Here’s two open letters I thought up of while on the flight back in to Sydney.
Some parts of the narrative has been edited to preserve the identities of the peoples involved. Some situations have been slightly exaggerated for dramatic effects, but they mostly happened. Read more…
If you’re a regular reader, you might notice that this blog’s layout has changed again. Fact is, I’ve moved hosts to Webfaction. They’re awesome as a host and beats my previous host in terms of performance and value for money.
So, enjoy the new blog!
I’ve been writing code quite a bit lately. I used to be the kind of guy who would work on any IDE with any appearances because they didn’t matter much to me. I would code with the default IDE themes (from Visual Studio to Eclipse to Aptana). But then, something changed. I became the guy who tells everyone: appearance matters (I still have colleagues at work using the default Visual Studio theme)
This year, I decided to try something different. I changed my IDE colour scheme to the VibrantInk colour scheme. And suddenly, my productivity increased. I realize, as I grow older my eyes are more sensitive to certain schemes. A white background with black monospaced text made my eyes tired really quickly, and switching to the VibrantInk theme on Eclipse helped a lot. Over the year, I tweaked more and more of the IDE colour schemes of both work and home. Here’s how my home Aptana theme looks like (it’s the Vibrant Ink theme with the background colors switched to #191919)
Vibrant Ink Theme for Aptana
Then came the font revolution. Most IDEs would use the default monospace font on the system (Courier for Windows, Ubuntu Mono for Ubuntu). I was fine with those to begin with. Eventually, tweaking about, I settled for Inconsolata at home and Anonymous Pro at work (I use separate fonts to force my mind to think differently). The same fonts would be set for my terminals at home and at work.
Another tool that I twekaed was PuTTY. But I had just built a new computer last month and my PuTTY is still not tweaked – i.e. still using the defaults. My Aptana on the new machine is fully pimped out, but not my PuTTY – afterall, I don’t pay much attention to it considering I have 4 PuTTY windows sitting there doing nothing, except the occasional cursory glance at it.
Now, today I worked almost all day on my terminal on Ubuntu at work. The font for my terminal was Anonymous Pro, and my background was set to a 95% opacity with #191919 as my background-colour and #EEEEEE as my foreground colour. I came home and needed to tweak something on the edgeyo landing page (which we tweak on a daily basis – mostly invisible tweaks). Having spent the whole day on Ubuntu’s terminal window, coming home to striking white text on black background with Courier size 10 hurt my eye.
Here: have a gander at the before and after
Before - Courier size 10, background: #000000;
After - Inconsolata size 12, background: #191919;
I still have yet to tweak the ANSI colour settings for my PuTTY though – I’ll get to it sooner or later – when my eyes hurt again. So, what are the colour schemes that fit you best?
Productivity and motivation gurus always talk about flow. Flow is a psychological state of being immersed and concentrated in doing something that everything outside doesn’t matter. It is very difficult to explain the concept of a flow, until one actually achieves and experiences it.
I’ve heard about flow for many many years – when we were younger, my father used to bring us kids to motivational seminars where we’d learn how to get into the flow – and on many occasions I thought I had experienced flow. But I had not. I only truly experienced flow once in late 2008. And immediately, it clicked and I instantly understood why it was called flow.
The experience came with my first ingestion of Ritalin. Ritalin (aka methylphenidate) is a drug used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It was (and still is I believe) rather used and abused by university students who want to concentrate while studying. All I did was have a slow release of methylphenidate and I achieved flow while studying Game Theory. Since then I realized a few things: a) flow is the way of getting things done; b) I probably have ADHD that was never treated.
That however, is besides the point. You see, once you have experienced the flow state, you tend to want to experience it again – afterall, you typically exit the flow state with positive results at hand. I was familiar with the standard advice on how to achieve flow:
Easier said than done. I remember many a days when I was in primary school, setting aside blocks of time of solitude to do my homework, but still end up sitting on the TV reading (yes, kids, back in the days, TVs were made of cathode-ray tubes and they were large, and I have a vivid memory of this incident of me ending up sitting on the telly while reading a Secret Seven book by Enid Blyton when I was supposed to be doing my homework or revising for exams). The same continued up to my university days, when I would set aside time to have no distractions, no internet, and yet achieve not much. Read more…
Chewxy:
I am sleepycfgt:
I’m about to sleep. Good night. Not even day9 can keep me awake anymoreChewxy:
I need to figure this shit outcfgt:
You should sleep too. I don’t really want to wake up and get an explanation for an algorithm that only works with spherical chickens in a vacuum.Chewxy:
lolcfgt:
Or even worse – an algorithm you claim works on spherical chickens in a vacuum but really only works on alternate universe chickens
And hence I shall sleep.
