Tia Marie

Need I Say More?

I am different. You are different. This started differently and progressed without intention. Long evenings without harmless untruths. It was quixotic and confidential.  Trials were made and times got hard.  Everything always got better, but time ways always too short.  

We're silly and horrible people, but you are awesome and  I am awesome. We're not alone but certainly in our own world. We don't always agree, but we can compromise and most importantly you put up with my quirks. 

Thank you for being different.  Need I say more?

 

Social network Path apologizes in privacy flap

Social network Path apologizes in privacy flap (via AFP)

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Google launches Google+ developer hangouts

Google launches Google+ developer hangouts (via The Inquirer)

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Elevator Pitches: It's Everyone's Job

I'm not really one to write Startup advice, but there are a few topics that I feel rather strongly about and have found in my startup endeavors are actually helpful. 

Most of you reading this already knows what an "Elevator Pitch" is already, but for those outside of the marketing world your Elevator pitch is a short one or two sentence summary of what your product/service/organization does and what it's business strategy is.

Most people think that only your CEO, bizdev folks and marketing crew needs to have their elevator pitch down but that simply isn't the case, especially in the startup world.

In San Francisco there are tons of tech events people end up going to, some of them are hack-a-thons for developers and others are networking events.  If you work at a startup company, you'll eventually find yourself at one of these events and you will be asked "So where do you work? What does your company do?"

I've noticed most of the time, people end up asking me those questions just because they want to give me their elevator pitch and need a polite way to transition to conversation to their own company.  Either way, you're going to have to be able to sum up what your company does in as few words as possible and get the point across.  

Yeah, I'm looking at you developers and Q&A/Support staff.  I'm know all of this marketing speak hurts your brains and makes you want to gouge the eyes out of the startup douchebags who talk non-stop at you (usually about their product that is like Y for Z), but you're going to have to suck it up and toss out your elevator pitch.  It benefits your company and makes you look like you're more involved in your company than just the code or your realm of the code.

Elevator pitches can be really hard to come up with the more complicated your product or service is.  I couldn't imagine having to come up with an elevator pitch for Cassandra at marketing party to a bunch of folks who don't know what a distributed database is and why some one would use it. That being said, you have to make sure your elevator pitch is in simple plain English. A marketing guy's eyes are going to glaze over if you start talking about the Dynamo model or clustering and a programmer is going to decide they're done talking to you (marketing folk, I've got my eyes on you) about how their "value justification is a long-tail solution to cloud optimization for the content optimization for the BuyerSphere." Ew, I feel kind of dirty writing that sentence, but I digress.

I'm not saying that marketing folk aren't technically competent or developers have a short attention span.... but at a party you're one of a dozen people they've talked to and if you can't tell them something quickly and simply then you've lost your chance for a good elevator pitch. So do try to avoid too much technobabble or marketing buzzwords.  If you're super lucky, the person you talked to will remember your pitch and be able to repeat it to some one else. 

 

 

Get the f-- out of here, really?

Clipped from: www.boingboing.net (share this clip)

So I was browsing reddit and I saw this BoingBoing article 

and I was quite confused.  First I thought it was a kid's book with an unfortunate title, then I realized it was a book intentionally created that way and now it's apparently up on Amazon.com's top seller's list.  

 

What craziness is this!?  The book hasn't even been published yet and this writer has to deal with overwhelming demand and attention because of piracy.  

 

Below is a full text article from The Bay Citizen about Bay Area writer Adam Mansbach's unusual success heralds new headaches and opportunities for publishers:

Review: Blackberry Torch

Clipped from: us.blackberry.com (share this clip)

Before writing this review, I want to thank the folks over at the AT&T Brand Ambassador program for including me as well as sending me the Blackberry Torch to review.  I've taken a good few weeks to dig into the Blackberry Torch (probably longer than anyone would like) and it's finally time for me to share my experiences in using this phone.

I also want to say that this is the first RIM OS phone I've ever used.  My smartphone experiences have been limited to the iPhone for quite some time, it was certainly both a refreshing but incredibly new experience to use a smartphone that was not an iDevice.  

I feel a bit silly in what I'm about to admit my favourite feature of the Blackberry Torch is, as it was nothing that was directly mentioned to me as a "cool feature" by the AT&T Brand Ambassador folks.  The things they were interested in my looking at was the predicative video, the social streams and other nifty little features like that. 

So what feature of the Blackberry did I find myself wanting so badly for iPhone? 

