Mild Mannered Maverick

A review of two iPad Casings

2011-11-26T12:57:00.002+08:00

There are a lot of iPad casing options available. Unfortunately there aren't many that allows you to a forego a bag or purse for carrying your iPad. I mean, casings that have a shoulder strap or similar feature to allow you to carry the iPad without holding it in your hands.

The ideal iPad casing

Ideally I want a case that can hold the iPad for me while I'm using it while commuting or otherwise while standing. In other words I need something similar to the Connect-A-Desk Laptop Holder for my iPad. One of the big problem of using a laptop that way is that the laptop's screen gets too much exposure to potential damage / breaks / brushings from the crowded Singapore MRT during rush hours. On the other hand, an iPad (or any other tablet) can be quickly "secured" (brought to safety) when someone carelessly rushes for the train doors.

The next best option that I can find here in Singapore are iPad casings with shoulder straps on them. Those allows me to carry the iPad as it is a small purse, and allows me to type (albeit only with one hand) but with the strap still hanging on my neck.

I was rather fortunate (or from a cost perspective, un-fortunate) fate of trying out two different kinds of this kind of iPad casing. As of this writing, these two models are the only ones that can be easily bought in Singapore. Believe me, I've done mall-to-mall searches and even look at the ones available in the IT Show for alternatives and these are the only two models available. Those casings are:

Tunewear TuneFolio Urban
Ozaki iCoat

Tunewear TuneFolio Urban

TuneFolio Urban

Initially I bought this model primarily because there was a test unit available in Challenger Plaza Singapura. Another reason I chose it initially was for the black color, which nicely matches my black iPad 2. The price was also about S$9 cheaper than the offering thas Ozaki has. I used this for a couple of months until my dad saw how practical it was and asked to have it during my last trip to Jakarta last Eid

Plus side

Many alternative colors readily available, including Black.
Made out of synthetic materials which can be easily cleaned.
It includes a screen cover (the transparent kind that sticks on the screen) and a micro-fiber screen wipe to get rid of the fingerprint.
It has a small pocket on the side to put the screen wipe or small documents.

Minus side

Rather poor build quality, very disappointing for something that's almost S$100. After about a month the hinge that holds the strap starts to tear. Not to mention the sewings at the rims started to dismantle itself and I had to re-sew some myself. If this was a $10 casing, it might be forgivable.
The rings that connects the shoulder strap to the casing was rather large and are a hindrance when placing the iPad at a desk.

Ozaki iCoat

Ozaki iCoat

Returning to Singapore with my iPad casingless and very late night after a delayed flight at Changi Airport, I bought Ozaki iCoat. There weren't many choices at the time, only light brown, dark brown, and pink. Since I've done much research before on this kind of casing and I haven't seen a black Ozaki model anywhere in Singapore, I decided to buy the dark brown one. Yeah, it isn't as good as having a black one since the case has a golden-ish border around the iPad. But eventually I got used to it anyway.

Plus side

Pretty good build quality. Pretty strong materials and doesn't tear easily.
Flexible with many add-ons. It includes a shoulder-strap, hand-strap, and even to strap it at the back of a car seat. Not to mention it includes a capacitive stylus.

Minus side

Not many color options, at least in Singapore. I couldn't find a black one to match my iPad.
Looks like it's made of suede, which easily attracts dirt, pen marks, and can't be cleaned easily. Probably not suited for animal lovers.
The elastic band that holds the screen lid tend to lose about a third of its plasticity after about a month. No real functionality gets lost (it still holds the lid just fine), but it looks kinda hanging like the elastic inside old underpants.
The suede wears off easily. In other words it ages quite fast, faster than your sports sneakers.

So that's my take on iPad casings. If you like to commute light with your iPad and wouldn't mind to spend extra on a casing I hesitantly recommend getting the Ozaki one, especially if you can get a color that matches your iPad (hint: I think I saw a black model popping up here and there recently). But really, these casings are too pricy for the durability that they deliver – only the shoulder strap that somewhat justifies their prices.

On the other hand, if you still need a bag to carry other things or you don't feel safe hanging your iPad on your shoulder in a public transport, you'd be better off getting a cheaper S$25 casing. As for Apple's smart cover, I don't think it is useful in protecting your iPad - better get a screen protector instead and go casing-less.

Employee dis-empowerment can cost you money

2011-09-27T10:17:00.003+08:00

I experienced yet another example on how not empowering employees can cost you real money. Or perhaps from a different point of view, how Singaporeans are so engrossed on "doing things right" instead of "doing the right things". This particular event occurred with a couple Subway baristas in Raffles City basement.

It was an ordinary morning and I just came out from City Hall MRT and segued my way to the office to get my breakfast at Subway. When I got there it looked like nobody was tending the counter. I tapped the bell twice and an old lady barista came up and then I place my usual order of "Sub of the Day" with Honey Oats and Yellow Mustard.

Sub of the Day

After about a minute afterwards I was unpleasantly surprised when I was charged S$4.90 for it instead of the usual S$4.50. The cash register was attended by a younger, bulkier male barista with earrings on his ear. Then I asked, "Sub of the Day"? He said that I ordered Tuna Sandwich and the Sub of The Day was Egg Mayo. I replied that I ordered "Sub of the Day" and didn't really know what it was supposed to be. Apparently the auntie made a mistake and forgot what today's sub was supposed to be. Then the he threw away the perfectly good sandwich, ordered the much older barista-auntie to make Egg Mayo and gave me the S$0.50 change that I wanted.

If he instead asked me whether I could accept Tuna Sandwich as Sub of The Day and price it accordingly, it would be fine with me. It doesn't have to cost the company a perfectly good sandwich and I'll just continue my day merrily. I for one just want a nice S$4.50 sandwich to start my day, whether it's Egg Mayo, Tuna, or even Tempeh filling, doesn't really matter for me.

I'm not sure whether the barista throwed away the sandwich because of Company Policy, not enough empowerment, or simply was too focused on "doing things right". But having been an employee for a few large multinational companies, I can understand his position. In companies like these, people and "higher ups" will question you if you don't follow instruction "to the letter". Even if you did what you feel right at the time, it can as well be audited and questioned later on. Which is of course safer to stay "behind the yellow line" and play "by the book" since that's the entire point of being an employee and working for someone else.

Becoming a Knowledgeable Investor

2011-09-18T21:54:00.003+08:00

It looks like there is a way to escape the new MAS regulation and become a "knowledgeable investor" — at least as according to MAS. The new rule will take effect starting on 1 Jan 2012 and thus I have about three months to make six purchases or switches before then. So now comes the question: which fund to buy? Should I get a new one or make additional purchases of the same funds in my portfolio? Should I switch the money around?
In my previous blog post on this issue I received a suggestion to switch S$100 six times to so that I can automatically pass the Customer Knowledge Assessment test. However, switches makes it more difficult for me to track each fund's performance over time. Not to metion the involuntary switch I had back in 2008 when ABN AMRO sold their funds to BNP Paribas. Furthermore, a lot of my funds' minimum sale price is significantly greater than S$100, which makes these switches non-negligible.

Peeking the Portfolio

Here are the funds I have in Fundsupermart right now. Almost all of my investments are there, except for a (now small) portion that I have in Manulife Indonesia. As you can see for yourself, my investments haven't really recover from the 2008 bust, despite that I made the majority of purchases at that time (and haven't been buying any more since then).

