Juixe Techknow

History is made by rewriting history. Imagine writing an academic paper a 100 years from now about Lost, when several episodes have been lost, and using as resources and references blog posts and twitter streams. In some sense, this is how history books are written. History is rewritten from personal points of views, second hand accounts, supporting national myths, rewritten based on cultural outlooks, and geopolitical propaganda.

If you provide a free no obligation trial version why do you need my credit card information prior to me getting access to the free no obligation trial version? I been a big fan of the online cartoon Geek and Poke and I just saw that he put out a free PDF on Scribd. I wanted to download to it the pdf ebook to my collection of free PDF document and books so that I can load it onto my other devices. Even thought I have an account with Scribd and even though I myself have posted documents on Scribd I was not able to download the Geek and Poke PDF unless a signed up to their Scribd Archive paid service, a $9/monthly service or a $5/day pass. I know that Geek and Poke is worth the $10 but I would rather have the author of the PDF get the money instead of Scribd.

One reason why students and teachers fail is because teaching has been reduced to a trade, no different than a fast food industry.  Do you want fries with that?

What will be the codename of the next release of Android? They’ve had cupcake, donut, froyo, gingerbread, etc. What is next caramel apples, cotton candy, laffy taffy?

I’ve had an iPhone for such a long time that I had forgotten how horrible an experience it is to buy or upgrade a phone from a cell phone company. I recently had to upgrade a family Android G1 to a G2 at the T-Mobile store and found the whole episode painful. First I had to wait what seemed over 30 minutes before anyone even asked if I need help. Once someone was ready to help it took all of 2 minutes to decide on the phone, but about another 30 to process my purchase. After all this I ended with a different plan that I used to have, of course I didn’t notice until I got home. I explicitly asked if my plan would be the same, I was explicitly told yes, and I came to found out that I am, not surprisingly, paying more. Why don’t cell phone companies have a self help kiosk. All I really need from their employee is for them to give me the phone. I could set the phone and the plan myself.

What is the job function of a printer driver? When you hit the print button what do you want to happen? Apparently if you are HP, you want users of your printers to get attractive offers on some of their other products. Apparently, HP is using their printer drivers to send system configuration of your home or work environment back to home base to up sale you supplies, warranties, support from your print manager.

For years, Microsoft Windows has had the feature to send a crash dump to Microsoft when an application failed after prompting the user for permission. The crash dump information helps Microsoft understand the conditions that lead to the application crashing. Firefox also has a similar feature where anonymous user statistics so that they can learn from their users and improve their product. But now HP has hit a new low when they designed a phone home feature that shares statistics and usage information from your printer back with HP HQ to up sale you on supplies, warranties, and support. Effectively, HP has turned their HP printer driver to a their sales force embedded in your office.

This is a bad user experience for many reasons, including the fact that all I want is a document not a popup with HP ads, I am not the one responsible for purchasing office supplies, I dislike the accumulation of background processes that send statistics about my computer use to third-parties. It is clear to me that this is a feature that a marketing manager dreamed up and not a engineer driving solution to a problem. Since it doesn’t solve any of my problems, but their, I disabled it.

Below is the portion of the text from the HP Printer Driver dialog.

This HP Printer Driver can provide valuable information about your HP device for things like supplies, warranty, and support, as well as attractive offers. This information will not affect your normal interaction with your computer or printer, nor will it result in your receiving any additional emails from HP.

To take advantage of this feature we need your permission to transmit your printing and imaging system configuration to HP over the Internet. All information will be handled in accordance with the HP Privacy Statement.

HP Printer Driver Dialog

I’m the kind of person that wants to say yes to everything. “Can we add this new feature without a specification in a day?” “Yes” Saying yes is so easy, and a lot of of the times doing the work is easy too. But the trouble with saying yes to quickly is that not everything is thought out, finalized, or formalized accordingly. Sometimes the best answer is not yes. Many times the easiest thing is saying yes, but it’s doing something right takes time and that time should can not be speed up. A key ingredient to any recipe is time. You need to give everything the time to simmer, like wise in a software project you have to have the time to test accordingly, and to follow established processes. Sometimes saying yes is negotiating kamikaze.

I use Apple’s Mobile Me service. I got the first year subscription as a gift a little over a year ago and I recently renewed the service for another year. I don’t use the email or calendar service in Mobile Me much but one feature that is worth its price is the Find My iPhone locator feature. This feature lets you track the location of your iOS device, it lets you put an alert message on your iPhone or iPad, and it lets you ring the iPhone (even if it’s on vibrate or silence mode). I’ve used it once when I lost my phone under the couch and I couldn’t find it. It also lets you lock down or even wipe your missing iOS device of all personal and identifying data.

Apple's Mobile Me

All mobile devices, from phones, tablets, and to laptops should have a built it self destruct feature that when activated would destroy all data on a compromised device. It is my belief that a phone is a very intimate and personal device, there is so much personal data in my phone from private contact lists, to confidential business emails, to other dubious activities that I may or may not be involved in.

In addition to having the ability to destroy incriminating data from a mobile device, such as an iPhone or iPad, I want the ability to program rules into the phone. Such as if the phone has not been unlocked in over 24 hours, or if the attempted to unlocked more than three times, if it activated with a given specific code, if it is located in a known police or government building, etc.

Find My iPhone

One of my favorite podcasts is Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders put out by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders is a lecture series with guest speakers from across different fields and industries. David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals, Mark Pincus of Zynga, Robing Li or Baidu, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, and a great many of other founders, entrepreneurs have spoken at Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. So when Tina Seelig, the person that runs the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, came out with a book I knew to put it on my Amazon wishlist. Sadly no one bought me anything off my wishlist so I bought it myself to read over the winter break.

