Today was Pi day, and this year was “super Pi day”. I already mentioned it this morning. I also mentioned Pi day is celebrated as “Aba day” in my family, thanks to my perfect wife. She’s not into the geekiness, but she’s into making it an awesome day! Today included lemon meringue pie for breakfast, Pi-decor and balloons with a bunch of Pi digits floating around the house, pizza-pie for lunch, and some Pi-centric fashion statements 🙂

The Weekly Review is a recurring (sort-of-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last week.

Earlier this week, I finished listening to the audio book version of “A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas”, by Warren Berger.

In this book, Warren Berger explores the power of questions and the questioning mindset, and how it is used to ignite change in business and in our daily lives. Warren finds that although children start out asking hundreds of questions a day, questioning decreases dramatically as children enter school. He discusses the effect of the education and business culture that rewards answers, and barely tolerates questions. Warren analyzes numerous examples of successful startups (e.g. Google, Airbnb, Netflix, and more), and reveals how questioning is key in their culture, and the driver for innovation. Throughout the book, the author outlines a practical Why-What If-How framework of inquiry to facilitate the process of innovation.

I enjoyed the book very much, and recommend it whole heartedly! It resonated with my own lingering thoughts and concerns about the western education system, that keep growing as my own kids approach entering this broken and outdated system. When the day arrives, I hope I will be able to enroll my kids to a school that embraces and encourages the questioning mindset, instead of demanding canned answers and emphasizing compliance – a culture that served the industrial age, but is harmful at the information age. Are you familiar with such school? In Israel? Around the world? Please let me know!

I also completed today the Cloud Compute Concepts (1) Coursera course. This course was a 5-week MOOC from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, covering some basic technical concepts in cloud computing. The syllabus includes MapReduce, grids, peer-to-peer systems, failure detection and membership protocols, key/value stores (e.g. Cassandra), multicast, time ordering in distributed systems, snapshots, the consensus problem and the Paxos protocol.

I’m not seeking any “formal” qualifications on this subject. When I started my current job at Yowza](http://www.yowza3d.com/), it was the first time I worked with cloud technology at depth. I picked up lots and lots of practical stuff, but I felt I’m missing the background and underlying theory. To compensate for this, I decided to take a series of Coursera courses, whose syllabi looked comprehensive enough. This course was the first in the series, and I think I already produced value from it. For instance, we’re considering using Cassandra, and thanks to the course, I now know more about Cassandra then I knew before.

The Weekly Review is a recurring (sort-of-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last week.

In case you missed it, Lenovo preinstalled an adware called Superfish on Windows laptops. Not only that this adware obnoxiously injects ads to your search results, turns out that the Superfish adware implements man-in-the-middle to do its thing!

If you think that’s bad enough, the certificate they use to do this was easy to crack… This means that anyone can use this to implement man-in-the-middle attacks against machines with the Superfish certificate installed… 🙁 In case you’re curious, the password is “komodia”.

Scared? Rightly so! Go ahead and check yourself, and clean it up if you’ve got it!

Interesting to see claims that the adware poses no risk… O_o

The Weekly Review is a recurring (sort-of-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last week.

The twins had their first birthday yesterday! I’m glad to let you know that we all survived their first year of existence! I wonder if this surviving thing was harder for them or for us. ^_^

I finished “audio-reading” I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi last week. I realize that the title sounds like crappy self-help, but I thought I’d give this book a chance. I got several positive recommendations, and Ramit’s personal finance blog is pretty good.

Unfortunately, after reading it, I can’t recommend it to any non-US readers…

I agree with the principles that are at the essence of the book:

1. Invest aggressively, invest early.
2. Spend responsibly on what brings you the most value.
3. Be as frugal as possible with everything else.
4. Automate financial processes whenever you can.
5. Don’t be stupid with debt, fees, tax advantage opportunities, etc.

These are great messages, worth passing on. My problem with the book is that 95% of the content delves into how these principles apply to the average 20-something american – which I’m not. Three examples from the top of my mind:

• Going into the details of credit score at length.
• Detailing the different types of US bank accounts.
• Reading out phone numbers of US banks?! Seriously?!

Bottom line, if you live in the US, this book may be valuable to you. Otherwise, save your time.

The Weekly Review is a recurring (sort-of-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last weeks.

For the first time since starting this weekly review, I skipped a week! Did you notice? 😉

Anyway, I just finished “audio-reading” The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. It was a long one! At 17:30 hours net play time, it took me about 4 weeks to finish it at 1.25x rate, but it was worth it! I followed a recommendation by Jamie Todd Rubin, and enjoyed the excellent stories laying out the evolution of the digital age. I always thought that “historical subjects” can become interesting easily if told through stories of actual people involved, as opposed to dry facts and numbers. This book proved that point for me. As a common geek, I admit that it isn’t hard for me to find interest in stories about people ranging from Ada Lovelace through Sergey Brin, but I really think also non-geeks will find this book interesting.

The Weekly Review is a recurring (sort-of-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last week(s).