Security features - 10/10

I no longer feel that Blackberry is simply blowing it's own horn in regards to their devices being the "industry-leading security." It's no wonder that the Blackberry is the choice device for our President and his secret service.  

I was given the option of encrypting my data on the Blackberry, pretty much everything that I would store on the phone (ie: contacts, pictures, textual data, datacard contents and browsing history).  I was offered the choice between AES or triple DES and to be honest that's not nearly the end of the laundry list of security features that the Blackberry platform offers.  I was blown away, it actually made me wish I had brought a Blackberry to DefCon with me this year instead of my iPhone (which I pretty much had to leave off most of the time to avoid ending up on the Wall of Sheep). 

It was also nice for downloaded apps to be asked just how much access I wanted to give the application to my device.  Once you download an application, you're asked if you want to make that application a "trusted application status." Which essentially allows you to grant it full security permissions without being prompted or you can disallow this status and select more fine tuned authorizations for that particular application.  Anyhow, I'd seriously recommend (if you're a stickler for security) to take a real look over at Blackberry's security features:

Clipped from: us.blackberry.com (share this clip)

Home Screen - 7/10

After I got over the "Somebody moved my cheese," part of playing with the Blackbbery Torch, I eventually grew to appreciate the home screen and the amount of screen real estate that I had.  I really liked that I has super fine control of what applications I wanted displayed or what I wanted hidden and some other nice OCD organizational things.  The iPhone really fucked this over for the large part until they added "folders" which aren't completely doing the trick.  I think that the Blackberry does a better job of organizing your applications.

Keyboard and Touchpad - 5/10

I have to say that I wasn't a fan in the least.  I felt that the physical keyboard was way too small and often didn't benefit me to use it.  This was even more so with the touch screen keyboard.  The only way that it felt sizable enough was in landscape mode, I also didn't like the way the numeric keys were displayed.  You might also chalk this up to an issue of my being an iPhone user, but I honestly don't feel that the Blackberry touch screen keyboard is intuitive enough.  I often use passwords that have letters, numbers, special characters and uppercase, the keyboard (both physical and touch screen keyboard) really was restrictive and while it's nice to be able to use better passwords on my device, it's almost worthless if typing the passwords is a pain. I did love the little touchpad for navigation.  It gave me the ability to fine tune navigate through my web browser where I have to zoom and hope for the best on my iPhone.

Camera and Video - 8/10

The Blackberry torch has a five-megapixel camera in it, that is far superior to the iPhone.  The UI for the software is relatively pleasant and simple to use.  The photos and videos that I shot in the day time were much better quality than anything that I had shot on my iPhone.  During the night though, it seemed that the images/video were slightly undersaturated.  All in all though, I like the camera and video better than for iPhone.  

Battery Life - 10/10

It's almost unfair of me to comment about the battery life, but it's incredible.  Of course comparing the battery life of any device to an iDevice is like comparing the speed between a snail and Maserati.  You just can't put the two in the same category.  I was able to do the same amount of usage on the Blackberry Torch that I do with my iPhone (web browsing, video taking, email, SMS and pictures) and still be able to make it more than 4 hours without charing.  

Social Streams and Messaging - 4/10

I'm sorry.  I wanted to love you, but I couldn't.  I didn't really like the unified messaging inbox.  I thought I would, but it soon became overflowed.  I really wanted to add all of my social streams in there, but because of the amounts of incoming information I receive it was just too much and I really couldn't find a way to simplify these things.  

Gaming - 3/10

As we all know, I spend four hours a day commuting.  I get to do more mobile gaming than any other type of gaming.  That's why I was really looking forward to test driving the Blackberry Torch for gaming.  First thing I did was download Sims 3, it was a game that I recognized already on iPhone.  I understand that the dev community for Blackberry games aren't really as large as they are for Android and iPhone, but the quality of games were pretty wretched.  More simplistic games (like match 3 games and card games) were okay, but anything more complicated than that really didn't have a good gameplay. 

Overall - 6/10

Overall I didn't come away hating the Blackberry Torch, I was blown away by the security features and encryption.  I enjoyed the look and feel of the device, though it certainly wasn't something that I could grab the device and intuit it's use right away.  I appreciate a great deal of the customization and usability options that the Blackberry operating system has allowed, but the IU wasn't nearly as snappy and responsive as I would've liked. 

Organization, security and the camera was certainly my favourite features and I think that the biggest stars of the Blackberry Torch.  

