About Me
My name is Shahar (he: שחר), and this is my blog. I grew up and live in Israel - currently in Tel Aviv, but I grew up in Mattat, a small village in Israel’s northern Galilee.
I was born in June 1981, which makes me 25 years old. I like this age, it’s nice. At 23 I used to think I’m old. Now I don’t. Does this mean I’m really getting old?
I think the place I grew up in, and the way of life I was brought into, has allot to do with the person I am today. Growing up in a small village (Mattat is ~40 families today - but I clearly remember days of ~15 families) has large advantages in my opinion - and this is how I want to raise my kids some day (no plans yet, mom 
).
Allot of my hobbies revolve around computers: I am very much an open source person, and I strongly believe and sharing of knowledge and “intellectual” property. I run Linux wherever I can, preferably Gentoo Linux, for both technical and philosophical reasons. I do allot of PHP programming, both for a living and as a hobby.
I work for a company named Zend Technologies as a professional service engineer. Zend (for those who don’t know) has allot to do with the development of PHP, and there’s allot of interesting things going on and allot of very smart people in the company to learn from.
My job requires quite allot of traveling, mostly to Europe but also to other continents (well, Asia and North America.. Sadly we don’t have allot of big customers in other places…). I like traveling allot - even if it’s for work purposes. I always think that meeting nice people all around the world is the best part of my job.
I am also very much interested in humanities, especially history, philosophy and sociology. I am not officially educated in any of those (and neither in computers for that matter), but I do my best to read and educate myself. Allot of my interest in open-source comes from the philosophical and sociological side, and not only from the technical side.
Hmm… That’s it I guess, if there’s anything else you want to know about me, just post a comment, or keep reading this blog
Hi Shahar,
I came upon your website rather randomly. I’m not much of a techie but I enjoyed reading about your travels and am curious about what it was like to grow up in such a small village. If you’re even in San Francisco, I’d love to show you around my foggy beautiful city.
I look forward to reading more of your blog!
-Anita
San Francisco, CA
Hi - Thanks!
In fact I’ve been to SF once, I have family there - and I have to say It’s one of the pretiest cities I’ve been to, very close to nature, plus it has that “edge of western civilazation” feeling.
It’s nice to know some non-techies read my blog as well - if you’re interested, you can always subscribe to my non-tech feeds, most of my “other” posts go into http://prematureoptimization.org/blog/archives/category/people-places/feed or http://prematureoptimization.org/blog/archives/category/thoughts-possibilities/feed
Shahar.
[...] bien, Shahar ha creado una clase(magic_quotes_gpc) bastante interesante para poder solucionar este problema de [...]
Dear Shahar,
first of all congratulations to your new job!
I’m posting here because I can’t find your mail address and despite “If you have any comments, I’ll be happy to hear them.” the comments to
http://prematureoptimization.org/blog/archives/45
are disabled.
Are your very useful (but duplicated) slides of 17 Oct 2007 still current?
http://devzone.zend.com/article/3150-Slides-link-is-from-2007
Greetings from Germany
René
Hi René,
Yes - the slides have not changed since October. I actually really enjoyed giving that talk, and might update it once in a while if I have opportunities to give it at other conferences.
For now - they are the same as they were when I gave them at ZendCon07.
BTW comments are disabled on that post just because it has been more than a couple of months since it was posted. They get locked automatically to avoid spamming.
Shahar.
Hi Shahar,
It is refreshing to feel the wisdom of the ages, expressing itself through your words. It is maybe partially because you come from a family of philosophers !? but more importantly it is for sure due to who you are in Truth… A pure and sincere heart !
May 2009, brings you the opportunity to offer all your gifts to Life and to the world !
Laurent… your friend from Paris
Hi Shahar
I’m posting here as I couldn’t find a mail address and comments are closed, but regarding your Finding Apache’s Memory Usage post, the following command should avoid the PHP requirement.
ps -ef | grep httpd | grep -v ^root | awk '{ print $2 '} | xargs pmap -d | grep ^mapped: | awk '{ print $4 }' | cut -dK -f1 | awk '{ SUM += $1} END { print SUM/NR }'I know it’s old but I hope it helps!
Karl