From the table above you can see that I have three funds that are beginning to turn a profit. These could be good candidates for additional re-investment. The rest doesn't break even after almost three years. After all, why should I add more money into funds that couldn't recover after three years out of US financial meltdown? Not to mention that none of those funds specifically invests in the US. As the saying goes back home, the rice have become porridge — I still have hopes that they can turnaround somehow and don't have any plans to liquidate those positions within the next five years, but it is quite clear that those funds aren't performing well.
Since I already have a number of losing funds in Europe, probably I should avoid the European fund for the time being, even though it is beginning to turn around. Not to mention that the European Union looks like they're being too generous in bailing out their bankrupt members.
So that leaves these two funds — probably I should take a look deeper and see what makes them tick.

BNPPL1 Eq World Materials EUR a.k.a. BNP Paribas' World Materials Fund.
UNITED GOLD & GENERAL FUND a.k.a UOB's Gold & Precious Metals Fund.

BNP Paribas' World Materials Fund

BNPPL1 Eq World Materials EUR invests in commodity companies. That is, the typical brick-and-mortar old-school factories that manufactures raw materials into semi-finished goods for other industries to use. Examples are steel, glass, paper, and industrial chemicals. These are the types of companies that have been around since industrial revolution and yes, the growth for these are supposed to be slow. Furthermore they're also not immune to the 2008 crisis, as shown in their NAV evolution below:

If you're a treehugger you might protest, "You're destroying the environment by investing on heavy industries!". Assuming that you're reading this on a computer, wearing clothes, and still have a roof over your head, please be aware that these industries help make those stuff that you use. A computer needs silicone, gold, copper, etc to make thus somebody needs to either mine or recycle and purify these stuff.
Another faintly amusing thing to note is that this fund's management believes that they have outperformed their benchmark but didn't place the benchmark anywhere inside their fact sheet. Not displaying the benchmark makes it harder for potential investors to quickly evaluate their performance. Another instance of confusopoly in action, at least that is what I think of it.

UOB's Gold & Precious Metals Fund

UNITED GOLD & GENERAL FUND is a more specialized variant to BNP Paribas' World Materials Fund. They invest primarily in companies that mine gold, silver, and other precious metals.
Personally I don't really think gold as precious in itself — it is yet another medium of exchange in my point of view. But even so gold makes a good conductor and thus needed to make computers and other electronics. So gold does have some intrinsic value apart from being an alternative currency.

The fund have been consistently underperforming its own benchmark, which is quite strange really. Makes me wonder why Fundsupermart isn't offering a cheaper indexed fund that is passively managed and just track the Financial Times Gold Mines Index.
Apparently underperforming is pretty common in gold companies fund sold in Fundsupermart. Schroder's gold fund also underperforms its own benchmark whereas DWS Sharia's Precious Metal fund looks like they are too shy to include a benchmark in its fact sheet. Along with UOB's, those are just about all of this type of funds offered in Fundsupermart.

Fund Shopping?

Then I think to myself, why not invest in new funds? Looking at the best 10-year returns in Fundsupermart shows that primarily Thailand and Indonesia stock markets are providing good returns. The list changes quite a bit over the past two weeks, but it looks like funds investing in Indonesia and Thailand funds seem to pop up. Moreover, the ones managed by Aberdeen looks to be consistently present in the list.

Aberdeen Indonesia Equity

Originally I feel that I shouldn't invest in Indonesian funds any more since I already have a significant amount of money invested in Manulife Indonesia. Then I realized that Aberdeen's management fee is significantly lower than Manulife's — that is, 1.5% against 2.5%. Probably I should give Aberdeen another look. You might ask, why did I invested in Manulife originally? Because that's the best one I could get at that time, when I was working in Indonesia and earning IDR.

An interesting thing to note is that Aberdeen Indonesia Equity doesn't always invests in Indonesian stocks (i.e., those that are traded in the Jakarta Stock Exchange). The last time I check that they have 10% investment in Jardine Cycle & Carriage. Yes, Jardine have significant investments in Astra International and may derive a significant portion of its revenue from Indonesia, but I find it odd since Jardine isn't publicly traded in JSX. Not to mention that the prospectus, section 9.1.2 says "The Aberdeen Indonesia Equity Fund aims to provide Holders with medium to long-term capital growth from a portfolio of Indonesian equities." Is it a deviation from their prospectus? Or that they loosely define "equities" to also include the over-the-counter variants (that is, not just public companies)? Do they also loosely interpret Indonesian to mean "having any relationship with Indonesia, however remote and far-fetched that relationship may be, and includes having Indonesian employees"? Heck, if the last part is true then any company can hire an Indonesian janitor to make it qualified to be "Indonesian" 

Despite its lax adherence to its own prospectus, it looks like Aberdeen have consistently beaten the Jakarta Stock Exchange (JSX) index since 1997. Although funds that bend its prospectus may as well likely to bend its own fact sheet and inflate its own self-reported performance.

Aberdeen Thailand Equity

Most of the time Aberdeen Thailand Equity was on par with its benchmark. That is, the fund's self-reported performance closely matches Thailand's stock exchange index. The fund somewhat outperformed the index during 2005-2010 and have never yielded a return below the index. At a management fee of 1.5%, probably you would be better off buying an index fund instead.

LionGlobal Thailand

When it comes to Thai equities, looks like LionGlobal Thailand is the winner here. Most of the time they had higher returns than the Thai Index, although they roughly match the index from 1999-2003. They do had a rough dip during the 2008 crash, but for investors that weathered the storm, they have recovered and bring in more returns from 2010. One caveat is that they are heavy in the financial sector with about 35% invested. But hopefully Thai banks aren't as deep in derivatives as their counterparts in the western world.

Making the call

So in conclusion, what will be my next step? Likely I'll go with Aberdeen Indonesia and LionGlobal Thailand for the time being, easing in my investments to maximize the number of transactions so that I can meet the new MAS regulation of six transactions before 2012. Furthermore I'll prpbably divest from the gold fund since it's quite clear that the management fee doesn't add value to the fund.

The Four-Hour Work Week Book: A Biased Review

2011-09-10T20:34:00.001+08:00

It's been a while since I listened to the audiobook version of the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. After significant digesting, contemplating, and interpreting what the book means to me, I've finally reached a conclusion that I can share in written form.

Four-hour Work Week is mostly another version of Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad. There are a lot of bragging in the book done by the author, Tim Ferriss, of how much money he made by selling nutritional supplements via the Internet. The way he said it makes me feel like he probably made more money selling the book rather than through his supplement business. Although I can't really disprove his statements, they just sound too good to be true.

The major takeaway from the book is the idea of micro-retirements. That is, taking many extended vacations and making a career that you can enjoy to continue doing for your entire life. This is in contrast to keeping a job that you hate but it makes so much money that you can look forward for funding a lavish retirement at near the end of your expected lifetime. Ferris also promotes a frugal and minimalist lifestyle for both practical (less stuff to carry around) and financial reasons (more money in the bank in case you need it). He also proposes thrifty vacations in cheaper countries — he argues that any country that is not at war is safe enough. He describes his vacations in South America and Eastern Europe to show his point.

