flungster's musings

I recently upgraded our home PC to finally an OS X machine (gasp). Yes - that trusty old Windows box has finally decided to die on me so I went ahead and got myself the latest Apple Mac mini (2.5 GHz Core i5 and 4GB of RAM), and I have to admit - it’s pretty sweet. It’s certainly not the fastest machine out there (that 5400 RPM HDD is a bit painful) but it’ll do for now. Anyhow, I’ll talk a bit more about my OS X machine some other day.

Today, I’m going to jot down some notes I just took in installing Scala on my OS X box. This new box will serve as yet another development machine here at home and since I’m beginning to learn Scala at work, I thought why not go ahead and install this sucka at home. 

NOTE: This is by no means the official way to do things - this just happened to be the way I set up my OS X box here at home about 10 minutes ago. Also - I’m not going to give every single mind-numbing detail unfortunately. If you’re not sure how to do some of the stuff I’m saying, just Google it up - that’s what I did!. I’m sure things will change as I play with Scala more and more. BTW - if you have any additional tips, please do share!

INSTALL SCALA

First thing - snag (aka download) the latest version of Scala from the scala website here: http://www.scala-lang.org/

The actual download page is here: http://www.scala-lang.org/downloads. I installed Scala 2.9.1 for “Unix, Max OS X, Cygwin” - with the link here: http://www.scala-lang.org/downloads/distrib/files/scala-2.9.1.final.tgz

Once downloaded (and assuming you downloaded to your local Downloads folder on OS X), I did the following. Fire up Terminal and..

cd ~/Downloads/

tar -xfJ <name of scala tgz file>

Once expanded, I moved the scala directory to “/usr/local”. Do you have to put it here? No of course not but this happens to be the location I placed Scala in.

You could reference the scala directory in /usr/local as is, but I like to keep a consistent directory despite any upgrades I might perform later on. Thus I decided to create a symbolic link to the scala directory I just moved (in this case called “scala-2.9.1.final”) and call that link “scala”. Then any later versions of scala I can download into separate directories and then update the symlink. To do something like this simply type

ln -s scala-2.9.1.final scala

SET UP SCALA_HOME and PATH

Scala might be installed on your machine but unless you like typing in full paths to everything with Scala, it’s probably a good idea to add the Scala bin directory to the environment PATH as well as add the SCALA_HOME variable.

To get this going, I simply edited my “.profile” file located in my home directory and added the following lines:

export SCALA_HOME=/usr/local/scalaPATH=$PATH:${SCALA_HOME}/binexport PATH

Once done, I simply ran at the terminal the following command: 

“source .profile”

and everything in my terminal is now updated.

SETUP EMACS FOR SCALA

Now, if you’re an emacs user like I am, make sure to check out this page on instructions on how to get emacs to recognize Scala code: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/354

That’s it for now. Hope this was useful. I’ll try and get scala working in an IDE later on - I’m just too used to working within emacs at the moment to bother with an IDE at this point (wow I’ve come a long way from my days with Visual Studio on Windows huh?)

awesome piece about Gilt’s taxonomy implementation. Check it out!

gilt-tech:

by Amy DeCicco, Taxonomist and Steve O’Brien, Sr. Software Engineer

Halston, We Have a Problem
Like most rapidly growing start ups, product classification at Gilt Groupe was not fully formed at the outset. Initially, products were tagged with keywords, and those keywords were user-defined and free-form. One person’s “shoes” were another person’s “lace-ups” was another person’s “monkstraps,” and as a result it became increasingly more difficult to assess inventory by category of product. Additionally, as inventory grew and there was a need to surface product categories on gilt.com to help shoppers navigate through sales, this method of classifying and organizing products became rapidly untenable.

In response to this problem, around a year ago Gilt introduced a more structured 2000-term “product hierarchy” for merchandising specialists to index their inventory, a component of which was to attach a “pretty name” or short label to each product category for front-end category navigation. This structured classification was a step in the right direction, and improved inventory reporting, but it wasn’t the best solution for creating intuitive user experiences for shoppers on gilt.com. Two thousand very specific categories were too granular for the number of products typically featured in a sale. In addition, categories were not hierarchical, mutually exclusive, unique, contextual, or even very illustrative. As a result, Gilt’s site filter tools were often imprecise, created user confusion, and fostered suboptimal user experiences.

