Experts are clueless.

Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. They can tell you how to sell something, but they cannot sell it themselves. They can tell you how to create great teams, but they only manage a secretary. For example, the experts told us that the two biggest shortcomings of Macintosh in the mid 1980s was the lack of a daisy-wheel printer driver and Lotus 1-2-3; another advice gem from the experts was to buy Compaq. Hear what experts say, but don’t always listen to them.

Customers cannot tell you what they need.

“Apple market research” is an oxymoron. The Apple focus group was the right hemisphere of Steve’s brain talking to the left one. If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can only describe their desires in terms of what they are already using—around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all people said they wanted was better, faster, and cheaper MS-DOS machines. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use—that’s what Steve and Woz did.

Jump to the next curve.

Big wins happen when you go beyond better sameness. The best daisy-wheel printer companies were introducing new fonts in more sizes. Apple introduced the next curve: laser printing. Think of ice harvesters, ice factories, and refrigerator companies. Ice 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Are you still harvesting ice during the winter from a frozen pond?

The biggest challenges beget best work.

I lived in fear that Steve would tell me that I, or my work, was crap. In public. This fear was a big challenge. Competing with IBM and then Microsoft was a big challenge. Changing the world was a big challenge. I, and Apple employees before me and after me, did their best work because we had to do our best work to meet the big challenges.

Design counts.

Steve drove people nuts with his design demands—some shades of black weren’t black enough. Mere mortals think that black is black, and that a trash can is a trash can. Steve was such a perfectionist—a perfectionist Beyond: Thunderdome—and lo and behold he was right: some people care about design and many people at least sense it. Maybe not everyone, but the important ones.

You can’t go wrong with big graphics and big fonts.

Take a look at Steve’s slides. The font is sixty points. There’s usually one big screenshot or graphic. Look at other tech speaker’s slides—even the ones who have seen Steve in action. The font is eight points, and there are no graphics. So many people say that Steve was the world’s greatest product introduction guy..don’t you wonder why more people don’t copy his style?

Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.

When Apple first shipped the iPhone there was no such thing as apps. Apps, Steve decreed, were a bad thing because you never know what they could be doing to your phone. Safari web apps were the way to go until six months later when Steve decided, or someone convinced Steve, that apps were the way to go—but of course. Duh! Apple came a long way in a short time from Safari web apps to “there’s an app for that.”

“Value” is different from “price.”

Woe unto you if you decide everything based on price. Even more woe unto you if you compete solely on price. Price is not all that matters—what is important, at least to some people, is value. And value takes into account training, support, and the intrinsic joy of using the best tool that’s made. It’s pretty safe to say that no one buys Apple products because of their low price.

A players hire A+ players.

Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called “the bozo explosion” to happen in your organization.

Readl CEOs demo.

Steve Jobs could demo a pod, pad, phone, and Mac two to three times a year with millions of people watching, why is it that many CEOs call upon their vice-president of engineering to do a product demo? Maybe it’s to show that there’s a team effort in play. Maybe. It’s more likely that the CEO doesn’t understand what his/her company is making well enough to explain it. How pathetic is that?

Real CEOs ship.

For all his perfectionism, Steve could ship. Maybe the product wasn’t perfect every time, but it was almost always great enough to go. The lesson is that Steve wasn’t tinkering for the sake of tinkering—he had a goal: shipping and achieving worldwide domination of existing markets or creation of new markets. Apple is an engineering-centric company, not a research-centric one. Which would you rather be: Apple or Xerox PARC?

Marketing boils down to providing unique value.

Think of a 2 x 2 matrix. The vertical axis measures how your product differs from the competition. The horizontal axis measures the value of your product. Bottom right: valuable but not unique—you’ll have to compete on price. Top left: unique but not valuable—you’ll own a market that doesn’t exist. Bottom left: not unique and not value—you’re a bozo. Top right: unique and valuable—this is where you make margin, money, and history. For example, the iPod was unique and valuable because it was the only way to legally, inexpensively, and easily download music from the six biggest record labels.

Bonus: Some things need to be believed to be seen. When you are jumping curves, defying/ignoring the experts, facing off against big challenges, obsessing about design, and focusing on unique value, you will need to convince people to believe in what you are doing in order to see your efforts come to fruition. People needed to believe in Macintosh to see it become real. Ditto for iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Not everyone will believe—that’s okay. But the starting point of changing the world is changing a few minds. This is the greatest lesson of all that I learned from Steve.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Minty-Fresh™.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2010. That’s about 3 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 3 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 24 posts.

