Work on Zio Ivan

Crossing the pond

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:30:47 +0000

I borrowed the title from a guy who kickstarted all of this. Thanks Ariya ;)

I’m leaving Betfair. I owe a lot to this company: for a bit longer than a year I have had the pleasure to work with smart, enlightened, knowledgeable people from which I learned loads. Leaving was definitely not an easy choice.

The only thing didn’t happen, is that I didn’t become a proper punter: I just learned that even something sounding “boring” as betting on sports, can actually be a very big challenge in terms of the technologies involved. Even more, if you try to do it in the Betfair way: with million of customers, all constantly hammering the servers to make the most out of their money.

11/02/2011 - It happened today

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 23:47:43 +0000

I’m impressed. Today a lot of important things just happened, and I think it’s work putting them down.

Tahrir Square pushes Hosni Mubarak down

After what he said yesterday night, I was not expecting this to happen so soon. Mubarak stepped down! In addition of being a great news for all my friends that are directly or indirectly related to Egypt, this is an INCREDIBLE news for something I tagged as “lost”: hope.

Too busy to blog?

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I have been thinking about a million posts to write, snippets of code to publish, CompSci problems to discuss.

But I’m just really busy at work, and not finding the energy to publish anything worth more than a tweet.

A pint for whoever gets why I putted this here

Yes, Twitter. I do believe now that is what stops me from writing a post: sometimes thoughts are not worth more than a 140 characters. And the very nature of Twitter also pushes me to be as synthetic as possible. With the result that I don’t really post anything anymore. :-(

Dan Pink on Motivation

Sun, 30 May 2010 19:13:51 +0000

This is a really amazing version of the Daniel H. Pink speech about Motivation. It all into it’s second book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”.

And, best of all, it’s all explained on a white board ;)

Books that are my Developer Mantra

Mon, 03 May 2010 21:24:57 +0000

I can’t put it any simpler: buy and read those 2 books ASAP.

Getting Real

Rework

This is proper stuff. This is stuff that translates into words what you, THE DEVELOPER, would like to have in your daily work life.

And probably the reason for which having a pet project, something where you set the rules, helps remaining sane, and sometimes to dream that, one day, you will be on your own.

Git-over-SSH through Socks 5 Proxy on Windows

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:01:52 +0000

Because of my work, I use crappy M$ Windows in my office. And we are behind a bidirectional firewall.

So, how do you do if you need to pull/push code with Git-over-SSH in this scenario? You need a Socks 5 that passes the firewall, and some scripting.

First, you need to install:

Git on Windows - http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/
Connect.c - http://bent.latency.net/bent/darcs/goto-san-connect-1.85/src/connect.html

Then, you need a script that connects to the Socks 5 server. Like: [sourcecode lang=‘bash’] #!/bin/sh

Working from Home today...

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:38:04 +0000

White London ;)

Hopefully I can access my code… ;)

Not Dead, Just Busy!

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:38:38 +0000

No, I’m not Dead. I’m just “very Busy” guys ;) A lot of things are happening at the same time: as soon as I have more time I’ll speak about it.

I’ll just make a list of things I would like to speak about… if I would have time to do so:

My new Job in France Telecom R&D UK - Orange Labs and my work inside the Source of Webkit (and a bit of Opera)

Picture of the Day

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:22:37 +0000

A new, even bigger City

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 11:35:28 +0000

After a year and a couple of months I’m going to leave Symbian Software Ltd. (London). It has been a very good experience as my first job in [en:UK]: a way to grow mainly, first as a [en:Man], then as a [en:Software Engineer]… and then professionally in general.

A lot of interesting, inspiring, intelligent people (and a lot of NOT), that showed me “their way”: I took where it was worth it, not where it wasn’t… and left where I was able to.

A Fox in Boundary Row, London

Sun, 18 May 2008 23:01:29 +0000

I was on my way to the office (yes, on Sunday: I have stuff to do ;) ), when I see something that doesn’t look correct or “in the right place”. A Fox in the middle of Boundary Row!!!

[![](http://lh6.ggpht.com/detronizator/SDCgpPE2BfE/AAAAAAAAA80/DRR4vtnWpwQ/s160-c/AFoxInBoundaryRowO_o.jpg)](http://picasaweb.google.com/detronizator/AFoxInBoundaryRowO_o)

[A Fox in Boundary Row O_o](http://picasaweb.google.com/detronizator/AFoxInBoundaryRowO_o)

I don’t know, probably was bringing to my desk Firefox 3 RC1 ;) Yes yes, I know: Firefox is not a [en:Fox], but a Red Panda!!!.

How Google works

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:47:10 +0000

I was looking for info about [en:MapReduce] and I thought that would have been a good idea to take a look at the Tech Talks published by Google. Here we go.

Title: 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability: MapReduce Used on Large Geographic Data Sets Location: Google Tech Talks June 23, 2007 Speaker: Barry Brumitt, Google Inc. Abstract: MapReduce is a programming model and library designed to simplify distributed processing of huge datasets on large clusters of computers. This is achieved by providing a general mechanism which largely relieves the programmer from having to handle challenging distributed computing problems such as data distribution, process coordination, fault tolerance, and scaling. While working on Google maps, I’ve used MapReduce extensively to process and transform datasets which describe the earth’s geography. In this talk, I’ll introduce MapReduce, demonstrating its broad applicability through example problems ranging from basic data transformation to complex graph processing, all the in the context of geographic data.