To Cooks Source Magazine: Plagiarism is never okay

I've had some recently situations where I have found my work plagiarized on another website, it feels horrible.  Nothing feels worse than some one stealing something you put work into and calling it their own.  It's become a very casually done thing here on the internet, but the last place I'd imagine it taking place in the print industry. 

Thanks to reddit, I found a story about a LiveJournal blogger who not only had a piece of her work plagiarized, but when she wrote to Cooks Source Magazine about it and made reasonable requests to fix the situation, they condescend her and tell her that she should essentially be thanking them for stealing her content for the free publicity. Here is what they had to say (emphasis is mine): 

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.

But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!

From illadore.livejournal.com (share this quote)

There are so many things wrong with that response, I don't even know where to start.  First off, if you've been doing three decades of editorial work for the print industry and you don't know about copyright laws, you're doing it wrong.  I find it hard to believe that some one with this amount of "experience" has never once had to educate themselves on plagiarism issues.  Also, the web is NOT automatically considered fair use. Idiots. 

If you'd like to read more about what this LJ'er has to say, you can read her words here as well as her friend's retelling here. 

 

Call us at (413) 397-3338
Drop us a note at

P.O. Box 273,
 Sunderland, MA 01375
or email us at
info@cookssource.com

From www.cookssource.com (share this quote)

I don't condone harassment in the least, however, should you be an individual who has a great interest in copyright law and would like to educate Cooks Source Magazine how plagiarism and copyright works, they've helpfully placed their contact information on their website. 

Scaling: Comparing Apples to Oranges

Disclaimer:

1. I'm not a scaling expert
2. I'm not even a programmer
3. I'm neither a Digg nor a Stack Overflow user
4. I have no problems with Joel Spolsky

With those points out of the way, I wanted to write a post about a statement that Joel Spolsky made that made in regards to scaling and comparing Stack Overflow to Digg. I think it can go without saying (based off of the above disclaimers) that I don't understand the intricacies of either Digg or Stack Overflow's code base and server setup, however, I have culminated some of the discussion on this topic.

 

Digg: 200MM page views, 500 servers. Stack Overflow: 60MM page views, 5 servers. What am I missing?

From twitter.com (share this quote)

As I'm sure many of you know Digg is a social news site where community members can submit links for other community members to vote and comment on as well as dynamic widgets that can be found on thousands of sites across the web.

Stack Overflow, is a Q&A style site which allows it's community (of programmers) to ask and answer questions of various topics on programming and vote up or down on the submitted questions and the answers.

So what is being said about this comparison?  First off, I'll direct you to a former Digg engineer's comment about this very subject. This post more speaks about what servers Digg has running (or had during his time there).  

Clipped from: www.quora.com (share this clip)

 

Interestingly enough, there is a decent conversation thread on reddit about this as well (where people far brighter and informed on scaling than I, discuss the differences), that I thought I would highlight some of the more on topic comments.

 

We're not comparing apples to apples here. Digg has a different feature set and a completely different social setup. Stack Overflow doesn't promote "discussions" along the same line as digg does, nor does it have nearly as many simultaneous DB requests. "Page views" doesn't mean much (consider all the "outside" AJAX requests too.)

I'm pretty sure if you look at the read/write DB ratio, Digg will be much, much heavier on the write site than SO.

From www.reddit.com (share this quote)

The hot pages Digg wouldn't be able cache efficiently as discussions are ongoing and updates are expected (community participation is encouraged, caching responses for even a few minutes hampers participation). Comments are frequent, small, and semi-threaded (at least they were).

Digg will have a large amount of activity on all new stories as they rise up and eventually they fall off. Caching old stories won't help because no one visits them, the bulk of their 200MM visits are on the newest most popular links.

Stack Overflow will have articles hit by google, so visits are spread over new and old questions. Since old questions become static (already answered so no need for new responses) they can be cached completely, and since a good portion of those 20MM visits are spread out over old posts thanks to google those static page caches will have a major impact.

Plus near-realtime response is not expected on Stack Overflow (You walk in expecting to wait a few hours for an answer) and discussion is not the goal (no threaded responses, you respond directly to the question). Comments are infrequent and large and a longer cache won't have as much of a pronounced impact on visitor perception as it would on Digg (again, as a visitor you aren't expecting responses frequently or in large numbers).

Edit Digg's server architecture could probably be slimmed down, but Stack Overflow vs. Digg is apples and oranges when you take into account usage.

From www.reddit.com (share this quote)

 

The proportion of write to read traffic Digg is built to receive in comparison to SO.

