the conversation

Setting up self-signed SSL certificates for your Jetty instance (experiments with Noir and Clojure)

2012-01-26T07:57:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,
Recently, Heroku has included support for Clojure (fantastic!) and I have been testing it out with Noir. There are several good tutorials on how to get started with Noir (a route-based website development framework with Clojure) and MongoDB (congomongo) on Heroku:http://thecomputersarewinning.com/post/clojure-heroku-noir-mongo http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/clojure
Interestingly, Heroku has also enabled free SSL (PiggyBack SSL), which is useful for testing apps. Free hosting, database and SSL, why wait? =)

This is to document my steps in setting up a self-signed SSL certificate on your own machine for development purposes (Jetty, not Apache). I thought I would be done in 2 hours.. but I ended up taking 2 days. Sigh.. hopefully, this will help someone else.

There are 2 ways to do this. You can either use keytool or both keytool and openssl. I used openssl and keytool. In hindsight, keytool seems to be easier (thank you Brenton - http://formpluslogic.blogspot.com/2010/08/securing-clojure-web-applications-with.html) and less problematic than using openssl to create the necessary files, then using keytool to import the files.

FYI, I'm using Windows 7 (you will need to change the commands and paths accordingly), Noir 1.2.2, CongoMongo 0.1.5-SNAPSHOT, Clojure 1.2.1.The 2 programs that you need are OpenSSL ("../GnuWin32/bin/openssl.exe") and Keytool (which you can find in "../Java/jre6/bin/keytool.exe").
OpenSSL - http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/csr (download the proper version for your system)

As an overview, you will need to do the following steps:
Install openssl
Use OpenSSL ("../GnuWin32/bin/openssl.exe") to:

generate a private site key (site.key)
strip the password from site.key for automatic loading when uploaded to a server
generate a self-signed signing request (site.csr) (might need it for Heroku)
generate a self-signed certificate (sitex509.crt - in x509 format for loading into the keystore)
combine the self-signed certificate (sitex509.crt) and site key (site.key) and export it in pkcs12 format (site.pkcs12)

Use keytool ("../Java/bin/keytool.exe") to:

import the file site.pkcs12 into the keystore (sitepkcs12.keystore)

I tripped up along the way for many of these steps, so I will include the error messages too for reference.

Install the appropriate version of openssl for your operating system.

OpenSSL
You might need to enter some pass-phrases or passwords. I suggest that you write them down these up, just in case.

Generate a private site key (site.key)
$ openssl genrsa -des3 -out site.key 2048

Make a copy of site.key and strip the password, so that it can be auto-loaded when uploading to a server
$ copy site.key site.orig.key
$ openssl rsa -in site.orig.key -out site.key

Generate a self-signed signing request (site.csr) (might need it for Heroku)
Error: could not find openssl.cnf in the config
You will need to find a copy of the openssl.cnf. I used the one that was in "GnuWin32\share\openssl.cnf". If you are using Linux or OSX, you should be able to find your version. Btw, the version of openssl.cnf that I used was dated 2005 and it still seems to work.
$ openssl req -new -key site.key -out site.csr -config "..\GnuWin32\share\openssl.cnf"
You will need to key in the information requested (please refer to http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/csr for an explanation). Please fill the proper info for "Common Name", it should be the secure domain or sub-domain. I suggest that you save this info, as you will need to enter the exact same info for the certificate. You can also skip entering any info for the "extra" attributes.
For example,

Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:SG
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:SG
Locality Name (eg, city) []:Singapore
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: myapp
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:localhost
Email Address []:

Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:

Backup your site.csr.

Generate a self-signed certificate (sitex509.crt - in x509 format for loading into the keystore)
$ openssl req -new -x509 -key site.key -out sitex509.crt -config "..\GnuWin32\share\openssl.cnf"
Enter the same info as above.
Error: not in x509 format..
The certificate needs to be in x509 format or keytool will not be able to import it into the keystore as it cannot recognize it.

Backup your sitex509.crt.

Combine the self-signed certificate (sitex509.crt) and site key (site.key) and export it in pkcs12 format (site.pkcs12)
$ openssl pkcs12 -inkey site.key -in sitex509.crt -export -out site.pkcs12

Backup your site.pkcs12.

Keytool
Copy the file site.pkcs12 to your "..\Java\jre6\bin\" directory

Make sure you have full control (write, read-access) to the Java directory
Error: I had an error initially as I could not write to the Java directory. Go to the folder settings and enable the permissions. For Windows 7, you can add "Everyone" to the users and set "Full Control" for "Everyone".

Import the file site.pkcs12 into the keystore (sitepkcs12.keystore)
$ keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore site.pkcs12 -srcstoretype PKCS12 -destkeystore sitepkcs12.keystore

Double-check the keystore.

$ keytool -list -v -keystore sitepkcs12.keystore

Backup your sitepkcs12.keystore.

Noir

Copy all the files (site.key, site.csr, sitex509.crt, sitepkcs12.keystore) to your Noir project directory ("../myapp/").
I think only the keystore file is needed.
Error: javax.ssl does not .. correspond .. cipher.
You need to convert both the key and the cert (in x509) to pkcs12 format and import them into the keystore. Then, place the keystore in your Noir project folder.

Change your jetty settings
You will need to pass the settings (jetty-options as a map) to Jetty (remember your password!). In server.clj, for example,

(defn -main [& m]
(let [mode (keyword (or (first m) :dev))
port (Integer. (get (System/getenv) "PORT" "8080"))
ssl-port (Integer. "443")]
(def myappserver (server/start ssl-port
{:mode mode
:jetty-options {:port port
:ssl-port ssl-port
:join? false
:ssl? true
:keystore "sitepkcs12.keystore"
:key-password "abcdef"}
:ns 'myapp
:session-cookie-attrs {:max-age 3600
:secure true}}))
(users/db-init)))

Apologies for the weird formatting, please adjust accordingly for your app.

Go to https://localhost:443/myapp and http://localhost:8080/myapp to test.

Ask yourself daily how you are making someone's life better

2011-11-30T05:08:00.001-08:00

Today, I learnt a very important lesson about startups. After 1 year of hitting walls together and self-reflection, I have arrived at a definition of a startup (not the definitive one, just my personal understanding). The startup process is a daily journey of pain and joy trying to honestly answer the all-important question for your customers: "How are you making my life better today?"

Appreciating the stochastic nature of life, failures and success

2011-11-01T04:42:00.000-07:00

I think it would be good if people realized how random the world is (at least, it seems random to me =) ).

Imagine if all the things you ever did in life could be plotted as a normal distribution. Failures would then be considered as only data points on the curve. Instead of being overly concerned with a single data point, we would be more interested in the overall shape of the curve.

There are 2 properties that characterize the shape of the normal distribution, the mean μ and variance σ². Hence, we would start asking ourselves different questions. Are our attempts leading us closer to the mean? Are we increasing the peak of our mean? How many standard deviations are our attempts away from the mean?

We would accept that life is inherently random, and that there is always a slight possibility of failure, regardless of how much we prepare ourselves. We would not put so much pressure on ourselves to always get it right or to always succeed on every attempt. Moreover, we would understand that trying and failing is just merely part of a process of trying and failing enough times, while trying to move closer to our peak and improving our peak.

We would not sweat the small stuff. Instead, we would keep a close look at how the middle part of our curve looks like (the bulk of the curve within 3 standard deviations).

What would be the value as measured by the vertical axis? Would it be money? Happiness? "Quality" (as defined by Robert Persig)? Would there be more than 1 dimension measured? It would be difficult and pointless to compare.

We could rank the activities that we do daily and start dropping all those activities that are not worthwhile.

Similarly, we could plot the relationships that we have and focus on the ones that make us happy.

If we were to compare between the curves of our friends and our own, we would realize that there would be a large overlap. The large overlap enables us to relate to each other and the differences make us interesting to each other.

10,000 experiments to find the material for a light bulb. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert. 10,000 attempts for a good approximation to a life's worth of normal distribution =)

Relativity among humans

2011-10-22T20:07:00.000-07:00

The biological origin of the relativity bias
As the human mind is biological in origin, it is not naturally inclined to frame thoughts in absolute terms. Having no reference to an absolute definite scale, the human mind is forced to generate thoughts, pass judgments and form conclusions using relative references. This has wide-ranging implications for the behaviour of individuals, groups and societies.

Relativity among individuals
Relativity and sensation

Psychologist Cialdini's experiment with subjects reporting their sensation of water at room temperature is an example of relative bias affecting the rationalization of individuals. Cialdini instructed subjects to first place one hand in a bucket of warm water, then the other hand in a bucket of room temperature. The subjects reported that the water at room temperature felt cold. Similarly, he repeated the experiment, but changed the warm water to cold water. The subjects subsequently reported feeling that the water at room temperature felt warm.

Relativity affecting how the weights we ascribe to recent and historical events
This simple experiment shows 2 aspects of human irrationality that we often fail to acknowledge - the tendency to ascribe value in a relative manner and the recency effect. The recency effect refers to the way we tend to weight events that happened recently more than events which happened in the past.

Why we treat wins and losses differently

The relativity bias also affects how we treat potential losses and wins. Prospect theory demonstrates our aversion to loss and also our risk-seeking behaviour. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory) Simply put, we would walk 20 minutes to save $1 on a $4 plate of noodles, while we would not walk to the next Apple store to compare prices for a $700 iPad 2. For losses, we can examine the experiment conducted by Richard Thaler, where students display significantly different behaviours in 2 cases (http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/prospect.htm). The first group of students were told to assume that they had won $30 and vote for a coin flip to decided whether they would win or lose $9. 70% of students voted to toss the coin. Another group were then given $30 and offered a chance to flip a coin to decide whether they would receive $21 or $39. 43% of students in the second group chose the coin flip. Thus, when people have gained something, they are reluctant to lose what they have gained. When people have nothing, they tend to adopt risk-seeking behaviour.

Since Prospect Theory seeks to explain the anamolous behaviour through a S-shaped utility curve, I would like propose that relativity bias be used to explain the origin of the S-shape. Relativity affects us in 2 ways, thus shaping the curve. For the example of lunch and iPads, we unconsciously or consciously judge the savings relative to the absolute amount we are intending to spend. Relativity also affects us in an emotional sense through our perceived relative social status. Once we have gained something, we perceive ourselves to be ranked higher in terms of social status and we are reluctant to lose that increased rank.

Examining the concept of identity, we can also break down an individual's perceived identity in terms of how an individual visualizes himself or herself relative to the other people whom he or she interacts with. We assume different roles according to the time and group that we are in.

We can thus attempt to understand individual human fallacies such as the attitude towards sunk costs, gamblers displaying increasingly desperate behaviour and the failure to learn from history.

Relativity among groups
Envy driving economic exertions

What happens when the effect of the relativity bias is extended to groups? Many people would instinctively choose the option of winning $5,000 in a lottery while their neighbours gain nothing, than win $50,000 while all their neighbours win $100,000. This explains the general disquiet felt when someone gets a brand new sports car while the rest of their friends are driving normal sedans. This explains the rush to keep appearences up with the neighbours, office politics and the behaviour of relatives at family gatherings. The annual jockeying of positions is keenly felt by those who come from a Chinese family, although I believe this behaviour is present in most cultures. Hence, as income inequality increases, society will naturally experience greater unhappiness and disquiet until a great reset. Greed may not drive the economic progress as much as envy (http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/why-envy-dominates-greed.html).

Fluctuations in the stock markets

If we allow ourselves to treat the stock market as an emergent system from the behaviour of individuals, the bias due to relativity becomes useful in explaining the inherent irrationality present in stock market movements. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is only roughly right, with the aberrant behaviour ("Mr Market") probably being explained by the relativity bias. Since relativity affects our decision-making processes with respect to time (recency), losses and wins, it is understandable why people cut their losses too late and why people sell their winners too early. It would be resisting typical hardwired human tendencies to not do so.

The relativity of morality and social norms

What is morality and social norms? If you merely hold yourself and others true to certain principles and commitments, you are merely being self-righteous. I will attempt to define morality as a common but not universal unexclusive dynamic intertwined commitments among a large porous group of people that emerges from the set of mutual commitments. Morality and social norms only become powerful as a set of mutually binding commitments relative to the individuals in a group or society. However, the boundaries of the group are porous, the dynamic set is largely common but not universally agreed upon and the way morality emerges cannot be controlled. Hence, it is logical to follow why morality becomes extremely subjective and divisive, as undeniably, there exists relative standards of commitments as perceived by each individual within the porous group. Regardless of such an argument, I do believe there exists universal human truths such as the "Golden Rule", which seems to be repeated across multiple monotheistic and multitheistic religions.

Possible counters against relativity

Are we able to counter this relativity bias? This relativity bias is not always bad. If we cast our future selves as always being relatively better than our current selves, this personal reflection using relative judgements is useful for self-improvement.

It is my own personal hope (warning: introduction of subjective human bias) that we are able to detect signs that we are being subjective and objectively correct our thought processes. Remarkably, Buddhism and Stoicism have devised practices that address this fallacy of relativity bias in human behaviour.

Both Buddhism and Stoicism seems to emphasize a clear recognition of desires or insatiables. Having recognized the presence of these desires, one cultivates a mindset that reflects upon these desires and devises practices to rationalize why those desires are unnecessary. One method used is the concept of "impermanence". Recognizing that most things life are transient, we are able to cast the desire or want as being a mere blip in any relevant timeline we choose. We can also choose to frame what we lack into what we already possess. Before getting angry, we can also observe the emotional state in which we are getting angry and find a way to cast the situation in a relative favourable light. Thus, only a person's imagination limits the number of alternative reference frames to switch to in a tricky situation.

On a deeper level, through daily cultivation, Buddhism and Stoicism works on removing the generation of thoughts that lead to such desires. Clearing the mist of such desires, one can then focus on true happiness.

Personally, I find this concept of relativity very useful. I find myself being extremely arrogrant most of the time. By shifting my relative frame of reference, I am attempting to find a way to reduce or remove this arrogance as way to introducing much-needed humility. I also tend to judge people extremely quickly and harshly. By shifting my frame of reference, I see the person completely and am able to appreciate the person's faults relative to their strengths.

Clojure - Printing special characters " \ / { } # ' $

2011-10-12T05:15:00.000-07:00

I was playing around with Clojure and I had a problem printing out the following special characters:

" \ / { } # ' $

I uploaded the solution here: https://github.com/ryanteo/clojure-utilities

You can define a string containing all these special characters, then you can access each character by its index as a string in Clojure is stored as a sequence.

Not sure why this works (no time to read the documentation), but it's my hack-around.

As a side note, I've attached this reference for printing special characters in other languages.

Reference:

http://langref.org/clojure+cpp+csharp+erlang+fsharp+groovy+haskell+java+ocaml+perl+php+python+ruby+scala/strings/declaring-strings/special-characters

A love story over a lifetime

2011-10-01T19:06:00.000-07:00

Quoted from The Straits Times, Lee Wei Ling

He told her: "We have been together for most of our lives. You cannot leave me alone now. I will make your life worth living in spite of your physical handicap."

She replied: "That is a big promise."

Papa said: "Have I ever let you down?"

"Today is a public holiday in Singapore. Can I take a break from swimming."

Papa replied: "No, have a swim. You will feel better after that."

They had concluded that the one who died first would be the lucky one.

“For reasons of sentiment, I would like part of my ashes to be mixed with Mama's, and both her ashes and mine put side by side in the columbarium. We were joined in life and I would like our ashes to be joined after this life."

江蕙 - 家后

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eJP4kwQJVs

Understanding Financial Leverage in a crazy world: UBS Trader losing USD$2 billion

2011-09-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/sep/15/ubs-star-trader-arrest-career

Given that I don't understand or have studied finance, I shall try to understand what happened during this incident.

Recently, a UBS trader lost USD$2 billion while trading. Of course, there's a lot of outrage (heard that, seen that before..) about how such a sound financial institution could have such a lax financial control, but I think the whole system was designed from the start to incentivise such risk-taking behaviour.

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/09/16/analysis-the-real-rogue-is-not-kweku-adoboli-but-delta-one/

"In simple terms Delta One Trading is buying or selling an investment instrument that you don’t own. Delta One desks trade financial derivatives, or investment vehicles that mirror closely the price of a real asset. Any position taken is offset or hedged."

You are trading virtual goods.

The trader was earning at least a comfortable mid-6 figures. Let's assume he earned around USD$300,000/year and his annual performance bonus is 24 months. His bonus would have amounted to USD$600,000. Of course, his bonus is based on performance. It is also apparent that his bonus dwarfs his salary by a lot. Therefore, he would definitely want to earn more by taking extreme risks than earning just his basic salary. Given that traders are regularly fired based on performance, he would be forced to chase profits. Most investment bankers are also only in it to make a quick buck and retire in 5 years, hence everyone is trying to earn as much as possible before burning out.

For him to lose USD$2 billion, he must also have had the chance of earning USD$2 billion. For a person earning ~USD$1 million/year, he enjoyed 1000x leverage. In order to employ that leverage successfully, he should have some combination of insider knowledge, intelligence, sense of timing, judgement and experience. Guess he did not.

I know things don't scale as simply, but would you let someone earning $1 buy something from you that costs $1000 on credit?

The other thing that puzzles me is the unknown identities of the parties who earned that USD$2 billion. Someone must have earned it. If someone did not earn it, then we are effectively creating more exotic virtual financial fluff and printing more useless paper money.

Back to a simpler and more rational life as an engineer in a startup.

Startups - A daily journey of gratefulness

2011-09-13T09:42:00.001-07:00

Ever since starting, we've met our fair spectrum of good and bad people. The funny thing is, most people are good and decent, who want to help you, even just a little along the way.

The world isn't so bad after all.

We've had our share of nasty and snobbish nurses, belligerent distributors, suspicious bosses and haughty doctors.

We've also had touching support from our customers, nice "aunty" nurses, supportive suppliers, suppliers who turned friends, mentors, reporters, friends, girlfriends (my co-founders, not me.. =) ) and family. These are the people we like to help or try our best to help.

The funny thing is.. you tend to forget the bad and nasty incidents, while remembering the nice people.

Of course, in a startup, after screaming at each other a couple of times.. It all tends to even out and everyone's pretty happy being buried under their own workload =)

Funnily, the good tends to amplify the good, while the nasty just vanishes before you even start getting angry. We've got nicer people to help, than wasting time getting angry over one person or any incident.

Maybe, a startup can be defined as "a daily journey of gratefulness".

Eriz Mazur's Keynote at ICER 2011 - The scientific approach to teaching: Research as a basis for course design

2011-09-11T19:07:00.000-07:00

I came across an interesting presentation by Eric Mazur on how to teach students physics better.

The perceived test result differences between gender is probably due to culture.

The study tested American and Taiwanese students, and the gender difference among Taiwanese students was not significant.

Interactive teaching and engagement improves test scores.

However, not all engagement is useful or helpful. For example, showing students physics demonstrations may have an adverse impact as students may remember the demonstration using the wrong understanding of the principles. Hence, when you show students something, be very aware of what they are taking away from what you are demonstrating.

Students like teachers to be clear.

Confusion is a good sign.

It shows that the students are trying to make sense of what is being taught.

I wonder how this affects technical education (the supposedly more science, math and computing subjects) for girls.

