Eran Kampf
Mac App Store Insights
Its not in iTunes When hearing the news that the Mac AppStore was launched I immediately opened iTunes, but didn’t find it there. I went online and read that an OS X update is required so I ran Software Update – there was no iTunes update but there was an OS X update so I figured the [...]
Write your own Twitter.com XSS exploit
So it seems the new twitter.com has a “virus” going around. Few minutes ago my twitter stream filled up with strange jQuery calls so I looked into it. Apperantly the new Twitter website is vulnerable to a simple SQL-Injection like attack. It’ll just spit out to the page whatever HTML code you write on your [...]
What the new Apple TV is really missing…
I was watching the Apple launch event the other day and I must say I was a bit disappointed. Don’t get me wrong the device is small and slick and the 99$ puts it in the right price range to compete with other streamers in the market. The problem is, that besides connecting to iTunes, [...]
3 Takeaways from the Apple iPad Launch
A Computer That Doesn’t Feel Like A Computer Its not a geek device, its a computing appliance. The iPad is a computer with an iPhone OS. Not a full fledged Os like we’re used to, no multitasking, terminal, filesystems… Just a list of Apps that can be installed and updated from the net. Simple, elegant, [...]
The New Google App Engine Blobstore API – First Thoughts
Google’s App Engine 1.3.0 was released yesterday along with a brand new Blobstore API allowing the storage and serving of files up to 50MB. Store and Serve – Files can be uploaded and stored as blobs, to be served later in response to user requests. Developers can build their own organizational structures and access controls [...]
iPhone vs. Droid
I found the following comparison between the iPhone and the Droid ads hilarious. Especially, the following Droid bullets: It is fast and it despises aesthetics. It is packaged inside missiles launched by stealth jets. (*) It is a robot and should mostly be handled by other robots. Droid is to be used with robotic hands [...]
Building an iPhone Application
On the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new venture centered around the iPhone. The process of building our app has been quite an adventure and we’ve experimented with several technologies that were new to us before reaching our current technology stack. As we’ve finally got our stuff together and made an initial [...]
High Performance at Massive Scale – Lessons learned at Facebook
Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook gave a great presentation at UC San Diego on “High Performance at Massive Scale – Lessons learned at Facebook“. The presentation’s abstract: Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today serving over 200 billion pages per month. The nature of social data [...]
Who Will Twitter Acquire With Their Fresh $100 Million?
Last week the NY Times reported that Twitter has raised about $100 million of new funding, making the company’s value to be $1 billion. Just to put things in perspective, they also provide an example: For context, that is almost double the market capitalization of Domino’s Pizza, which has 10,500 employees and had $1.4 billion [...]
Moving Your Application to Amazon’s Cloud
I’ve been dealing a lot with Amazon’s AWS platform lately. Mostly doing offline data processing using Hadoop but the latest load balancing features finally opened the door for frontend applications to take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing platform – making it easier for developers to make application more cost efficient an scalable. Keeping in mind [...]
Yahoo! Releases Its Own Hadoop Distribution
Yahoo! is releasing its own distribution of Hadoop: Hadoop is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data. In response to frequent requests from the Hadoop community, Yahoo! is opening up its investment in Hadoop quality engineering to benefit the larger ecosystem and to increase [...]
New Features for Amazon EC2 – Now You Can Truly Scale Applications
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows customers build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. One of the core features for achieving this kind of efficiency and fault-tolerant is the ability to acquire and release computing resources in a matter of minutes according to demand. While [...]
Google’s New Behavioral Ad Targeting Should be Excellent for All
The discussion over Google’s latest move into behavioral ad targeting is all over TechMeme. Basically what this means is that Google will start selling users (or more specifically, clusters of users, like football fans for example) in addition to words: Today we are launching “interest-based” advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and [...]
Playing with the Windows 7 Fish
I just finished installing Windows 7 Beta on my home machine to find a fish swimming on my desktop: But not just any fish, its a Siamese fighting fish, also knows a “betta fish” (or just “betta”). A subtle Microsoft joke? Hope it does a better job selectively breeding this one (and get rid of [...]
Give Up Control, Think Distributed – DLD 2009 Summary
I was very fortunate to get invited to the 2009 DLD Conference as a participant (Thanks to Yossi Vardi!). This was my first time at DLD and I can definitely say it has been the most amazing conference I have been to so far. As defined by Steffi Czerny "DLD is interdisciplinary, creating interfaces and [...]