Reads are relatively easy to scale out: cache and load balance/proxy. (Add more SQL slaves, etc)

Writes are much much harder to scale out. You start dealing with flooding, stale caches (which in turn makes cache regeneration a scaling issue), issues that (a) a large number of SQL slaves only exacerbate due to replication latency and (b) proxy caches do absolutely nothing to address.

Twitter took your stance, "oh it's easy just cache the pages, yadda" and realized their error when their servers were being taken down by floods of write requests. Twitter had to rapidly expand their server pool not to accommodate more viewers, but so that their systems could effectively handle bursts of write activity.

For similar reasons, Digg's architecture is going to necessarily be much more complicated than SO's as their activity is heavy on the writes and those writes come in waves and bursts (major events will cause a burst in Digg's traffic while SO will remain relatively consistent in comparison).

From www.reddit.com (share this quote)

..nearly all traffic is focused on new entries and semi-realtime discussion is/was a cornerstone of the site, making caching much more difficult. Stack Overflow gets a lot of traffic to old questions from Google and can do a full static cache of those pages. Digg has to maintain frequent changes to pages that get slammed all at once for a few hours/days then promptly ignored by traffic for other, newer pages.

From www.reddit.com (share this quote)

 

So what are they all talking about?  Essentially the points that I have pulled out are that one cannot compare the scaling needs of Digg to Stack Overflow due to the different nature of request loads each site has and how much of each site's pages can be handled in cache and also that Digg is unique from Stack Overflow in the sense that they have dynamic widgets that are embedded on thousands of sites some with extremely high traffic, where Stack Overflow doesn't have to deal with the load issues of these widgets.

To be fair, I've only pulled out the comments that are in agreement that Stack Overflow and Digg aren't comparable in their scaling needs, if you think these viewpoints are wrong  or disagree, I encourage  you to read and join in on the reddit discussion about this topic. 

Scaling is a hard and unsolved problem. A few dozen engineers are working very hard to work on a problem that isn't exactly the same for each of them.  I put together this blog post because it's so easy for a person who isn't a tech person to hear statements like this and make blanket opinions based off of some one else's opinion.  

While I'm not a fan of Digg myself, I do find the problems of scaling an absolutely fascinating topic, one that isn't widely understood and often misunderstood.  I've seen so frequently in Social Media people repeat criticisms they've heard in regards to engineering as their own opinions without having a basis of understanding of those criticisms or the oposite side.

A Programmer's Quick Guide to Social Media Women

So previously, I wrote a blog post about loving a geeky beau.  It was (unintentionally) pretty geared towards programmer guys and I've decided to follow that blog post up with this one.  Essentially it was inspired by listening to my female social media friends lament about their programmer beaus and vice versa.

 
Do you sound condescending? 

You might not think that you sound condescending when you're speaking to her, perhaps that's the tone you use to talk to your peers and you think that she should be used to your flat affect by now, but she's not.  Your social media lady isn't your programmer peer.  Also ladies, before you accuse him of being condescending just ask.  He really isn't and you can't take this too much to heart, but programmers - you have to be mindful of your tone too.

Be excited for her!

You may think Mashable/ReadWriteWeb/TechCrunch is a joke (sorry guys <3), but she probably doesn't.  Perhaps she managed to land a post about her company, maybe she got to guest post or even better maybe they mentioned her.  Keep in mind that those social media news sites that you find laughable is most likely gospel to her marketing bosses. Just like she probably doesn't really care that you made your site's response time a couple of milliseconds faster, you probably don't care about her social media news sites.  Remember, her social media voodoo might just as boring to you as your bug fixing war stories are to her.  You don't have to understand why it's important to her, just be excited for her when she's proud.

Communication is Key!

Just as I told the ladies, communication is important. It's a two way street.  She's probably more likely to talk to you about what she does, but you don't have to pretend to understand social media ROI to impress her.  There's a chance she doesn't even like Twitter or Facebook but only uses them as tools for work.  It's as simple as remembering that you don't have to pretend to be someone you aren't. 

Laymen Terms Help.

Just as I said above, communication is a two way street, when you start talking about what you do, don't forget she's not one of your peers.  You don't have to talk down to her like she's a child, but don't assume she's not interested in what and how you do what you do.  Don't be afraid to breakdown what a red-black tree is to her.  

Don't be afraid to include her!

Spend a date weekend introducing her to Python and Django or Ruby on Rails.  Go out on a limb and buy her a pragmatic programmer's guide.  Don't assume that she isn't interested in programming.  It might be a fun project for the two of you.  You'll be surprised at how much pride will shine in her eyes when she writes her first program, even if it's just a django tutorial program.  