I read with slight amusement this afternoon this article: Google, ANZ, GE Money ads caught on porn sites. Why? Because it’s within scope of my job, and I couldn’t help but felt I had done quite well. In short, it gave me pride in my job[1] – I felt good. And yes, because of that, I am going to write and brag about it.
You see, the company I work for (hereforth: my company) is not a large company with a lot of resources, and it is quite comforting to know that bigger, better-resourced companies face the same problem too. We’ve recently been pursuing brand safety as a selling point for the agency-facing side of business. Come to us, we say, for we would sell you only brand-safe inventory, and we only show your advertisements on brand-safe sites. It is a bold claim for a medium-sized company like ours. I happen to be the one who is doing quite a bit of the work in the brand-safety side of things (no, I’m not the only one. My colleagues also play a large role in creating our brand-safety policy). Join me, as I regale to you, my dear reader into the world of online advertising. Read more…
Several discussions I had throughout today has brought me into this funk that I am in right now. But first, let me regale you with a tale of yonder. In my university years, I concentrated my study on two ‘streams’ of economics – the microeconomic ‘stream’ and the econometric ‘stream’. In the microeconomic stream, I did stuff like experimental economics, game theory and the like – you know, micro stuff. In the econometrics stream, I did stuff that had to do with data analysis. I love both streams. Then I graduated, and found a job.
The job mainly focused on the data analysis part of things – I have gone on to gain experience in all sorts of data analysis, from linear regression to support vector machines. I think I am good at it – I cannot be too sure after today. The new stuff I had to learn and pick up came fairly easily to me. PRML? No problem – consumed in about a week’s worth of baths (twice a day), and committed to memory. Heck, I even implemented some of the cutting edge machine learning algorithms like sparse coding at work.
So far, it’s about 3 years since my last course in the microeconomics stream. A discussion amongst colleagues today required my expertise (or lack thereof) in game theory. I could provide enough resources on the game theory end of things. But I decided to come home and do some research on the problem anyway to see how I could better improve the algorithms discussed. Lo and behold, my knowledge in that area is very spotty, and I had to wikipedia a lot of the concepts for refreshers.
This depresses me.
Why? You see, my one true love in economics had always been Consumer Theory, and the behind-the-scenes of it – you know, budget sets, convexity, clopen sets, the lot – but it’s really hard to find a well paying job that involves these theories directly, short of getting a PhD and being an academic. Money was always an issue for me – my parents aren’t wealthy people and I can’t thank them enough for struggling so I could do a degree with a not-so-high-paying job. Doing a PhD meant getting a post-graduate degree like a Masters before being able to do a PhD (which may or may not be sponsored). So the plan was to work and save up enough cash to do a post-grad degree that will eventually lead to a PhD.
So, thankfully enough, I had the presence of mind to do something that could potentially feed me as well – data analysis, a.k.a econometrics.
But this becomes a self-fuelling cycle of positive reinforcement. The more I worked in data analysis, the proficient I became at it, but that came at the cost of not remembering as much of what I love to do. Just before I wrote this blog post, I was combing through my bibliography of hundreds of papers on the Core and auction theory. I remember the gist of most of those papers, but a lot of key concepts I was once familiar with, I had to reacquaint through wikipedia.
Oh well, doing what you’re good at makes you only better at it. To excel in something you love, you must do it too. Lesson learned. May I be good enough to eventually do that PhD.
For almost 3 years, I didn’t sleep on a bed. I slept on the floor. Why? Obviously, I didn’t have a bed. And beds, in case you haven’t noticed, are expensive. There is really no use buying a 100-dollar bed from IKEA and breaking it from vigorous… nocturnal activities. And mattresses, don’t get me on them – they’re expensive, and the minimum quality mattress I was going to go for was way above my willingness-to-pay.
So, I slept on the floor. Until today. From today on, I shall be sleeping on corrugated cardboard.
Behold:
Read more…
As many of my readers know (that is, 5 out of 5 who read this blog), I’m actively involved in the startup space – our startup is Pressyo, and we have a couple of projects sitting on the launchpad, some with ignition already. My startup team is a very good team. We’ve went through multiple projects, failing most of the time (and the occasional success we’ve had rapidly degenerated into failures), and undoubtedly, we will fail many times to come in the future. For every failure we make, we dissect the failure, and find pain points, and fix them with tools. We argue a lot over why we failed, but the important thing is that we learn. This article is >2300 words long. If you want, you may jump to the TL;DR of Polish, Passivity, Privacy, Pressyo instead.