The idea of micro-retirements is pretty similar to Stefan Sagmeister's one-year sabbatical for every seven years of business. Mr Sagmeister runs a small design company and during the year-long time off he focuses on his personal design projects to gain inspiration.

Micro-retirements resonates with me deeply especially since my retirement fund haven't recovered after three years have passed from the 2008 financial meltdown. Given the recent macroeconomic misfortunes, my idea of early retirement may not be possible after all. The financial crisis of 2008 trigged by subprime mortgage collapse, the series of defaults and bailouts in the European Union, and the seemingly imminent bankrupcy of the United States seems to show there might be no way to passively grow and safekeep money for the rather distant future. Financial crises and inflation both work against the idea of working to invest money to have a totally passive income in the latter half of a person's lifetime.

Another valid point from Ferris is that retirement does not always mean happyness. You can retire and never have to work again but you still can be unhappy. The key is to find an activity that makes the full use of your potential that you enjoy doing yet can fulfill your economic needs. Keeping a sucky job even though it pays a lot isn't a good thing — the next financial crisis can wipe out the money that you earn in that job and you won't get back the time you lost. I've practically experienced that last point myself: most of the extra money gained from a higher-paying job (which sucks) was taken by the financial crisis; my financial position today would be almost the same had I taken a slightly lower-paying job but didn't invest my money.

In short, if you're big on working hard in a sucky job just for the extra money to save for your retirement, it may be good to read Ferris' book. The book will also a good read if you're buried down in debt to pay for a lot of things that you rarely use. But if you're a frugal person, have a decent job that you enjoy, and like to savor every moment of your life, probably you're already living the book's ideals.

Entreporn: A Dictionary Definition

2011-09-09T10:19:00.001+08:00

The word entreporn have been used quite a bit in the last few months. Unfortunately it looks like people haven't yet agreed on a precise definition of the word, which leads to confusion on its usage. Here is my proposal of a dictionary-style definition of entreporn, hopefully it will be good enough for inclusion in Wiktionary.

Entreporn (English) a portmanteau of entrepreneur and porn. Generally refers to reverence of sensational larger-than-life entrepreneurism (as opposed to the toned-down humble yet hardworking businesspeople).

1. (noun) A genre of publication (magazine, website, blog or podcast) that idolize entrepreneurs, primarily those with multi-million dollars success stories. These publications tend to encourage the worship of these entrepreneurs and place them in a similar setting to movie stars. Example: Techcruch is mostly entreporn.

2. (noun) A fetish toward creating a startup to attract venture capitalist (VC) funding, grow the company at an immense rate, and sell it early before it breaks even (capable to return all of its investor's money).

Etymology

The word "entreporn" was Initially coined by Amy Hoy in TechZing podcast episode 111 to describe the genre of HackerNews and to some extent the podcast itself. Several days afterwards the term was further clarified by Justin Vincent in his blog entry, "Entreporn: the fallacy that wastes your life".

Sasmito on Career and Management

2011-08-26T06:06:00.001+08:00

Good bloggers at times handpicks old notable posts and gather them under one theme. There is enough content on this blog for me to start doing that and here is my first "back in time" post.

I've been doing office jobs in a number of large companies so far and have gathered some insights of my own. In the following paragraphs, you can read how I see the world by being a corporate salaryman.

Happy fortune matrix
The joy and torture of your job is not correlated to the amount money that you get from it. Here is a tool to see the health of your job and whether you should keep doing it or start looking for a new one.

Why appraisals are bad.
Appraisals promote backstabbing since they are primarily a zero-sum game, especially when normalization is involved. Or, why the Pointy Haired Boss should get his own comic strip

Dilbert's way of doing enhancement requests
Do you have a list of problems in an internal business software that you want to get addressed? One way to get these bugs expedited is to make them a good reason for the development team's boss to do business travel. In other words, arrange for the manager who is responsible for fixing bugs to get to travel on company expenses because of your list of enhancements.

The Captain and the CEO
Companies aren't extended families and you shouldn't believe any manager claiming otherwise. At times of crisis, CEOs will throw people away "out of the airlock" to improve maneuverability — vastly different than what the wise captains of the Enterprise or Voyager would do.

Fundsupermart being killed by investment advisors?

2011-08-24T17:23:00.000+08:00

Recently I received an e-mail from Fundsupermart (one of the investment brokers that I use) essentially saying that I can no longer use their services since I am not a finance professional. They say that this is a new regulation from the Singapore government (to be exact, from the Monetary Authority of Singapore - MAS). My initial reaction was "Shit, should I sell out? I'm still at 20% loss from 2008's financial crisis". But then again they wrote that they will provide more information later — whatever that means. At least there isn't any immediate action needed from me.

Between the lines, it looks like the MAS regulation urges investors to go to investment advisors (IAs) instead of making decisions to buy funds themselves. An IA is supposed to recommend mutual funds (unit trusts) based on the investor's risk profile. But really an IA is nothing but a glorified salesperson since they take commissions from the funds that they recommend. But really, it's the fund managers that are supposed to be at the investor's best interests — if I'm already very good at stock trading, I will simply manage my investments myself and not buy mutual funds.

This is crap. If IAs already made their money when the fund is sold, they won't care how it performs in the long run. Unlike fund managers who at least should take care of the fund during their tenure. Anybody who have done any business know that salespeople doesn't really care what happens after they made the deal and get their cut.

Then again, the Association of Investment Advisors or some really powerful unit trust salespeople could be behind this. They lobbied MAS to enact this regulation and say that say that the regulation is meant to protect average investors but really they are just trying to get more business. Recent financial crises (2008 and 2011) have been tough for anybody who are selling investment products. People are just keeping cash (me included) or buying gold. So it make sense to suspect IAs who lobbied for this regulation to get more business and make it look as if they are helping the general public.

Remember that when you use an investment advisor, you're paying double commission: once when the investment advisor sold you the fund and every year to the investment manager. The commissions of an investment advisor typically more than double compared to self-directed investment brokers like Fundsupermart. The problem is that IAs just want you to buy more funds and doesn't really care if you profit from your investments in the long run since at that time most likely she have already moved to another client.

Working on a word cloud engine

2011-08-18T10:15:00.005+08:00

I'm starting work on a Twitter client with word clouds as its primary feature. My plan is to build the components separately as individual apps to get feedback and iterate from there. Some people in StartupGuild sounds interested in the concept and it looks like a guy in Quora wants word clouds in his Twitter client (his name sounds like a guy). Seeing these two signals, I think it is enough market validation to "proceed with care".

On one hand it looks like Twitter isn't being used much among teachers. At least that is the answer that I'm getting from asking questions in LinkedIn. Furthermore, the answers sounds like nobody are aware of the Twitter studies done by Dr Monica Rankin or by Dr Rey Junco.On the other hand, searching the #edchat and #edtech hashtags shows many educators who uses Twitter. Sure there are many self-proclaimed social media wizards and a few looneys giving out free iPad 2s. But there are a good number of legit-sounding headmasters, college professors, and K-12 teachers in those channels.

This looks conflicting.

Is the demographic between "Twitter people" and "LinkedIn people" that different? It could be so. Personally I use Twitter more than LinkedIn. I find LinkedIn website to be slow that makes me don't feel like using it much. Although Twitter's website is not much faster, I use fat clients (Twitter apps) that mask most of the website's sluggishness - I rarely access the website directly. Unfortunately, LinkedIn's official iPhone app doesn't have the Q&A nor much other interaction feature outside messaging, so I don't find much use for the app.