Blog post:

http://computinged.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/eric-mazurs-keynote-at-icer-2011-observing-demos-hurts-learning-and-confusion-is-a-sign-of-understanding/

Slides:

http://mazur.harvard.edu/search-talks.php?function=display&rowid=1712&szrowids=&searchURL=function%3Drecent

Given that I teach tuition to 2 girls, this is interesting. I'm still thinking about how to incorporate this.

佛在心中 - Buddha lives within your heart

2011-09-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

I have heard the saying "佛在心中“ being used when someone is caught in a situation which does not exactly align perfectly with commonly known Buddhist practices (Note: common Budddist practices are normally just practices, I don't really think Buddha ever tried to control the things you eat, the clothes you wear. I think Buddha is only concerned with how you think). For example, this saying is often heard when someone eats meat while claiming to be a Buddhist.

I shall digress here shortly to talk a little about 杀生. Actually, I've heard that Buddhism does not forbid eating meat, as long as you do not "杀生". 杀生 is the act of killing just for one's pleasure, hence eating meat for one's survival is fine. You might accidentally step on an ant, or consume bacteria in the water you are drinking.. these are not considered 杀生.

Anyway, back to the saying. I recently had another understanding of the phrase triggered by reading the opening chapter of "I Wonder Why". The saying could also refer to the internal Buddha that lies within everyone, although it is shrouded by our human frailties.

Therefore, I shall use this saying to balance my personal proclivity to judge a person harshly. It's a much easier life to lead.

Sep 11, 2011

2011-09-10T19:55:00.001-07:00

11092011

I read the stories, and uncontrollably, I tear. I find myself moved by the stories which required extraordinary heroism.

The reality of it is that people move on. It is both human tragedy and human strength to bounce back from unimaginable suffering and loss.

It's been 10 years. I find myself wondering how someone like me, as far removed as I am from New York and doubly estranged due to the passage of time, could be touched by the sense of loss.

I think about how Singaporeans would react.

I wonder whether we would show the kind of inner strength to pick ourselves from the rubble. I question whether we have the resilience. I doubt we can draw upon a common core.

I also wonder what actions I would have done. Would I have ran? Would I have helped?

(thoughts in progress)

Toxic encounters with oneself

2011-09-03T20:10:00.000-07:00

Recently, I'm experiencing a long ongoing dispute with a friend (I'm pretty sure I don't consider him to be as close to me anymore) which exposed several of my assumptions and weaknesses about myself.

Much as I would like to think that I am wise, mature, benevolent, unfortunately, I am still human, small-minded and extremely petty.

As many of my friends would know, I am perfectly able (I'm not sure whether this is considered a strength or weakness) to completely cut off someone totally.

For quite a few days, I was searching and questioning myself. In retrospect, from experience, it's easier to be the "bigger" person. The internal turmoil and self-doubt is worse than the lasting serenity of forgiveness.

I am what I am. This does not stop me from knowing who I am, while striving to be a little bit better today.

Of discontent and progress

2011-08-21T06:22:00.001-07:00

Our minds dream of visions

Beyond the limits of

Where our eyes can see

Stretching further than

What our arms can reach

Of discontent and progress

The story of mankind's struggle, death and rebirth

Because we dreams of visions

That we strive to see

That we yearn to touch

That we long to live

Why is Facebook free?

2011-08-12T18:48:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered why Facebook is free? If it's so awesome (free photo galleries with easy sharing after my holiday/wedding/party, allows me to organize events without calling/emailing/smsing, free games) and complicated (seems more complicated than my Gmail and I get more work done on Gmail than on Facebook), how can it be free?

Let's look at how the mechanisms within Facebook work to make it free.

In our digital distracted disembodied world, a Facebook "like" immediately triggers overly optimistic feelings and thoughts. The thought process for many people is: my (Facebook) friends they think I am very smart/witty/cool/beautiful, hence they "like" my status update to show their support. For companies, my customers must have "like"d us so much that they willingly broadcasted their "like" to all their friends. They did not do it for the free voucher or the chance to win a million dollars.

Let us put things in perspective. A Facebook "like" is a click of the mouse or a touch on a mobile device. A typical person goes to Facebook when they are bored at work/school, killing time on their daily commute or just trying to be non-productive. It is an action that takes less than 0.1 seconds and probably lesser mental processing time. The Facebook interface has already gamed Facebook users into mindlessly clicking "Show More Posts". A Facebook user easily reads more than 20 random status updates daily from "Facebook" friends. A "like" is inconsequential. The calculation of the value of a "like" should look like: 1/20 * 0.1 = 0.005.

It is in Facebook's interest to design an algorithm that both shows you updates from people who are close to you and from people who are not really active users of Facebook. The first group of people whom you are close to (easily identifiable by metrics such as the number of mutually connected friends, common tagged photos, common events, plays the same games as you, frequency of interactions within the Facebook platform.. etc) are of high value or interest to you. You want to know what is going on in their lives (how are their kids, where did they go for their honeymoon, are they feeling happy at their new job, are they still together..). The second group of people who are not as close to you are of interest to Facebook (or to the advertisers using Facebook). You probably added them due to social obligations at a random event. You are not really interested in what they think, say or do.

Facebook currently earns money from advertising. The only way it can guarantee money from advertisers is to ensure that Facebook users spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook. Hence, for people who are not active users of Facebook, it will try to increase the likelihood that they will feel connected to their friends by introducing their rare updates to active users of Facebook. Active users like you (yes, you, the person who comments to everyone's status update with your pithy remarks and insightful musings about the fate of the universe) are very likely to do something. Therefore, it makes sense and cents to introduce passive users to active users, so that the network effect kicks in. The most valuable users to Facebook are those who are active and who are able to catalyze other people into doing things on Facebook. Facebook is really a good example of BF Skinner's psychological experiment (Skinner Box), where rats are trained to push buttons incessantly because the relationship between rewards and activity is not clear and randomized. For humans, you don't need to put them in a box. You just need a screen and an internet connection.

You are no different from a rat, who has been trained to push a button in a clever experiment with randomized rewards. Facebook is the digital abuse of humanity's primal need to feel a connection to another human being.

If you want to blame the increasing disconnect among human relationships, blame Facebook or the advertisers paying Facebook. However, since you buy the products marketed by the advertisers on Facebook..

If you think my reasoning is entirely flawed, just ask yourself - "Why is Facebook free?"

If you really want to be popular, be well-liked or to show care and concern to a friend you have not contacted in a long time, just try this. Facebook helpfully sends you birthday reminders. Take 5 mins for each friend, and call them to wish them happy birthday. Switch off your mobile phone and computer. Find a quiet place, pick up a fixed line phone and call (I know you need to write the friend's mobile number on a piece of paper which is an archaic concept, because your brain cannot remember mobile numbers anymore. It's a skill only present in older adults who cannot fathom the usefulness of Facebook.) Instead of the "marshmallow" (air and empty immediate sugary goodness) fleeting sense of achievement, you will feel more fulfilled and happy than giving out 200 likes (for "world peace", to support someone's bid to the next "XYZ", to stop the war..).

There are two benefits of doing that. Firstly, two people in the world will be happy and one will be pleasantly surprised. As people age, you will gradually realize that you are lucky to have had the chance to talk to that friend. It's a fact of life that people die and not entirely because of old age. Accidents happen. Earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear reactor meltdowns, riots, wars, train wrecks, tornadoes, shipwrecks, cancer, heart attacks, muggings, fires..

Even better, write a handwritten letter.

Super human powers

2011-07-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

I believe that humans possess super powers:

The power to love

The power to empathize

The power to forgive

The power to share and transfer knowledge

The power to transform dreams into reality

The power to break human limits

(Work in progress)

Bullshit filters from doing a startup

2011-06-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

One serious side effect of starting a startup and digging into the trenches is that I've realized that my bullshit filters have highly evolved. (Note that in the title, I said I am doing a startup, but we've not exactly did anything outstanding.. no revenues to speak of and definitely not profits, just a lot of failures and lessons =) )

In the first place, I am a pretty skeptical person. This has been further enhanced by my 4 (5?) years in engineering school, where you quickly learn to drill down into the numbers about whether the thing will hold your weight or explode into your face. The bridge will collapse or the reactor will blow. There are no 2 ways about it.

The funny thing about introducing yourself as a startup co-founder is that you suddenly get pitched a lot (not as much as a VC, I'm sure) about new potential business ideas and partnerships. Well, I guess that's karma for having pitched stupid ideas to other people.. (Oops..) Now, I think our small team has gained a little bit of credibility just because we're still hanging around after 1 year. The internal joke among our team is that we are the cockroaches.. =p We try not to die by keeping our burn rate low and trying stuff out to see if it works (www.paulgraham.com/die.html).

Having blown away the smoke (social media guru.. cough cough), I tend to fall back on some wise words that many experienced businessmen/businesswomen once told us.

"It's 'Revenues - Costs'. Nothing else matters." I don't really care about what your idea is, as long as you quantify the additional sales it brings or the costs savings it will bring to the potential customers. If it's so fantastic, it should also have at least 1 client already committed to paying. If I see/hear unicorns and fairies, I'm riding my magic carpet out.

The other thing is that, I should be impressed by how well you know the industry surrounding the idea you are pitching. I should not know more people within the industry or more about how the industry operates than you.

Coincidentally, it seems that our team also follows a simple division of labour. We are either making the product or selling the product. Nothing else matters. There are no "idea" guys. Like my prof said, there is no market for ideas.

I'm also pretty convinced that there's no smart way or shortcut to do stuff most of the time. Just do it the hard way, and it almost always turns out to be the smart way. If all else fails, and the competition is more entrenched, has more resources, is smarter, than the only recourse is to work harder.

Customers are not users. Users are not customers. Customers are defined as people who pay you money. Period. If you can find users but can't find customers, you screwed. Customers are also defined as people that you can help in 2 ways: either add to their revenues or lower their costs. If that happens, they are extremely happy to pay you for your hard work.

A competitive advantage is not something theoretical from Porter's 5 Forces. A competitive advantage in reality is:

Something that lets them do things faster, better and cheaper than you (the FBC test)
A larger sales force (which means they can cover more ground than you) and that they can spend more time talking to each customer, making your customers feel highly valued
A larger marketing budget, which means they can place advertisements left, right and centre in industry publications, conferences and on all the media channels
More knowledge of the industry, which means they know the shortcuts which costs you effort, time and money to learn
Insider knowledge - Nothing sneaky or underhanded, it just means that they might get wind of certain movements such as regulatory changes or someone having a large budget to spend in 1 week's time
More experience in the industry, which means they know more people who have a business relationship with them, whom they can ally with to kill you off
A more established reputation, which may translate to better credit terms, better discounts and preferential delivery
More cashflow, which means they can kill you with a price war
More assets, which means better financing terms
A prettier or more attractive sales force (ever wondered why all the ice cream shops, dessert places, yogurt cafes almost ubiquitously have young servers? Or why the male private bankers all seem to be models in their previous lifetime?)
A longer list of marque clients, whom will attract more marque clients, whom will attract more marque clients.. to infinity
Infrastructure that is more efficient in delivering products/services to customers quicker and at a cheaper cost
Better customer service, both before sales and after sales (after sales service translates to repeat customers and referrals, something which many don't grasp)

I'm also interested in understanding how people think they can start businesses if they can't convince themselves to survive on half their paycheck and not prepare enough cash reserves for 18 months of living expenses, just in case no revenues come in for 1.5 years.

There's nothing really for free. There is something called social capital, and it's hard earned capital. You better be doing a lot of favours for people around you, because you're not going to get much help when you need favours or introductions back. If you have been introduced by a friend, please don't cut out the person who made the introduction. The person making the introduction probably does not want anything from you, but just wants to be cc-ed at least for the first email just to ensure that contact has been made. If you are being introduced, make it easy for the person doing the introduction by writing a short introductory paragraph and be specific about what you need help for. Thank the person making the introduction in the email thread and remember to treat him/her a drink or a small box of chocolates/tea/something healthy.

It could be just timing, the wrong team or wrong execution. If it does not work for 2-3 years, just man (woman) up and try something different. A successful entrepreneur probably tries more than 10 businesses or project in his/her lifetime, and not all of them will succeed. So everyone has a failure now and then.. it's bouncing back that matters.

Also, just because you co-founded a startup or raised some money, you're not a hotshot. I feel that humility is highly under-rated as a virtue. Please feel free to smack me on the head if I ever get too inflated.

It also helps to laugh at yourself once in a while. Everyone makes mistakes, and startup founders have made one of the largest mistakes one can make in a life by trying to fit a lifetime's worth of work/stress within 5 years.

Don't lose your temper at a co-founder. It's one of the most unproductive and stupid things to do.

Once in a while, give a little (time or money) to charity. You don't really need that $1 and it's always handy to have tissue around.

There are 5 cent, 10 cent problems and there are half a million dollar problems. Choose carefully which problem you want to solve in your startup. Unfortunately, we have not found that million dollar problem yet, but we believe we are closing down soon.

If the cost of trying is low in terms of effort, time and money, just do it and don't think so much about it. Just write it off as a bad investment if it does not do well.

Sometimes, it's about the money and timing. See an opportunity, calculate the risk and returns, assemble a team, strike hard and fast, get out.

Sometimes, it's not about the money, but that you really genuinely have been thinking, living and breathing that domain for the last couple of years and you really feel that you have a unique solution that is Faster, Better and Cheaper. I don't think that you really need that much passion, but if all else fails, passion might be the only motivating force left. I've seen people attract great teams, just because of their enthusiasm. It's highly contagious.

There are a lot of resources out there. Probably, one of the most useful is the Startup Toolkit.

http://thestartuptoolkit.com/ It helps to ask you the questions you should have the answers to before even starting. Even now, we're still trying to fill up all the sections with both quantitative and qualitative data and we're still finding more customers. We need more doctors to sign up so that we can more accurately diagnose what makes them happy!

http://www.MedF1.com

Death by a Thousand Cuts

2011-06-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

Lately, I feel as if I'm slowly bleeding to death from a thousand cuts. There have been miscellaneous annoying things and requests which have been taking up time, energy and mental space unproductively. This has led to frustration and unhappiness.

Henceforth, I shall develop a polite way to deflect such annoyances, so that I can focus on the more important things in life.

http://www.quora.com/Etiquette/How-do-you-politely-turn-down-someone-who-wants-to-grab-coffee-sometime

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/05/17/learning-to-say-no-to-meetings/

I'm awfully sorry, but I need time to focus on learning and working on getting more sources of revenues into our startup, if it is ever to develop beyond its current embryonic stage.

Whenever I feel like this, I take a deep breath and go back to the basics of what makes me happy - learning from my mentors, working hard on something difficult to concentrate, getting some real work done, reading something mind-expanding, exercising, spending time with important people and finding my personal meditation spot on the Himalayans.

The face of global competition for young Singaporeans

2011-05-15T18:28:00.001-07:00

Upon returning from Shanghai recently, it is with great shock, sorrow and trepidation that I became aware of the brief announcement that MM Lee Kuan Yew and SM Goh Chok Tong were stepping down from parliament. Many of their statements and comments about how the younger voters deserve a fresher perspective pained me greatly. The negative feedback from the public was especially appalling, given that some of them were made without context and without acknowledging the sacrifices, hard work put in by these 2 senior leaders. I question the media's exaggerated portrayal of the ignorant young voters seriously. If the comments featured in the papers are reflective of the general sentiments, we have a crisis.

Given that the choice to retire by these 2 senior Singaporean leaders (collectively, they have served a total of over 80 years in office, more than 3 times my years on earth) reflects the official recognition that Singapore is in a phase of transition, I would like to introduce from personal experience the real face of global competition that is faced by my generation. I have always wondered what this term meant as it is a popular term bandied about by the media and government. To me, it was unsatisfactory, abstract and difficult to grasp. This is an attempt to give human faces to the largely anonymous and ambiguous term "global competition". I have worked with these individuals before briefly and I claim with a large degree of certainty that I am able to give a frank assessment of their capabilities.

In my personal experience, "global competition" is real and I have witnessed it first hand. They are smarter, more educated, more hardworking, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, willing to forgo pay in exchange for learning experiences, humble and willing to push themselves to learn. They have a strong environmental and social consciousness. They are concerned with health and personal development. They are religiously tolerant and are able to connect emotionally with people from various backgrounds. They might or might not have privileged backgrounds, but they are firmly able to contribute to any organization or enterprise based on their own merits. They effortlessly fit into several major cultural and business landscapes of the world, be it in the United States, Europe or Asia (I have not witnessed Latin America and Africa, hence, I am unable to make any comments). Many of them started running their own organizations or companies, while being a full-time student.

I shall start my introduction in chronological order. Although I have not sought the approval of these mentioned individuals, I believe that they will not take offense. I consider it a privilege to have worked with them (or currently still working) and I have personally learnt much from them. I can only hope that they have similar opinions about me. Where possible, I have included links to their online profiles. Of course, they are my friends, so I will be a bit biased =)

America

Caroline Howe

http://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinelhowe

http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/author/carolinehowe/

I got to know Caroline through environmental activities a few (4?) years ago. She's been based in India for the last few years, first starting with the Indian Youth Climate Network. Since then, she's been on an electric car roadtrip across India and has recently started a startup focusing on environmental solutions. Spunky, full of energy, genuinely warm and smart, she has been dynamic and driving the cause of environmentalism among youths, organizations and corporates. She works both locally (India) and globally, through her links with the United Nations and international youth networks.

Education: Yale

Domains of knowledge: Engineering, Environment, Organizational, Media, Policy, Awareness

Languages: English, French

Places: America, India

Australia

Jack Fuller

http://www.learningandteaching.unimelb.edu.au/awards/features/jack_fuller

I met Jack around the same time as Caroline. He was kind of tall (compared to me.. short Asian guy), and funny in a quiet way. I am very happy that he was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship recently. He has experience working in Germany (green politics) and East Timor (building sustainable gardens).

Education: Awarded Rhodes Scholarship (Oxford)

Domains of knowledge: Environmental politics, policy

Languages: English, German, Tetum (I had to google this.. the language used in East Timor)

Places: Australia, Germany, East Timor, Malaysia

China

Li Li

http://www.cycan.org

http://baike.baidu.com/view/38325.htm

Li Li is another great friend. There's no need to introduce much about him, other than he headed a project to clean a river polluted by industrial sewage in his hometown, founded the largest youth climate network in China (China Youth Climate Action Network - http://www.cycan.org/) and has been working as a environmental consultant for several companies.

Education: Valedictorian (Outstanding Student Award), B. Eng, PLA Information Engineering University

Domains of knowledge: Information Engineering, Policy

Languages: English, Mandarin

Places: Zheng Zhou (Henan), Beijing, Shanghai, Indiana, Bangkok

Europe

Hungary

Pal Pastzrai

Pal came over to Singapore for exchange during his MBA programme. He also played waterpolo with the NUS Team and kicked our collective butts in the pool =) Don't mess with the Hungarians in waterpolo. They are unstoppable (although after drowning you, they are pretty friendly..) =)

I don't understand how he works on 4 hours of sleep everyday, while balancing studies, work and waterpolo trainings.