Two examples of category filtering pre-taxonomy on Gilt.com.

Gilt needed a way to negotiate between the very specific product categories used by the Merchandising and Planning teams to analyze their business and what the shopper saw in category navigation. We needed to build a taxonomy tool and the back-end database infrastructure to support it.

Taxonomy (Not Taxidermy)
Taxonomy is a method of organizing categories of content on a website. Taxonomies are built to help you navigate through content  in top and left nav experiences all over the web. Taxonomy is hierarchical, that is, taxonomies are made up of a root and multiple category levels which have parent-child and sibling relationships.

An e-commerce taxonomy

Gilt’s taxonomy needed to support navigation through product categories and subcategories in men’s, women’s, and children’s apparel and accessories, as well as home goods and gifts sales, and support attributes for additional navigational filtering.

Read More

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly ten years now. Ten years since that fateful beautiful Tuesday morning. Ten years since everything we knew about the world around us changed. Ten years since nearly three thousand innocent lives were taken from all of us.

For although its been practically a decade, the events of that day are still etched visibly in my mind - as if it just happened yesterday. 

That morning started as with any other morning during those days - with me getting ready to go to work at DoubleClick which was located around 34th and 10th ave or so. I was living in Forest Hills Queens at the time which meant my commute, depending on my route, would take anywhere between 35-40 minutes on the E train to about 15 minutes on the LIRR. 

That fateful morning, I was actually running late so I didn’t have the TV on (which I normally do while getting ready for work).  As I got my stuff together and headed out the door, something drew me back to the apartment. Something, which I can honestly not remember anymore, drew me back in and towards my computer. I turned on my monitor and lo and behold I had nearly six IM windows flashing in front of me with messages from folks who were already at work to turn the TV on. Ironically enough, I didn’t read the messages closely enough so I thought “gee.. folks from work telling me to turn the TV on - could DoubleClick have been acquired by someone?” Remember - it was 2001 and the dot com world was coming apart at the seams…

So I headed back to the living room, snagged the remote, and turned on the TV straight to CNBC (of course!). However, instead of seeing financials about DoubleClick or whatever other companies that were making the airwaves that day, I saw a video of flames and billowing smoke coming from North Tower. 

What the heck? Was this some movie? This just couldn’t be real .. right?

A few seconds of listening to the anchors on CNBC made me realize this was in fact very real. All too real.

I sat there in disbelief. There was confusion all around. A quick scan of all the major networks and no one could explain whether that was a bomb; an accidental collision by some commuter airplane; or something else. The prevalent thought at the time was that a small commuter plane had managed to find himself lodged in the North Tower yet one look at that large gaping hole and you knew.. that was no small plane.  Yet through it all, no one dared to mention the word “terrorism”. And really - why would they? These types of events happened everywhere else around the world - certainly not in America, let alone in the largest city in America.

Then I watched the second plane hit the South Tower (by now I was watching Channel 7/ABC News) and knew - this was no accident. I remember thinking, what the hell is going on? All sorts feelings and emotions were coursing through my veins - I was on one hand shocked, on the other hand scared, and ultimately horrified at what I was seeing.  

It really started to sink in when I saw the visuals of people jumping for their lives from the burning towers. Had things gotten so bad at the towers that the only viable option was to jump from those heights? I’ll never be able to erase those images and quite honestly, I don’t really want to . 

I picked up my cell phone and called my girlfriend at the time (who also worked at DoubleClick) to make sure she was alright. She OK and proceeded to mention that some folks at work actually saw the second plane flying past them along the Hudson river as it made its way down to the World Trade Center and into the South Tower. I’m not sure how I would have felt had I been there at work to see that happen. My girlfriend then told me she was going to try to make her way back home.

Then the news switched over to coverage from Washington DC. I naturally thought someone from the White House or the Pentagon was going to provide some insight into what was going on in NYC. Instead, the news is focused on billowing smoke coming from the Pentagon. As with practically all news reports that morning, there was mass confusion as to what was occurring. Did a bomb go off at the Pentagon? I initially thought - how could that be? The smoke coming from the Pentagon was tremendous - that would have been one immense bomb (and how the heck would a bomb make it that close to the Pentagon anyhow?)

