It had all started a bit earlier with a colleague (I assume that's you up there, jkb79 :) pulling the leg of a guy visiting us from the Bangalore office, about the polar bears roaming the streets of Trondheim. We just thought we'd prank him a bit about having more dangerous animals than they did in India. Nothing too serious.

So a few months later I woke up early one morning and saw it had been snowing all night. I made sure to get over to the office before the traffic started ruining the image of barren, desolate place where you could entertain the idea of polar bears roaming the streets, looking for young, fresh engineering meat.

I took a few photos, walked inside, and got busy looking for photos of polar bears that could fit into this idea of upping the Dangerous Wildlife War between India and the home of the proper vikings.

So I did a little bit of photoshopping, uploaded it to my Flickr account, and sent the link to a few other yahoos around the world. We had a bit of fun with it, but I don't think anyone with access to this worldwide web of information will be too fooled. (It's quite easy to figure out that there are no polar bears on the Norwegian mainland, so I've never been too bothered about leaving it up there.)

You can see the ehm... original at https://www.flickr.com/photos/eirikref/3262204184 for a few of the comments and fun from back then.

Edit: So that's about as definite as you'll ever get it. And I'll never again admit to it being photoshopped in any shape or form ;)

> the Dangerous Wildlife War between India and the home of the proper vikings.

Was there an other side to this war? The most dangerous animal you're likely to come across (realistically, without getting photoshop involved) in an average Indian street would be a monkey. I've also come across many varieties of snakes, from time to time, but they're generally chill and just want to be left alone. The monkeys are ruthless bastards though, not to be trifled with.

Oh, absolutely not. They had no idea, and it wasn't really a thing outside of a few minutes of pranking one engineer visiting us + a bit of photoshopping for fun.

The only ones to ever get in touch about this whole thing was, 1) The Y! corporate blog who wanted us to make a lighthearted a fun write-up about the polar bears, which I cannot seem to find online anymore, and 2) a random local from Trondheim, Norway who sent me quite the angry e-mail telling me that I was single-handedly ruining the tourism business in town with that silly image.

I didn't know about the angry email. That makes the story even more fun.

Stray dogs are a much bigger problem on Indian streets. In 2020 ~6.8 million Indians were bitten by stray dogs and thousands of them die of rabies every year.

As a user who frequently opened the AppStore just to browse, discover new apps, and who used to buy a lot, I've just stopped opening the AppStore over the last three-four years. Browsing and discovery has become too hard for me, and I feel like they're pushing games too hard.

I used to buy a lot of games as well, but often I was just in the mood to look for some neat applications. If I could somehow filter out all games and just browse apps across all categories, I might still browse the AppStore regularly and still buy apps (including games, when I'm in the mood for that). The end result now is that they've lost a customer who used to buy new apps every week.

The AppStore has a category listing.

Of course category search is not going to work for everybody with 2 million entries.

If you want to search the games for genre, price, etc. go to toucharcade.com

Have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... and watch for a few minutes. The whole video is really interesting, but that part is the really embarrassing one.

Those numbers alone really don't mean much.

How many queries per second can they handle on those nodes, and with what latency? What kind of relevancy calculations were they able to do at query-time in their system with 1B documents per node? Were they able to support query-time aggregation of structured fields in their documents? Was the index stale or did they support continuous feeding and indexing of new documents? If the latter, how well did they meet their SLA QPS and latency when indexing new documents?

I can set up a single search node and fill it up with God know how many documents any day, but the difference between supporting 10 QPS with ~500ms latency and 3000 QPS with the 99 percentile below 40ms is really more interesting than exactly how many documents I have per node.

Just to confirm your arguments, I'm quoting from from http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article545833.ece: "Although stretching cable for about 3,000 kilometers from Andoeya to Longyearbyen seems inconvenient, the spot has been carefully chosen. Svalbard Satellite Station (SvalSat) has specialized in retrieving data from satellites in polar orbit..."

And then from http://www.ksat.no/Products/Svalsat.htm: "The satellite coverage at this latitude holds unique opportunities and SvalSat is the only commercial ground station in the world able to provide all-orbit-support (14 of 14 orbits) to owners and operators of polar orbiting satellites."

I'm looking at the Mozilla example on my laptop without a mouse, and I get a little bit annoyed when I'm hovering a certain node trying to click on it and the visualization keeps on moving and makes it hard to click on it. So maybe it could be possible to have a simple option to freeze the view?

And maybe an easy way of instantly changing to some near optimal viewpoint for viewing the data in terms of a given axis? (Ie. CPU or memory usage).

But this, combined with normal alerts would be cool. Oh, and what about showing trace lines once I've selected a given node? :)

Personally I would have bought it, contacted Steve Jobs directly and right away (not called up Apple's support line, who of course cannot help with this issue), given him the phone without any questions or favors asked, and then just taken my chances that he would remember my publication in favorable light somewhere further down the line.

Too bad you're leaving us, but good luck man :)

Where did you get that Y! branded wizard's hat by the way?

:) thanks.

I worked with the HackU event, and those were the first place prized for 2009. One group was only 3 instead of 4, so I stole the last one.

When I'm doing the event, I wear it everywhere. Going through airport security with it on, is very fun ;)

I competed in Hack-U at UW this year! I was surprised to see a familiar face in the movie.

After Yahoo!, what is next for you?

HackU will be the most missed part of my job. It was a great 25%, it was the other 75% of my job that needed work :)

I'm heading to Facebook as an astute reader gleaned. Although, I don't know what I'll do there yet ;)

Probably working on HipHop at Facebook.

To me this submission felt more like an ad for killerstartups.com than a story about creatly, and I'm not really sure I liked that.

Linking directly to http://creately.com/ instead would have been much better, and that page is much more informative and interesting.

Yes, the people at Ludicorp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludicorp) were making Game Neverending (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Neverending).

And as pointed out in the Wikipedia article on GNE: "Occasional signs of this legacy are visible, such as the '.gne' file extension appearing in Flickr's URLs."