Neighbors

Cuppa has moved to the new place and first thing he did was to visit his neighbors, feline ones.

This boy is dozing off

Carbide.C++ is Given Free (Quietly)

New thoughts as of Dec 26:
On the PC-front, Apple's Mac OS is gaining market share and this could be the most serious threat MS has to deal with. Linux although has been touted as the Windows replacement for years, due to its decentralized nature of development, I feel it still has a long way to go.

Will MS release Visual Studio for free when further threatened by The Fruit? We will see, but the giving away of Carbide.C++ will keep me from buying any MS development tools in the near future. Freebie is good. :)

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Carbide.C++ is an IDE for Symbian OS, developed by Nokia. As recent as a few weeks ago it was still selling for as much as 3500 Euros for the OEM edition where the user gets all the works.

The tide has changed course and all editions are available for download, totally free of charge.

Nokia must has felt the heat from gPhone (running Android), iPhone (running trimmed down Mac OS?), and probably phone running a new OS from Palm (pPhone?). This step is on the right path, but its effectiveness remains yet to be seen. For the mean while, I am delighted to have the full-featured IDE to play with.

What Lessons Can We Learn?

First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The world economy is in a mess, and a lot of economists are predicting the worst is yet to come.

I could still recall when the sub-prime morgage crisis just reared its ugly head a while back, there were 'experts' and even banks claimed this issue was limited to individual institutions. The disclosed amount of poison assets was far lower than what actually turned up to be, and the rest was history.

If we inspect this string of incidents, step back, and think for a while, we can draw some observations:

The tip of iceberg: when a financial institution fails due to exposure to questionable assets, it can't be an isolated case. There must a systemic problem that manifests in the background and I even argue it is safe to say most of the institutions with similar nature will be affected, those not affected are rare exceptions.

So what have been hot beside banking and finance in the last few years? Answer is: Outsourcing.
Both of them are Irrationally hot: some point in time everyone was rushing or considering to do banking, and every company was rushing to outsource, or at least thought of outsourcing.

It seems outsourcing, too, rears a pretty ugly head: Satyam Computer Services, from India, is banned by the world bank from doing business with it for 8 years. News is here.

If we apply the lesson we learned from the banking system failure and assume the lesson can be applied, I will check my accounts and the deliveries very carefully if I had dealt with these outsourcing companies before.

Luckily, I haven't.

The Time When Vista Doesn't Suck (Too Much)

In my previous post, I mentioned I got myself a notebook computer, BenQ S42, which is equipped with Windows Vista Home Premium. Since the S42 is equipped with hybrid graphics cards (integrated Intel GMA and nVidia 9600M GT), downgrading it to XP will disable one of the cards permanently. However each of those has its own advantages: the GMA is weak in graphics processing but it uses less power while 9600M is much more powerful, but also is very power hungry at the same time. Therefore I have to use Vista. This is not the first time I use Vista, the last time I used was around 15 months ago with my company's notebook computer. That experience was less than optimal and I promptly downgraded to XP in a few days.

Fast-forward to today, I have been using Vista for close to 3 weeks and the experience is different. It is much more pleasant than last time. Has Vista improved in leaps and bounds in 15 months? I will say yes it has improved somewhat, and also note the hardware I have now is also way more advanced. Given these two factors, I find Vista is entirely usable, and admittedly, it has addressed some nuisances of XP that are really inconvenient.

For example, in XP your can either be a user or an administrator. If you login into a regular user account, you are forbidden to perform most system-level changes. You have to log-out and re-login as an administrator. In Vista, it will automatically prompt you for administrator password. Although it is still quite annoying, but at least you can do most stuff in one account.

You see, 'Vista sucks' is one of my assumptions that I believe so deeply for a long time. I avowed I would avoid using it as much as I could. Though I still won't entrust my precious data to it (that is ZFS's job, period), as a system for entertainment and casual net surfing, it is quite adequate.

What I have in hand is an assumption that is no longer valid due to external changes (M$ improves it and hardware advances). My concern is: how many of the assumptions I still believe in are no longer valid now?

It reminds me a quote by a Caltech professor, which goes something like: "except strictly forbidden by physics, or else anything is possible"

The only mitigation I can think of is to experience more and keep challenging our own assumptions. Be adventurous, be meticulous, open your head, and most importantly, have fun. :)

Why Screw Yahoo?

A former worker of Yahoo! recently has made a video titled "Screw You Yahoo" (link is here).

I sympathize the plight of losing one's job. However, I just feel there are a lot of people think they are entitled to their jobs and it is as sacrosanct as their birth rights. And when they suddenly got fired, they were in a very rude awakening, realizing so far they harbored neither skill nor money to withstand the ever changing world.

If we look closely to those families who are hit by the waves of retrenchments and lay-offs, I am sure there are a lot of heart-wrenching stories: kids can't go on with their educations, old folks can't retire and have to continue working, couples fight and quarrel over petty cash, family cancel their holiday plan, etc. It is therefore much more relevant and useful to learn from others' mistakes and not to repeat those.

