Dec

31

Happy New Year — 2007 !!

Filed Under goal setting, self improvement, things to ponder about | Leave a Comment

Wishing all my readers a very happy new year. What are your new year resolutions? Vague goals (like “oh, to be better than last year”) never happens; so write it down this year, and see how much you manage to accomplish at the end of the year. Holding yourself accountable by writing it down is important so that you can measure how well you do. We all have a picture of where we want to be next, so start setting some goals/milestones towards that path today. Or another year will pass, and you will _still_ not be any closer.

I found this clip on YouTube. I like his quote just before he puts down his cuppa coffee and runs off jogging, “Why not start today, eh? Happy new year.” Start today! =]

Dec

25

Merry Christmas!

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Merry Christmas, to all my readers. Looks like I didn’t make Santa’s list this year. But it’s still an improvement from last year. (I got a lump of coal last year)

Dec

20

Cartoon: How software is really made

Filed Under engineering, geeky, humor, uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Funny picture description of how software is really made in a bloated big corp. Thanks Carny.

Dec

17

The media industry, and content creators

Filed Under business, career, innovation | Leave a Comment

Brandon Peele from Generative Transformation has written about the media industry, that I think is a great explanation of what’s happening there. It’s a long read so I’ve summarized it in short below, with some observations I feel are relevant to anyone in tech whose interests are in building a career and innovating.

In the media business, there are two forces competing for the same piece of pie. On one side of the ring, you have the content creators (artists, writers, actors, etc.) and on the other side you have the content enablers (think infrastructure – the cable service providers, cell phone carriers, satellite TV networks, etc.). The enablers take 50% of the revenue, and the starving artists duke out the other half with overhead costs such as talent agents (middle-managers and what not), production costs, etc. – so in reality, actual content creators get less than half the profit.

Since the cost of delivering actual content is so high, only a tiny subset of all creative talent actually sees some action. However, the cost of distribution and technology is constantly decreasing (see Moore’s Law) and Web 2.0 apps such as YouTube have significantly lowered the barrier to entry for these independent content creators. Anybody and their dog can submit a video to YouTube without filing a whole lot of paperwork and getting through a long line of gatekeepers who make thumbs up/down decision based on their own subjective yardstick. If it’s really good, it will get eyeballs; and these days, venture capitalists are aggressively after anything that can get lots of eyeballs. Where the attention of the masses go, you will find money to be made, so the saying goes (in the advertisement business anyway). And to find out if we’re headed for another technology bubble, follow the venture capital money, but I digress.

The punch line of all this is if you are in the business of being a gatekeeper to the medium of how information is distributed (i.e. TV, radio, cell carriers), you will eventually be undercut by someone else who can bring people the same content at a lower price – like YouTube. Technology expedites commodity. Hence, the diminishing returns on investment in yesterday’s technology used by content-enablers. Similarly, if all you do at work is cut-and-paste person A’s words into an e-mail to be forwarded to person B, and then cut-and-paste person B’s words into an e-mail to person A (behaving much like a parrot), then you’re just a speedbump in disguise who is not helping create any new of value. <Insert scene from Office Space where Tom Smykowski tries to justify to the consultants Bob and Bob why he has to physically transport a piece of paper from person A to person B>. But I digress.

Content is king, and if you think about it, it is much harder to be creative and come up with something new (writing a new joke, writing a new story everyone will like); than it is to simply re-apply well-known engineering practices (which is what the infrastructure guys are just really doing). It ain’t rocket science, it’s more about applying proven principles / methods / laws / theories. Obfuscating code to make your code look more complex and confusing makes you look smart to stupid people, but stupid to smart people, but I digress.

Brandon’s article quote Thomas Friedman, who observed that not only call-centers, telemarketing, and other mundane business processes but now even high-end knowledge work such as software development, legal and financial research jobs are going out to whoever is qualified to do it, at the lowest price – and that usually means, outside of the US.

In the interest of creating, consuming, and managing knowledge, the following line meant a great deal to me:

The extent to which an individual or organization thrives is governed by innovation and values, such that they can create faster than their creations are commoditized. Thus, a particular technology / product / service, or even portfolio of technologies / products / services, are not as important as the processes which produce them.

Appears to make perfect sense to me, that if you innovate slower than the rate of commoditization of your inventions – you will become a toasted dinosaur. So, to stay in business, out-innovating your competitors is the name of the game.

Any software engineer can program. That’s the easy part. You just pickup a book on whatever the new shiny programming language is, learn its syntax, and off you go. You can start building something in that new red-hot language. The tough part is, what is that something that you are going to build? Will it be useful? Is it of any value to others? Will your customers want it? Two programs that do that same exact thing but written in two different programming languages is about as valuable as having two $5 dollar bills instead of a single $10 dollar bill. Who cares. I don’t even use cash anymore, I use plastic cards and sometimes virtual cards.