Remember her work is hard too!

She might not be spending hours writing mathematical proofs on an office whiteboard, but this doesn't mean that her job is like a day at kindergarten.  There is no proof to solve social issues. She probably has to do a ton of manual work and has to deal with people that you'll never have to deal with in your career.  You know those marketing people that you've thought to yourself, "I'd shoot myself or them if I had to be in a room alone with them," she has to deal with those people and still remain graceful. 

I can't really give you a nice list of cool things to get your lady, I'm a total tomboy and would like the things on the list from yesterday's post.  

In closing, respect her interests even if you don't regard them as highly as she does. Also don't make assumptions, let her tell you if she's not interested in something.  I'd love to hear what you have to say about this article, please either drop me a comment or give me a shoutout on twitter: @tia_marie.

 

Loving your geeky beau

I asked earlier today on Twitter, "You've got a geeky male love interest, how would you sweeten his day?" I was surprised by the responses, not the suggestions but more of the people who reached out to me privately saying, "Let me know what people say, I'm curious!" With stories of their geeky beau they want to make happy.

Without getting into the multitudes of types of geeky men, I can break this down in one answer: Show interest and curiosity in what he does. 

If you're beau is a programmer, you don't need to know how cache invalidation works, Big O notation or the finer points of functional programming, you just need to listen.  You're not going to understand everything, but I promise if you take a moment to ask him about his work he'll tell you.  If you have a programmer love interest, try asking them if they've "solved any cool problems this week," in regards to their job.  Chances are, you'll have them asking you if you seriously care (and do show interest) and then going on to tell you what they did. Perhaps they work at a webby startup and has been fighting some bug all week and after finally vanquishing it, discovered that they were able to speed up request times on the site they work for by a couple of milliseconds.  

It's not hard to talk to a programmer, even if you don't think you're not smart enough to hold a conversation with them.  I've only had good experiences talking with programmers, most of the ones I know are very opinionated and passionate about their specialties. Communication isn't a one way thing.  
I've known many a geeky male to be more than happy to sit back and let me talk about myself, my interests and my work.  That's not a conversation though, don't let them get away with being listeners.  You also don't have to pretend to understand what they are talking about to get them to converse and potentially respect you.  

Which brings me to my next point, there is no shame in telling some one "I don't know." Repeat that phrase, learn it and embrace it.  You'll gain far more appreciation and respect if you own up to things you don't know and seem willing to learn.  Learning doesn't mean being a master of something, it just means knowing more about a subject than you knew five minutes prior.

The above suggestions can go for whatever genre of geekery your interest is into, be it video games, physics, medicine, programming or math (and all the other genres of geekery).  It really doesn't matter, just show interest.  Nine times out of ten, you'll not only get an explanation of what your interest did at work, but they will also try their best to explain what it means to you in laymen terms so that you can better follow the conversation.

I'm sure you probably were thinking I'd have a list of things you could buy your geek instead of something as simple as "listen." So, I've put together a list of nice things that I know some geeks appreciate:

• Composition Book - This is half line paper and half graph paper, if you have yourself a programmer or an electronics aficionado this composition book is great for mathematical proofs and circuit diagrams with notation.
• World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War -  Check to see if they don't own this already!  Not only is this book a great read, it's about zombies too!
• IM Me Device - If it's a hardware hacker you've got on your hands, this little device is a really great way to have a hackable radio on the cheap. 
• Cling-on whiteboard sheets - Whiteboards are the vitae of many a geek's life.  These are static cling on whiteboard sheets that one can plop up on their wall for some giant sized whiteboard awesomeness.
• Dr. Who USB Hub - There is never enough USB ports for all of your devices, why not let him celebrate it with geekery.
• Battlestar Galactica, the boardgame - YES It exists, surprise your geek with it and enjoy this "semi-cooperative" game with them.
• Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers - Chances are, if they are a boardgame geek they already have the original Carcassonne.  Do they have this version yet?  Also, why aren't you playing Carcassonne with your boardgame geek yet?
• Cowboy Bebop CD Box Set - I've yet to meet an anime geek who didn't absolutely love the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack and cheaper than the entire DVD set.
• The Black Mages: Final Fantasy - If you have a gamer geek on your hands, they might appreciate this collection of final fantasy music. 

If you have any suggestions or additions leave me a comment or tweet me to: @tia_marie