This is so cool. I just bought the new Radiohead album, “In Rainbows”.
What’s so special? The album is available only by direct download from a website set up by the band (http://www.inrainbows.com/).
Everybody wins:
1. The buyer - finally, I can legally download music from the internet (iTunes and the like do not allow downloads with a credit card that is issued in Israel).
2. The seller - Radiohead bypass the record label, and probably profit more for each album sold.

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I’ve stumbled upon (what appears to be) a bug in MySQL .Net Connector (version 5.1.3).
I opened the bug in the MySQL bugs database, you can read the details here - bug #31617.

Basically, when calling MySqlCommand.ExecuteReader with an sql statement that times out - you get back a closed MySqlDataReader and the underlying MySqlConnection becomes corrupted, meaning you cannot use it for new operations and you cannot close it either.

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There is a strange, underground, free-mason, rappers-delight, a-tribe-called-quest, thank-you-chuck-norris, scrum-lover-association-kind-of-thing taking shape as we speak.
For some reason, Moti and Oren simultaneously posted some seriously weird posts with some scrum mambo jambo in them. Moti even added some scary Egyptian-writing-stlye codewords in the end.

And then, of all things, they tagged me to be a “scrum clan member”.
Well well. And I thought this blog doesn’t take itself seriously.
If this is some sort of scheme to make me write something I don’t stand behind, well, you got another thing coming, boys. My opinions on the Agile Methodologies are well defined and will be expressed in written form sooner rather than later.
And I’m supposed to tag someone.

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On this happy day, I am most pleased to announce the launch of my own clothing line - “bitzwear”.
It’s about time I joined the ranks of many sports celebrities and hip hop artists and designed my own, signature wear.
So, if you’re young, cool, hip, smart and beautiful - get yours now! And get something for your friends too.
Available only from the official bitzwear store on the web.

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This post is a continuation of two previous posts: Solving the Measuring Paradox and If You Measure This Then Your Children Will Be Next.

When setting quantity-based goals or metrics, it is usually better to measure over a period of time that is long as possible.
Consider the following example: suppose you want to motivate developers on your team to resolve as many bugs as possible. So you start measuring the number of bugs closed by developer and set the following goal: each developer must resolve at least two bugs a day.
Here’s what will happen: Alice, a developer on your team resolves her second bug of the day at 2PM. By 4PM she already has a fully tested solution to her third bug. Alice, being the perfectly logical creature she is and aware of the goal you set, will not check in her fix but rather wait until the next day. This way she will make it easier for herself to reach her goal tomorrow as well. In fact, your developers will start accumulating these “spare” bugs “just in case”.
I’ m against the measurement tactics altogether, but if you have to id it, it is much better to define the metric for a longer term.
Suppose that instead you define the goal to be “40 resolved bugs per month” (I’m assuming 20 work days per month here). This way, your developers still have more of an incentive to work on bugs throughout the period, because “good days” (with lots of resolved bugs) will balance with the “slow days”.

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I finally caved and got the Flickr “Pro” account.
So now everything, old and new, is available here.

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That was fast.
Oren wins a beer correctly answering the quiz.
Not exactly what I had in mind, but the rules didn’t say anything about googling it.

Solution:
MySQL thinks that in my time zone (Jerusalem) daylight savings time starts on March 30th every year (which is not exactly true) and on that day the clock goes from 01:59:59AM straight to 03:00:00AM. So all the datetime values between 30/3 02:00:00 and 30/3 02:59:59 are considered invalid.

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Zoominfo is a website that exposes a database of companies and people. Zoominfo builds this database automatically by software that crawls the web and extracts structured data from unstructured web pages (for example, “about” pages in company websites and press releases) using natural language processing algorithms.
A while ago, I posted a little satirical “press release” about me, the CTO of pashabitz.com, purchasing a burekas from “sammy burekas”.
A couple of weeks ago zoominfo’s crawler reached that “press release” and now I am listed as the “chief technology officer of pashabitz.com”.

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As I’ve mentioned, I left Clarizen a couple of months ago.
Now about the new thing:
I joined a new startup company - Semingo.
During the past year I got certain that what I want to do right now is develop ideas “from scratch” in a startup environment. So when Sagie, who is one of the founders of Semingo and my friend from the army days invited me to join - it was a perfect fit.
The idea we’re working on is very exciting and the people on the team are very bright.
Oren and Tomer are also blogging from a few feet away (and more bloggers coming soon!!).
We’ve only just started but it’s been a lot of fun already.
About the product: all I can say right now is that it’s related to social networks (just because that’s what the press release says) and it’s as cool as ice (before global warming). Don’t worry, we’re planning to release soon, so you’ll be able to use it in no time (touch wood) - stay tuned!

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Flash:

Mitch:

And yours truly:

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