20.12.12

Of Java and Assembler

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 6:04 pm by Liv

The title would no doubt puzzle quite a few of you — after all I’m putting in the same sentence a low-level, processor-specific language (for no better term for “assembler” — I know, I know, I know, “it’s not really a language”, right?) with a rather high-level, even platform-independent language like Java. So, right away you’d all be asking yourself “well, what can they have in common?” — or probably thinking that this is an article looking at how far apart these 2 languages are. The thing is, they’re not actually that far apart! Yup, I’m going to say that again and re-phrase is so the purpose of this post becomes more clear: they are quite similar in fact!

Now, I bet this got your attention, didn’t it ? Rest assured, I didn’t just say it for the sake of it — I will try to explain throughout this post how that is possible. And if you decide to read it all, and happen to work within the JVM space, I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this — either via a comment here or simply drop me a line.

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17.01.12

Advertising or Information?

Posted in Blogroll, News, Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 10:52 pm by Liv

This goes out to all you ad skeptics out there who bang on about how useless the internet advertising is and how it should be banned / destroyed / 101′d etc: it is sad that not often advertising is delivered as a complement to the content being viewed, and as such it doesn’t come across as an intrusive piece on the page. However, when it happens, it creates something useful!

I have just experienced something like this just now, looking at some technical article online — and even though I worked for Vibrant Media before, there’s no hidden agenda in highlighting this ad unit I spotted as one such piece of great advertising. (I know I slagged them off in the past as well, hope they don’t take it personally : guys, I’ve slagged off Google more than you, so don’t read too much into it! )

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11.12.11

This Is Where It Began…

Posted in Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 7:03 pm by Liv

I tweeted this photo the other day as well but I thought it deserves a bit more than just a tweet — having just met up with some old ex-Vibrant Media colleagues, right in the neck of the woods where we all started from. For all of you ex-Vibrant Media (or still in Vibrant Media) peeps who started in the London office, you will remember this — the small office on 2nd floor and the bars around it. Brings back some memories, huh?

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10.10.11

AppNexus Webinar on Scalability — Part 1

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 6:11 pm by Liv

Mike Nolet of AppNexus started a 2-part webinar on scaling their advertising business and I am glad I followed the first part (and I will definitely be there for the 2nd part!) as some interesting things came out of that. (As a note, for those who are interested, Mike has more details on internet advertising in general on his blog mikeonads.com and you can find more details about these webinars here.) I spoke with Mike after the webinars and he was kind enough to let me publish some of the slides on my blog together of course with my personal opinions on some of them. As I said, you will find the full slides (and not just my screenshots) for free here: https://student.gototraining.com/…2416 or from Mike’s blog.

There is no question that the AppNexus platform is nothing short of complex — at around 14 billion ads transacted a day (Mike will have the precise figures) this is nothing to be sniffed at! But when building something like this, one has to understand from the beginning the challenge ahead. Your project managers will show you the basic equations which tell us that more people in your tech team means more man-hours; and also that more features/complexity means more man-hours too; and just as well more customers mean more man-hours (you have to develop and adapt for customer needs, support the customer and all these technical issues cost you man-hours too!). But what they miss out quite often is that when you bring all these coordinates together, the man-hours spiral out of control! That’s why I was pleased to see that it’s not just me who observes that, as Mike included this into his slides:

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03.10.11

Quality Job Targeting on LinkedIn

Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 1:42 pm by Liv

Today seems to be my “funny things I see on the web” day — I just logged into LinkedIn to be targeted in the job section with an interesting one: a job offer from Vibrant Media (who I worked for till a few years ago):

If that job is based on my previous jobs (which LinkedIn knows of) then this is brilliant retargeting, hats off to LinkedIn!

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