Then again, asking questions in LinkedIn yields much higher response rate than asking around in Twitter using hashtags. Surfing hashtags in Twitter is like walking into a large hall in which most people are talking loudly by themselves.

In any case I'm starting by coding up the word cloud generator and probably release it as a standalone app for the Mac. It looks like Lion's text processing features will be a big help in this area, especially for processing Unicode texts (not every language use a space for word boundaries, for example). I'd probably release it as a free app - it functions roughly the same as Wordle, which is free and probably a free app allows me to get quicker feedback on the engine's quality.

Besides, word clouds can also be applied for other uses beyond a Twitter client. The next thing that came into mind is a file manager. Something similar in spirit to the Raskin file manager but geared more toward wordsmiths rather than visual designers. That brings up the question: would you like a tag-cloud based file manager?

The iPad doesn't need an Indonesian manual!

2011-08-17T13:42:00.004+08:00

Two guys were arrested in Indonesia and sentenced to prison for selling a few iPads. The reason? Because the iPad doesn't have an Indonesian-language manual. This is among the things that makes me embarrassed of my own country. It's even more retarded than the case where the TSA caused a MacBook Air owner to miss a flight.

Well, Mr/s Police-person and Mr/s Judge, there are two reasons why the iPad doesn't have an Indonesian manual. First reason is that the iPad doesn't even need a manual. The one-page leaflet that comes with every iPad barely qualifies as a manual. The second reason is that the iPad can speak Indonesian, you only need to tell it to.

Here is how you can change the iPad system language to Indonesian.

Open the Settings application (the gray gears icon)

Select General (in the left pane), the right pane will show some options

Select International (in the right pane when General is selected)

Select Language. A popup will show with list of languages.

Scroll down and select "Bahasa Indonesia".

Tap on "Done".

Wait for a while, it takes about a minute to set the language.

The iPad now speaks Indonesian. Furthermore these same steps also applies to the iPhone and iPod touch.

When you set the system language to Indonesian, all the built-in applications will be in that language. Of course for third party applications it's up to the developer to add Indonesian-language support (by the way, my Speech Timer app does support Indonesian when that is set as the system language).

Happy 66th birthday Indonesia! Merdeka!

Lion "Production" Day One: Xcode snafu

2011-08-15T08:52:00.005+08:00

The last (hopefully) last step of my migration to Lion was installing the latest public release of Xcode. Again I hit some snags. On first (and subsequent) launches, Xcode crashes with some undefined references to the iPhone SDK private plugin. The issue was finally resolved by re-installing iTunes 10.5 beta.

It was Xcode 4.1.1 and sadly looks like it's available only from the Mac App Store. Which means I can't use any of the download managers that can accelerate the 3GB download. Sometimes I just miss the regular .dmg or .zip downloads.

~~I don't have the Xcode crash log handy right now (writing this post on my iPad during commute to day job). But I'll see whether my mac's System Log still have it.~~
Here is an excerpt from Xcode's crash log:

ProductBuildVersion: 4B110 Encountered multiple assertions. First assertion was: UNCAUGHT EXCEPTION (NSInternalInconsistencyException): Couldn't load plug-in 'com.apple.dt.IDE.IDEiPhoneSupport' while firing fault for extension 'Xcode.Device.iPhoneSimulator' UserInfo: { NSUnderlyingError = "Error Domain=DVTPlugInErrorDomain Code=2 \"Loading a plug-in failed.\" UserInfo=0x400d9a9a0 {DVTPlugInIdentifierErrorKey=com.apple.dt.IDE.IDEiPhoneSupport, DVTPlugInExecutablePathErrorKey=/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Xcode/PrivatePlugIns/IDEiPhoneSupport.ideplugin/Contents/MacOS/IDEiPhoneSupport, NSLocalizedRecoverySuggestion=The plug-in or one of its prerequisite plug-ins may be missing or damaged and may need to be reinstalled., NSLocalizedDescription=Loading a plug-in failed., NSFilePath=/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Xcode/PrivatePlugIns/IDEiPhoneSupport.ideplugin, NSLocalizedFailureReason=The plug-in \U201ccom.apple.dt.IDE.IDEiPhoneSupport\U201d at path \U201c/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Xcode/PrivatePlugIns/IDEiPhoneSupport.ideplugin\U201d could not be loaded. The plug-in or one of its prerequisite plug-ins may be missing or damaged., NSUnderlyingError=0x40031d940 \"The bundle \U201cIDEiPhoneSupport\U201d couldn\U2019t be loaded because it is damaged or missing necessary resources.\"}"; }

This reminds me -- it looks like whenever I install Xcode there were often issues with the iPhone SDK that was resolved by reinstalling iTunes. The problem often shows up when installing Xcode "from scratch" or when upgrading Xcode between iOS major version releases.

Apple - you really need to work on your "just works" mantra. You're becoming too arrogant and its showing.

Finally bit the Lion bullet

2011-08-14T23:35:00.001+08:00

I finally installed Mac OS X Lion on my main drive today. A wee bit earlier than my original plan of installing Lion only after iCloud comes out. The reason is that I'm starting a new project and I'd better make use of the latest tools and APIs that are available to me. It wasn't a smooth process, I hit a snag with the migration assistant - more on that after the jump.

So I uninstalled my HP ScanJet 3500c Scanning Software, which depends on Rosetta, removed Parallels Desktop 5, and removed my BootCamp partition. I installed Windows XP in that partition since I bought the machine four years ago, but never used it for anything serious - played a game or two borrowed from the library but that's it. Since my game needs (and allocated time) are being satisfied by iOS games nowadays, there isn't much use dual-booting to Windows any more. Sadly, after removing my BootCamp partition, Disk Utility won't allow me to resize the main partition to use the empty space, so I had to reformat the entire drive. Not really a big problem since I can restore my data and applications from my Time Machine drive.

Then I installed Lion and everything was pretty much in order initially. Until the time I tried to use the Migration Assistant. After running for about three hours, the Migration Assistant stuck in the last minute, literally, during the copying files that supports applications phase. It stuck there in saying that there was "one minute remaining" but actully lasted for many hours.

I googled around and found an answer suggesting that I disable Spotlight from indexing both the main drive and the source drive from which Migration Assistant reads data from. Sorry but I forgot the original article's URL. Then I reboote, reformatted the drive again (for fear that there are already dangling files copied from my Time Machine drive) and try installing Lion again. Apparently the suggestion works, this time the Migration Assistant was able to restore all my files.

Afterwards I install Java that is needed to access my dayjob's VPN. I also installed Adobe Flash, needed to access Google Analytics. Then I re-enabled Spotlight, installed iTunes 10.5 Beta, and run Mail. While I'm writing this, Spotlight is still in the middle of indexing my main drive and Mail is updating my mailbox.

Lesson learned is that always disable Spotlight before you start migrating into a freshly-installed system. Also you should only try OS updates when you have a day to spare and fast Internet connection to update stuff that are not installed by default

Here are the steps to disable Spotlight correctly:

Open System Preferences
Go to Time Machine
Click on Options
Add both of your your boot drive and your system drive to the Exclude these items from backups box
Restart your Mac

After disabling Spotlight, you can run the Migration Assistant again to restore your files. This time it should work.

