Spare time activities
Filed under: zemanta — bostjan @ 21:28 28. Feb, 2008
setting: headquarters@8pm. There is still a couple of Zemantors left wandering around the office. Someone cryies out:
CTO: “Ha! found it!”
UI: “what?”
CTO: “Look, I’ve found a bug in the API or in the documentation of the API”
UI: “put it in the bugtracker”
CTO: “not ours, in Flickr…”
Demo impressions
Filed under: zemanta — bostjan @ 20:36 30. Jan, 2008
I thought I’ll be able to do some live blogging from the conference, but unfortunately, I’ve been taken back by the famous high-tech conference virus - lack of bandwidth. The only conference where I could use wireless efficiently was LeWeb3, kudos to them!
Otherwise, Demo.com is quite a ride, partly because of density and diversity of companies presenting revolutionary products, partly because of a great venue in the middle of the dessert and golf courses (note the oxymoron), and partly because of very interesting people who are gathered here and happy to discuss the future of technology while sipping coffee and waiting for the next demo.
We were very proud to see our good friends from UK launching their next generation collaboration platform here - check Huddle.net, they’re great! Among other new services, I can suggest ribbit, xtranormal, hubdub, youchoose, and Sprout.
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Off to Le Web 3
Filed under: london, zemanta — andraz @ 18:30 9. Dec, 2007
We are wrapping up our London experience and going to Le Web 3 in Paris next week! If you would like to meet us there, please drop me a mail!
We are quite excited about Le Web since everyone is saying how good it was last year. We are presenting there also.
In other news after countless issues we finally moved our private beta service to a hosted server, out of our living room. Hopefully we’ll open up our web page a little bit more later today.
See you at LeWeb3!
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Quality assurance
Filed under: technologies — andraz @ 17:08 24. Nov, 2007
How do you test a complex system that is trying to mimic being smart?
You want to automate testing, so you have your quality meter available for every little change you make. While having unit tests helps catching classical programming regressions, the major part of the challenge is having ’smart part’ under control. Unfortunately the only way to tell if the system is doing a good job or not is to have human check the results. The trick is that if you could automate testing in general, you would already have solved the hardest problem.So what you basically do is generate a set of evaluation data, manually. And have a system that does something like unit tests, but instead of giving you fail/pass results, you get statistics. Now you would think that the problem is solved, but that’s far away from truth.
There is changing of the dataset - when you have new content in the system, you get completely new related stories and you have to go back and have a human judge them. There is expansion of the evaluation data - as you add new tests you generally can’t send them through previous versions of your algorithms, since that would be prohibitely expansive. And there is statistics that hardly gives you overview over what exactly your changes caused, just few final numbers. And then there is the problem of pipelining the processing. Even if you improve the first stage, end results might be worse, since you’ve already adapted the second stage to previous first one. So you need to actually evaluate each part of the system in isolation and then together.
At the end you actually find out that you spend disproportional amount of time evaluating even the smallest changes. So you are in danger to just skip that evaluation which naturally you shouldn’t.
Ok, so much for today, now I think the evaluation run has just ended and I should be checking the results, again.
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How do you spell Zemanta?
Filed under: zemanta — andraz @ 1:35 21. Nov, 2007
Some internal jokes that really aren’t:
Q: How do you know you are stretching your tools to the limit?
A: You find reproducable segfault inside Perl. In its regex code.
Q: How do you know you surely have enough RAM?
A: “free” command causes a line break in a terminal. Everything below is doubtful.
Q: How do you know your server specs are not balanced?
A: You have more memory than disk space.
Someone testing one of the most hyped technologies in the Valley: Who are “The other guys” and where can I use them?
Q: What does a developer say to CEO at 8am in the morning?
A: Goodnight.
Q: How many developers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Wait, wait, I am already looking it up in Wikipedia!
Q: How do you properly spell Zemanta?
A: Did you mean Zemanova? Google cannot be wrong!