Education: CEMS Master's in International Management (Current), Corvinus Unversity of Budapest (best for Economics in Hungary)

Domains of knowledge: Corporate Finance, Strategic Management

Languages: Hungarian, English, French, Italian, Singlish =)

Places: Budapest, New York, London, Singapore

Thoughts

Four friends, unbelievable attitudes, great team players and leaders. They are all about 23 - 26, with much more experience than many of my peers. They have lived on at least 2 continents, 3 different countries and speak at least 2 languages. They are happy with being paid slightly lower or competitive market salaries, as long as there's learning opportunities and challenges (which, of course, being them, means that they want to lead, plan, manage and execute independent projects with real impact). There are many more friends with similar life stories, just that I've selected these few for brevity and breadth. They appreciate life, arts and music. They are humble and modest, many preferring to work in the background.

That is the global benchmark that is being set. I just hope I'm not too far from it.

Are we seriously that far from it? I doubt so. We possess a bilingual education, familiarity with both Western and Eastern cultures and a rigorous training. The hardware and training is there, but the crippling narrow-minded mindset, the audacity to take risks and the courage to uproot oneself into an unfamiliar environment is lacking. Can we break this national stranglehold on our imagination? Why are we limited unconsciously by our 710 sqm? We should at the very least, be active in SEA and Asia. We are more than able to live in any major city anywhere in the world, and be an global asset.

Why does the government want to attract global talent? Why do you think global talent attracts a premium? Well, if that global talent can speak 3 languages, has a network spanning 2 continents, works harder than you (12-hour days are normal), is better educated, is warm to people, open-minded, able to switch between different fields of knowledge effortlessly with actual execution expertise, is younger (has less liabilities), socially comfortable in different cultures and environments, why should that talent not get a premium? It's far cheaper to pay someone 1.5x the salary than hiring 2 people. While saving 0.5x the salary, that person may even generate more business through new ideas, contacts and knowledge sharing.

I hope that more people are aware of the global benchmark. From what I know of them, these friends are not stopping for a break. They are relentless.

Putting together Getting Things Done (GTD) and Evernote

2011-04-09T18:15:00.001-07:00

The link to the Google doc is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pLF4UemiBsT5RJqK5oF_v8ZsI1Jp46VkN2ajOn33PIo/edit?hl=en_GB&authkey=COSuqsUE#

It contains a list of tips, tutorials and helpful videos.

I've been thinking of trying out Evernote and the "Getting Things Done" (GTD) workflow organisation method. This is intended to be a condensed guide to the best articles that introduce you to both Evernote and GTD. I've freely copied from various sources. For more details, please look into the references.

Introduction to Getting Things Done:

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2006/11/06/getting-things-done-how-to-take-control-of-life/

Done by Scott Moehring

PDF: http://www.getrichslowly.org/forms/GTD-diagram.pdf

Flowchart taken from:

http://www.komarketingassociates.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/gtd_chart.png

The Google doc is open to anyone with the link, so feel free to share it and update it =)

We need leaders, not politicians

2011-03-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

There is election fever in Singapore currently and it comes with its usual media storm of snarky online anonymous critics. Somehow in this maelstrom, I feel the real issue has been ignored.

The real issue that we should be focusing our passion, intelligence, collective wisdom, ingenuity and courage on should be the issue of producing leaders at every level of society, in every organization, in every community, in every school and in every family. This does not depend on which party you come from, how much experience you possess, which organization you are a member of, the current job scope you are covering, which school you come from, how much wealth you have accumulated, whether you are a Singaporean citizen or not. These are artificial dividing classifications that arbitrarily cause us to forget we all live on a tiny utopia, seemingly well insulated from the barrage of financial crisises, natural disasters, civil strife, war, religious conflict, corruption and terrorist attacks. Our daily grouses consists of not being able to board the first train that comes, wondering why the price of food has increased by 20c, complaining that housing is getting too expensive and debating about the melodramatic characters in the evening TV drama serials.

We need leaders, not politicians. The term "politicians" brings to mind a calculated career choice, with connotations of mudslinging, petty political snubs, baseless rhetoric, endless machinations and maneuvering in an ever-consuming power struggle, alliances and carefully cultivated relationships. It carries the miasma of empty promises, under-the-table benefits, allegations and counter-allegations, thunder and fury. Where is the heart, the joy of service, the determination to set a leading example, the conviction to do the right thing, the courage to admit to the inherent human tendency to make mistakes?

For those online anonymous critics, please remember that your remarks are targetted at a real person with feelings. Before you make a another intelligent comment, mentally check whether you have ever taken up a leadership role in your daily life and whether you are qualified to criticize. If your comments do not enhance the debate that relentlessly drives the quest for better leadership from all our political, social, religious and business leaders, please refrain.

Just imagine the impact of everyone performing simple acts of leadership everyday. Just stop blogging, tweeting or updating your Facebook status for just 30 secs, and imagine. We can move on to discuss more salient issues such as current events and impactful long term trends. What can we do to balance our economic aspirations and environmental impact? What should we do about reducing our oil dependence on volatile supplies? How should we take precautions against shady financial products that do not create value? How do we adapt to a world where the global power order is undergoing upheaval? How do we remain relevant to China and India? What should be our role in South-East Asia? How do we drive the creation of more home-grown innovation, given that MNCs are placing more emphasis on China and India? How should we ensure that everyone gets a chance to enjoy a comfortable standard of living, work in a fulfilling capacity and develop a social consciousness? How do we manage the problem of an aging population? What is our culture and national identity? How do we preserve the best of our combined Asian heritage? How do we improve our education system so that kids learn how to learn, rather than rote learning? We can take action. We can fail, we can learn from our mistakes, we can improve on every iteration.

6 million leaders, that is a force to be reckoned with.

We need leaders.

The Dalai Lama was asked about what confused him about humanity

2011-03-25T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered:

"Man.. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.

Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.

And then, he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

Submission for YES! Funding to Spring Singapore - Spring has shifted to Fusionopolis!

2011-03-21T08:42:00.000-07:00

For people applying for YES! Funding, please note that their office has shifted from Bukit Merah to Fusionopolis. Luckily, I did not mail our application in, but I went down personally.

Their new office address is:

1 Fusionopolis Walk

#01-02 South Tower, Solaris

Singapore 138628

Tel: 6278-6666

Take the MRT to Buona Vista MRT, then take the Biopolis shuttle bus. Alternatively, cross the road and take 91 from opposite the train station.

Conversation fragments from CNY 2011

2011-02-20T01:11:00.001-08:00

"So cute! What's your name?"

"How old is he?"

"How old is she?"

"Come, let me give you an angpow.. Aiyoh, angpows cannot be eaten.."

"Come, wish Uncle, Aunty happy new year!"

"来，阿妈抱抱！“

"Don't let her fall!"

"Do you want a soft toy?"

"Must be sleepy.. Nap time is over.."

"Don't be scared.. These are all your relatives.."

"Mumm mumm.."

"Last semester? Good ah, graduating already.."

"Wah.. can earn money already.."

"So many of them getting married this year.. one after another.."

"So hard to book the hotel.. Must book way in advance.."

"Eat first or 'ban lat' first?"

"Hey, how come so-and-so never come?"

"This brand of cholesterol pills are sold at NTUC.. "

"Our family has history of high blood pressure.. so must take care of diet.. "

"Only when you do CT scan, then you can detect lung cancer, normal x-rays cannot detect it.."

"The cancer spread to the spine.. At first, she thought it was rheumatism.."

"The doctor said: 'Let her eat what she wants to eat..'"

China's evolution from Deng Xiao Ping's "Black Cat" to "Green Cat"

2011-01-16T02:23:00.000-08:00

Good video, if you understand Chinese.

This was shot during the 2011 Commonwealth Economic Forum, and was given by Mr Hu An Gang, the head of the Centre for China Study, Tsing Hua University.

http://www.macrochina.com.cn/prize/brt/huangang.shtml

胡鞍钢

中国科学院-清华大学国情研究中心

http://cwef.cw.com.tw/2011/video08.aspx

After giving a background introduction of China's economic and social progress as evaluated by the the 11th 5-year plan, Mr Hu starts discussing environmental economic targets and indicators as prescribed in the 12th 5 year plan from 3:47 onwards.

5 areas which demonstrate China' environmental commitment

Heavy polluting industries morphing to sustainable manufacturing (黑色生产 -> 绿色生产)
Consumption to "green" consumption (黑色消费 -> 绿色消费)
Expanding on cleantech infrastructure and investment (进一步对生态环境进行建设和投资)
Promoting a sustainable lifestyle (提倡绿色生活方式)
Aiming for global technical and environmental standards (在所有的技术标准、环保标准向绿色标准靠近) - E.g. Beijing will implement very shortly the Euro-5 vehicle emissions standards

His conclusion:

The "Black Cat" Strategy - If China continues to rely on industrial manufacturing as its economic development pathway, it will suffer global criticisms and will result in China being easily overtaken by global competition vying on the basis of cost advantages.

The "Green Cat" Strategy - In actual fact, the "Green Cat" is actually the “best cat". This will benefit both China and the world. Hence, through its "Green Revolution", China will move from being an imitator to achieving pioneering leadership in the cleantech arena. China will aim for adapting a Chinese style of sustainable economic development, ensuring prosperity for its citizens and the world.

2011 - Just 1 small thing to highlight for everyone - Manage your Energy, not your Time

2011-01-15T17:10:00.000-08:00

Came across this HBR article which I think is pretty useful, especially as 2011 seems to be an exciting year for everyone =)

You know it's useful, when just the title sums up the value =)

Download the pdf here: http://kimhjorth.dk/User_files/6546b09903976a2d7f706bc4d2197db9.pdf

http://hbr.org/product/manage-your-energy-not-your-time/an/R0710B-PDF-ENG

Business Insider - Tony Hsieh Interview

2010-10-25T19:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-tony-hsieh-zappos-2010-10

Watched this 30min BI interview featuring Tony Hsieh from Zappos, pretty cool interview (fanboy.. =p)

It would be so awesome for Richard Branson and Tony Hsieh to do an airline together =) (Tony wants to start a Zappos airline?)

For a person who has so much success, Tony is remarkably humble and down-to-earth. Zappos is his second company after the sale of LinkExchange to Microsoft.

High tech vs High touch customer service

Tony was asked to elaborate on the difference between Amazon's similar focus on customer service versus Zappos. He summed it up as it being high tech versus high touch. Amazon tries to be as efficient as possible in solving customers' problems as fast as possible, while Zappos tries to have a highly engaging interaction with the customer every time.

Zappos also maintains a U.S. based call centre, despite the higher costs compared to outsourcing. This allows them to give a better customer experience.

He also reveals that despite all the hype about social media methods, a phone call is still one of the best ways to leave a lasting impression on the customer. You obtain the customer's undivided attention for 5 - 10 mins, which is much better than any advertisement.

I guess the paradigm shift comes when you start thinking about how to make customers happy, and when you view customer call centres as a profit centre, not a cost centre.

The human intuition

Zappos is mainly into "soft" goods such as footwear and apparel. Unlike "hard" goods like books and electronics, it is still highly dependent on the sense of merchandisers who have to buy inventory 6 months before fashion trends reach the masses.

Bad hires have a domino effect

Tony was also asked about how Zappos' hiring habits affected culture. He emphasized that hiring should be done based on cultural fit, not just on skillsets and experience. Bad hires have a domino effect. Bad hires make bad decisions that hurt the company. Furthermore, they may also hire other bad hires, which snowballs negatively.

To resolve this, Zappos hires for the long term and uses cultural fit as an indicator. They are perfectly happy to fire people if cultural fit is not seen, despite excellent job performance.

"Blah" core values vs committable core values

Often, corporate core values are shown during employee orientation and immortalized as bronze plaques hanging on walls. Nobody really pays attention to them.

To define Zappos' core values, it took them a year of discussion. Tony sent out an email to everyone and it was debated internally within the company as most people had different opinions. Zappos wanted to find commitable core values, not corporate core values.

The results are clear. If you do a google search for any of Zappos' 10 core values, Zapppos is almost always the top result.

Hiring for serenpidity

The core values also affect the interview process for cultural fit. For e.g., taking the core value of "Be Adventurous, Creative and Open-minded", interviewees are asked about how lucky do they perceive themselves to be.

This was inspired by the study conducted by Richard Wiseman (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/72/realitycheck.html)

(http://www.richardwiseman.com/) (Incidentally, Paul Buchheit has a similar personal article - http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/10/serendipity-finds-you.html)

Culture

There are a few stages of company culture - namely, starting, building, maintaining and scaling. Zappos is currently not just concerned with maintaining it, but scaling and strengthening it as the company grows.

Work-life integration

Zappos allows its employees 10 - 20% of the time to hang out with each other. Initially, this met with some disbelief, as people felt that they had unfinished work left hanging.

However, subsequently, when asked about whether they felt they were more productive, they said that they felt more productive. This was due to lower communications costs and higher levels of trust, as people were doing favours for each other, not tasks.

Negotiations

Tony explicitly negotiated for no retention bonus, which ironically gave him more negotiating power over Amazon. His pay was also fixed at $36,000/year after the acquisition.

Good judgement

Tony also explained that Zappos does not have much policies, as policies often inconvenience the minority (1%) at the expense of the majority (99%). It is far better to rely on human judgement.

School

Tony tried to get decent grades while in school with the minimum effort, given that he was always interested in starting businesses.

Future expansion

Zappos is aiming for the apparel market, which is 4x the footwear market. That's $5 billion in sales.

Zappos also has a consulting company that helps companies find their own corporate culture.

Quote from Darwin

It's not the fastest or intelligent that survives, it's the most adaptable - Charles Darwin

All choices are irreversible =)

2010-10-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

As I was on the way home today, I suddenly realized that all the choices we make are irreversible. Since we don't have the power of time travel, any choice we make is irreversible =)

We can choose between being kind and unkind.

We can choose to speak out or to feign ignorance.

We can choose to try very hard on that problem set or to just watch youtube.

We can choose to give a 5 min call to an old friend or just surf facebook.

We can choose to not leave any reserves in training or coast along with the average.

We can choose as our first reaction, anger or a smile.

We can choose to make someone's day special, or we can make it horrible.

We can choose to give snide comments or to give encouragement.

We can choose to listen first or to just start pointing fingers first.

We can choose to eat McDonalds or we can choose to eat something that makes us feel better.

We can choose to go for a slow jog or we can watch some TV.

We can choose to read a book or we can watch a chick flick/rom-com/dude movie(?).

We can choose to buy that awesome new must-have electronic toy or we can think about it.

We can choose to switch off our phones and internet while out with friends, or we can all check Facebook on our iPhones while we are sitting less than 1m from each other.

We can choose to be optimistic or pessimistic.

There are so many choices that we make unconsciously every moment of our lives, and we don't realize that they are all irreversible.

Don't Do It

2010-10-13T10:29:00.001-07:00

(draft.. not as if I am doing all the following anyway)
Don't do it if..

You think 2 years is too long.

You can't manage your personal finances.
You are not enthusiastic about the idea of working part-time/ consulting/ freelancing/ giving tuition to support your idea.
You think you can ask your parents for business capital.

You cannot say "no".

You don't know what is cashflow and the amount of runway/reserves you need.

You think school is useless.

You cannot build eigencourses.

You think you have an idea.

You can't summarize any idea in 1 sentence so simple anybody (your mum) can understand.
You hate selling.
You've never sold anything in your life before.

You are not a hardcore tech/ marketing or learning intensively on how to be.
You don't like reading.
You can't make yourself learn how to talk to people from other backgrounds and disciplines with different ways of solving/looking at the same problem and synthesizing all the approaches coherently.
You think learning something you've never seen before in your life is painful.

You think you will hate the people you're going to work with. (You will, at certain points in time. They will most definitely hate your guts too. =) )
You think you will lose your friendships.

You have a significant other half who does not understand/ support. (One will give way. I'm not sure which will survive.)

You have no sounding boards/ mentors/ network.

You like home-runs and only home-runs.

You have a backup plan.

You do not like the contrarian investment philosophy.

You don't think you can do four times as much work in one half of the time an average person takes.

You cannot focus like a maniac.

You've never read 80/20, 4 hour work week and applied it on a daily basis.

You think being a boss/CEO is a chillax job.

You do not like looking through legal documents, tax forms, write website copy, do product mockups and 1 gazillion other nitty-gritty things that will suck your time and energy.

You want to have an active social life and paaaaaaaaaaaarrrrtttyyyyyy...

You must have the latest Apple product/ tech gizmo/ fashion accessory.
You think a 15K Rolex watch makes you look professional.

You think you will make a million in 1 year.
You want to drive a sports car, own a private property and eat at expensive restaurants all the time before you're 30.

You think you are the world's biggest genius and the world should shower you with money.

You think you are so smart that good advice just flies over your head (you're probably sinking into a self-created hole..).

You are not as good as finishing as you are at starting.

You never read anything on behavioral economics and psychology.

You like to make well-informed, thoroughly researched and over-analyzed decisions with perfect knowledge of markets, customers and trends.

You don't think of money as an asset, or you don't understand why you need a certain amount of money to do certain stuff.

You don't have some music you listen to, that always gives you an energy boost or calms you down.

You have some hobbies that are totally unrelated to it.

You don't have close friends who have known you since young.

You don't like solving problems.

You don't like people.

You don't have a island to disappear to.

You cannot find humour in any situation =)

You are too optimistic or too pessimistic.

You don't like to say "sorry" to your team and work to make up for it.

You cannot acknowledge that different people pull different weights at different stages.

You are currently not exercising enough.
You are not eating healthily.

You don't believe in karma.

You don't have something spiritual to believe in.

Book - "Running for my Life" by Ray Zahab

2010-10-08T07:33:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading a short but nice book titled "Running for my Life".

An ultra-marathoner, Ray Zahab, describes how running changed his aimless life as a chronic smoker. Through ultramarathons (160km desert runs, 333km runs, running in the Artic, runs in the Amazon jungle... ), he talks about failing badly, running through all the interesting places he competes in and the warmness of the hard-as-nails people who run as passionately as him. Through running, besides discovering his life's purpose, he found love too.

He describes running as entering a strangle peaceful state. When running, he just focuses on putting one foot in front of the other, maintaining smooth breathing, just listening to his mp3s and being alone with his thoughts.

Weird how running parallels life, the ultimate marathon.

Mdm Kwa Geok Choo

2010-10-05T06:32:00.000-07:00

I guess it's time that people knew her as Mdm Kwa Geok Choo, and not Mrs Lee Kuan Yew.

Caught the mini-documentary on her on TV, and it was a series of flashbacks across Singapore's history imbued with a personal touch. It was no longer about dates, facts and places. It was about people's lives and struggles.

The stories of small nations are stories of individual lives, weaving a tapestry of threads, forming a canvas of history through their daily triumphs and failures.

Intelligence, humility, fierce intolerance for corruption, warmness, genuine concern for people, elegance, witty, hardworking, strength, successful balancing of career and family (And smart businesswoman, look at the water agreements).

One of the most shocking photographs I saw today (TODAY, 5 Oct 2010) was of PM Lee Hsien Loong and his brother, Mr Lee Hsien Yang in mourning attire. It was simply too surreal.

There was a scene in the documentary when Mdm Kwa Geok Choo stood up and wiped the sweat off MM Lee Kuan Yew's forehead, with MM Lee Kuan Yew protesting mildly that it did not matter. Admittedly, she was probably the only one who dared to, but for me, that was the best moment of the documentary.

I read before that you are the average of the people you spend the most time with.