Till next time. Take care.

Twitter in Education

2011-08-12T05:51:00.002+08:00

Lately I have been fascinated by two college professors who bravely attempt to apply social media (primarily Twitter) as a way to provide better service to their students. One is Dr Monica Rankin , a history professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, who used Twitter to facilitate discussion in a large class. The other is Dr Rey Junco , a researcher at Lock Haven University, who used Twitter to generously extend consultation hours and improved students' grades as a result.

From the experiences of these two teachers, it became clear that a number of features are missing from a "generic" Twitter client. These features are the ones that will benefit mostly to educators, but perhaps not so much to the general public. In summary, these are the features that I feel will help educators to use Twitter.

Overhead projection
Archive of hashtags
Group messaging / reminders
Blog tweet
Group tweet aggregator

Let me go through these features one by one.

Overhead Projection

Having class discussion with a large number of students can be difficult. A lot of questions and opinions can get unaddressed and students may resort to passing notes around or talking among themselves. One workable solution is to use Twitter bring the backchannel forward for everyone to see and contribute. That is have the class' to tweet with a certain hashtag and display their tweets in a live overhead projection display.

Simple display mirroring of the Twitter client may work but may be suboptimal. The font size in the display may be too small since it was not designed to be shown in a projector. Typical classroom LCD projectors usually has less pixels than most computer monitors. Furthermore the acceptable minimum font size is usually about 14-point to be legible at the back of the classroom.

From these factors, the Twitter client need to have a projection "mode" that displays only the hashtag search result and not much else. The "controls" such as tweet input, toolbars, and other widgets should only live on the operator's screen and is hidden from the main projection display. Furthermore there should be a way to "feature" a tweet -- that is prominently show a set of tweets (selected manually by the operator) in a special section and not have them scrolled off during refresh.

Archive of hashtags

After the class discussion session have completed, the instructor may want to save the session for further reference. He or she may even want to export it and use the tweets as a source for a post-discussion commentary blog post. This is where archiving the hashtag search may be useful. Moreover, the Twitter client should facilitate search and annotation of the archive.

Group messaging / reminders

Instructors may need to explicitly send direct messages (or @-mentions) to a group of students to notify class schedule changes, remind of assignment dues, or notify an exam. Unlike regular tweets that may be scrolled off, @-mentions should bring the message into their immediate attention. This may sound like spam, but it's actually an evolution of the SMS reminder service.

Group tweet aggregator

An instructor may want to get a quick glance of the hot topics being exchanged between students of the class. This is so that the instructor may readily "jump in" to the important conversations to offer a clarifying answer or stimulate further discussions. Word clouds (like the one used in Wordle) may be useful for this purpose -- the "hot topics" easily bubble up and made in the cloud whereas minutiae are de-emphasized to help mitigate information overload.

Since an instructor may teach more than one class or even further subdivide the class into groups, the Twitter client may explicitly support collecting student's twitter accounts into groups. This is pretty similar to Twitter's lists feature with one big difference: speed. If you have used other Twitter clients, you'll notice that it's quite slow to add people into Twitter lists or check list membership of an account. Groups should be vastly faster than lists since group definitions are stored locally in the machine.

The group feature works hand-in-hand with the tweet aggregator (word cloud) and the group messaging. Groups may be imported from or exported to lists (or even synchronized), but the primary data will be stored within the application itself. An instructor may populate a group definition based on a list of twitter handles or even e-mail addresses and have the application query Twitter to map the address with the correct Twitter handle.

Blog tweet

Twitter is good for short reminders and messages but aren't much useful to express more complex ideas. That's why the instructor also need to a blog for the regular announcements, assignments, and exam details. Most of blogging software / service (like Wordpress for example) automatically provides an RSS feed for the blog. Yes, some services like Twitterfeed allows automatic RSS-to-Twitter publishing but this may be a bit difficult to setup for non-techies and perhaps the instructor would like to phrase the tweet differently than the title of the blog post or to tweet the post more than once.

Twitter for community leaders?

Around this time I was pondering to make a Twitter client for community leaders called Resonate. It is targeted for thought leaders the likes of Florian Müller (FOSSPatents), Andrew Warner (Mixergy), or even Jason Cohen (ASmartBear). Then I realized, that teachers are the most ubiquitous community leaders. They lead their classes that they taught. They shape other people's thinking. They aim to inspire people to grow and be better than themselves (well, at least the good teachers are). So education is a better "first vertical" to start with.

Questions are:

Which one of these features that you feel will be most useful for educators?
Are you a teacher? What would you like to see in a Twitter client?

Please provide your answers in the comments section below.

I'm alive!

2011-08-04T18:16:00.001+08:00

Hi All

In case you are wondering where have I been in the past few months, here is a quick update of what I've been doing. In short I've been doing some work to News Anchor and researching new product opportunities for Basil Salad.

With the recent release of Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion", I've been fixing up News Anchor so that it still works fine on both Lion and Snow Leopard. As always with every operating system release, Apple tends to break something. I don't have a dedicated test machine so I have to boot Lion from an external (USB) drive for testing and development. Yes booting off USB makes everything slow and painful, not to mention I don't have all my day-to-day apps installed on the drive. I also had to dual-boot back-and-forth between Lion and Snow Leopard to make sure that News Anchor works great on both machines.

Frankly I haven't really upgraded to Lion. I have an HP scanner that requires Rosetta (it only works with an old version of HP Scanning Software that runs on PocketPC), which unfortunately is no longer supported in Lion. I thought of installing the scanning software inside Windows XP and run the whole thing on a virtual machine, but alas my copy of Parallels Desktop 5 doesn't work under Lion. I'm not keen of upgrading Parallels "again", since I seldom run Windows nor use the scanner. That's also the reason that I'm un-keen to buy a new scanner. But every now and then I need to scan something. This is on top of some other unknown 3rd party applications that may break under Lion. Probably I'll wait until 10.7.1 before upgrading. Or I win Toto and can buy a new MacBook Pro.

Lion aside, the other thing that's been keeping me busy is finding a new application concept for Basil Salad. That is what is the "next app" for us. There were a number of ideas but the most promising ones are SparklingSheet and Resonate. SparklingSheet is a time-tracker application whereas Resonate is a Twitter client. Which one will materialize? I'm not sure yet. It depends on your votes -- you can open the respective apps' landing pages and then vote by registering your e-mail address.

SparklingSheet is a time tracking application based roughly on David Seah's Emergent Task Timer series. I used to use his forms to track my time when I was doing Application Support for a Big Bank. Those Task Timer sheets works great for jobs that consists of mostly ad-hoc tasks. In other words, fire-fighting type jobs that you can't really plan what will happen within a day's work.

Instead of entering tasks and selecting the number of hours you work on each task, you strike-off a series of check-boxes to mark time spent doing a task. It brings the paper time sheet metaphor in its entirely into electronic form. If we live in Harry Potter's world, the paper would be interactive, but since our world is a bit more boring, a tablet computer should be a good approximation. Furthermore there will be some elements of gamification thrown in -- that is you can see your time expressed as scoreboards and productivity points.

