November 7
Tags: co-op
Co-op at NY Tech Meetup, Tuesday Nov 11
We’ll be demoing Co-op this coming Tuesday at the NY Tech Meetup in the Frank Gehry-designed IAC building.  300 spots will be open for RSVP at 12PM EST (they go quick!) Come by and say hi!
November 6
Tags: design
We received this 110% spam/scam-looking invitation via e-mail.  I think they need to work on their pitch to entrepreneurs.
We received this 110% spam/scam-looking invitation via e-mail.  I think they need to work on their pitch to entrepreneurs.
November 4
Tags: business

Trying out the Harvard Idea Cast podcast.  Heard a couple of dry ones, and one good episode: #107, Singapore Airlines’ Winning Strategy (they don’t provide a page for the episode, so the best I can do is to link to the MP3 file - about 10 minutes long). Towards the end of the episode, Professor Rohit Deshpande talked about three lessons that we can all learn from Singapore Airlines:

  1. Marketing should be treated as an investment, and not as an expense. This is a particularly important thing to remember as our economy gets worse, as marketing budget is usually the first thing to get cut.  Prof Deshpande thinks that if we can change our point of view and see marketing as an investment, we’d make better decisions during good or bad times.
  2. Focus needs to be on the customer - rather than on the product or the service.  There’s a big difference between serving your customer and having the best product.  And the professor believes that if your business is “customer-centric” and you’re giving what the customer need - you can ride through the tough times because your customers will stay with you.
  3. Getting the customers involved in all aspects of your business - and have them involved in helping you solve problems.  I agree with this to a certain extent…  Customers are obviously important, but I think the opinions of your customers are often formed by the very few vocal ones, and they may not represent the majority.

About the airline industry - it seems that most airlines are providing great service and attention to their business and first class customers.  For us normal folks who cannot afford business class, we are treated like cattle.  I think it’s strange to split up your customers into the very rich and the extreme price-conscious.  What about the folks in the middle, who are willing to pay extra but cannot make the jump to business class?  Maybe there’s something I don’t know about the airline industries, but it seems to make sense to create a middle class, that I can pay extra for a bit extra legroom, humane service and decent food.  Is that too much to ask for?
November 2
How to nap According to this article from The Boston Globe, our propensity for an afternoon nap isn’t  due to a heavy lunch.  It’s just a part of our physiological pattern, something we’re genetically wired for.  Read up on this article accompanied by tasty infographics for the how and the why.

How to nap

According to this article from The Boston Globe, our propensity for an afternoon nap isn’t  due to a heavy lunch.  It’s just a part of our physiological pattern, something we’re genetically wired for.  Read up on this article accompanied by tasty infographics for the how and the why.
October 31
Tags: design
I just saw this sweet ass HP Mini on Uncrate, clicked on the image, went on the HP website and what did I see?  A tiny picture of some black laptop with what looks like a molded, stained screen.  Look, if you’re selling a product, please make sure your product shots are at least as good (and as big) as the pictures used on blogs. I did a quick comparison of how HP and Apple display their products on their websites.  Moral of the story: when in doubt, think: what would Apple do?

I just saw this sweet ass HP Mini on Uncrate, clicked on the image, went on the HP website and what did I see?  A tiny picture of some black laptop with what looks like a molded, stained screen.  Look, if you’re selling a product, please make sure your product shots are at least as good (and as big) as the pictures used on blogs.

I did a quick comparison of how HP and Apple display their products on their websites.  Moral of the story: when in doubt, think: what would Apple do?
Making music on an iPhone with Bloom (an ambient music composition app by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers).
October 30
“ Let’s take that bitch on together.
Inside Obama’s Emails | The Onion
Tags: design packaging
One of our Harvest customers, Headspace Design, has recently won an Ice Award for their package design for Mucci Pucci, a dog food company.  I love the package design and asked Kyle about the story behind it.  This is what he said: Mucci Pucci is run by a couple of entrepreneurs who wanted to sell home-made, organic, human grade ingredients to an audience of dog spoilers. The design challenge was to create an identity that was high-end and almost fashionable, but also fit their small start-up budget. The logo communicates cute and friendly, and the tagline sums it up, “For dogs with taste”, a tongue-in-check play off of the snooty attitude we think of when it comes to dogs getting bought human-grade treats. The bone designs on the packages are made up of organic designs, and they differ for each flavor. The bags used are cheap, recyclable paper, and the labels were printed and applied by hand. Headspace, which is based in Nova Scotia, also designed Mucci Pucci’s website, point-of-sale booth, staff shirts and poster campaign - and you can see them on their website.  Aside from the honor of getting the award, Mucci Pucci has been selling out since April 2007, when the marketing campaign launched.  That’s good design, folks.