MM Lee Kuan Yew is a lucky man indeed.

The Font Story behind Orchard Road Logos

2010-09-28T06:12:00.001-07:00

Have you ever wondered what is the font used in some of the logos you see? Well, that thought occurred to me one day while I was passing by Orchard.

From what I know, most of the fonts we see everyday commercially, on the web or while reading can be divided in Serifs (Times New Roman), San Serif (Arial, Helvetica, Futura, Verdana) and Script (those cursive looking letters).

(http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/classifications.html)

I've guessed some of them and I'm pretty sure I'm wrong for most of them. However, I've intended this post as more of a reference when you are designing your own logo, posters, presentations and titles.

By choosing a good font, you might be able to convey a certain image (like the overly expensive luxury brands here =) ).

Serif

Armani - Bodoni

GAP - Spire Regular

Prada - Engravers' SB

Sans Serif
BCBG - Looks a bit like Avant Garde, Engraver's Gothic

Bread & Butter - Frutiger, Univers, Gill Sans

Chanel - Avenir, Akzidenz Grotesk, Engraver's Gothic

Louis Vutton - Futura Medium

Takashimaya - Looks a bit like Rockwell

Isetan - Meta, Futura

ALDO - Looks similar to the font used for BCBG, maybe Engraver's Gothic

Marc Jacobs - Sackers Gothic Medium, or something similar to the BCBG, ALDO

Ngee Ann City - Arial? (Personally, it looks a bit dated..)

Script & Misc

ION Orchard - Comic Sans? VAG Rounded

Salvatore Ferragamo - Some custom script

For Fun

References
Basics of Typography
http://designshack.co.uk/articles/typography/8-rules-for-creating-effective-typography

If you have Illustrator, you can design some pretty nice text
http://designshack.co.uk/articles/graphics/an-in-depth-guide-to-working-with-typography-in-illustrator

This is a pretty good introduction to some classic fonts: http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/articles/25-classic-fonts-that-will-last-a-whole-design-career

(Did this while waiting to install COMSOL.. 8 more GB to go.. =p )

AAAAR - Why do people "screw up" and projects fail in organizations?

2010-09-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

I screw up all the time, so I try to not repeat my mistakes as much as possible for the sanity of my friends.

Some of the ideas I've read about project management have percolated in my mind recently.

It seems to me that success of a project depends on the level of

Authority
Accountability
Autonomy
Ability
Responsibility

among the people in the team.

Imagine that you are responsible for the outcome of a project, but you are given insufficient authority, are not held accountable, do not possess the required ability and do not enjoy sufficient autonomy. Sounds like a recipe for failure..

Inappropriate levels of any of the five parameters will increase the chances of the project failing.

7 gifts

2010-08-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

A fairy godmother blessed her child with the following 7 gifts:
To have a smile as warm as the sun
To have thoughts as pure as a mountain stream
To have wisdom as deep as the ocean
To have principles as strong as a mountain
To have regrets as heavy as the wind
To have a mind as open as the sky
To live a life passing on these gifts to the people around you.

The kid decided to dedicate a day of each week to cultivating each gift, with Sunday being a day of reflection.

Just watched "Precious"

2010-08-04T16:51:00.000-07:00

Just watched "Precious" with Jia Mein . It's funny that the film feels contrived in the moments when it tries to be "Hollywood"-like inspirational and the cheesy fantasy scenes. For people who disliked it, I guess people nowadays watch films to enter a fantasy. If a film is too realistic, it cuts too close to home to be comfortableThe darkness in the film is just a contrast to the strength of the characters.

Ze Passion Talk

2010-08-03T18:00:00.001-07:00

I guess after the passion talk (in retrospect, it was really funny to have the 3 of us talk over Skype to a chat window representing HP.. should have taken a photo!), all of us really want to do 3 things.

Solve real problems for businesses and the world.

Build, deploy and improve systems involving technology, engineering and people.

Create an sustainable empire and retire at 30~35 years old.

In other words, we have a Genghis Khan, 2 hackers and 1 Stoicist dreamer =)

My tuition experience today - irritation and joy

2010-08-01T04:13:00.000-07:00

I feel like starting by introducing this article (http://www.readingrockets.org/article/199).

It's called "Reaching Rommel" by Tyler Currie. She describes how she used the power of individual attention to teach Rommel, an illiterate kid, how to read. It will take you around 10 minutes to read it, but it's a nice story for people who are interested in teaching and communicating with people.

I deviously employed this method (headfake!) in tuition today to my new student (replace "student" with "guinea pig").

The lesson started ominously. I felt irritation when my new tuition kid described the blase way that her teacher went through a block test question. He simply said that the question was similar to the one in the notes, and that the class could refer to it in order to understand how to solve it. Well, my tuition kid did not know how to do the question, along with the similarly stumped majority of the class (gnashing of teeth..).

Oh well, we selected a different topic and started. I tried to explain the basics (definitions and formulae) slowly and clearly using the simplest words I could find. I drew some graphs and used some analogies from everyday life. I explained some techniques for solving problems.

We then went through a previously unsolvable block test question for 40 mins. Next, we chose a difficult "three smiley face" question from the notes (I kind of like how the school chooses 3 smiley faces to represent difficult questions..) (Obviously, I'm influenced by a certain prof =) ).

5 minutes passed.

I see her scribbling, making mistakes and correcting them, solving the unknowns. In fact, I was a bit lost following her working (students nowadays use graphic calculators.. ).

"Ey.. is it like this?"

The "ah-ha" moment is doubly "shiok" when you make someone go "ah-ha".

I have not given much tuition over the years, but I am slowly observing some common behavioral trends among supposedly weak students.

They place their handphones beside them during tuition and sometimes check their sms-es (but they don't reply my sms-es within a day when I ask them to tell me how's their studying progress.. ). Immediately after tuition, they inadvertently plonk themselves next to their computer. In case you get your hopes high, they are not doing research on Wikipedia... (I know Wikipedia is only good as a convenient reference.)

They also do not have much basics. They don't remember the definitions, formulae and examples in the notes. I'm not certain whether this is due to the teacher not covering it enough, or whether this is an aftereffect of having goldfish memory from the current technology trends. I term this the "flush after test" syndrome (I'm guilty too!).

They also don't practise enough, or at least, until they are able to solve them without referring too much to the notes.

They are also rather smart (in fact, probably much smarter than me, regardless of the school they are in). Often, they can solve questions in the second hour of the session, without much help, by themselves. I'm probably one of the most horrible people at explaining stuff. I don't think I did anything special. All I did was to to explain the curriculum again.

The funny thing is, they will probably be smarter without their television, computers and handphones.

Hmm.. Suddenly, I find tuition quite fun (besides the additional $$) =) They are experiment subjects! (Sorry, kids!)

Just started reading Robin Sharma - Who will cry when you die?

2010-07-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

Just started reading Robin Sharma's book titled "Who will cry when you die?", and I am slowly savouring and reflecting on it.

Even the title is enough to start me thinking..

----

Worry breaks

Robin's father observed that the Sanskrit character for the funeral pyre is very similar to the character for "worry".

Robin remarked:"I'm surprised."

Robin's father replied:"You shouldn't be, son. One burns the dead, while the other burns the living."

(I thought this was a beautiful description..)

If you worry too much, Robin suggests scheduling daily worry breaks. Haha..

----

Robin's quote from "Walden":"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it's because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

----

Honor your past

Every second you dwell on the past, you steal from the future.

Every minute you spend focusing on your problems, you take away from finding your solutions.

And thinking about all those things that you wish never happened to you is actually blocking all the things you want to happen from entering your life. Given the timeless truth that holds that you become what you think about all day long, it makes no sense to worry about past events or mistakes unless you want to experience them for a second time. Instead, use the lessons you have learned from your past to rise to a whole new level of awareness and enlightenment.

Questions

2010-07-25T04:56:00.001-07:00

What makes you happy?

What makes people happy?

Why does making people happy make you happy?

How far can we equate financial discipline with discipline of time?

How does the understanding that money does not equate to wealth, and that money is normally exchanged for time, change your life?

If you realize that a difference in mindset is the one important difference and possibly the only significant one between successful people and mediocre people, what would you do to change your life?

If we understand that thoughts give rise to actions, can we learn to control our thoughts?

What is wealth? How do we arrive at a good definition of it? How do we measure it? Do we include relationships? How important is money? Can we measure it by the impact we have caused?

How do we measure beauty?

Kang Shi Fu - Insights into Chinese consumer psychology, competitive strategy

2010-07-13T17:28:00.000-07:00

Over the last 2 days, I had the good fortune to attend the FutureChina 2010 Summit organised by Business China. It was extremely packed with well-regarded speakers, businessmen and leaders who have extensive experience in China.

Mr Wei Ying Chiao is Chairman of Ting Hsin International Group. They have a few well-established food-related brands in China, chief among them is a brand called Kang Shi Fu "康师傅". Their performance has been astonishing, being the market leader in the bottled tea category, instant noodles and bottled fruit juice categories (over 50 percent each).

Mr Wei Ying Chiao explained that their dominance can be attributed to successful branding, superior execution, competitive strategy and focus.

When one first hears the brand Kang Shi Fu, one immediately assumes that the founders' family surname is "Kang". However, there are more interesting twists which demonstrates a very in-depth understanding of Chinese consumer psychology. "Shi Fu" in China is a common term used to refer to skilled workers such as drivers, repairmen and chefs. It carries the connotations of possessing mastery and of being shown respect. This term also grew in popularity in the late 1980s to replace the previous term of "同志" (comrade), which was around the time Ting Hsin started to make investments in China's packaged foods industry.

"Kang", being part of the words 健康 (health), also represent the founders' desire to bring healthy quality food to the Chinese masses. In addition, Kang Shi Fu has proven catchy among consumers.

Mr Wei also explained how they developed their strategy against large foreign competitors such as Coca-Cola. They started out with bottled teas, as these were very familiar to Chinese consumers' tastes and preferences. Only after establishing their position in the bottled teas market, they then extended the brand to other foodstuffs. They have only recently expanded to include product ranges such as carbonated soft drinks, as they now have the capital and resources to battle with Coca-Cola and Pepsi. This also explains why they chose to focus on instant noodles, a common pre-packaged food common to the Asian market. Their product is so successful that Kang Shi Fu instant noodles can be found in the convenience stores in some Western countries.

If the market for bottled drinks is spilt into a high end market and low end market, Mr Wei revealed that Ting Hsin actually has more than 70 percent of the high end market. This shows the strength of their branding strategy in promoting Kang Shi Fu as a sign of quality.

However, Mr Wei also revealed some problems with business expansion. The threat posed by foreign competitors like Coca-Cola is fierce. Finding talent is also a problem, as increasingly, the battle is not over costs of manufacturing, but over the depth of talent. Mr Wei revealed that Ting Hsin is a family-owned business, with the 4 brothers sharing equal equity.

Mr Wei was also asked about whether he had ever considered bringing the brand "Kang Shi Fu" overseas. He revealed that with annual growth of 35 percent in China alone, he was already too busy managing that growth. He also used this to illustrate the point that the Chinese market is big enough.

"Kang Shi Fu" was a very good example of a well-executed branding and business strategy by a team who understood the local nuances of Chinese consumers well. I heartily agree with Mr Wei's bold prediction that they will continue to do well against Coca-Cola.

The X-Men around us

2010-07-04T07:39:00.002-07:00

Img source: http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/3900000/X-Men-x-men-3978092-1024-768.jpg

It suddenly occurred to me that the reason why we sometimes find ourselves exasperated or angry at the people around is because there are not enough X-Men around. There is a lack of people possessing superpowers in the world!

We want them to have the superpowers of infinite patience, understanding, kindness, wisdom and intelligence. We would like them to anticipate our every need, request, want and desire. We want them to be telepathic and empathetic. We want them to defy the law of gravity and place us at the centre of the universe. They should have an inexhaustible supply of good humour when we are down, radiate energy like the sun when we are tired and possess colossal strength to carry our burdens for us.

Yet, we use our words and actions to diminish the power of these X-Men around us everyday, whether unconsciously or consciously. Soon, they lose their super-magnetic attractiveness to us, and we use our own power of magnification to focus laser-beam like on every imperfection.

Let us add to the power of the X-Men around us. At the same time, let's all try to slowly mutate into someone's X-Men in our daily life =)

Thoughts after attending the "Eminent Speaker Series"

2010-05-30T08:54:00.000-07:00

Today, I attended the "Eminent Speaker Series" organised by Business China and Lianhe Zaobao. The 2 guest speakers were Mr Qian Gang and Mr Jin Wei-Tsun.

I don't have time to write a full article, but this quote about education from Mr Jin Wei-Tsun really struck me as being a good description of education. Mr Qian Gang gave a good summary of the development of the Chinese media and its relationship with the Chinese government. Mr Jin Wei-Tsun gave a global perspective on the role of traditional media and a commentary on how linking GDP growth to populace happiness is flawed.

幼儿养性童蒙养正少年养志成人养德

When you are small, cultivate your character,

When you are a kid, strengthen your sense of right and wrong,

In your teenage years, fight for your dreams,

When you are an adult, accumulate good deeds.

tare zameen par

2010-05-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

http://www.taarezameenpar.com/

This is a movie that provides quite a few critiques on the pressures imposed by the Asian education system. This is told through the story of an Indian boy who has dyslexia and his struggles through formal schooling until a teacher finally diagnoses his condition and builds his self-confidence through encouraging him to express his artistic talent.

Although it lasted for 2.5 hours, it is beautifully shot, so it's rather bearable. I don't deny it's a good movie, but I wished I had lower expectations of it. Some parts of the movie were a little predictable and the dialogue felt too scripted at times.

Watching the movie made something of a light bulb go off in my head though. The movie illustrates a few methods to teach kids about numbers and reading which I found very interesting.

Using a box of sand as the drawing medium instead of pen and paper

I guess this works as kids have lesser motor control, so usage of fingers are encouraged through this method.

Using a grid to teach handwriting, then slowly shrinking the grid

The boy in the movie was able to express himself quite adequately through drawing or painting, but had atrocious handwriting. The teacher drew a grid on a chalkboard and used it to teach tracing of numbers. I guess this is a common technique adapted from teaching illustration, where you reproduce shapes using a grid. The boy increasingly drew a finer and more well-defined number with more practice.

Usage of movement to teach

Another interesting method was getting the boy to do simple arithmetic by giving maths sums and getting the boy to jump the correct number of stairs.

Usage of audio tapes

Lord of the Flies - Kids can be so cruel to their peers. Parents, even more.

Quotes from the movie

"Caring.. is a hug, is letting him know that you will always be there."

"Glad to know that you think you care." - Aamir Khan has some of the best lines =)

"Oscar Wilde - The price of everything and the value of nothing.."

Thanks Jay for the great introduction and team Moolah for the movie invite! =)

"Goh Keng Swee - A Portrait" by Tan Siok Sun

2010-05-26T07:02:00.000-07:00

So impressive, yet so humble. The best No. 2 to LKY. Intellectual and practical.

Finance, MINDEF, Education, EDB, GIC..

Never re-invent the wheel.
Seek the best expert advice always.
Honesty in thought and action.
Respect for intellectual rigor.
Curiosity and creativity.
Admit to your mistakes and learn from them.

One can only imagine the leadership of LKY to have gathered such a team.

What if.. you can't predict the future?

2010-05-17T18:15:00.000-07:00

It seems as if it's getting more ridiculous to predict the future, in a world where countries can go bankrupt (How does that happen..?), where companies like Google did not even exist 10 years ago and where resource wars are getting more intense.

Perhaps, we should focus more on dealing with the future by increasing our adaptability, rather than focusing on planning too much for our individual careers and lives (It is my belief that many of the MNCs will leave Singapore sooner than later to China or India, probably within 5 - 10 years). The next question would be: What are the skills that we could adopt to increase our capacity to adapt? I think certain skills are fundamental. Communications, technical skills (pick 2 or 3, programming seems to be quite useful), presentation skills, a financial understanding of organisations and project management, how to actively learn on the job, some design skills, working with people that you may not like to get things done.. I'm sure everyone will come up with their own list.

Another way to think about it would be focus on issues that will never go away (realist!). For example, the problems of energy, education, poverty, healthcare.. and adapt your skillsets towards a particular area that you have passion for.

(However, countries do still need long term planning for infrastructure, as infrastructure does not happen overnight.)

Gmail - "Undo Send"

2010-05-14T15:54:00.000-07:00

Gmail Labs -> Undo Send

I'm not sure if anyone noticed, but if you go to Gmail's Settings, you can actually increase the time for "Undo Send" to 20 secs.

"Undo Send" has saved my ass many times and is one of my favourite features in Gmail =)

Resizing Ubuntu (wubi)

2010-05-14T15:31:00.000-07:00

Okie, I installed Wubi and surprise, surprise, I chose the default option which only gave me 5 GB of space, which meant that I only had 1 GB left after installing some stuff. Err.. Miscalculation.

Luckily, for newbies like me, there's an easy option to resize your Wubi installation. Use LVPM. Go to http://lubi.sourceforge.net/lvpm.html and install LVPM.

You can resize your Wubi installation in a few ways. I chose not to install another partition but just to increase the virtual disk allocated to Wubi. [Wubi installs itself as a virtual disk in your hard drive (I am noob, give me a break =) ). ]

(Keep an external hard drive handy.. )

So before everything, make sure you have enough disk space on your hard drive as LVPM copies the whole disk over. E.g. If you want to increase it to 10 GB, make sure you have 10 GB free.

Now,

Start LVPM (Applications -> System Tools -> )

Choose the "Resize" option.

Wait for the new file to be created and a dialog box will pop telling you to boot back to Windows.

After it's done, restart Windows.

Find your ubuntu installation folder. There are 2 files you need to look out for, "new.disk" and "root.disk".

Backup "root.disk", that's your current disk and remove it from the folder.

Rename "new.disk" to "root.disk".

Go back to Ubuntu and check that everything should be working fine.

Installing Compojure from a clean Ubuntu

2010-05-13T12:23:00.001-07:00

This is a rough draft of my steps for the all the frustrated people who tried to get Compojure to work. Disclaimer: This is the first time I've ever used any version of Linux and ever tried to do anything in Linux.

----

Got irritated while trying to configure Windows cause I wanted to use Compojure.. (Clojure's web development framework.)

Finally, I gave up and installed Ubuntu. (Bye Windows..)

1. Wubi - Start clean

I downloaded Wubi. Went through the default installation, and let the update manager update everything once.

2. EMACs - Text editor for Clojure, with the necessary modifications

Next, I followed the steps outlined (http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2009/12/clojure-101-getting-clojure-slime-installed/)

EMACs

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EmacsHowto

sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk

Run EMACs by using Alt-F2, "emacs".

You have to configure emacs properly for Clojure.

In emacs, Type: M-x package-list-packages (You should have "EPLA").

Select the following options by clicking on them, typing "I" for each of the options, then type "x"

Installed in emacs

clojure-mode

clojure-testmode

slime-repl

paraedit

magit

swank-clojure

3. Git (for downloading code and libraries)

http://book.git-scm.com/2_installing_git.html

$sudo apt-get install git-core

4. Leiningen

http://alexott.net/en/clojure/ClojureLein.html

Follow the instructions to install Leiningen. (Thanks Alex Ott!))