The busiest day of the year was February 17th with 28 views. The most popular post that day was DePo Masthead Theme for wordpress.com.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were en.search.wordpress.com, eksith.wordpress.com, en.wordpress.com, j2eethoughts.wordpress.com, and tvrizor.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for depo masthead, depo masthead download, download depo masthead by derek powazek/noel jackson, depo masthead theme, and noel jackson.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

DePo Masthead Theme for wordpress.com July 2009
3 comments

Simple WordPress Themes July 2009

Higher Resolution in Ubuntu, NViDIA drivers November 2009

About July 2009

Key Generator August 2009

Let’s see how it goes!

But it is definite that they don’t want them to be suggested something or asked some question or maybe they are trying to cover their tracks, for what is done is in past and they believe it shouldn’t be bothered.

I have written comments on these posts and so many others too earlier but these are recent

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/new-theme-inuit-types/
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/the-theme-team/
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/hook-line-and-sinker/

and the comments are now no longer visible after a day or two when my browser showed the message “Your Comment Is Awaiting Moderation” courtesy: browser cookies

but now i don’t see them anymore.
I am not even associating any of my blog urls with the display name, so as to get more visitors etc.

OR

Is it due to the use of display name “admin” and the wordpress logo?
but even that doesn’t make sense since the Gravatar isn’t in effect on these posts and the Identicon is shown except for the logo associated with my profile.

So any of the WordPress.com folks owe me an explanation etc?
If it is deliberate or automated?
Why are my comments being held back?

Hey there Automattic! Anything?????????
Anything that might help me with this?
Am i writing anti-wp?
What possible reasons can there be?

This is the shortened “in a nutshell” version of my guide here.

So, here goes:

Backup your current configuration.
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.xonf.original

Install all build dependencies.
sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Remove all traces of the Ubuntu version of NViDIA on your system
sudo aptitude purge $(dpkg -l | grep nvidia | awk ‘{print $2}’)

Download the driver from the nvidia download site.

For 32bit systems using the 185 Driver:
wget ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/185.18.36/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.36-pkg0.run -O NVIDIA-Linux-185.18.pkg.run

For 64bit systems using the 185 Driver:
wget ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/185.18.36/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.36-pkg0.run -O NVIDIA-Linux-185.18.pkg.run

If you use a legacy card that is not supported by the 185 driver, you can download the right one accordingly here for 32bit or here for 64bit.

Install the installer into the /usr/src directory and create an easy link to it.
sudo install NVIDIA-Linux-185.18.pkg.run /usr/src
sudo ln -fs /usr/src/NVIDIA-Linux-185.18.pkg.run /usr/src/nvidia-driver

Save and close all work, then kill X.
sudo service gdm stop

Login to a VT, and run the installer.
sudo sh /usr/src/nvidia-driver

Once the installer finishes, restore the backed up xorg.conf
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.original /etc/X11/xorg.conf

And restore X.
sudo service gdm start

Congratulations, you now are running on your own manually compiled drivers.

One caveat with this that you must recompile every time there is a kernel update. For a guide on how to automate this procedure, see here.

To upgrade from your manually compiled the 185 drivers to the latest 190 beta, you would run through the current procedure.

Download
wget ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/190.32/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-190.32-pkg0.run -O NVIDIA-Linux-190.32.pkg.run

Install into the /usr/src directory, and override your existing symlink
sudo install NVIDIA-Linux-190.32.pkg.run /usr/src
sudo ln -fs /usr/src/NVIDIA-Linux-190.32.pkg.run /usr/src/nvidia-driver

Save and close all work, then kill X.
sudo service gdm stop

Uninstall NViDIA, to ensure a smooth transition.
sudo nvidia-uninstall

Run the installer as per previous method.
sudo sh /usr/src/nvidia-driver

And restore X.

sudo service gdm start

simple, eh?

here is the complete guide:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1125400

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize. You will probably be unable to access that account, but Journey Etc. has a possible solution.”
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/old-wordpress-versions-under-attack/

http://www.dave-reed.com/Nifty/randSeq.html

though ther are services like for generating those keys:

http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/

but random sequencer is the best…:)