I think what I can learn from this wave of economic crisis is:

1. A lot of conventional assumptions are proven wrong. Usually people will think banks will never fail, hey, they can just print more money! Now, a lot of banks have gone belly up. My other thought is when people are flooding a particular place/field, we should avoid that place entirely. For example, banking and the financial sector have been the hot babes in town. Countless people, from the working professionals to high school kids all want to be bankers or financial analysts because of the obscenely high salaries. Think about it, where does all the money come from?
   
2. Usually people will jeer at people who put cash under their pillow as silly and ignorant, however this crisis proves those people's money seem to be safer than those who put in the bank. Those who entrust the almighty banking system may not even see most of their money if their savings are over the insured limit.
   
3. Complacency kills. If you don't push yourself hard enough, you won't make it when the external world pushes you. Case in point is the car manufacturers in the states. They have been complacent for decades, even after losing market share year after year to Japanese and even Korean car makers, no attempt was done to revamp and streamline the product line. The outcome is when the crisis stroke, they fell flat on their faces. Guess who gotta foot the bill....?
   

The world is changing in a faster and faster pace, and definitely all rules are made to be broken. We have to be vigilant and keep studying the environment in order to keep abreast with the latest development. The bad news is we can't rest. The good news is, change does bring about opportunities. So if you study the world carefully and apply common senses, it is much easier to be successful than in the normal times.

Good luck ;)

How To Recession-Proof Your Career

Here is a good article on how to recession-proof a programming career, but almost all of the advices can be applied to any technical career with minor modification.

Here is the summary, with some of my own thoughts

1. Volunteer to Lead a Big Project

Another way is to take control important projects such that you become indispensable. Most of the time, 'important' means 'money making'




2. Show Up Early, Leave Late



Make sure you look busy.




3. Start a MicroISV

MicroISV refers to an one-person software house. Since that article is targeting programmers, the author is talking about starting one's own business that can generate recurring incomes.




4. Moonlight



Getting a part-time/contract job may not be practical most of the time. But in this economy, temp jobs will be aplenty because companies will refrain from hiring perms.




5. Become a Popular Blogger, Author, Speaker, Podcaster, etc…



Increase one's popularity. Marketing is vital nowadays.




6. Become a Trainer



Becoming a trainer has double advantages: it is a good marketing tool for your prowess and also serves as respectable income source




7. Write Technical Articles



Same as above




8. Work for a “Recession-Proof” Company
   



This idea may not be practical nowadays, as it is hard to tell which industry is 'recession-proof'...

Weird Quote

While reading this article on the new OpenSolaris 08.11, I came across the following quote:

The OpenSolaris project launched its first pseudo-commercial release, code-named Project Indiana, in May, with the goal of getting the open source variant of Solaris humming along in binary form and being used by the development community and other cheapskates who like to play with operating systems but who don't want to pay for them.

What caught my attention is the author labels those who tinker with open-source, free software as cheapskates who don't want to pay. Hey come on, if Windows were open-source, i promise I will install Windows everywhere, including the flush system of my loo.

Weekend Trip

Last weekend I attended my ex-colleague's wedding dinner at Kuala Lumpur. Four of us departed Singapore by car and the whole trip took around 5 hours.

Oil palms along the high way

The North-South Highway of Malaysia that connects Johor in the South to Penang in North (there is a state north of Penang, but I forgot its name...)

Rest area along the highway, I have reservation about the food quality though...

Petaling Street in KL, a tourist attraction for good food

Bride and groom are giving speech

During the wedding, the bride couldn't control herself and cried, especially when she was giving speech and thanking her parents. I was wondering if my bride will do the same, and if she does, should I do nothing, like what my ex-colleague did, or should I give her a pack of napkin, or just give her a hug and kiss? Hmm....

Amazing Song

I came over Minnie Riperton's "Loving You" when watching The Simpsons 'Mapple' store episode, and boy, I was amazed.

The Simpsons no doubt is funny as usual, but the song played, even though only for a few seconds, impressed me enough that I searched it up and down for the singer and lyrics. Initially I thought the song name was "Take me away" and I found one by Avril Lavigne, but nope, not it. Yucks.

The Simpsons:



Here is the Minnie Riperton's song. If she were alive today, she will beat almost every female singer out there hands down. Nowadays these so called 'singers' just can't sing, they only know how to act sexy. That is true in the west as in the east.

Random Thoughts

Recently the looming depression has caught everybody's eyeballs. Discretionary spending around the globe is dropping like stone, while retrenchment and salary cut are affecting more and more people. I foresee the greetings exchanged in the near future will be either "You got a pay cut?" or "Are you retrenched?" instead of "How are you doing?"

Another issue that shook the world will be the terrorist attack at Mumbai. I really have nothing much to say except this world is getting more and more crazy.

See, although economy and terrorist attack seem irrelevant, but what commonality they share? Well, they are all rooted in something pretty arbitrary and artificial. Finance sector is not part of the nature, so do all the religions in this world. We human beings invent all these initially for the betterment of human races, but end up screwing everybody deep and hard.

When I was young, I remember an old guy told me the older he got, the less he understood the world. Now I understand what he meant..., damn, that means I am also getting old...?? :P