Resonate is a Twitter client meant for discovering interesting people, tame information overload and keep spammers away. The idea came from my own information overload on Twitter and how most Twitter client that I see doesn't really help in this matter. Originally Resonate was pitched as "Twitter for Thought Leaders" but as I learn more about the problem domain, it looks like high education may be a better vertical to start with. Thus Resonate becomes "Twitter for Teachers".

In high education it looks like Twitter is used mostly for these three things:

Augmenting class discussions, to help shy students to "speak up" more.
Extending consultation hours beyond the regular one (or two) hour class sessions.
For teachers/professors to contact other people in education to expand their personal learning network.

There is one professor, Rey Junco, who looks very dedicated in applying online social networks (Twitter included) into education. One of his research even show that Twitter has a positive impact to student's grades.

Twitter use in education is mostly experimental. One study made in the US in 2010 shows that about half of educators doesn't use Twitter (half of the respondents, to be exact). Some even say that Twitter may be detrimental to education since it encourages students to divide their attention between the instructor and their mobile phones. But then again it's good enough for if the other half of teachers, professors, and other educators use Twitter to expand their personal learning network and would find Resonate useful for them.

So that's what I've been doing so far. Probably I'll post some more details about those two applications either here or in Basil Salad's blog when I have more to say. Comments? Ideas?

News Anchor 2.4.1 beta is out

2011-06-22T06:07:00.000+08:00

News Anchor users can download News Anchor 2.4.1 beta from my dropbox folder - as long as it’s there. As usual, Mac App Store customers will need to run the current live version so that it will create the necessary license file.

This version is primarily bug fixes and performance enhancements. The Growl notifications are better: it properly notifies how many new episodes that you have and whether there was any feed that couldn’t be reached during the refresh cycle. Furthermore channel images are now stored as individual files which helps to combat fragmentation of the main database file. Those images are also now stored as JPEG2000 files, which supports thumbnailing better and help increase the performance of the channel selection display. Special thanks to Will Shipley for his writeup about JPEG2000 as a good format for thumbnailed images.

News Anchor 2.4 beta

2011-05-26T03:00:00.003+08:00

News Anchor 2.4 beta is out.. if you feel like you like being in the bleeding edge, you can download it from my DropBox folder (as long as its there).

Changes from the last version:

Performance improvements. Specifically the GUI should still be responsive even when you're refreshing a lot of feeds.
Growl support. Finally you'll get notified of refresh completions, new episodes, and feed refresh errors.

If you are a Mac App Store (MAS) customer, you'll need to update to News Anchor version 2.3.1 and run it at least once for each machine that you plan to run this beta. The MAS version of News Anchor will create a copy of the MAS receipt in a common folder that can be used by the direct-download version to authorize itself. Special thanks goes to Daniel Jalkut who shown how to do this secondary authorization using MAS receipts.

Non-programmers may want to stop reading beyond this point.

How did I improve News Anchor's performance? Apparently NSOperationQueue doesn't really know what is the optimal number of threads to start for each operation. It looks as if it simply takes a look at the CPU load at the time an operation is added, and will start a new thread if it sees that the CPU still have some spare cycles left.

The problem comes when you do a lot of network I/O in the operation objects and your Internet connection is slow. You might potentially get hundreds of threads started and most of the threads will be idling away waiting to download stuff. The bad thing is that having many threads swamps the scheduler. It may then allocate less CPU time for the very important main thread that runs the GUI, making the app looks frozen.

Anyway, I've worked around this in News Anchor's background refresh operation by limiting the number of simultaneous operation that can be done:

Yes, it limits the number of threads taken by the refresh operation to twice the number of CPU cores. For dual-core machines, this means running a maximum of four threads at the same time. Keep in mind that the background refresh operation isn't the only one that's creating threads. There are other threads that the CPU needs to service, that is the main thread, Core Data threads, and others created by the runtime environment. We need to limit our own appetite of CPU cycles and place a cap on the number of threads.

At testing, this actually works quite well and the GUI remains responsive even while News Anchor is refreshing many feeds and generating a lot of episodes.

Till next time..

LifeHack: Achieve real multitasking on iOS

2011-05-08T12:46:00.002+08:00

Let’s face it, multitasking doesn’t really exist on the iOS for third party apps. Even the new “multitasking” features of iOS 4.0 is only task switching -- not real multitasking since 3rd party applications get frozen when it enters the background. For example, while the Dropbox app is downloading a large file, you can’t switch to Twitter to check your stream and let your file downloads in the background. The download will stop after about 20 seconds or so.

But there is a solution for true multitasking for the power user, and even multi-processing on iOS devices. How? Read on.

Ingredients

Two (2) iOS devices of a similar size and shape. The example above shows an iPhone and an iPod touch.
One (1) scissors.
One (1) clear cellulose tape.

Step-by-step directions

Remove protective casings from both iOS devices.
Place the devices in which the backside presses against each other. Align the screen and ensure that the orientation is the same for both devices.
Use the cellulose tape to tie the devices together on the top and bottom sides. Puncture a hole through tape to uncover the speaker.

Now you have a multitasking capable iOS device. How to multitask on this iOS device?

Start an application on Side A of the device, and let it run some lengthy process..
Flip the device to Side B.
Start another application on Side B.
Switch tasks by flipping from Side A to Side B and vice-versa.

You can even make phone calls on this revolutionary iOS device.

As you can see, this lifehack can be taken to the next level so that you can run both Android and iPhone applications on your device ;-)

Enjoy and take care ^_^

Chrome is a hog, switching back to Safari

2011-05-03T20:54:00.003+08:00

Google’s Chrome may be the fastest browser to date, but it does so by making everything else runs slower. Why? It’s such a memory hog, eating up almost twice the memory as Safari for the same web pages. If you also run other applications on the Mac, I suggest you use Safari instead of Chrome.

I started using Chrome on a daily basis from about two months ago. It was a great browser -- it rarely freezes (although sometimes its tabs do crashes), runs quick, and synchronizes my bookmarks with its Windows counterpart from my dayjob’s office PC. Life was great with Chrome.

Then I notice that my Mac is getting really slow. Microsoft Word takes minutes to load, switching between spaces sometimes stutter, and even the volume control slider takes a wee bit longer to draw and open. At first, I thought that my 2007 MacBook Pro begins to show its age and maybe it’s time to get a new computer.

That is until I opened Activity Monitor yesterday.

I realized that with a few Chrome windows, Xcode, iOS Simulator, Adium, Word, and iTunes, the 4GB RAM in my Mac has only 8 MB free. Microsoft Word was barely usable, I looked at the Real Memory usage of Chrome and found out that the biggest memory hog was Chrome. After closing Chrome, my trusty old Mac suddenly seems to gain its youth.

After the incident, I decided to see whether Chrome really was the culprit. I open the same website in Chrome and Safari and see the memory usage of each. Indeed Chrome is the bigger memory hog.

Just look at its Real Memory use. The three Chrome processes takes 39.2 + 10 + 79.6 = 128.8 memory just to display a single web page. And this is real memory, not just some space on the hard drive. The test page URL was http://newsanchormac.com/wp/tour/

In contrast, Safari only used slightly more than half of it, 81.3 MB of Real Memory. It’s not exactly small, but far better than what Chrome is using. Besides, Safari is almost as fast as Chrome anyway.