(Some stuff that might be important for Terminal commands:

echo $PATH - find your path)

5. Your first "Hello World" Compojure project

http://kzar.co.uk/blog/view/installing-compojure

All the instructions on "http://weavejester.github.com/compojure/docs/getting-started.html" are essentially correct, except that you must add to the dependencies in project.clj the swank dependency

Open project.clj in emacs and add

:dev-dependencies [[leiningen/lein-swank "1.2.0-SNAPSHOT"]

Then in Terminal:

lein deps

Then run:

lein swank (to start a swank server)

You should see the swank server running.

Then switch to EMACs and type

M-x slime-connect

You should see emacs connecting.

Run: (run-jetty example {:port 8080})

6. Verification

Open up a browswer, and type http://localhost:8080. It should show "Hello World".

----

P.S.

Sorry for the awkward formatting, going off to bed first. Hopefully, this will help everyone trying to use Compojure. I included all the pages I used, and much thanks to everyone who wrote those articles as guides.

Ryan

Love: some musings

2010-05-07T17:38:00.000-07:00

Love is unconditional

If your other half asks you:"Why do you love me?", and you immediately give your reasons, what happens when those reasons disappear? Do you stop loving the person?

98 Bricks

This is a short adaptation of a story by Ajahm Brahm.

Many years ago, when building a monastery, Ajahm Brahm was a young monk trying to lay the bricks for a wall. It was surprisingly difficult to lay a brick straight. If you hit a brick on one end, the other end would pop up. If you tried balancing it by hitting the other end, the other end would pop up. It was more difficult than he thought. He decided to put in a lot of effort and took a lot of care to ensure that the wall he was building was a level wall. After laying 100 bricks, the wall was finished.

Alas, he noticed that in the midst of laying the bricks, there were 2 bricks in the middle of the wall that he had missed levelling. They stuck out like a sore thumb. He was horrified, but he could not do anything as the mortar had already set. He wanted to rebuild the wall, but when he told the abbot, the abbot told him that it was not necessary.

For many years, whenever he had visitors visiting the monastery, he would avoid showing them the wall with the 2 bad bricks as he was ashamed of it. One day, he was leading 2 visitors around when he forgot about it, and he led them past the bad wall. One of the visitors remarked:"That's a beautiful wall."

Ajahn Brahm was aghast. He immediately said:"How can that be? Dear sir, do you not see the 2 ugly bricks that are crooked?"

Visitor:"Yes, I do. But, I also see the other 98 good bricks that make this a beautiful wall."

Sometimes, we focus on the shortcomings of the people around us and even ourselves to the point that we forget about the existence of the rest of the things that make us like them in the first place.

Finding Love 寻找爱

2010-05-04T01:08:00.000-07:00

最近看到一位作者对寻找爱人过程的见解。我们寻觅爱的时候其实在渴求五样条件 - 1. 符合美观欣赏标准、2. 生活频率的吻合、3. 沟通性、4. 信赖度、5. 彼此学习的地方
Recently, I came across an author's interpretation of the process of finding a lover. He proposed that we are looking for 5 things -

1. Physical attractiveness, 2. Overlapping lifestyle habits and rhythms, 3. The ability to communicate and understand each other, 4. Trust, 5. The chance to learn from each other.

Pondering: Is the concept of nationality losing its relevance?

2010-04-24T05:23:00.001-07:00

What if we used culture instead to place a person? I can have a Singaporean culture, but I also draw upon Chinese culture, American (the popular media that I'm exposed to is still pre-dominantly American), a little bit of Japanese (learnt a little Japanese but forgot most of it).. It seems to me that the debate about nationality is sometimes too narrowly focused on patriotic and nationalistic notions, which does not really reflect what a person is.

The current reality is that through the Internet and the ease of transportation, talented people are highly mobile and in touch with what is happening around the world. People under the age of 30 may have studied, worked and lived for extended periods in easily 3 different countries. Forcing them to take up citizenship might instead have the opposite effect of driving them away.

CS3216 - Why it's special

2010-04-18T06:40:00.001-07:00

How long does it take Prof Ben to change a lightbulb?

It depends.

(He might be in the middle of a fascinating discussion about the optimal way to teach someone how to change the lightbulb and his mindset using some online video tutorials, facebook posts, buzz updates, blogging... )

To ask for forgiveness =)

Firstly, thank you to all the people I've worked with (hope we stay in touch... ). I am still not good at doing any worthwhile programming, but working with you has been a pleasure.

Facebook App

"Who is the Monkey?" is a game where we mask our friend's profile photo with an icon of a monkey, then we ask our other friends to guess who they are. If this does not give you an idea of our sense of humour...

Team

Seb and Jon, thanks for being damn fun team mates over the first FB assignment.. I think we settled on the most wackiest idea, but it was quite a fun game.. Now, if Seb can make some time after the exams.. =)

Good luck to Jon for his CMU application! =) I'm not so sure what you learnt from the 2 of us.. but if it's anything good, please remember it.

Seb is very hardcore .NET and Microsoft, to the point that he's running Windows 7 on his Macbook. I'm honestly baffled.

Duh..

I learnt that major online platforms have APIs that allow you to build applications for their users (a chorus of duhs from the readers..). It's actually not so duh as you think. Most people (99.9999% of the world population who use FB) don't know that (surprise surprise..). This is what happened to me - I went to an event for startups and I actually showed one of the people there where to find the resources to build their own FB app. The other question that he asked me was where to find this awesome class and whether he could sit in for the lectures.

The world that uses Facebook does not know how to develop applications for Facebook. The potential of FB apps has not even been exploited beyond 0.01%.

This was also my first introduction to cloud computing. I'm quite excited that Amazon is developing one of its cloud computing data centres in Singapore.

Assignment design

I must compliment the assignment. It is easily one of the best written assignments that do 2 things: guide and stretch. I wish there is some place where we can vote for the best prepared teaching material in NUS.

FB Seminar presentation

Thanks Zezhou for thrashing out the presentation points. Hope people like the 7 sins model as a guide.

I think this short assignment was pretty good. A lot of good points were raised by the class presentations about what makes good viral FB apps.

Google wave - Waveplan

The Wave team - Kah Hong (best dressed award in class), josh (video pro.. and a great mate), Justin (pro. nuff said), Dillip (thanks for handling the report)..

This was quite funny, I don't think I will ever experience debugging over MSN, buzz and Gchat ever again.

Honestly, I think I was more of a hindrance to this team, as Kah Hong and Josh did most of the actual work which was coding. josh was also sick during the last part of the assignment! Kah Hong had to covert from his favourite job of designing to coding.. haha.

This assignment was pretty interesting, as Google Wave's documentation was not as polished as Facebook. I hope some of the class will volunteer to work on open-source projects, and if they do, this was a pretty good introduction. I believe that contributing to open-source projects will train you to be a better programmer and being part of a community.

Honestly, I think if we had more time to play with it, we could have done something much more polished. I'm not sure how many of us will go back to tinker around with it after the exams.. Hmm..

Of course, being mentioned on Google's blog is great. Score one for NUS =)

Final Project: Voucherous

Reuben: Like your drive and intensity.

Hong Pang: Quiet execution and very humble.

Andy: Our marketing guy

A simple idea, based on Groupons, and modified to suit Singapore. Execution? Not so easy...

It's funny how things just managed to cock up.

Find a designer?

Not simple. Till today, I'm not sure whether we had to drop the first designer because we did not communicate the style we wanted properly or whether we had unrealistic expectations. Finding a designer took almost 2 weeks out of the 6 weeks..

Hustling for Business

I like Reuben's style of walking randomly into a shopping centre and talking to all the shop owners. That's balls man.

Project management

Till today, I admire Hong Pang's refusal to budge from adding more features to meet the deadlines.

Communications

I won't say that we worked perfectly together, but I think we managed to communicate better with each other at the end. I still think that splitting the team into the technical and business from the start was right, but we did not handle the communications well. I guess this comes with experience, as all of us were unused to each other's working style.

Wave does not work - We are still not used to changing our behaviour for wave, despite it being more functional than Docs or email.

Google docs - Much better

Gmail - Less efficient with email threads getting crowded, but not bad at team updates.

Our life is on Google. =)

PayPal integration

PayPal integration was not as simple as we thought. On the other hand, if you guys ever need to talk to someone who has wrestled with it, please talk to Hong Pang. I guess integrating PayPal will get more important, as the recent deal between DBS (DBS has over 90% over the local population) and PayPal effectively means the local online transactions market is cornered by PayPal (oops, e-NETs?).

Summary: Perfect example of how much we underestimate execution, while the idea is just a start.

Other CS3216 friends

I have made many new friends in this course.. I'll just mention a few that I've had the pleasure of talking to.

Wye Mun - Bioeng Major (why?), and web designer (http://www.wyemun.com/) If you need a good freelance designer.. You know who to call/recommend. Flash, CSS, Javascript..

Jian Hong - Bball someday after exams =) Foodwerkz, food, enhanced image processing (inside joke)

Cedric - Cheem sia.. But good thoughts. If you could be a little more succinct, you might be able to communicate the message within people's attention span =)

Tomithy - Thanks for introducing me to genetic algorithms, bio-computing and your interest in social causes. Have fun in NOC! =) (Many of us in the class did.. maybe a bit more than we were supposed to)

Other interesting people

Ji Wei and Jonathan Low - Man, this guy from physics and Jon Low are a damn funny pair. And TopsyTurvia is quite fun to play.. =)

Bernard - Good luck for the choices you make in life.

Laurence - Hope you make it in business.. =) You seem to like it. However, bear in mind that you have friends who like you regardless of how much money or attitude you have. If NES IT director gets too boring for you, maybe you should start 2 companies..

Wai Hong - Thanks for your encouragement on my blog =) Quite surprised thanks.

Xialin - Thanks for taking our group photo! Your FB profile pic is quite cool, reminds me of a ninja =)

Hung Doan - Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen this guy not smiling and bouncing around.

TAs and Speakers

Congrats for surviving as his TAs =)

Chris Henry - I really like the presentation you did. Thanks a lot, I saved that as a reference.

Yan Jie - All the best for your journey as a teacher! Your students are going to be so lucky to have well-thought out slides and lessons.

Su Yuen - Err. Crazy. Haha. (Great designer)

Jason - Thanks for your introductory programming lectures.

Kok Wee - Thanks dude! I know you handled a lot of the irritating administrative stuff. Good luck for your tuition agency!

The speakers were great! Actually, I think the speakers alone would have made the class worthwhile.. Certainly learnt a lot from them.

Overall

Mood diary - Wow. Pro sia. Their take-up rate is pretty awesome. 16,000+ users in a few weeks?!

BrainStormer - Getting some good reviews and the UI is nice. Jia you!=)

Blogging is good for people who like to write.. Maybe it's a good way to force people to recap what they've learnt. I noticed that there are people who don't really like writing..

A lot of the people in class have the chance to apply for NOC. I hope you do.

Questions I still don't have answers for:

Why must such a class need soooooo much manpower, effort and thinking? Is there any way to create the same value/quality but some way to reduce the hassle?

This is certainly not "think more, do less". This is "think a damn bloody lot, do a damn hell more".

On the other hand, if every class I've taken was like this..

Is it true that the year 1s and 2s have been affected to a greater degree? I think the technical stuff was not that important. I could feel that the year 1s and 2s were impacted more by the class. (Stay teachable.)

I'm surprised that Justin and Yanjie came to talk to me about the healthcare idea. Thanks..

Did I suck? Haha.

Can everyone be a teacher? To be a teacher is really a calling.

I have more questions than answers. Maybe I wasn't looking for answers in the first place..

P.S. The second last photo is "Guide by Ben Leong - Common Sense - How to survive NUS SoC"

How long does it take a teacher to make an impact?

It depends. But they never stop trying.

CS3216: Security system design, Chiang Kai, IBM

2010-03-29T05:19:00.000-07:00

IBM: Guest Lecture, Chiang Kai

Date: 29 Mar 2010

(To be honest, I was falling asleep during the talk given by Chiang Kai (CK) on security. I guess that's the thing about security, you take it for granted that it works while you sleep..)

I think one of the interesting points is that we widely underestimate how much of our personal information is online and easily accessible by any crawler. CK brought up an interesting fact that using information available on social networks, a MIT student project predicted with 78% accuracy whether a profile belonged to a gay person using data from 4,000 profiles.

The original article "How privacy vanishes online” can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/technology/17privacy.html

Could potential employers use this information to reject your application or be biased against you during the interview? Even if you choose to maintain your privacy through regulating the information that is publicly accessible, you are unable to stop your friends or colleagues from sharing information about your activities. Another scary fact was that social security numbers could be guessed at by analyzing the data available on your profile pages. (Social security numbers are identifying numbers like your I/C number in the U.S.).

CK also brought up the example of Kevin Mitinick, who did not use hacking to break into computer systems, but instead relied on manipulating human trust and behaviours to gain passwords and sensitive information. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/technology/17privacy.html

Ironically, after being arrested for hacking, he now runs a computer security consulting firm.

A crook to catch a crook.. =)

I think the important point is that the system can be designed to be secure, but if the users are not aware of the security risks of giving away passwords..

Okie, after googling, I found a presentation which gives a short but sufficient introduction to Secure Software: http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/secdesign/intro.pdf

Secure software should ensure:

Confidentiality: Only authorized people or processes are allowed access
Integrity: Data integrity
Availability: The system and data is available under adverse conditions
Authenticity: Users are who they claim to be

Interestingly, the lecture gives a intro on Lifecycle Risk Assessment (second time I came across lifecycle analysis, the other is in calculating ecological impact). The analysis might result in the developer weighing the probablity, severity of potential damage and repair costs required before fixing all the security risks.

It is often a trade-off between security and usability (in terms of speed, efficiency.. ).

Some interesting videos when you search for "How to think like a Blackhat"..

Google's Matt Cutts

http://searchengineland.com/think-like-a-blackhat-by-matt-cutts-16129

This Stackoverflow discussion is quite interesting. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/772596/black-hat-knowledge-for-white-hat-programmers

Conversations with a BlackHat

http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20100314/conversations-with-a-blackhat/

"Expert Sharing on China" Talk today - Quotes and lessons

2010-03-27T15:55:00.000-07:00

Singaporeans in Africa
Recently, Mr Lee Yi Shan and a few of the panelists went to Africa for a business trip. They came across a fascinating Singaporean and shared it with the audience. They met a Singaporean woman who set up an electronics business in Lagos. She was working in an electronics shop in Sim Lim as a sales assistant, when she started noticing that a significant percentage of the shop's revenues (five figures) were from Africans who often paid full in cash. Intrigued, one day, she just bought a plane ticket and flew to Lagos alone. As she did not know that it was customary to bribe the immigration official, she was made to wait in the airport for the whole day. That was the start of her African story. Eventually, through much hard work, she managed to grow a very successful business. Lagos is reminiscent of Singapore in the 1950s, and the panelists shared that there are many opportunities.

Quotes from Mr Zhong, boss of Yanlord
有字的书，无字的书，干中悟 (Book knowledge, and knowledge outside of books, learning through doing) 培养沟通能力、判断能力 (to develop communications skills and decision-making)

越发展的国家，商机越深埋（The more advanced the country, the more hidden are the opportunities)

越满足市场需要，越成功 (Market-product fit ensures success)

非诚信取得的成功不长久。(Success gained through dishonest means does not last long.)

具体化 -> 制度化 -> 高效化 -> 人才化（Execution -> Standardisation -> Optimisation -> Talent development)

以前，我们谈合约时，如果带了律师和会计师，对方会觉得我方很不友善。现在，当我们带律师和会计师时，对方会觉得我们的公司很规范。
（Previously, during contractual negotiations, when we brought our lawyers and accountants, the other party would feel that we are being unfriendly. Now, when we bring our lawyers and accountants, they would feel that we are a properly managed company that commands trust.)

Systems of Systems Integration - Applications for Engineering in cleantech: A talk that ESP students and engineering students should have attended

2010-03-24T19:45:00.000-07:00

(Any mistakes made in this post are mine. I would appreciate any feedback on erroneous information.)

Today, I attended a very good talk by a engineer/scientist/corporate leader/analyst named Dr Michael Quah after he gave a talk about "Systems of Systems Integration - Applications for Engineering in Cleantech". (You have to love engineers =) )

The motivation for writing this is to share:

Why we need Cleantech research
An introduction to Cleantech: Constraints, Potential and Economics
The geo-socio-economic reality of Singapore's situation

How does being part of ASEAN affect Singapore
What kind of cleantech research really makes sense for Singapore

"Negawatt" - The large potential in being energy efficient
Relooking existing processes to make them more environmentally friendly - carbon sequestration
Future research areas with large potential for Singapore
Systems of systems integration approach - Weighing research vs economic value as engineers

(The structure will follow loosely the motivations above. It is quite long, so if you are in a hurry, just skip to the conclusion.)

First, some background about the speaker.
Background (Dr Michael Quah)

Michael has extensive research, engineering, corporate and defense experience. He was primarily based in the US, but just recently moved to Singapore to help Singapore's cleantech research. Sharing his experience from DuPont, he first gave an introduction to the role of research in DuPont.

Insights from DuPont - How research is driven

Research in DuPont is divided in Basic (fundamental) -> Applications -> Real, which forms a feedback loop.

Basic or fundamental research is important, as potential new discoveries are a source of patents and competitive advantage. However, the direction that basic research takes is still guided by the demands of the market. ~~This does not undermine the academic rigor, as there was a healthy proportion of 2,000 PhDs in a working staff that's 6,000 strong.~~

This does not undermine the academic rigor. For example, when he was at DuPont, the DuPont Headquarters in Wilmington had a healthy proportion of 2,000 PhDs among the 6,000 staff.

DuPont has a very interesting policy regarding their library of patents. If a patent expires and the management of DuPont decides that it's not worthwhile to renew the patent, the original inventor is free to take the patent and develop it. An example of a patent that got away is GoreTex, which made its inventor billions =). Obviously, DuPont cannot guard against these losses, but that's part and parcel of being a large company.

DuPont also allows their ~~researchers~~ senior researchers to work 1 day in academia.
(Not just Google, 3M =) )

The US Research ecosystem

MQ also shared about how it's not just the universities (MIT etc) that play a major role, but companies arrayed along the Routes 128 and I-495 in MA. The companies play an important role in drawing out the intellectual capital from the universities for developing products and services.

(Is this tight industry integration lacking in Singapore?)

Why do cleantech research?
The world is currently facing a shift to renewable sources of energy. This is due to the inevitability that fossil fuels will eventually be depleted. However, Dr MQ feels that usage of fossil fuels will still persist for 30 - 50 years, due to our addiction to high energy density fuels and their ease of transportation. Furthermore, this addiction to fossil fuels has affected the current state of world politics in an undesirable way.
(I guess the costs of replacing the current infrastructure is too still exorbitant or no one wants to pay for overhauling the creaking infrastructure.)

Energy supply - Renewable energy vs Fossil fuel based

Dr. MQ also highlighted the differences and potential implications.

The renewable energy diet consists of technologies like solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, nuclear etc.

~~For the US, for it's "liquid" diet, it is 60% dependent on foreign sources. For it's "electronic" diet, it's foreign dependency drops to 10%.~~ Unfortunately, reliance on fossil fuels introduces dependencies on certain oil-producing countries. Obviously, this carries some national security implications for all net oil importing countries.
(Time to talk to some friends in the MFA..)