This was getting ridiculous now. Confusion was everywhere. There were reports of possibly other hijacked planes in the air (and of course there was in fact one other plane still out there at that time). Although I was still stuck in Queens, I hardly felt safe at all anymore. Who and what was next? The Empire State Building? The bridges? The White House? The airports?  What was next??

Over the next hour or so I found myself going back and forth between the living room where the TV was and my office room where my computers were. I was chatting with folks from work every few minutes and then heading back to the living room to see the latest news coverage that was taking place. I wanted to head into the city to see this first hand myself (why .. I had no idea but I felt compelled to go) but given that the subways were now closed, there was really nowhere for me to go except to stay at home.

Then the most unthinkable of the unthinkable events occurred.. the towers collapsed. First the South Tower followed several minutes later by the North Tower. In its wake were incredible mushroom clouds of dark grey-ish soot and ash - almost as if a small tactical nuclear bomb had gone off in lower Manhattan.

These fixtures which I had taken for granted all of my life were now gone. These incredible soaring skyscrapers; the symbols of New York City were no more. One moment they were there, and the next.. gone. In an instant. 

All those lives.. all those office workers who thought this was yet another normal Tuesday morning.. all the emergency first responders; the firefighters; the EMT; the police; the New York City officials; you name it.. all those innocent lives now lost. 

I remember the news were showing video images of doctors and nurses lining up outside St. Vincents hospital waiting for the inevitable stream of casualties that would.. or should have come from lower Manhattan.. except that it didn’t - at least not in the numbers people thought.  

The rest of the day was a complete blur to me outside of those initial two hours. I remember driving out to near the mouth of the 59th Street bridge to pick up my girlfriend who had walked with so many others to escape Manhattan. Escape Manhattan - doesn’t that just sound so strange? It was like a scene out of some disaster movie (think “Deep Impact” or what not) - that was what it looked like as I drove west along Queens Blvd that day to pick up my girlfriend. Streams of civilians.. of regular New Yorkers walking east along the blvd - looking for a way to go home. I eventually found my girlfriend and also picked up another random person to drive her just a bit closer to their home.

That night I ventured out to the rooftop of my building to see what Manhattan looked like from Forest Hills Queens. Although I could barely see downtown Manhattan, I could very much see the smoke rising from the area. My earlier feelings of being scared and horrified turned to utter anger and rage. How dare these people do this to my city? How dare they attack us in our backyards?? 

And as I walked the streets of Forest Hills that evening, I realized something else had changed. This city for all its millions of residents, which often feels distant and cold, came together in an instant. Neighbors who were typically just strangers became friends. Random people who would normally give you the evil eye or stare if you were in their way were suddenly friendly and helpful. Candles were outside of homes all across the area. People were unified for once here in this city and it was an incredible site to behold in the hours, days, and weeks to come. 

It’s been ten years since that fateful morning and I am utterly so conflicted about where we stand as a city and as a country. I left NYC for LA a few years after 9/11 - not so much because of 9/11 but more for a fresh start to my life. Late last year I came back to New York City to work for Gilt Groupe and in doing so, I came back to a city that in many ways I didn’t recognize anymore. NYC had changed all around me. Parts of the city which I remember to be sketchy were now the coolest parts of the city to live. Hipsters were everywhere from the lower east side to Brooklyn to even Jackson Heights Queens.. Go figure. And perhaps most importantly, downtown Manhattan was coming back to life. The construction of both the 9/11 memorial and the new WTC buildings have brought a new sense of hope and purpose to downtown Manhattan. It is once again bustling.

Yet its hard for me to say that we’re better off today than where we were ten years ago. The city still stands; the nation still lives; yet whatever innocence we had that day ten years ago is now forever lost. For the thousands of families who lost loved ones on 9/11 and in the wars and conflicts that resulted from 9/11 - their lives have been forever changed. 

So while I hope for the future; for all of our futures; I remember the past. Let us never forget.

gilt-tech:

If you’re curious about functional programming, I’d recommend watching Dr. Venkat Subramaniam’s recent talk at Gilt HQ. “Thinking Functionally” provides an insightful and entertaining overview of functional programming techniques and assumes no previous experience in this area.

Venkat does the whole presentation in TextMate, working through examples in Java, Scala and Groovy.