One of our Harvest customers, Headspace Design, has recently won an Ice Award for their package design for Mucci Pucci, a dog food company.  I love the package design and asked Kyle about the story behind it.  This is what he said:

Mucci Pucci is run by a couple of entrepreneurs who wanted to sell home-made, organic, human grade ingredients to an audience of dog spoilers. The design challenge was to create an identity that was high-end and almost fashionable, but also fit their small start-up budget.

The logo communicates cute and friendly, and the tagline sums it up, “For dogs with taste”, a tongue-in-check play off of the snooty attitude we think of when it comes to dogs getting bought human-grade treats. The bone designs on the packages are made up of organic designs, and they differ for each flavor. The bags used are cheap, recyclable paper, and the labels were printed and applied by hand.

Headspace, which is based in Nova Scotia, also designed Mucci Pucci’s website, point-of-sale booth, staff shirts and poster campaign - and you can see them on their website.  Aside from the honor of getting the award, Mucci Pucci has been selling out since April 2007, when the marketing campaign launched.  That’s good design, folks.
Tags: food
We did not have this for lunch, but I wish we did (I have no idea who the photographer is, but I follow him/her on flickr and damn wish I can go on trips and eat all that delicious food).
We did not have this for lunch, but I wish we did (I have no idea who the photographer is, but I follow him/her on flickr and damn wish I can go on trips and eat all that delicious food).
Tags: co-op ActitveResource
Caching is not enough: spite of having Co-op to serve nearly all requests by gluing together memchached content after going live things were just slow compared to what you would expect from quad Xeon servers. Whenever a cache item became stale we have to go out via an API and refresh the missing pieces from the cluster running Harvest. Going trough logs it revealed that processing the API output was significantly more expensive than just generating the XML on Harvest side. 88+ seconds for just parsing an XML file that took a few milliseconds to produce … just not reasonable. It turns out that the XML parser used by the Hash.from_xml method or ActiveResource in general has a horrible performance. The larger the input worse ActiveResource behaves. Enter Libxml to the rescue, there are countless benchmarks claiming 10x speed improvement. If anything I think they are an understatement as Libxml mostly has a linear performance that cannot be stated about XmlSimple shipped by default with rails. The graph above shows how CPU usage looked before with libxml and after. As you see speed is just one factor. With libxml I can actually increase the ruby processes to handle much larger traffic, whereas a with XmlSimple can tie up an entire cpu core. Libxml is more scalable. If your XML processing needs limit to consuming REST resources via ActiveResource the fix is simple dead simple. Just install the fine FasterFromXml plugin by Brian Durand.

Caching is not enough: spite of having Co-op to serve nearly all requests by gluing together memchached content after going live things were just slow compared to what you would expect from quad Xeon servers.

Whenever a cache item became stale we have to go out via an API and refresh the missing pieces from the cluster running Harvest. Going trough logs it revealed that processing the API output was significantly more expensive than just generating the XML on Harvest side. 88+ seconds for just parsing an XML file that took a few milliseconds to produce … just not reasonable.

It turns out that the XML parser used by the Hash.from_xml method or ActiveResource in general has a horrible performance. The larger the input worse ActiveResource behaves. Enter Libxml to the rescue, there are countless benchmarks claiming 10x speed improvement. If anything I think they are an understatement as Libxml mostly has a linear performance that cannot be stated about XmlSimple shipped by default with rails.

The graph above shows how CPU usage looked before with libxml and after. As you see speed is just one factor. With libxml I can actually increase the ruby processes to handle much larger traffic, whereas a with XmlSimple can tie up an entire cpu core. Libxml is more scalable.

If your XML processing needs limit to consuming REST resources via ActiveResource the fix is simple dead simple. Just install the fine FasterFromXml plugin by Brian Durand.