The real peak oil debate

Dr. MQ also showed why the current debate about peak oil production is redundant from the engineer's point of view.

If you integrate the peak oil curve (sum up all the production both past and projected), you will get the sum of the sun's energy which has been stored in the form of fossil fuels via geological pressures and temperature cycles (update) over the last 3.4 x 10^9 billion years.

We are going to use this accumulated energy in n x 10^3 years.

By debating about peak oil production, we are actually just arguing about the value of n, and not how much oil there is there.

What is Sustainable Development?

Dr. MQ also shared his definition of sustainable development that he feels is most appropriate.

"Sustainable development is meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the future generation."
(Hmm.. so the current generation should think of ways to leave the world for us.. =) )

What is the potential of ASEAN?

ASEAN is a large economy that is the combined size of Canada and Mexico, with a population larger than Europe.

Some of the key issues for ASEAN are protection of land and marine environments, biodiversity. Transportation of fuel will be a problem. Another is access to water resources. Grid security and infrastructure will also be important.

Why some cleantech research does not make sense for Singapore

According to Dr MQ's calculations, if we covered the whole of Singapore with solar panels, it would only meet 22% of Singapore's current energy demand. This is taking into account current levels of conversion efficiency. However, the solar panel industry does play a role in creating jobs for the workforce that were previously working in the sillicon wafer industry.
Similarly, for biofuels, if we take a crop such as soybean, it would take 183 Singapores to grow enough soybeans to fuel Singapore's energy demand. This does not even take into account the water needed for the cultivation. However, other biofuels might be worth considering, such as the cultivation of micro-algae using sea farms. If inexpensive cultivation tanks and processes can be made, algae could be grown offshore without the limitation of land.
Update:
Biofuels proponents often push for a certain crop species and suggest that land can be found in neighbouring countries for cultivation. Singapore would be able to grow biofuels in other countries and import the crops. However, it is more important to maintain bio-diversity through crop diversity and crop cycle rotation than sticking to mono-cultures.
(I wonder whether the effect of the transportation costs of the crops negates any environmental savings.)

Hydrogen is also not very economical, when you factor in the total energy required for the electrolysis of water for hydrogen production.

"Negawatt"
A key point of Dr MQ's speech was on how there is a lot of low hanging fruit in energy conservation and energy efficiency. For example, he did a simple calculation involving the hypothetical trapping and usage of waste heat from US industries. If 20% of waste heat was captured, that would be an amount equal to the total amount of energy currently generated from all the renewable sources in the US.
For the chemical engineers, Dr MQ also introduced the concept of capturing waste heat in combined heat power generators with a double closed loop Rankine cycle. This results in a huge jump in efficiency.
(Please google "cogeneration" and "trigeneration" for more details.)
(It's easier to save most of the time than to generate additional supply.)

How to improve existing processes - Carbon sequestration?
Dr MQ also mentioned that coal plants need not necessarily be a bad option. Coal resources are cheap and plentiful. Hence, coal might still be an economically preferred choice for many countries. (I do know that US and China still have large coal reserves.) With carbon sequestration techniques that capture 45 - 65% of the carbon emissions, coal plants would have comparable environmental impact to a natural gas fired plant. Of course, this means a large potential area for research.

Future research areas
Dr MQ identified several research areas that were very interesting. (I did not have time to take down the details, I'm just guessing for some of these categories using my own knowledge)

Water - Access, management, marine environments
Energy security
Waste conversion to energy
Logistics - logistics of distribution
Command, control & infrastructure of grids - smart grid technologies, cybersecurity, sensors, optimization, reliability, performance, safety
Materials - new membranes, engine lubricants, catalysts
Transportation - electric vehicles, public transportation systems for cities
Carbon footprinting

Systems of Systems Overview
This diagram captures Dr MQ's view of the research value chain and economic value chain of cleantech.

While basic research is important, it is worthwhile to take note that most of the value to industry is in the higher levels. As engineers, we want to focus on these areas.

What I liked
Besides Dr MQ's sense of humour, he was able to break down difficult concepts into several levels that were executionable. He started with a broad overview, then gave a clear rationale for each of the decisions and the various consequences of the choices that he weighed. Each conclusion was supported by empirical evidence. His passion for renewable energy was also very inspiring. He gave not just the context, but also the rationale and the inspiration.

Quotes:

Olivia Lum did not become rich from inventing a membrane. She became rich by selling entire systems that worked.
Carbon needs a price.

Conclusion
A lot of low hanging fruit in energy efficiency
We are still going to be using fossil fuels for the next 30 - 50 years, so there is a lot of potential in improving existing processes.
The slide captures many of the points about the technology research landscape and the economic value associated with each step.

Can we be the first city to be really green? I do know that we are horribly energy inefficient with all our air-conditioners running with no one in the room.

Given that our economy is export driven, and we depend on imported energy, we have to reduce the costs of production to stay competitive and for national security.

---
(Edits made after Dr MQ's comments.)

Mostly, I write this blog to capture my thought process and learning, and not always necessarily for a target audience in mind.

However, I really hope that my year 1 juniors read this, and start thinking about why you chose this programme. If you really understand what is the potential of what you are being taught, and how you can use it to change the world, you will find that it's one of the most fascinating courses ever offered. I only realized this recently, and I find a lot of holes in my understanding which irritates me. I can only try to patch my holes with the limited time I have left before I graduate.

CS3216: 6 stories from 6 entrepreneurs

2010-03-23T04:10:00.000-07:00

It was a good session last night. Prof Ben managed to persuade 6 entrepreneurs to come and give stories that are authentic.

Chin Leng (singaporebrides.com)

Chin Leng shared about how he struggled for almost 2 years. He originally got the idea for the portal when he was getting married, and he found it a very stressful experience to go to 50 - 60 wedding agencies just to compare prices and packages. Therefore, he had the idea of putting all the information online, while charging listing fees for advertisements. This was in 2000, the era of the 56.6kbps internet.

Those 2 years were so bad that he was literally down to the last few hundred dollars in his bank account, and he still had bills to pay. He also had to reassure his wife that everything was okie. To save money, he drank water from public taps and bought mineral water that was not chilled, just to save 15c. He also walked from place to place for meetings to save bus fare.

He even had to make free websites from his clients, as they were all small businesses with traditional bosses that did not understand the internet. The dot.com crash in 2000 - 2001 was also a huge negative factor for Chin Leng, whose idea of selling online listings sounded like a scam.However, the websites turned out to be a great marketing tool. Once a shop had a website, other competitors would suddenly start asking Chin Leng to make websites for them too. He also helped them fix their computers and clear their computer of viruses. He also helped them register their domain names and apply for web hosting.

He also shared stories of how he got rejected. Sometimes, the bosses would just turn around and "show him their backside, without giving him a chance to talk"(his words). Some employees would also push him physically out of the shop and close the door in his face.

Chin Leng also shared that he was a lousy student, so all those rejections compounded his feeling of depression during those years.

He also shared how 2 of his former clients became copycats, and how SPH tried to muscle in on his market.

However, he really believed in the idea, and slowly made progress. Today, SingaporeBrides has about 50% of the market. The next competitor has around 5%.

Very humble guy, and able to laugh at himself.

my take
I asked him a few questions, as I think I will be facing the same problems. I asked him how he managed to talk to the traditional bosses, in order to change their mindsets. He said that you must use proper analogy. To explain domain names and web hosting, he told them that it was like registering with ACRA and opening a shopfront, but in the online domain. Once the bosses got it, he would get the business.

I really like what he shared. This had one of the largest impacts on me, especially the part where he was really going broke. (Wow.. it started 10 years ago!)

I wonder what role his wife played throughout those years. Really solid marriage.

I think Chin Leng probably ate the most pain through his journey.

Hoong An (hungrygowhere.com)

Hoong An had a very good presentation entitled: "Why you should not be an entrepreneur"

He was also one of the few who emphasized the importance of the media and building up a network of contacts in the media. His lesson is that you must suit your story to the angle that the journalist wants to write about.

Hoong An also shared how he imagines himself to be a cockroach, unkillable.

He also emphasized that sometimes, you just need to be in the right place at the right time. Sometimes, he was rejected from events that he tried to attend. However, many of his biggest deals was over casual conversation during events.

These are the headers from the 7 slides:

1. You give up too easily

2. You have no business plan

Note: He does not mean a formal business plan, but a document sketching the steps

3. You plan too much.

Just Run The Business.

4. You hang around people just like you.

A soccer team with 11 strikers/goalkeepers will not win.

He would rather work with someone who disagrees with him, but can get the job done, rather than someone who he can get along with, but cannot get the job done.

5. You cannot make decisions.

A wrong decision is better than no decision.

6. You lack working experience and capital.

Sure die. (more or less.. )

7. You have no faith.

Likewise, he shared about how the 1st year's revenue for hungrygowhere was $4,000, when they had 4 founders. That's $1,000 per person per year.

Funnily, he met Chin Leng when he was just starting hungrygowhere. Chin Leng obviously ignored all the rules. Hoong An's reaction was:"Wah, like that also can ah..." Chin Leng was very inspiring to Hoong An when hungrygowhere was going through its first year.

my take
Obviously, Hoong An understands the media angle very well. I need to start learning how to talk to more people and to grab their interest quickly.

Tong Yee (School of Thought, under the Thought Collective)

Very thought provoking social enterprise. I think Tong Yee's sharing had the most impact on the audience, as he went straight to why the education system needs change.

Tong Yee's sharing was very interesting to me. Obviously, it's a very rare social enterprise that's doing very well. His tutors are being paid easily over 1ok/mth (please see below for more details).

His tuition agency achieved 55% A for GP. That beats any junior college.

Tong Yee also shared how he was a lousy student, but found his calling when he became a teacher. He discovered that he was a good at teaching.

Tong Yee also shared about how he was very shocked by his students. The most shocking incident was when a student actually told his teachers in school that they need tuition at School of Thought. When Tong Yee heard that, he was like "What?". However, the teachers willingly signed up for 1 year of tuition at School of Thought, and their feedback was that they finally understood why the student made that comment.

Tong Yee also shared about the transformation in his students. 2 of his students were awarded the PSC scholarship not because of their grades, but because of the maturity that they showed during the interview. When PSC tried to find out why these 2 students were so special, they realised that these 2 students were from SoT. Therefore, SoT is now exploring collaborations with PSC.

The Thought Collective also publishes a general affairs magazine that is solely dependent on subscription. This gives them freedom from corporate advertisers who want to target the 14 - 18 yr old market. However, they have actually thought of alternative advertisers that would also add to the general interest quotient of the magazine, such as government agencies (scholarships), NGOs and embassies (education fairs?). Currently, they have 32,000 subscribers.

Regarding the structure of the Thought Collective, Tong Yee shared that the Thought Collective consists of ThinkTank Publishing, a cafe called Food for Thought and ThinkTank. They grew laterally, not vertically, which means that each company is actually an independent company. This structure had unexpected benefits, as the staff could actually tailor their working hours and job scope to work at 4 different companies at the same time. Effectively, they could design their dream job.

Unfortunately, Tong Yee revealed that his model is highly unscaleable, as it's dependent on talent. Teachers who share that special something are hard to find. Similarly, each business is highly dependent on the founder.

Tong Yee also shared that they made a lot of mistakes. Going into the cafe was not very smooth at the beginning, as they had no experience. It took them a long time before they could break even and make a little profit. Similarly, they also failed with offering national heritage trails, as they ended up competing on price, and not differentiating themselves with their advantage which was quality of content. Their main competitors in the competitive market were 3 travel agencies.

my take

Tong Yee also shared that he's very good at reading people. I wonder how much can this skill be trained/practised.. Hmm. I'm obviously lousy at it.

Tong Yee also shared that in the long run, dollars and cents might cloud your initial vision, so it's necessary to revise your course regularly.

I came across the website of School of Thought about a year ago and was quite intrigued. Really great to meet the founder in person. I found Tong Yee very passionate about social causes. I think it's very true that any social enterprise should have as its end goal the eradication of itself, which means that it solved the problem.

I'm quite interested to find out what's their teaching pedagogy and whether it can be applied to other forms of coaching. Does it include the concepts in "Flow"?

Why did the students have such transformations? If his school's intake consists of students who did not do well in their A levels, then he has saved a lot of lives by giving them back their self-belief. Singapore's education system rarely has second chances due to its efficient sorting and classification. How much hidden potential have we lost? It's not even brain drain. It's really time to change the education system, cause it's no longer a manufacturing economy.

Ash (Interactive SG, turbanizer.com)
Ash was the only foreigner (Canadian). He brought out some different perspectives. For him, he emphasized on investing a lot in company culture and fit.
He also made a very good point that sales solves everything.

(once you hear that he founded turbanizer.com, you can't help but like Ash.. haha.. )

He also seems to understand the consumer market very well. For example, he started sg.shirtpal.com, and in its first month, it was making revenues of 30,000 Canadian dollars. Not bad for a team that only started developing the website 2 months ago.

Ash also said that he only took money recently, since it's other people's money. However, he only takes "smart money", which means that the investor must not only be able to provide money, but also open necessary doors. In shirtpal, the investor also managed to settle the shirt production factory in Thailand.

Ash - "SALES!"

Ash also advised strongly against middleman kind of businesses. It's too easy to get squeezed out by partners if you don't offer unique value.

I heard a comment that although Ash is friendly, people got the feeling that they were being sized up quickly when talking to him. I'm not sure about that and why people had that impression, but he is a good talker and very charming. I think the salesmanship abilities of Ash probably explains the SGD$7 million revenues..

(How to size people without being detected? haha.. Dunno leh. Sia lah, I suck at this man..)

Leslie (Redsports.sg)
Leslie made a very interesting point about being debt-free, before starting his business. That was very important to him, as he had 3 kids, and wanted to be able to maintain his spending.

Leslie also shared that his working experience in various MNCs allowed him to practise and hone his skillsets. For example, he picked up video production, sports-related marketing, photography, editorial writing on the job. In fact, he was working as a full-time freelance photographer before starting RedSports.

my take
Leslie is interesting, because he has a lot of liabilities and responsibilities when he started. I'm not very sure how he made the decision to do it when he had 3 kids.

Maybe I should have did the final project for him, since I seem to be the only active sports person in the class.. (although I still don't know how to code for nuts). I just get the feeling that whenever he talks, the audience just can't seem to connect. Sorry for the general stereotype..

Oh well, after this month of school, then I can replan my time.

General - Funding
All of them either used their own savings and just survived very leanly until they made it.

My question to all of them: What is your compensation plan for your top employees?

I had the chance to pose a question. These are their responses.

Chin Leng: I have an employee who has been with me for very long. I recognize her contributions and I pay her 3 months bonus. Including the 13th month bonus, that's 4 months of bonus. In addition to that, I also pay more than the average for her. I also allow her the flexibility to work from home.

I also don't pay my wife =)

Hoong An: Every employee that joins us has to take a pay cut. That is to ensure that people are really buying into the vision, and not just joining just for the job.

The reason why this is a strict company policy is because previously, we lost 2 programmers who were working with us just for a few hundred dollars more.

Tong Yee: We cap our maximum salary at 14 - 15k. To us, that is too much money for a person. We also tithe 10% of our profits (revenues? Was unclear about this).
Ash: We pay easily close to the top 15% of the market rate. We also expose our employees to our biggest corporate clients like Nike, Skype, PayPal, so that they really learn a lot. We try to compress 2 - 3 years of experience into their first year. We also focus highly on culture. We organise regular gym sessions and fortnightly company outings. Our sales people also make 6 figure salaries due to the generous commission rates.
Kwek Loong: We pay more, because startup grows exponentially, not like well-established companies. It's only natural to pay more than the market rate, because they are really doing more work.
Leslie: We work with freelancers and volunteers who believe in RedSports' vision of Sports for Singapore. I give them a lot of exposure and training.

All mentioned that good employees needed space to grow, and good employees learn very fast. It is sometimes not a waste to allow people to leave, as the alumni make good referrals. However, compensation is very important and should be proportional to results/contributions.

-- Notes --
Paiseh for missing out any points! I only took down the points that had impact on me and caused me to think through some of my own thoughts.

There is lack of analysis because this post is too long, and people who went for the session probably don't want to read this. This is more of a reminder to myself =)

I found all of them very down-to-earth and friendly =)
(Kwek Loong arrived late cause he had a business meeting. Hence, he did not have time to share much.)

Why?

2010-03-23T03:43:00.001-07:00

(stuff I've heard, thoughts that popped up, always in progress)

Cause you know, someday, at 2am, you will have horrible nightmares about making payroll.
Cause if the batt on your mobile phone dies, you really in deep shit.

Cause you think that the Matrix is f*%%#*@ cool.

Cause you see a pretty girl, and you find that physical attractiveness has very little long term impact.

Cause you start slicing time by the day, the hour, the half hour, the minute, the second.
Cause you see that there are different kinds of beauty. Beauty that is timeless and beauty that is ephemeral.

Cause you learn that rejections, although personal, are things you can cope with.

Cause you realise that your friends all know your weaknesses, and they are still your friends.

Cause you sit up straight, learn to be 15 mins early and f*&$@!$ listen to laojiao advice.

Cause you walk rather than wait for the feeder bus sometimes to give yourself time to think while you walk.

Cause the small things that bug you still bug you, but you laugh them off. (Don't sweat the small stuff.)

Cause you find that you get a deeper high playing a competitive sport. (WATERPOLO)
Cause the ten million things you do, all lead to one thing.

Cause you learn to understand people and the decisions they make.

Cause you appreciate a bunch of friends who have been with you for more than 10 years.
Cause your friends do things that touch you.
Cause you do an almost daily ritual of examining yourself.
Cause you realise it's easier to be true.
Cause you talk less but mean more.
Cause yolk on your face is quite tasty.
Cause you are happy.

Cause you learn that your parents work damn hard.

Cause you use headfakes =)

Cause you learn why people are unhappy with their lives.
Cause you diam and just do.
Cause you learn that wealth != health and happiness != wealth.
Cause you find yourself laughing at yourself and all the silly things you do.
Cause you realise that the classics are damn classic, and the lessons in them are eternal.
Cause you realise that perfection is worth striving for, although mostly unattainable by mortals.
Cause you find the goodness in people and it balances the evil, lack of thoughtfulness in people.
Cause you experienced loss.
Cause you learn to be humble and not be an arrogant pr@%4 that you were all your life.
Cause you learn that although you think your troubles are damn important, actually, there are other more important troubles in the world.

Cause you find peace.

Cause you start to see colours that you never saw before, music you've never heard and discover connections that were invisible.

Cause you learn that there is only 1 immutable law in human relationships, karma.

Cause you know you will have regrets if you don't.

Cause you finally get it.

Random - Choose to work with people who hate the same things that you do?

2010-03-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

Thought? - Instead of working with people that like the same things you do, why not work with people who hate the same things you do? It seems easier to narrow down the things you hate. People often are willing to state what they hate. They also know what they hate, often with a greater intensity than what they love.

(Sample conversation:

"What do you like?"

"I like being in a creative, dynamic environment. I like challenges.. I like xx xx xx."

It's a never-ending list, and you don't really get what the person is at the end.

"What do you hate?"

