The Dead Wood Syndrome

When a tree grows big enough, some branches will stop functioning, and they become dead wood. Similarly, when a company grows to a certain size, some people will stop contributing positively, and literally, they are also becoming dead wood.

For a company, the problem doesn't stop at the productivity lost from the dead wood employees. Due to the nature of dead wood, they will sap energy and productivity away from those good employees. 'Good employees' in this context refers to productive and contributing people in a company. Eventually the good ones will either feel overloaded or frustrated because of the under-appreciation from the management. In one way or another, they can and will find a better place to work .

What runs parallel with this is Gresham's Law: bad money drives out good.

I am witnessing the exact problem now in my company. The incompetent people are driving out a good engineer. This makes me to rethink my career path...

Love Story

Recently my colleague told me there is a song which is a hit called "Love Story" by Taylor Swift. He knows that because his daughters like it very very much.

The music video looks nice, mainly because Taylor is pretty. Lyrics-wise I have nothing much to talk about because it is the standard stuff. Nevertheless, it is still worth a look if you have nothing much to do.

Wishing Myself A Happy Birthday

Just come home from a drinking session with colleagues, however today I really had no mood to drink. It is July 4. For all these years, I never forget this day....

I like this song, its title is: wishing myself a Happy Birthday... Hope you like it...

Change of Status

Have not blogged for almost a month now, the reason is I have resumed dating and now in a relationship, although it is not very stable yet, but nevertheless it is a relationship.

I keep on thinking to write something meaningful on my blog, however I am quite exhausted recently to think anything too much too deep.

Since I have started talking about relationship, let me elaborate.

A 'relationship' connotes a status change, and usually it is associated with two people in love. In my case, there are a few non-trivial questions to be answered, among those will be "what is love?", and "is this better than being alone?"

So far what I can conclude getting someone who loves me more no doubt is selfish, but it is much easier than to love someone who sends only blank emails. My current girl can't make me laugh, but she also won't make me cry.

I am so tired.

Always better with windows?

Asus and Microsoft think so, after launching a campaign "It's Better With Windows". Link here.

I feel so glad I didn't buy Asus laptops.

Farewell To Fravia

I doubt many people will know who Fravia is, he is one of the finest hackers I am aware of. Note the term 'hacker' here carries no derogatory meaning, in fact it's a compliment.

He wrote a pile of essays in 90's on reverse-engineering. To some idiots he was a cracker who did nothing but wanted to steal software, but his essays convey much more than just cracking and getting software free. His thoughts on freedom of information, how people are zombie-lized by TV, and the view on information have influenced me fundamentally. I have to agree it was his prowess that I really look up to and eventually driven me to engineering

I learned that he passed away on May 3, 2009 and he left a final page on his webpage here.

The No No-Script Saga

I was a user of the firefox add-on No-Script for sometime, until I found it updated itself too frequently (about once per week), was too intrusive for web surfing, and was not very useful (i.e. blocks everything blindly). I removed this add-on about 3 months ago.

Then I came across this news about its frequency of updating is tied to ad-revenue (after every update it will open a 'change log' fully loaded with ads), and its numerous attempts to cripple another ad-blocking add-on, Adblock Plus.

For ad-blocking purpose, my firefox has the following add-ons, which I am quite happy with:

AdBlock Plus
Better Privacy
FlashBlock

I do sympathize the author of No-Script, he has put in tremendous amount of time and resources in the add-on and it is understandable he tries to get some money back from the user base he has had. However he used the wrong approach, which breaks the trust and very well will kill No-Script.