Getting back on the track

It looks like I got off the track last month.  Almost no blog posts, only passive Twitter streaming, sounds like nobody is here.  

Well, not the real truth is here though.  I was quite busy with some stuff.  Adium has broken support for Twitter now, I don't know why, but yesterday's fresh snapshot and build couldn't authenticate me still.  So probably this explains my only passive reading list there, but no active tweets, other that occasional mobile shouts.

My blog was keeping silence mostly because this is the way it is.  It looks like my blogging activity is mainly sinusoid, or something similar to a sine wave with very relatively slow ups, sharp peaks and quick drops.  Maybe it's because I don't blog much about my day job anymore, I'm doing a lot of tech stuff that is pretty custom tailored and I don't feel like sharing it (probably because of too tiny or lack of auditory for this posts at all), and my product management ventures didn't reach those stages when I'd start seeing a lot of value there to share with others.

But I'll put my wheels back on.

Whatever, but life is going on.  I had a chance to attend Percona's new one-day training in San Francisco, which was about Developing High Performance, Scalable Applications.  That was a pioneering one, but very good. It was a training course aimed at developers building applications with MySQL, and while I'm not 100% hands-on developer anymore these day, I do build applications with MySQL.  The training covered the topics on how to optimize queries, common design mistakes in MySQL, case-studies on how to solve various theorhetical application problem and  briefly on architecture decisions that should be made in applications.  I'm pretty happy with what I spent a day for.

I also read the Deploying Rails Applications book and almost done with Designing Social Interfaces.  I liked them both, and I can probably suggest both of them, so let me put some stress on what I didn't like instead:

Deploying Rails Applications:

1. It's a very great overview of the things around, but feels like too much of them.  Getting a better idea of what to apply and when with a good structure would probably do a better job here.
2. It's a little bit light and hard at the same time, probably the wrong mix of content.
3. If you do have an administration skills, you probably find the book more like, "okay, okay, got it, okay, cool - I'm done with it, what's next?".
4. I hate to repeat myself, but once again, it felt to me that too much stuff that probably doesn't need to be mixed together.
5. I still recommend it.

Designing Social Interfaces:

1. While I'm supposed to say bad things, I still want to say I really liked the book.  It's probably not the rocket science, but it's very good.
2. I felt like the author(s) got bored in the middle of the book, so did I, but it looks like he's recovering closer to the end of it (and so do I). :)
3. Too much of Yahoo, and particularly Flickr.  I love Flickr, but too much of cliches from it.
4. The books if pretty decent and I highly recommend it.  I still have few chapters to finish, but they'd probably not make it worse.

So basically that's it and see you around...

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Yahoo! Pipes for Twitter's Reading List

I've managed to create a very nice and probably useful Yahoo! Pipe to manage my Twitter friend's feed as a reading list.

As you know, nowadays it's a common practice to post interesting links to your Twitter feed. Even I personally hooked up my Google Reader with the help of Twitterfeed to post articles that I want to share directly to my feed on Twitter. Works well, except that I miss a lot of links. I can't read my friends feed all day long (and I'm following only a hundred or so people). So whenever I read the feed (very occasionally) I can hit the shared links of only that period of time. I don't browse history or anything like that.

However, I'd probably like to read all the links that they advice to visit. I'm pretty picky about whom I'm following. You can call it social news. Where your social circle is doing the job on filtering the news for you. And you end up with a list of "pre-approved" things that you're safe to go with, without high risk of wasting your time.

Anyways so I run into this venture and built a quick hack for myself.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/white/twitterreading

I call it Twitter Reading List. You put your name & password in there (yeah, I can be a asshole and copy your data, so take a look at the source first if you're afraid of it :), and you will get a RSS feed of all posts from your Twitter friends, whom you follow and who posted something interesting. This pipe will fetch a title of it for you, as well as link it to direct link to whatever your friend wants you to read.

Well, yeah, on the negative side, I don't like the idea of sending my password plain-text, but... whatever. One more thing, it looks like it's limited to some specific number of posts there. It's probably possible to overcome, I don't know.

So fire it up, link to your Google Reader or any other favorite news reader and have fun!

P.S. IT IS buggy. It's a dirty hack and I need to fix the regexp for URLs among many other things, but it works.

P.P.S. Yahoo! Pipes rock. This is definitely a great way to easily sketch up a tool and use it right away. Try it yourself.

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Reading Comprehension

Done with the set of 50 questions quiz on Reading Comprehension.

The questions are okay. I tried to keep 80-90% success rate over the track, however, the uncomfortable place which I used to work at added some discomfort and I missed the set of several questions in the end, getting down to ~75% of correct answers.

I still don't know how will this adjust to a real score. My originally idea was that scoring 65%+ on both verbal and math can be matched to high 600's or low 700's. Never got any confirmation for that, yet. ;)

Overall RC questions come easy when they're talking about something you can absorb (say, business topics), and come pretty bad when they're up to bacterias, molecules or other shit. (I never liked chemistry in school.)

So well, half of the book is done, but I still kind of miss the feeling of learning something new. Just 150 sample questions and that's it. The next part is math, but it feels like it's not going to be any better.

Now off-topic note. I can't stop wondering how low can be the price of vacation booked some time in advance.

The moderate room at South Lake Tahoe, CA in the middle of August could be booked for less then $145/5 weekdays, very close to the lake, cable TV & Internet, microwave & fridge, air conditioning, with pool & SPA on-site and continental breakfast included. Damn, that's hot. The room is good for 2 adults, sharing one king bed. If you're lucky, you might find a deal for two queen size beds for the same price (or close).

To compare, I recently talked to a friend of mine in Ukraine, who was struggling to book a "room" in Crimea (on Azov sea). The owners charged him ~$12/day per person, and the "room" is to be shared between 2 adults, more like a big-box-type-of-container, featuring nothing but two full-sized beds and few steps between them to "get up and out". The luckiest ones will get a fan in the room.

Nice.

Warming up with GMAT RC

Finally, after warming up a little bit (and staying away for different types of insect texts ;) I was able to score a tiny bit more then 82% of correct answers on my next block of Reading Comprehension texts.

So now it looks like it'd be the easiest part of manage, with some practice and just keeping up my English vocabulary.

I've already passed three types of questions (according to the first book of GMAT Review). They are Problem Solving (PS), Data Sufficiency (DS) and and Reading Comprehension (RC). To prioritize them, I'd write something like this:

RC < PS = DS

PS and DS are almost equal in hardness (for me), while RC is fairly easy one. Bear with me, and I'll compare more categories to those two.

GMAT Reading Comprehension (RC)

Starting with GMAT's Reading Comprehension (RC), I finished with 65% right of the first block. Such a low score doesn't make me happy either (and actually looks like a pretty sad tendency :).

However, I found a pretty interesting thing - I tend to make a lot of errors while reading text about animals and insects, but everything else, which is related to history, business or social is never less then 85-90% of correct answers.

While low scores are pretty depressing, I'm very sure that keeping up the good plan and working hard could give me the target 700+ score on the exam. It's sad that I don't really remember my feelings and thoughts when I just started to prepare for PMP exam, but I guess it wasn't that much fun either. It took me a fair amount of time to get on track, but I ended up with a pretty high scores on the exam (I guess I screwed up only one category getting moderate proficiency on it, while getting the tops on all others).