"I hate people who make excuses. I hate people who backstab. I hate people who talk a lot, but don't back it up. I hate inconsiderate people. I hate people who need to be told what to do, when it's pretty obvious what needs to be done."

Much much better...

)

It's easy to flip the things that they hate into things that they love to get a better idea of who they are.

Hmm..

The phenomenon of why trained (xx) can't do (xx)

2010-03-19T06:33:00.000-07:00

I've been noticing this worrying phenomenon that is rather prevalent among students. Unfortunately, it has also happened to me.

I realised that I know nuts about engineering, even though I am supposedly doing engineering. It is becoming very scary, when one of my favourite profs starts asking the LT:"Okie everyone, tell me intuitively how does an inductor work. Anyone?" There's a long awkward silence.. Some brave soul eventually ventures a formula, but no one can really explain it in a way that shows understanding.. (intuitive understanding is quite important, if you have read "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman!". It's important to build a mental model for your own understanding.)

After talking to another prof of mine that I respect a lot, I suddenly realised fundamental differences between the way he took his education and me. He often asked why about the things that he was taught, and his healthy skepticism for teachers showed. He also dedicated a lot more time than I did studying in his undergraduate years, in his words, " studying day and night, only breaking for sleep and meals." His fundamentals in mathematics, engineering, computational analysis, physics and chemistry are so solid that I am in awe. He is probably one of the few profs that I have ever met that has read through every book that's sitting on his bookshelf. I once wandered into his office and asked him a question that was not within the module that he was teaching. Nonchalantly, he told me to flip to the x-th chapter of the textbook on the second shelf in the middle column. That was pretty amazing (and I found the answer that I needed). (Btw, he's from an European country, not Singapore.)

Can we change the education system? I think we can. We can start by inculcating a habit in kids to always ask "Why" 3 to 5 times about the things that they are being taught in school. Googling is so easy that kids should be able to find what they need and assimilate that knowledge. Another method would be to ask kids to just keep trying to understand something they don't immediately grasp. They can try watching a video, drawing diagrams, reading another explanation.. just don't give up.

Implemented successfully, I think that would collectively result in a 10 - 20 IQ jump across the whole population, which is more than enough to spike a few Nokias in Singapore. =)

Trying to de-school myself, with the limited amount of time I have. Funnily, this is the first time in my life I think I'm actually enjoying the feeling of learning. I'm going "err..." or "Brain-freeze.." a lot more often, but it's quite interesting.

Grinding soya bean milk

2010-03-16T04:33:00.000-07:00

This is a nice picture of a soya bean grinder taken by some guy off the net:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/greyskullscastle/4314410855/

Soya bean milk is created when you keep pushing the grinder constantly. If you have a long lever, you can apply less force to make the grinder move. Sometimes, you realize that after you grind a batch, there is one spoilt and naughty bean, and you have to redo the grinding.

I thought of this analogy when listening to Prof Ben's sharing yesterday.

To succeed in life, you need to grind, constantly. Eventually, the momentum created by your efforts will carry you further.

If you have intelligence, wealth and power or other advantages that come to you when you are born, it means you have a longer lever than others. It does not mean that you don't need to push the damn bloody heavy thing though.. (And it helps if you have friends to push with you!)

And you need a little luck, so that every batch of soya bean milk turns out good. If you put in your heart and soul, I think most of it should turn out okie =)

Drink soya bean milk everyday =) It's a healthy drink!

[Seeing things at 24 that I wish I could have told myself 10 years ago.]

CS3216: Scaling infrastructure for web app deployment

2010-03-16T04:06:00.000-07:00

This was one of the most practical and useful lectures I've ever attended. Wow. I immediately downloaded the notes and saved it for reference. Thanks Zit Seng! Really appreciate the effort that you took.

Honestly, I felt like I was attending an engineering lecture on grid optimization. Load balancing/forecasting/filters.. The concepts sound very similar to my FYP.

Zit Seng also pointed out the need for accurate metrics for pinpointing the problem domain area, whether it is in the network, due to the servers or the application running on the client instead. To make his job easier, maybe he could create a web page with a list of software tools. Hence, when people complain, they can give him at least a basic set of data that he can follow up on.

I think a good web developer needs to be aware of the demands of the application on the network and servers. Zit Seng's example of the url ~~with and without the backslash~~ that is a subdirectory without a trailing slash was interesting. I never knew that "http://www.xyz.com/aboutus" needs 2 requests, while 'http://www.xyz.com/aboutus/" requires only 1. I guess I'm more wary of heavy AJAX usage on any page.. (Wave? =) ) (updated as per ZS's feedback=) )

I also think Zit Seng brought out another point about communicating in another person's language. I guess the picture he portrayed of developers being separated as above the OS and below or at the same level of the OS is quite accurate. To be good, one must be able to switch between both groups.

I do admit that the CORS system is more impressive after the lecture =) I wonder why Zit Seng is not working in a startup company or another organisation. Seems like a waste of talent..

Actually, another interesting point that Zit Seng brought up was the revenue model of SoC. Seems rather interesting.. Renting out their rackspace to earn revenue from the other faculties? =) Every faculty needs more computing power than they have, but not everyone needs electron microscopes, C&C machines.. etc. SoC has monopoly power.

I guess for the majority of us, we can happily deploy on Amazon, caring less about these infrastructure problems, thanks to nice people like Zit Seng. =)

CS3216: Googler commenting on our apps

2010-03-10T03:44:00.000-08:00

Many of the comments made by Pamela were about usability. If you're interested in making life easy for your users, I recommend reading "Don't Make me Think" by Steve Krug. I found that it's very succinct, and in a short 1 hour read, your application or website will be very much more user-friendly. If you have any other good books/links, please share them =) (That reminds me, it's time to start a new wave on usability.. ).
Making life easy for your users means that they will love you and hopefully pay you more.. it also becomes easy for them to pay you.. =p

Pamela made some other good comments about the apps. I was quite surprised that she said nothing negative about WavePlan. It's simple but generally quite useful. I guess that's my takeaway. It might be a simple app, but if it does the job really well, that's great. Far better than a complicated app that has lots of features, but horrible to use. Pamela did say that she did not get the colour scheme and she was unable to verify that which dates were selected by her. That means our interface was not intuitive enough. Time to think a little more for the design..

Pamela had no ready answers for why Wave was so slow. I'm quite interested to find out about the 16-yr-old developer who wrote a Javascript dedicated wave client that's 10x faster. (What the hell am I doing with my life?=) )

I'm still don't get what kind of apps are good for Wave, so I'll try to go through all the principles that they recommended.
http://prezi.com/egrptwqumq8j/making-wave-y-extensions/
http://prezi.com/sxuwendhwqsy/google-wave-apis/
(Btw, those 2 prezis are quite good uses of Prezi, not the horrible abuses I've seen.)

Principle 1. Make it wave-y.
If it's for real time, it's not working, cause it's just too slow. I think the slow factor is really irritating. I'm not sure if the people using netbooks will find it even slower.

I wonder whether a combination of desktop sharing software and Skype is still more usable than Wave. I know wave has a Ribbit conference call function, but given the overall speed of wave.. it just seems like a frustrating experience for users.

Principle 2. Make it easy to use.
Wave is quite easy to use.. but still quite difficult for people to switch from Gmail. Quite ironic that Gmail is so good that people find it not worthwhile to switch to Wave.

Principle 3. Make it easy to install
(No comments)

Principle 4. Make it look good
Hmm.. Some teams surfaced the complaint that Chrome messed around with the sizing, whereas Firefox was okie. (Pamela's reply was sweet:"At least it's not IE.. " Touche).

Principle 5. Make it useful - or fun!
I think the useful part is probably more important, since people are on wave for testing out how it helps their workflow and communications, not really for gaming.

Idea: Integrating Prezi with wave? Hmm...

Conclusion:

At the moment, the performance problems and the lack of a critical mass of people on wave are affecting the application of the principles.

I was also wondering about why the connection was so bad. Is it because of the network in Australia or NUS?

Thanks Pamela for staying up so late (and for answering my stupid question) =)

Anger: Getting angry at an educator's attitude

2010-03-03T19:26:00.000-08:00

Recently, I received a call from a tuition agency for an assignment.

What really pissed me off was the comments that the previous tuition teacher made about the assignment.

I asked the person from the tuition agency whether anyone else had applied for the assignment. She told me about the conversation she had with another teacher.

Tutor Anonymous: "Normal tech ah? No hope lah.. Don't want to teach."

WTF?

I admit I'm not a good teacher nor qualified enough, but seriously.. that pisses me off.

You can state quite honestly that the student might have a lack of discipline in studying, lack of interest, little time management or prioritisation and the assignment is difficult.. etc but no hope?

To tutor Anonymous, if any teacher made that comment about your kid, what would you feel?

The student might just be better at business, making stuff, dance, design.. just not that interested in the standard curriculum offered by Singapore's education system.

Howard Gardner - Theory of Multiple Intelligences
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

CS3216: Varsity Dynamics

2010-02-28T23:52:00.000-08:00

(Hey, I thought I would do/learn more programming, why am I writing so much stuff sia.. =p)

(Half written)

Firstly, I would like to give some background on team dynamics. I found the principles illustrated in this book quite useful - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Team.

Absence of Trust,
Fear of Conflict,
Lack of Commitment,
Avoidance of Accountability, and
Inattention to Results.

I find avoidance of conflict especially relevant for Asian cultures. Small problems and miscommunications tend to remain hidden because no one wants to voice them out until it becomes too big to ignore.

Okie, so the next step would be to try to detect these symptoms. I suggest a free and simple method for startups is to create a survey using google forms and ask 10 simple questions to every team member about these 5 symptoms.

1st part:

1. What are the pros and cons of working with people you are already acquainted with for work/project?

2. List out the important traits that you would look for in a team member. Share and compare them

with your team mates. How similar or different are they?

3. The members of VC considered their team “ideal”. However, what are some of the problems

that you can foresee?

4. Is it better to work with talented people or people you like?

Thoughts

Pros

You save the time getting to know them superficially. When you have disagreements, you can still work it out as you are all friends.

Cons

It might be more difficult to give feedback objectively about work without hurting any feelings.

Friends might show different sides of themselves when under work pressure.

It depends on how long you've known each other, and whether you've worked with each other before. Generally though, it's probably better to work with people you know, because there's peer pressure to not let your friends down.

I try to find teammates who score highly on the Passion, Character, Intelligence test.

Passion - They need to be passionate about the project.

Character - I think it's important to work with people who have good character and who are willing to work for the good of the team. This also covers their work attitude.

Intelligence - I think it's so important to work with intelligent people. Intelligent people are different from smart people. To me, intelligent means being smart appropriately without being a smart aleck. Intelligent people are willing to say that they made a mistake or they are unsure of something.

3. Not enough balance in terms of the technical background required. (Easy in retrospect)

4. Err.. It would be good to work with the people whom you respect.

2nd part

1. VC started out with an ambitious design, aiming to make many changes to many Facebook

game conventions (i.e. combat system, story as a reward, semi-exploratory quest design).

Would you have recommended them to pick a simpler design or would you have encouraged

them to go along with it?

2. How different would the situation have been if there was another strong programmer within the

team (a 5th member)?

3. How would you decide on how much to do given the composition of your project team?

Thoughts

1. I think they made a big mistake in taking on too much work that requires a lot of effort and time. Content production is very difficult to automate. I wonder whether they could have tried to let users generate their own stories/content.
2. Depends on whether the work roles are clearly defined. The other programmer needs to have strong execution skills that's necessary. Given that they kept switching the language, I'm not sure whether the 5th programmer can keep up.
3. Make everyone do a time budget.
List down the features and cut half of them, double the time estimation, work consistently.

3rd part

1. How different was the environment for working on the project during the school term as compared

to the vacations?

2. What were the main reasons for VC’s failure during the vacation? What would you have done

differently to prevent it?

3. Discuss with your team members, some of the lessons in this case study that can be applied to

your Final Project.

Thoughts

1. No deadline pressure
2.
3.

(Once again, I think Prof Ben is extremely prescient in forcing everyone to study team dynamics. This might be the breaking factor between a superstar team and a team of "average" people willing to work for the good of the team.)

CS3216: A different GetHelp blog post

2010-02-25T04:46:00.000-08:00

Recently, I read a book on User-Centred Design (User-centred Design Stories, Real-World UCD Case Studies, Authors: Carol Righi, Janice James. You can find some good books in the public libraries, and I'll post the title when I get the book back from my friend). I don't think many people have heard of the term before. I certainly was not one of them, but it's actually surprisingly quite important for good application design.

There are some basic but common sense principles which can be found here: http://www.usabilitynet.org/management/b_design.htm

Design for the users and their tasks
Be consistent
Use simple and natural dialogue
Reduce unnecessary mental effort by the user
Provide adequate feedback
Provide adequate navigation mechanisms
Let the user drive
Present information clearly
Be helpful
Reduce errors

There are some simple and cheap (almost free) practices that I want to share from the book. These are recommended practices before serious development to avoid massive re-writing/re-design.

This is where the non-programmers can really pull their weight. It just involves being human enough to understand that the general population is not as tech-savvy as people who work with computers everyday.

List of tasks - Can your app really help your users do what they want to do easily?
Create a list of tasks that you want your users to perform with the application within a timelimit and measure the completion rate. E.g. Registration, doing some work, creating a file, editing.. etc. Anything below 70% should be a huge warning sign.

Do Wire-framing - test the usability, intutiveness of the design
This just means drawing the design on paper and showing it to sample users. If the users are unable to complete the lists of tasks logically using the paper samples, something is not intuitive about your design/workflow.

Card-sorting - Improve your information flow within the app/website
If you are developing an application/website, write down the section headings/menu options on a series of cards, and let the users arrange the cards in a logical manner that makes sense to them. You'll realise that users might have a different information hierarchy from you.

Webcam
Record the users' reactions when using your application.

(I think the app is probably better than what I can do.. so sorry for making negative comments just for the sake of it).

1. Usability vs Aesthestics
Okie, the point about Reddit vs this app has been made. I think the design is graphically okie, although the top navigation menu is not easy to read. People read from left to right, so there's no need to make it slanted at an angle of 45 deg.

2. No. of options
Paralysis by analysis - User will be stymied by too many choices.
A simple way would be to reveal the following sections only when the user completes a section. E.g. After typing in the "need", the user will be shown the bottom half of the options.

Some options can be made default, such as location.
(Is it redundant to post it on twitter since you're already posting on FB? My twitter friends are not really the same group as my FB friends.. People use twitter more for semi-professional reasons and FB seems to be for keeping touch with friends.)

3. Incentives
I think it would make sense to allow custom badges to be made. E.g. CS4 Pro.. etc.
How to design user reputation systems: http://sharetheconversation.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-to-design-user-reputation-systems.html

4. Other problems
How to integrate user testing into development

The "Mum" test
Actually, I think the most useful test is the "Mum" test.

Lastly
Lastly, why did I read that textbook (totally unrelated to the case study.. picked it up during a random walk in the library)? We are using some of it to build a better application for our client and it is useful.

References/Further reading
Why I hate your web app: http://www.drawar.com/articles/why-i-hate-your-web-app/85/
Agile and UCD discussion: http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileUsability.htm
Slideshare on Agile and UCD (125 slides): http://www.slideshare.net/abcd82/bringing-usercentereddesign-practices-intoagile-development-projects-presentation
Commando Usability Testing: http://www.astatespacetraveler.com/commando-usability-testing/
(Man, I finally figured out why people were posting funny blog posts with the same title. The reason: it's a assignment. Another hoop to jump through..
Sorry Prof Ben. Been busy reading other stuff as evidenced from my furious postings during the holidays. And I really sympathise with you having to read so many blog posts..
Anyway, since I'm late.. This is my take on it. I tried to make it informative and practical for you and the people who bother reading.
I understand why you set this case study.)

CS3216: Find out what makes people tick - My basic understanding of behavioural economics

2010-02-22T08:01:00.000-08:00

Why do people sometimes behave predictably and yet they sometimes do things totally unexpectedly?

Regarding Chewy's points, I realized that besides cultural differences that appear odd, there are some underlying theories that help explain irrational human behaviour.

Monetary Value of Time
For example, the inability of people to be objective about the monetary value of time.

Prospect Theory
Another interesting concept is prospect theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory) that works on potential losses and gains. I think I understood a bit more when I worked it out just now. Imagine a scenario when you buy insurance (numbers taken from Wikipedia's article). Let's say that you might lose $1000 (v=-1000) and the probability that you think you might lose, P1=0.01. Let's also say that the premium you need to pay is $15.
Therefore, you need to compare between paying a premium or losing it all if you don't pay a premium and something happens.
Utility = Probability * Value (Utility is a measure of how much enjoyment you get from making an economic choice a.k.a. "happiness" =) )
Hence, the utility associated with paying the insurance premium is
U(pay premium) = P(pay premium) * Value = 100% * (-$15) = -$15
The utility associated with not paying the insurance premium is
U(not insured) = P(perceived probability of total loss) * V(total loss) + P(perceived probability of no loss) * V(no loss)
= P1 * (-$1000) + (1 - P1) * (0) = 1% * -$1000 = -$10

Assuming that we are starting from a reference pt (0,0), hence, most people would pay the premium, because they think they will suffer less from paying the premium. This is because they over-emphasize the probability of suffering an accident (P1 = 0.01 might be too large a perceived chance).

Hence, people think to overemphasize small probabilities, hence overreacting to them, while underreacting to medium and large probabilities.

Further reading
Man, I caught myself making these errors in my thoughts everyday.. =p (http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Predictably-Irrational)
1. Relativity
2. The Fallacy of Supply and Demand
3. Zero cost?
4. The cost of social norms
5. Influence of arousal
6. Procrastination and Self-control (I am guilty)
7. The high price of ownership
8. The cost of having too many options
9. Expectations
10. The power of price on perceived quality

Marketing
Most people would find "service marketing" concepts useful. It's not that difficult.. much easier than the assignments =p
7Ps
Product - How to make your product wanted/needed/desirable?
Price - Pricing strategy
Place - Where people can buy your product
Promotion - What kind of promotional activities do you do? Advertising? Freebies?
People - The people servicing your customer
Process - What steps does your customer take to buy your product/service?
Physical evidence - The tangible part of your service

This provides a good basic framework for thinking through the marketing strategy. I used it before. Common sense and budget/resource restrictions apply =)

References
http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Predictably-Irrational
http://www.nichegeek.com/profiting_from_human_irrationality_10_must_read_books

P.S. I'm not sure what I was supposed to blog about for the previous 2 weeks. I thought some of the things I was reading were also relevant to what the class wants to read. Furthermore, I think my classmates probably covered most of the points I wanted to raise.

Hope Jace does not mind the year 4s asking him so many questions... we just think that he could use some guidance =) His attitude is great! His presentation was not bad.

If you spot any errors, please tell me. =)

(Hi, this is one of my interests, although I don't know much about it yet. I used to hate economics because I did not like the overly theoretical stuff taught in JC and I thought ceteris paribus was bullshit compared to reality. However, age has caused me to understand that creating a simplified model might be the key to understanding a complex phenomenon. Also, "Freaknomics" sparked my interest in econometrics.)

Conway's Law

2010-02-20T07:13:00.000-08:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law
"..organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

So, organisations will tend to produce outputs that resemble their internal communications structure.
The internal communications structure is a derivative of the internal social structure.
The internal social structure is a derivative of the characters of the people in the organization. This includes the leaders and followers in the organisation.