This is on top of Chrome’s monstrosity of taking 200 MB disk space. Come on, this is a web browser. Not some RPG game. Just look at how big Chrome is when compared with its peers.

I’m planning to do a similar comparison in my dayjob’s Windows XP computer -- whether the Windows version of Chrome is also a worse desktop citizen than Safari for Windows.

For the record, these are some details of my test bench.

Chrome version: 11.0.696.57
Safari Version: Version 5.0.5 (6533.21.1)
Mac OS X: 10.6.7

An introduction to the Happy Fortune Matrix

2011-04-25T13:05:00.003+08:00

Some people blissfully live by the doctrine “Just do the things you like and money will follow.” That may be true for some people, but it’s not always the case. Some activities will naturally make money whereas others will always lose money. Yet some jobs are simply torture but they make a ton of money.

Looking at the cases above already show that money isn’t always correlated with like-ability of a job. In scientific terms, money and joy are linearly independent -- and when we combine a number of linearly independent things, we get a vector space. With money on one axis and joy on the other, we have a two dimensional plane that I call the “happy fortune matrix”.

Why Matrix?

The word “matrix” is to benefit MBA-graduates and economic majors readers. The Happy Fortune Matrix works quite similar as the BCG Growth-Share Matrix. You use the matrix to analyze the various activities that you and make a decision whether to continue putting efforts in those activities.

The horizontal axis in the Happy Fortune Matrix is the level of fun that you get when performing the activity. It goes from “despise” in the far left edge and to “enjoy” in the far right. Whereas the vertical axis is the financial side of the activity, it goes from costing money (which costs more as you go down the scale) to making money (and makes more as you go up the scale).

In the matrix you plot your various activities as blobs. The size of each blob represents the amount of effort that you spend in each activity. Feel free to draw ellipses to represent how do you feel about each activity. You can draw a flatter ellipse for jobs that causes mood swings (in other words, more variability of enjoyment) and also you can put a tall ellipse if you have variable-income jobs.

I’ve drawn some of the typical blobs that you’ll find in the Happy Fortune Matrix:

The typical job -- it’s a so-so between enjoyment and despise but it makes a decent amount of money, which often covers your living costs and that’s why you still keep doing it.
The golden handcuff -- this is a job that you really hate but it makes a ton of money. If you are in this situation, you’ll want to save as much money as you can from the job because it’s not sustainable. Eventually you’l burn out if you stay in this zone.
The heck, a mental and financial torture -- sometimes you get caught in a situation that you have to do things that you don’t like and pay money for it. Probably this is due to a past mistake that you’ve done -- substance rehabilitation programs and alimonies probably belong in this zone.
The hobby -- this is the stuff that you love and spend most of your free time with, but it taxes your wallet.
The nirvana -- the almost mythical area of doing the things that you love and getting paid tons of money for it.

As you can see for yourself, the goal is to eventually push most of your activities into the nirvana area, by minimizing the unhappy stuff and controlling the costs of the stuff in the hobby area.

How I said "no thank you" to Apple's job offer

2011-04-15T16:47:00.032+08:00

Recently I’ve said “no thanks” to Apple’s job offer. Was I stupid? Probably. But probably not.

A few days ago, I’ve received a LinkedIn message from Jennifer Rakow that claims to be an Apple recruiter. She told me that she had several opportunities and asked whether I would be interested to work for her company.

Initially I thought, “Horray... Could this be Jackpot? Finally, my chance to go to the Bay Area and maybe meet the Big Stevie J”.

But then again I thought, will I have to let go of my personal business? I mean, currently all I have offered are all Apple applications. If this means I have to dissolve all of them, I would have to say no and continue my current day job in a less conflicting company instead.

Like an Apple spokeswoman once said, "Apple’s policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they’re developed and published prior to their start at Apple." In other words, if I took a job at Apple, I can no longer release more App Store apps until I quit, probably.

Since there isn’t any more reply, it looks like they are not interested with enterprising people like me. The Mac and iOS are great, but to me they are just canvasses that I can draw my painting on. I do have great respect for Apple and the stuff that they make. Nevertheless, I simply don’t see myself comfortable of being a corporate drone for the rest of my life and being dependent on appraisals.

Getting ideas and talking about it

2011-04-14T11:29:00.002+08:00

Jason Roberts once said that telling people about what you are doing is equally important as actually doing it. Because telling and doing forms the two bases in a vector space called the luck surface area. In plain English, these two creates a fishing net that allows you to catch the fish (i.e. “luck”) that travels in your way. The bigger your net is, the more fish that you can catch. Communicating your ideas also help you to get in contact with your potential customers and allows you to pivot earlier before writing several thousand lines of code.
So as of now, here are our current ideas that we are working on (I mean "we" as in Basil Salad Software). Some of them may eventually become real products whereas some others may be just ideas.

GroupSale - A web service for you (as merchants) to create your own ad-hoc group buying event.
Chores - Make housework as exciting like MafiaWars or other MMORPG.
QR Genie - Manage and organize your physical advertising hyperlinks with your virtual presence.
Resonate - Automatically maintain presence in Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.
Time Fairy - Emergent time tracking software, 100% off-line for the Mac.

If you’re interested in any of these, please let us know. There is a signup form in each of those pages so that you can vote on an idea that you like.

Comparing Android vs iPhone typical users

2011-04-13T17:53:00.000+08:00

You might wonder, what are the characteristics of the typical Android phone user as opposed to the typical iPhone users? Here is the result of my observation from both on-line observations and off-line idle chats and questions.

Android users

Open-source fans, hackers, makers, and mobile hobbyist. These people made the conscious decision of buying Android, either for tinkering or that they need exclusive Android applications. Exclusive meaning that these kind of applications will not be available for the iPhone in the near future; either due to technical reasons or blocked by Apple’s review policies.
Technology-ignorant people who make purchasing decisions based on price alone. Android phones have a wider price range and some telephone companies are offering the lower end models at near-zero prices (subsidized by long-term mobile phone contracts).

That second bullet point alone explains why Android users tend to be more price sensitive than iPhone users. Open-source die-hards tend to be price-sensitive too, noting that their figurehead Richard Stallman uses a cheap Lemote Yeelong computer.

iPhone users

Highly visual people who like nice-looking things. This fits the typical Apple customer (read: fanboy/fangirl). They like iPhone because of its smooth animations, gorgeous look, and well thought user experience.
Herd behavior or peer pressure. These people bought an iPhone because their friends also have it. In other words, they bought the iPhone due to the “cool” factor and simply want to conform to the crowd.

Surprised? Not surprised?

Of course, like any other stereotyping there are exceptions. I explicitly exclude these other people from the stereotypes above.

Dedicated developers on both platforms. They use a phone because they need to develop on it and want a user’s view experience to help them develop applications that integrate well with the operating system and other applications of the platform.
Users of company phones. The places that they work for decided what phone to use, and probably the company paid for it.
People who work for Google, Apple, or Microsoft, and their affiliates. That includes Android manufacturers such as Samsung or Sony. The reason for bias is clear here, no clarifications needed.

You probably think, “citations needed.” Not much citation, I’m afraid. This is based solely on my un-scientific observations. However, if you do have a more concrete un-biased research, please do post links in the comments.

