Goodbye Yahoo!

Last week was my last at Yahoo!. It has been almost 3 years, and by far the most successful, productive and exciting years of my working career. I will miss the great people at Yahoo!, and I will always be proud of my contributions to the search engine: I released several ranking functions and about 12 lines of C code that I wrote are executed every single time someone runs a query on Yahoo Search.
Goodbye Yahoo!

Slow iMac

I have a late 2006 intel mac core duo, and I was a bit upset about how slow it was. After some investigation I finally narrow it down to the internal HD performance. Looking at the system monitor I found out that I was getting on average 1-2 Mb/sec transfer rate, tops. Which was really strange, since I was getting better performance even from the external hard drive connected via firewire. Running all sorts of diagnostic did not turn up anything suspicious, except the slowness. Suspecting a bad hard drive I decided to replace the internal hard drive. After following instructions on the internet (not for anybody: opening up the imac is quite a challenge) I replaced the internal drive with a 1TB hitachi, and after reinstalling everything I now get 10-20Mb/sec transfer rate. Happyness!
So, if you find your iMac particularly sluggish and you notice that the hard drive is slow, it might be due to a failing hard disk.