Hence.. if you want excellent outputs, you must have the excellent people with character. Extra emphasis on character should be placed when building a team, not just weightage on ability.

Argument flaws?

Article: Making Computer Science more interesting (Stanford)

2010-02-20T07:04:00.000-08:00

Stanford CS curriculum adapting
Passion is evident in good teachers. Is that an iff statement?=)

How to design User Reputation Systems

2010-02-18T03:46:00.000-08:00

http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2010/02/on_karma.html - Awesome! An article that tells you how to design a "karma" system. Important for people who want to build an online community.

(Why are there so many smart people in the world? Google your education man.. )

Eric Raymond - How to become a hacker

2010-02-17T02:59:00.000-08:00

Hi,
I know I have been reposting a lot of content, but I really hope that you guys who have been to my blog to read it, cause I find them meaningful and I hope you do too.
I don't think I have either the experience, knowledge or time to write things down again when people who are vastly more qualified and have executed on their plans have already shared what they know.
If you find that the stuff is not worth your time, please visit other blogs.. I can't stop you from going somewhere which is a more valuable use of your time.

Classic:
Eric Raymond - How to become a hacker
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Interview with Paul Graham

2010-02-17T00:53:00.000-08:00

http://mixergy.com/y-combinator-paul-graham/
Paul Graham started Y Combinator, which is a great model for Singapore's startup scene. His essays are a source of inspiration for entrepreneurs too.

Interview - How to Build a Business - WooThemes (Founder: Adriaan Pienaar)

2010-02-16T23:59:00.001-08:00

This interview is important for people who want to start their own business (length: 1 hr).

Important points
1. You don't need to be based in Silicon Valley.
2. Did not need to raise VC.
3. Started organically
4. Work with talented people around the world
5. Staying grounded despite the money
6. Doing what you love

http://mixergy.com/woothemes-adriaan-pienaar/

Seek-Sync-Stream - Save fuel, make profits

2010-02-16T21:28:00.000-08:00

Hi, my team are in a competition called Challenge Future.

The problem we are trying to solve is how to save fuel costs during transportation, while allowing businesses to stay profitable.

3 mins of your time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnPZyITcJU4

We need your votes and feedback (info(at)e3alive.org)
For more details, please visit this: http://e3alive.org/2010/02/seek-sync-stream-save-fuel-make-profits-p/

Thank you! =)

Why Engineers rock

2010-02-15T22:16:00.000-08:00

HP - CeNSE (Central Nervous System for Earth)
IBM - "Smarter Planet"
Cisco - Massachusetts

Although the HP system is probably more for finding more oil.. zzz.

This is science fiction turning into reality.. (Remembering what Dr. Erik told me about having loads of science fiction books in his university's engineering library).

新年

2010-02-13T19:49:00.000-08:00

家的温暖
回忆的海
红即是血也是亲

Six Lessons for Six Sons

2010-02-12T08:33:00.001-08:00

Confidence, Fortitude, Pride, Persistence, Fearlessness and Focus.
Book for life.

Google Buzz and Privacy Settings

2010-02-10T18:17:00.000-08:00

This is interesting. Google Buzz is definitely experiencing a higher adoption rate than twitter, since it's more mainstream. Almost everyone I know has a Gmail account, and Buzz automatically adds your Gchat friends to your Buzz.

Some privacy issues before people get too happy with Buzz..
1. You can restrict your posts to only certain groups of people. That is extremely useful especially for me, as I have professional and personal contacts in my gmail account. Look at the right of the "Post" button, and you can choose either the "Public"/"Private" option. You can control the "Private" option using the "Groups" feature in your Gmail Contacts settings. (I'm assuming everyone knows how to create contact Groups in Gmail. If not, http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=30970)
2. Apparently, you cannot post a Public "Post" in Buzz without allowing your profile to be public. Hmm..?
3. Look carefully at the info you are putting on your profile page. It might not be good to have all the info listed, much as you like feeding the Google machine.
4. You can block people from your updates.
5. Uncheck the Share Your Followers option.
6. Try not to use the personal profile URL. That will reveal your Gmail address to the world.

I'm still figuring out how to:
1. Group the updates according to contact group

User interface is a bit clunky, like what Dingyan commented.
It's a rather inefficient use of space, compared to twitter.

Anyway,
The Google Buzz API is here: http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/

The next titanic battle might be between Google and Facebook, not Google and Microsoft anymore. It's already happening with their executive hires.

I'm waiting for the China clone.. =)

Dinner seminar by Prof Wong Poh Kam

2010-02-04T07:11:00.000-08:00

Prof Wong shared some quite basic information about the angel scene in Singapore which was quite good. I guess the event drew the right people who were in the proper stage of starting up... If you are interested, you can google for Business Angels Network South East Asia (http://bansea.angelgroups.net/). It was good to meet Yiyang, Jian Hong, Jia Ji, Laurence and Tomithy there too.

I managed to talk to some of the people from NEC who were involving in managing the portfolios. Pretty interesting bunch of people, I think I'm going to bug Daphne (life science) and Laurence (clean-tech) more.

I learnt from Daphne that people who wish to start startups involving medical devices should design first with both the market in mind and FDA's/CEMARK's regulations, or a lot of resources, time and effort would be wasted.

NEC is doing a great job under the pressures of a limited budget. Hope they improve even more and become the best in Asia.

Meeting w Dr Ng Kah Loon: Experiences from research, teaching and life

2010-02-04T07:04:00.000-08:00

I met Dr Ng Kah Loon today. Now I understand why he's such a good teacher. It's simply because he likes to teach.

I can't believe the intellectual loneliness of being the only one doing network theory focused on epidemiology in Singapore. I would hate being in that situation.

Another takeaway I got was being 知足, unfortunately, I'm still too young or too changed to be satisfied with that state of mind.

It's interesting that he shared his experience working with people from other academic disciplines. It took 1 person to play the important role of an interface (some hybrid of mathematician/computing/physician/medically trained) before the whole team could gel. He also shared the importance of being an independent researcher who is able to identify potential research areas that they can work on. It just sounds so much like entrepreneurship that I was a little taken aback. It was also crucial for him to have did research overseas before coming back to NUS as NUS is too sheltered an environment.

Still looking for someone in NUS who has did work on Ant Colony Optimisation.. hmm..

Inspiration: Steve Nash Athlete

2010-02-02T20:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/142/transition-game.html

Man, I like this guy. His playing style, his character (they're linked inextricably), his passions, his intelligence, his speed..

Waterpolo

2010-02-02T08:26:00.000-08:00

Playing polo today was kind of surreal. I did something I hadn't done in years, which was to catch a opponent's pass in mid flight. The funny thing was, it was automatic. I knew that I could get it. Immediately after I got it, I turned and swam off without pausing. It was so fluid that I only thought about it after I did it.

After that, I just took a break and watched how the year 1s were playing. I guess the break in Shanghai was good. I learnt to play with a better sense of rhythm and overall game vision. More thinking without the ball than with the ball. It all began when I became much slower and weaker. You have to learn to time your swims better than younger, fitter and faster players.

Suddenly, what was becoming mundane is growing interesting again.

FYI Presentation: Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

2010-02-02T00:36:00.001-08:00

Hi everyone,

For people who are time-squeezed, this is the slideshare of the book that Yan Jie introduced.

http://www.slideshare.net/cvgallo/the-presentation-secrets-of-steve-jobs-2609477

Enjoy =)

Feedback on "Causes" presentation

2010-02-02T00:11:00.000-08:00

It's always interesting to hear someone present something that's related to social or environmental issues. Inadvertently, people will either like your opinion on it or disagree with you sharply. I guess we are Asian, hence we keep our disagreements hidden.

Groupwork

I think the "Causes" group prepared for this presentation quite well. The slides were simple and effective. There's honestly no point in over-designing the slides as long as the message is clear. (btw, I think there's a typo in the file name you guys uploaded.)

Presenter

Jonathan was a very engaging presenter. Jonathan is surprisingly not afraid in front of an audience. I always thought he was a bit over-cowed by me and Sebastian in our FB group. I guess people just blossom on stage and are able to crack jokes.

To be harsh, Jonathan has a lot of habits that distract the audience from his message. I wish he would control his movements on stage so that he can appear more confident and commanding.

(Of course, I am not good at presenting too.. Just that I fell flat on my face too many times when talking to people that I am not really concerned about it anymore. I also tend to be very serious when I present.. can sense people falling asleep during my presentation)

General Improvements

I wonder why everyone did not use laser pointers and wireless powerpoint remote controls. Hmm.. (I lent mine to a friend)

Overall

I guess among all the presentations given, "Causes" was the most positive. Most FB apps just appeal to our shallow desires.

I am still a bit skeptical about the ability of "Causes" to raise significant amounts of money. Actually, I think given how it's performing now, it would probably be better as a social media tool for creating awareness rather than actually raising money.

I like the point the group made about "Causes" enabling ordinary people to tap into FB's network for their cause. Most people are either apathetic or lack the skills to do so. Most people are not as tech-savvy as the general level of the class =) (The "Listen to your Mum" test: http://sharetheconversation.blogspot.com/2010/01/startup-concepts.html)

Suggestions for improving "Causes"

I wonder whether "Causes" could be made into an iPhone app that works like a RSS feed. People could install it and get updates on their favourite cause.

Hmm, what about combining "Causes" with the prediction markets idea? Not sure what that hybrid child would be..

Another idea I had was that "Causes" could hook on the FB marketplace and perhaps create some kind of "stamp of approval" for socially beneficial goods.

Future developments of NGOs

Personally, I feel that NGOs should start changing the way they operate and become more like a business. Recently, I read a good book by Willie Cheng titled:"Doing Good Well" which gives a detailed analysis of social enterprises and suggestions for how NGOs could evolve. It explains the inherent difference between NGOs and business. There is a disconnect between the beneficiaries of NGOs and the people contributing the resources (donors, governments). This is different from businesses.

Since Willie is Singaporean, there are a lot of relevant insights in the book. Of course, it was published after the aftermath of the NKF scandal, hence there is some analysis of the whole episode.

Perhaps, NGOs should think about their overall social media strategy, rather than having unrealistic expectations that "Causes" will be their silver bullet to public donations. Successful examples of people using "Causes"actually mostly have a simple and compelling story coupled with projects that people can visualize easily (http://exchange.causes.com/resources/success-stories/). There is a offline and online strategy that is complementary.

In my own opinion, NGOs should try to work with companies to help them with their marketing. Companies gain a free marketing team, good PR and branding, while NGOs gain resources while learning best practices from corporations. Some people might say the NGOs risk selling out on their principles, but sometimes you have to fight within the system to change the system.

P.S. Looks like I was not the only one who was abusing Prof Ben's profile picture =)

References

Apr 9 , 2009, "To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn't So Green", Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042103786.html

Links to Interviews with Chen Siqi, FriendsForSale, Co-founder of Serious Business

2010-02-02T00:02:00.001-08:00

http://highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300-million-page-view-month-facebook-ror-app

Hi all,

This was the article I took a lot of ideas from for my seminar discussion. In fact, reading it will actually answer a lot of the questions behind the assignment.

Technical difficulties in scaling are important

Actually, I will disagree with Ji Wei's and Wang Chen's comments about the lack of technical difficulty involved in scaling an application. The majority of the difficult problems encountered at the start by the founders of FriendsForSale were scalability issues. I'm still not so convinced that cloud computing would be a viable solution as the costs might be prohibitive for a advertising supported application. Anyway, I think it's difficult because I don't understand most of the technical terms used for balancing the server load and demands.

Models for copying the methodology for generating hits like FriendsForSale

I actually wanted to cover this in my presentation, but I ran out of time. I would just like to emphasize the 3 criteria that Siqi described, which are Social, Engaging and Universal. If you read the article, it will describe in more detail why these 3 characteristics are important.

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/interview-with-ceo-of-serious-business/

This article is also with Siqi, but it focuses more on the business development and talent problem.

Enjoy =)

Look around

2010-01-31T04:45:00.001-08:00

There are some people around us who are working so hard to fulfill their dreams that you know that they will succeed.

Find them.

Legal firms using online tools to automate legal document generation

2010-01-31T04:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.altgate.com/blog/2009/04/law-firm-wilson-sonsini-now-preparing-term-sheets-for-free.html
Interestingly, legal firms are making the process of generating certain legal documents more automatic.

Google Apps and cloud computing update

2010-01-31T04:19:00.000-08:00

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-apps-highlights-1222010.html
Google Apps allows you to upload any file up to a limit of 1 GB, of which you can share 250MB.
Is 1GB enough for personal users? Probably.

What are they doing with all the data?

Complete Intro to the Pen Tool in Illustrator

2010-01-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

Hi all,
I found this awesome guide to the confusing Pen tool in Illustrator.
"http://www.oit.umass.edu/workshops/tutorials/images_publishing/ai_2.pdf"
Enjoy~!

What I learn from Benjamin Zander

2010-01-29T21:32:00.000-08:00

The real message behind Zander's video.

Life means sense only when there's a structure from the beginning to the end and you follow your passion.

Integrity in Business

2010-01-29T20:57:00.000-08:00

One of the toughest things about doing business in developing countries is deciding when to compromise and when not to.

Tomorrow's lesson

2010-01-29T07:26:00.001-08:00

Looking forward to the Design classes tomorrow.
Nite! =)
Btw, there's a damn funny new group on Facebook.
Overheard at the National University of Singapore: "http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=270781852897&ref=mf"

Y-Combinator in SG?

2010-01-28T14:05:00.001-08:00

Looking at the SGEntrepreneurs website.. There seems to be some buzz going on.

For reference,

Tech Startup Events for 2009 http://sgentrepreneurs.com/commentary/2009/12/21/7-tech-entrepreneurship-events-that-rocked-singapore/#more-9948

Copying Y Combinator by Jed Christiansen http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2009/09/21/copying-y-combinator-why-and-how/

I'm actually rather surprised that there are so many Singaporean startups making their impact on prominent conferences. Looks like I need to talk to more people and find out what's going on..

Wow, Brandtology is doing well. Major props =)

All your bases are belong to us

2010-01-28T13:07:00.000-08:00

Got pwned real bad.. Everyone has crashed out around me. Seb is sleeping on his Mac running Windows 7, Jon is dreaming of stuff that does not involve designing jungles and I just woke up with the sense that I have fed 100 million mosquitoes.

MRT ftw.

Article on "Achieving Flow in a Lean Startup"

2010-01-26T19:18:00.001-08:00

http://www.ashmaurya.com/2009/12/achieving-flow-in-a-lean-startup/
Good reading.

Being "crazy"

2010-01-26T18:21:00.000-08:00

I like the comments from Prof Ben taken from Prof Randy and Apple about the "crazy" people.

You can't ignore them cause they want to make the world better and they never stop trying.

(A few seconds after writing this, I suddenly think of Hitler. Obviously, there needs to be some way to stop lunacy like that..)

starting a cleantech startup vs a tech startup

2010-01-26T18:15:00.000-08:00

Tech startups are normally started by a bunch of people (3 or less) with an idea or their guts telling them that there's a niche to exploit. They spend 1 year working on it on their laptops/desktops, surviving until they manage to convince customers/angels/VCs to give them money.

Relatively, cleantech startups require lots of capital investment as there's normally a product involved. Building a product requires prototyping, testing, manufacturing facilities..
It does not make sense to graft the SV startup process to cleantech.

So, how do 3 (or less) good friends in university start a cleantech company?
1. Pair with an experienced businessman/professor who already has the invention
2. Look through the Patent and Licensing Office of the university
3. Turn their FYPs or research projects in university into their product and make use of the university's resources to develop it

Yiyang and gang's process is starting to make more sense to me.

Feedback (for the noob me)?

Event: Developers' Garage this Friday

2010-01-26T08:39:00.000-08:00

Developers' Garage

Event details as follows:

Date / Day: 29 January 2010, Friday

Time: 4 – 6pm

Venue: BuzzCity (Yellow Pages Building)

Address: 1 Lor 2 Toa Payoh Yellow Pages Building #02-03 Singapore 319637

Speakers: Steven Goh (mig33), Je Alipio (BuzzCity)

Some things behind education - CS3216

2010-01-25T19:12:00.001-08:00

Learning how to learn and.. learning how to teach

Learning how to learn

2 aspects - On your own, and from others

Learning how to teach (give?)

(an intermediate response to the question"What have you learnt?" posed. I take very long to give answers to questions that deserve thinking.)

NUS Email thoughts

2010-01-25T08:57:00.000-08:00

Okie, so I've just received an email from NUS saying that my mailbox is full. Thoughts to ponder..

I've enabled POP3 access to my gmail, so I get all my NUS emails nicely with the appropriate filters and labels. The search is faster and better. Essentially, since I have all my emails, I can ignore the email alert.

The storage limit is pitiful for almost anyone with a normal email usage. You almost have to check twice daily in order to clear the inbox.

There is a lot of mail that is not relevant, with people happily attaching 1MB files/posters to mass emails.

I guess cost is the issue, luckily gmail is a free and better alternative.

Surface Contradictions and Balance

2010-01-25T08:04:00.000-08:00

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

When you feel that both ideas are opposed and make sense, they probably do...

This quote is one of my favourites. It captures the feeling I had about the debate we had after class today with Prof Ben. Basically, I find myself disagreeing (or being uncomfortable) with his method of thinking big and failing big. Hence, I did a search for "Breakthrough Innovation versus Incremental Improvements".

I think the challenge would be to be aware of these 2 processes and integrate them into your daily thinking. (But hey, I would still take a series of easy victories anytime over no victory to build up momentum.) I guess you could think of it as a bicycle with 2 wheels. The front wheel would be the breakthrough idea, but it needs to be powered by the back wheel which is a summation of all the small ideas that enable the execution.

How do we come up with breakthrough innovations? I guess that first, you need to be open-minded and accept any input. If you are working in a team, it would be the best to listen to everyone's opinion and ideas. There are many proven methods for generating ideas, and I think employing any one of them is useful.
What about incremental improvements? Googling "kaizen" would provide some ideas.

There are many ironies in a startup (or life). In a startup, you try to think big, but start by executing small, eventually scaling up to your vision.

This quote also seems to capture a lot of ironies that I have encountered in my short time on Earth. To lead people, you must first serve. To earn respect, you must be humble. To be strong is to show weakness. The smartest people always say "I don't know." To be a good conversationalist, listen more than you talk.

Another concept that Prof Ben touched on was "balance". I guess everyone has their own interpretation of it, but I would take the Buddhist view (middlefold path) or the Taoist ("Tao") view on it.

Millenium Development Goals

2010-01-25T02:43:00.000-08:00

Just to save some people time..

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals

1. End poverty and hunger

2. Provide universal primary education

3. Ensure gender equality

4. Reduce child mortality

5. Improve maternal health

6. Combat HIV/AIDs, Malaria

7. Environmental sustainability

8. Global partnership for development

Let's measure them against the S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) criteria .. Nuff said.

What can we do to improve these goals so that they are S.M.A.R.T.? I guess we need to systematically break down the problems. The good thing about these 8 areas is that any solution used would probably be able to address at least a few areas at once.

This reminds of what Ernest Madu said in his TED speech:"The best way to spiral into poverty is to kill the parents."