Bootstrapper's Stories

2011-04-11T10:38:00.001+08:00

Stories are interesting. Stories are motivational. Stories let you learn from other people’s successes and failures. These are my favorite bootstrapped startups stories that I’ve collected from the interwebs so far, in no particular order.

From Big Idea to Thriving Business in 8 short years

How Michael Akita developed and evolved PhoneTray, a call management application, from a side thingy into a real life-supporting business.

How to become an independent programmer in just 1068 days

Gus Mueller told his story of coding up Acorn, a painting application, in his spare time and into a reputable and recognized application.

If not you then who?

The ups and downs of Kevin Hoctor on the way to MoneyWell 1.0, a personal finance application.

Application Acquisition

Daniel Jalkut told his story in 2007 C4 Conference on how he acquired MarsEdit & Black Ink to kick-start his indie business.

Gotten swept off the tracks

Dan Wood’s initial hit application, Watson, got shoved off the tracks by Steve Jobs. So he decided to take that to the next level and use the event as inspiration for his company logo.

What's the impact of hackerporn?

2011-04-09T10:09:00.001+08:00

A commenter asked, what is the long-term impact of getting HackerNews-ed? This was asked on the post about how I lost my virginity and now became an amateur entreporn star. That is, whether there is a measurable increase in residual traffic from those hackerporn articles and whether there is an actual impact to my products’ sales?

After my third episode of hackerporn, I can confidently conclude that there is no impact whatsoever. The “baseline load” of this blog is about 30-ish unique visitors per day and after a day or two of hackerporn fame, the traffic returns to the way it was before.

You’re surprised? Want proof? Here are some Google Analytics excerpts.

The image above shows the three episode of my hackerporn fame.

Lifestyle Business - my overly-critical opinion about what VCs think of cottage software shops.
Entreporn - how I became an amateur entreporn star.
Dilbert’s JIRA - an old post about actual corporate Dilbert-ness I recently submit to HackerNews.

As you can see from all three events, after all the fanfare the traffic goes back to normal.

The sudden influx of readers really came from HackerNews. The following shows how the Dilbert’s JIRA post got its traffic at its peak time. As you can see for yourself, 94.96% exits looking for the next hackerporn flick.

One interesting trivia is that there is no significant difference between the number of Mac and Windows users that enjoy this particular hackerporn. Interestingly, it looks like the Linux crowd also enjoy these kind of posts. The graph below shows the OS distribution for that day and that post only.

Conclusion? Writing hackerporn materials is only good for kicks and won’t contribute to your long-term traffic nor sales. Unless you’re actually selling paid hackerporn stuff and you’re posting teasers to promote them. After these three episodes, I definitely agree with Rob Walling that a link from a famous-tech-site will not make a difference in your sales.

Why Appraisals are Bad

2011-04-08T14:52:00.006+08:00

In theory, appraisals are the tools to get the choir to sing the perfect notes each time. They are the tools to effectively manage, organize, and deploy a corporation’s resources effectively to maximize shareholder’s value. Usually the feedbacks gathered for appraisal are used as input to forcibly place the person's value to the company in a normal distribution curve. This way people are "encouraged" (read: incentivized) to do better than their peers. In other words, it creates an environment where everybody races to get to the top 10% of the normal curve.

However, when the population size is small, appraisal by normalization can no longer work since the normal curve does not really exists anymore. Furthermore in a small population it is easier to get ahead of the “curve” by sabotaging your peers (By the way, if you want to use the normal distribution then the population size need to be at least 30 distinct individuals, at least that’s what I recall from my statistics class).

I have recently notice this happening myself. In the high-ranking managerial positions in which there are not many people available to draw the normal curve properly, the normalization process is actually detrimental to shareholder value.

The story goes like this. At a recent fire drill event, I met an ex-colleague of mine in which we both worked at the same company (both of us no longer work at that company). He was working at another company in the same building as my current job. I asked him about our old organization, “How were things going over there?” He replied, “Really bad, man. [There were] bloodshed everywhere.” This was (still is?) a large bank which bought another large bank that went under due to the subprime mortgage crisis. Probably after a year down the road, they found that the purchase was not a good decision and then they start finding ways to remove people while minimizing the compensation they need to pay to do it. I am not sure this was the reason since I am not working there anymore when this happens.

After a few weeks, I got a phone call from an employment agent telling me that the bank was hiring. Interestingly around the same time, they were also interviewing a friend of mine. It looks like they are hiring again. It is quite strange since they were removing people a few months ago, and now they are hiring again. That’s quite expensive from an operational perspective since they hire big employment agencies that charges them 2-3 month’s salary of the hired person (the hiring company pays the fee, not the employee).

Then I remember what one of my ex-boss at that company said when I work there. Essentially he said that the appraisal and subsequent normalization process is done on a per-grade basis. That means they grade analysts against other analysts of the entire company and vice presidents against other vice presidents. Everybody is ranked on the A, B, and C grades and the organization always get rid of the Cs if it does not change into a B after a semester. He was a vice president at that time, which was two levels above me in the pecking order.

Now I see it. Therefore, by extension normalization is also done at the director level, against other directors. The last time I check there were four directors for the entire Singapore operation, both on the business and technology sides.

Then how are you going to do normalization on four people?

You simply cannot. You can try to rank them and you will always get one A, two people will get B grade and one will get C. In this environment, it is easier to sacrifice one of your colleagues to ensure that you can still keep your job -- make one of them get a C grade and that will ensure you will get a B and you also get to keep the job.

It looks like this is what happening at that organization. Let us say that you are a director of a cost center. In order to make your department look more profitable, you reduce headcount while maintaining the same workload. There are two ways to reduce headcount: fire them or move them to other departments. However, if you move them, it will be more work for you since you need to find who are currently looking for people and put your extra headcounts to the right places. If you simply make them quit, your colleague's department will need to pay that hefty agency fees to fill any additional positions that he/she needs.

Therefore by firing people you actually kill two birds with one stone (or is that two pigs with one bird? ;-) ). That is you reduce your own department’s cost, making you look good, and you increase your rival department’s cost, making them look bad. Of course, the net effect is a cost for the organization, but this is not easily visible on the balance sheets and you as a director can always find ways to justify your decision.

This sounds like a high-ranking version of the Dilbert comic. Hey Scott Adams, probably the Pointy-Haired Boss now deserves his own comic strip? ;-)

That’s all for now folks. Take care and be safe.

LinkedIn's April Fools Jokes

2011-04-02T07:00:00.000+08:00

Today I logged in to my LinkedIn profile and notice that there was a “Robin Hood”, Chief Fundrasier at Nottingham. Since I’m almost half a world away from UK and have never actually been there, I thought to myself “Hmm, there is an actual person named Robin Hood over there, probably it’s a common name or something”. After about 15 seconds, then I realized “Hey, it’s 2nd April over here, probably it’s still 1st April in the western part of the world. This could be an April Fools joke”.

I decided to click on Robin Hood and indeed it was an April Fool’s joke. It’s one thing to be an “Activist and Chief Fundraiser at Nottingham” (non-profit local organization, maybe), but as a “Mortal Enemy” and “Environmentalist at Sherwood Forest” ? definitely a joke. I’ve tried to connect with the Prince of Thieves, but I don’t know his e-mail address.

Just for fun, here is a list of the other April Fool’s joke profiles I saw on LinkedIn today.