One of the things we recently argued about is with regards to polish – as in, a product must look polished in terms of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). One of the things we agreed upon early in the inception of the company is the unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. And it was my argument that polish was not part of the philosophy. I argued vis-à-vis project success, that polish was not necessary. Google was just a simple HTML text box with a button[1]; Reddit still looks terrible, but accounts for a majority of web traffic users; Facebook looked terrible when it first began… and so on and so forth. The counter argument was Apple. iPhones were terrible. They did not have all the features of contemporary phones (and still don’t, really, if you really want to compare). But they did one thing really well: user experience. If they did another thing really well, it was marketing.
My father, ever the gadget lover, used a smartphone before the phrase “smartphone” existed. Remember the O2 XDA? He had one of those. He went on from smartphone to smartphone, from O2 XDA to a HTC Touch to a HTC Diamond 2, which was last stolen in Dubai. Then he switched to an iPhone. Despite the lack of features, he had still found it a better phone, simply because the iPhone does what it is supposed to do very well. The user experience for the iPhone surpasses anything my dad had ever used.
I too, had been using smartphones from the time they were called PDA phones. My first was a HP h2210 hacked together with a CF-based GSM receiver. I then moved on to other phones, and finally settling on a HTC Desire. If I ever upgrade any time soon (damn you Telstra and your restrictive contracts), I would probably upgrade to a similar Android device. Because to me, Android phones do one thing really well: flexibility. Heck, I once pulled data off a csv off my work email and wrote a regression analysis while en route on a flight from Sydney to Brisbane on my phone.
The difference between the iPhone 3Gs and my HTC Desire? They cater to different people. The chrome of the polish shows differently to different people. I like to tinker [2] with stuff. I am tolerant of terrible user experiences – the worst of my smartphone experiences comes from dropped calls and terrible hacking of my HP h2210 (I literally took a program[3] apart, figured out what was wrong with it and tried to recompile it to no success) – even my Symbian experiences with Nokia, whilst traumatic, wasn’t as bad. My HTC Desire has been a far cry from all that. Were I to present the modern day Android phone to someone of my father’s caliber, he would, I guess instantly like it, but probably not as much as the iPhone. Likewise, while I like the iPhone, I find it frustrating at times given that I can’t hack around to make it do things the way I want it to.
So you see, polish is not a single facet (as my prose may have led you to think). Androids are polished on their flexibility end. iPhones on the other hand, are polished on the UX end. If I were mean, I’d say the UX of the iPhone is the sizzle that sells the slightly-overcooked steak; while the Android is a perfectly cooked steak but because it was cooked sous-vide[4], has no sizzle.
Despite this, I agreed thoroughly with the counter-argument. The crux of the argument is that polish is necessary, and whilst I don’t agree that the polish on the UX is as necessary as the polish and chrome on the actual features, I have come to learn that UX can more often than not, act as the cool cam. I don’t think I will ever place as much of an importance of the external polish factor as Steve Jobs put, but I’ve thought through this myself long and hard, and concluded that UX (and other external polish like cool interface etc) are required, even at bare minimum. I think of it exactly like the situation as described in the Daily WTF, except, instead of board members, executives or investors that you’re thowing the product at, the people who judge you are your users of your product. Give them a cool cam, and they will shut up for a bit while they learn the ropes of your system. Read more…
In Time poster. Copyright of 20th Century Fox
I watched In Time a couple of days ago and while I’ve been a huge fan of all four of Andrew Niccol’s big name movies (In ranking order: Gattaca, S1m0n3, Lord of War, Truman Show), I must admit that In Time let me down quite a bit, but also strangely I loved the rather nicely realized version of an economic model. The movie was fine – Cillian Murphy’s acting was top notch, but the same cannot be said about Justin Timberlake. I loved the premise of the story, I loved the setting of the story, and I am fine with the story being all over the place. They kept hinting at more (I personally was hoping for a Logan’s Run-esque payoff – i.e. something larger than themselves), but there was no satisfying payoff in the end, and I was fine with that. I give In Time a 6.5/10. The following will be an exploration of the economics in In Time. Needless to say, here is a spoiler alert
What really bugged me though, was the mechanics of the currency. The premise of the movie is as such: time is now a currency, and intrinsically linked to their lives, and the lower class of society has to fight for their lives. They live from day to day, working just enough to earn them one more day of living. Another premise is that at least nominal price inflation happens. At the beginning of the movie, we the audience are told, and shown with rather emotional consequences that the prices of things are rising. A third premise that I think is fairly important in considering the economics of In Time is that the currency is spent every living second of a person’s life. Let us not consider to whom first, and assume that the currency evaporates. It is on these premises the plot of the movie was built upon. Essentially what bugged me the most was this: Given the premises of the movie, why was there even inflation to begin with? I try to give reasons in this article. Read more…
