While waiting (yes, another sleepless night) for the second game in the Lakers Vs. Celtics NBA finals, I remembered one of my all time favorite arcade games that I played when I was a child. It was an NBA arcade game called Lakers versus Celtics and it was one of the main reasons for my love for the NBA (and the Lakers).

So, while waiting for the game, I managed to run it on my macbook pro. Here is what I needed to do: First, download DOSBox. Next, head over and download the game here. Using DOSBox is pretty simple. You start it, and then mount c ~/path/where/you/undzip/the/game. So much fun!. Warcraft 2 anyone? :).

Well, its time for me to move on. I am leaving GigaSpaces and joining Delver to help in creating the best socially connected search engine out there.

This has not been a simple decision, and I think my “leaving GigaSpaces email” describes it best:

I am sad to say that I am leaving GigaSpaces. After almost 2 years with GigaSpaces, its time for me to move on. As someone who strongly believes in GigaSpaces, this has not been a simple decision, especially since I am sure that GigaSpaces is going to succeed. But, a chance to go and work on my primordial love, which is search, in a very young startup, is not something that I thought that I can allow myself to pass on. It has been great working with all of you, the DNA pool of GigaSpaces is one of the best one can wish to find in a workplace.

I really thought that this was a prank. Turns out there is a real product behind it. Funny.

I am reading the wonderful Dune book again and wanted to share the following quote:

Many have marked the speed with which the Muad’Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of the speed. For the others, we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries a lesson.

So true…

Just saw the Team America movie. Such a wonderful, nonse, ridiculous, funny movie. This quote from the movie really made my night, while coding Compass and GigaSpaces, what else :)

We’re dicks! We’re reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don’t like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn’t appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves… because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don’t know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don’t let us fuck this asshole, we’re going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!

Who do you replace with “We”, the “File Actors Guild”, and “Kim Jong Il”? I sure as hell have my candidates ;). Sacre bleu!.

I have been a mac user for a few years now (not for long though, but that is a different blog post) and have installed windows using BootCamp on my MacBook Pro. I am also using the Leopard WWDC build (which I hoped will have Java 6…).

The first thing that I was surprised about was the fact that once you installed windows, it defaults to start up into windows and not OS X. Somebody is going to pay for this in apple :).

The second thing is the fact that since now, by default, windows starts up, I find myself using the shutdown button more often. If I am not fast enough to hit the option button, it starts up into windows, and I press shutdown since I don’t want to wait till windows starts up.

Now for the difference between windows and OS X. If windows detects an improper shutdown, it will tell you next time that there was one in a very scary, text oriented window, and ask you what to do. 99.999% of the time, you will simply tell windows to continue and startup immediately. With OS X, this is not the case. OS X, when it crashes, or when I shut it down because it is stuck (yea, it happens with OS X as well), simply boots back without asking questions.

So, if most of the time people will simply boot into windows in case of an improper shutdown, and, people who wish to boot in safe mode will probably know the key binding to do so, why scare the typical user so much? Personally, I have not seen a difference between OS X and windows in being able to recover from such a shutdown.

So, with very small decisions like this, OS X is perceived to be much more stable than windows. And this manages to fool the best of us. This lesson is one that all of us should follow when developing applications.