A lot of the stories and lessons Tina dives into in What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 she talks about lectures she gave back in May 2009 and in April 2006 at Standford’s Entrepreneurship Corner.

In What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, Tina gives some important lesson on creativity, opportunity, and having the right attitude to invite both creativity and opportunity in what you are doing. For example, she speaks of having her students develop failure resumes and to highlight lessons learned from making mistakes. Her reasoning behind failure resume can best be summarized by the following quote from her book.

It’s a quick way to demonstrate that failure is an important part of our learning process, especially when you’re stretching your abilities, doing things the first time, or taking risks. We hire people who have experience not just because of their success but also because of their failures.

Aside from taking risks, and not being afraid of failure, she speak a lot of about having the right attitude to invite the correct atmosphere for success. A persons perspective is important to success, in one because each person defines what they consider a successful venture. Like in the movie The Social Network, where the Sean Parker character says “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars is cool.” For some people success is defined by having 500 million obsessive-compulsive users, and for others it’s about having 1000 paying customers. It is often the case that people let others define their success, but the truly successful are those that define their own success. And defining success has a lot to do with a person’s values and attitudes.

I took a lot of value away from What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. For example, create a failure resume in Google Docs. I’ve also learning to try to negate the effects of negative thoughts, especially when trying or learning something new.

Here are some choice quotes from What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20:

• Problems are abundant, just waiting for those willing to find inventive solutions.
• Steve Jurvetson, a partner at the venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, describes failures as the secret sauce of Silicon Valley.
• Students are told that it is much better to have a flaming failure than a so-so success.
• On reflection, there appear to be five primary types of risks; physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual
• Experts in risk management believe you should make decisions based upon the probability of all outcomes, including the best- and worst-case scenarios, and be willing to take big risks when you are fully prepared for all eventualities.
• Being too set on your path too early will likely lead you in the wrong direction.
• Planning a career should be like traveling in a foreign country. Even if you prepare carefully, have an itinerary and s place to stay at night, the most interesting experiences usually aren’t planned.
• The harder you work, the luckier you get.
• Even when we think we’re paying full attention, there’s usually so much more to see.
• I realized afterward that thinking about how you want to tell the story in the future is a great way to assess your response to dilemmas in general. Craft your story now so you’ll be proud to tell it later.
• A few years ago I took a creative writing class in which the professor asked us to describe the same scene twice, the first time from the perspective of someone who has just fallen in love, the second from the point of view of someone who has just lost child at war.
  You shouldn’t take yourself too seriously nor judge others too harshly.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• I wish I could Ctrl+Alt+Delete out of everything.
• The recommendation engine is the new search engine.
• Loop. Break. Null. Exception.
• How do you explain a feature is often as important as how you implement it.
• The implications of a code change are often much larger than the code change itself.
• There Will Be Bugs
• Don’t trust the cloud.
• This is my debugger. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My debugger is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I …
• Code fist and test later is like shooting first and asking questions later.
• I program with pen and paper.
• The debugger is my best friend.

Team Leadership

• Whining is not trying.
• Doing nothing is doing something.
• Don’t compound your problems by manifesting new problem.
• A great team chooses a great leader and great leaders builds a great team.
• Making good choices leads to better choices.
• The most narrow minded perspective is that “We Versus Them” attitude. There is no them, only we.
• If you have it, bring it, and if you brought it, don’t hide it!
• You are not who you used to be or who you will become.
• I am an idea artist, making you think is my master piece.
• Productize your expertise.
• Cheat off your own hard work.
• Instead of making the effort, sometimes people make excuses.
• If you can’t find reception don’t CALL ME.
• In search of a triple rainbow.

Product Placement

• Steve Jobs is one third innovator, one third imitator, and one third black shirt and jeans.
• If Yahoo were to close down Flickr, there would be blood in the streets.
• I got my hands on a Google CR-48 yesterday. It’s just a laptop with one single app, a browser. It’s a thin client for cloud computing.
• I CAN HAZ CR-48!
• I wouldn’t mind testing a Google CAR-48, their self driving car, for free.
• Atlassian should buy corporate twitter clone Yammer.
• I would like the hotel check-in process to be as easy as Foursquare check-in.
• Taco Bell is Moctezuma’s Revenge.
• I just had the yuckiest drink, Gatorade Recover Strawberry Kiwi. Claims to be a post game protein recovery beverage. Tastes like recovered gym shorts.
• This day will go down in history as the Great Skype Fail Whale of 2010, when people had to remember how to use a phone to call someone…

Quote

• It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it. – Alan Kay
• I aspire to inspire before I expire – Alina Morelli
• It is fun to do things others call impossible. – Emile Baudot
• I’m a hope fiend. – Frankie/Celebrity Rehab
• We now know that Visa, Mastercard and Paypal are instruments of US foreign policy. It’s not something we knew before. – Julian Assange
• Guantanamo is used for laundering people to an offshore haven that does not follow the rule of law. – Julian Assagne
• Assange had a lot of help making Sweden look like the last place on Earth that you would want to take your penis. – Scott Adams

Holiday

• Happy Shopmas Season!!!
• Jingle bells, cashiers ring, websites clicked.
• Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow… cash.
• Finishing up with xmas shopping.
• Santa is welcomed in my house any time.
• I think I developed carpal tunnel from opening all those gifts. Thank you santa.
• My new year’s resolution is to double surface area of my comfort zone.
• I’m gonna party like it’s 3999!
• We are going to one up 2010 in 2011.
• Getting ready for 2010++!
• 2011 > 2010!