How do you keep that creative innovative juice flowing? If innovating itself is difficult, then attempts to mechanize and automate such a process must be even more difficult. And we know it is difficult, also because VC’s have yet to find an algorithm that will accurately identify winning companies (e.g. Google) from losing companies (e.g. petfoods.com), consistently over time.

I have not actually thought this through long enough, so this is actually a good exercise for me. This is what I have done so far, whenever I find myself stuck in a mental roadblock, unable to think outside the box.

  1. Work from a remote location. Working at home is sometimes too distracting, I find myself unable to contentrate with a TV remote so near by, noisy room mates, etc. Working remotely from a sit-down coffee shop with free wireless internet is my favourite. I frequent places like Panera Bread and the Living Room in La Jolla, Calif. There’s a supply of snacks, caffeinated beverages, free wifi (and access to an electrical outlet), and perhaps more importantly, the ambiance (college students studying for finals, professionals having small ad-hoc meetings). Kinda nice to have in the background, I just sort of tune them out anyway. Also, sometimes I bring work to the beach – working from inside my car on my laptop. West coast sunsets are beautiful, the sound of the waves, birds, and the view of the ocean is just relaxing. Occasional random hotties are a plus. The only drawback to that is I don’t have wireless internet, but hopefully that will change soon when I get Cingular’s Samsung Blackjack and tether my laptop for internet access.
  2. Read my stash of RSS feeds. Yes, that’s right. Reading what others have written sometimes spur new ideas, and I start thinking about how to solve new problems, sometimes identifying a problem that I was previously unaware of. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to get me motivated. Someone writes something I find inspirational, that gets me into the flow, that “go, go, go!” feeling will make me stop at nothing.
  3. To be decided.

The full article from Brandon Peele is available here.

Questions:

  1. What problem are you going to solve next? The bigger the problem, the better. To quote Vinod Khosla, a well-known VC in silicon valley, “Any big problem is a big opportunity .. Nobody will pay you to solve a non-problem“. I just love that quote.
  2. After identifying the problem, how are you going to implement a creative solution to that problem? How about a solution so creative that it doubles as a barrier to entry to would-be competitors? What do you do to get your creative juices flowing? (you don’t have to ask yourself this question if you’re a “content-enabler”).

Dec

13

Funny video

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Amateurish video — but it still tickles :) Got 5:02 minutes to kill?

Read about this video from the NYTimes.

Dec

10

Things you want to address before they happen

Filed Under strategy, things to ponder about, websense | Leave a Comment

IMG_0751

It rarely rains in San Diego, but it did last night. I guess my car’s brakes were still wet although it was sunny today. As I made a pretty tight corner, jamming my brakes a little hard, I felt the ABS go off and I thought to myself, “wow, am I glad I went with the ABS on this car”. I drive a Mitsubishi Eclipse ‘05 and I remember the day I was debating if I should go with the GTS or the GT trim, the latter not having the ABS and cheaper.

I generally dislike the “scare” tactic used by salesmen. It usually entails providing you reason why if you don’t buy whatever they are selling, then something bad will happen to you.

But if I am going to be like that, then logic follows that I should start thinking about the things I need before I need them. I needed my ABS to stop my car before I hit another car. Surely, I can opt to get the ABS after I hit the car, but then I’d have to pay the financial consequences. So why not take the pre-emptive measure of getting the ABS first? I’m already penalized plenty for car insurance (namely because I am under 25, single, no kids, and drive a 2 door car). I do have a clean driving record, so my preference would be to keep it that way for as long as I can.

The punchline for this post is: What are the things in life that you should address before something undesirable occurs that will affect you, your loved ones, and/or belongings?

The other extreme would be to buy everything a scare tactic tells you. Sure, I could be struck by a meteor the size of Saturn that crashes on my car while I am driving to my hockey game, but what are the odds of that happening? (That was a jab at the insurance telemarketers that try to sell me their load of crap).

Without even feeling a *little* bit guilty for being biased (heh), another thing that comes to mind is my company’s flagship product. You can read all about it from the marketers, but one of the things we do is prevent people from accidentally visiting malicious websites that will silently install malware (trojan horses, viruses, spyware) on your PC. Did you know, just by visiting a link from your e-mail, you could get infected? That’s all it takes. Yes, that was a shameless plug for my company. I work for the Websense Security Labs. You could get a product as such AFTER you have been hit by piece of malware silenty running on your PC, harvesting all your credit card information from all that online shopping, but you’ve just paid the price. And if your Big Corp, Inc. — the damage to your reputation because you lost your customer information will be hard to undo.

There are plenty of examples like these in life, I guess I just need to list them all, and address them as they come. Do share in the comments below. I’ve just enabled Akismet, to combat comment spam. We’ll see how well this thing works!

On another note, I haven’t written anything for 1+ weeks because I was on a trip to Louisiana. Might post some hideous pictures up later. Cheers!