a "Stick it to them annoying VB guys" custom code snippet that acts like VB's dim keyword as a demonstration of using custom snippets. It's fun and it gets the point through...

3. System Setup

The guy whose computer I was using for the presentation had configured his IDE colors to look like Delphi (blue background, white fonts...). A personal choice of crazy color scheme, besides being annoying (or maybe because it is...) interferes with the information you're trying to present.
I had to reset that to default so that everyone will be looking at the IDE they're used to.
Besides that, you need to make sure your system is setup and ready in advanced. I brought a ready Team System VPC to present Team System stuff but it took us more than a day to get that copied to the computer I was using (army dumb security stuff).

Overall I've recieved a very good feed back over these two days. Even better than I expected...
So I guess it was worth the effort

Update:
Fixed the link to the presentation...