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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

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+ + The Real Deal + +

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by Sandy Weill
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+Sandy Weill is the guy who made Citigroup the largest financial institution in the world. According to this biography, he did this by buying on the cheap companies in trouble with good sales channels and customer bases, usually by stock exchange in a kind of merger. Then he cut costs by integrating the back office, streamlined operations and laid off staff, and had them cross-sell. Rinse and repeat.
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+He obviously was a great deal maker, and apparently a strong operational manager. He did not appreciate long term strategy like Sloan. I also can not shake the feeling that he uses his biography so settle scores and justify a considerable amount of shady dealings, treachery and backstabbing on his account. And if you take that away even after reading his own apologetic finger-pointing... Anyways he was a highly successful business man, so what is there to learn?
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+On goals: Never give in for despair. Dream big. Take risks. Build confidence by experiences of success.
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+On staying sharp: Worry perpetually about the future, and do not rest on past accomplishments. Don't get tripped up by clinging to a fixed vision of the future. Read and see changes in the environment early.
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+On dealing with failure: When you make mistakes, surface the errors in judgment, correct the mistake, and move on. Don't dwell on past mistakes or missed opportunities, except for learning lessons. Better ones may come along.
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+On personal productivity: Plan for the week ahead on Sunday evening. Recognize and play to your strengths.
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+On Acquisitions: They should do one or more of: consolidate business and generate savings on shared functions; add products and diversity enhancing the value offered to customers; add management talent. Only make acquisitions that do not dilute your rate on equity return. Move against the crowd, buy companies cheap on the bottom of their business cycle, cut costs.
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+On negotiations: avoid pushing for the absolute cheapest deal. Leave some room for the other side to feel good about the transaction, too. Best enter negotiations from a position of strength.
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+On costs: Keep costs under control during good times and keep a strong capital position to be flexible in bad times. One-time large investments are OK, but cost day-by-day must be kept low. Contain operating risks - manage day-to-day operations conservatively to have a steady base of recurring earnings. No frivolous spending. Don't use across the board pay cuts. Fire weak performers in lean times.
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+On execution: The CEO must focus on execution. Corporate culture, relations and vision are meaningless if you can't execute. Speed of action is a great competitive asset. If you want to be successful you need to understand the business. Develop healthy instincts by being well informed about company and competition. Act swiftly. Think independently. Move ahead right away once you make a decision. Formality and hierarchy slows decision making. Understand how operations work -- it helps you to leverage cost, integrate new acquisitions, cross sell products.
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+On strategy: Manage for continuous short term results, and the long term will take care of itself. Use reporting tools that give you real-time information on each businesses' key drivers, so you can identify anomalies early.
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+On alertness: Ask employees how they feel, and how we can do things better, HOW WE COULD RUN OUR COMPANY BETTER. Roam around, get to know people. Someone raising a problem should also volunteer a solution. Don't manage from a thirty-thousand feet. Walk the floor and drop in unannounced. Interact with employees and ask questions all the while. It helps you to learn about your business, and helps you to seize up people. Everybody should think on their feet and express what they believe.
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+Read voraciously and constantly probe others to learn about parts of the business. Know and understand your competitors. Develop personal relationships with others in the industry.
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+On people: Don't humor power struggles, they weaken the entire company. Effective leadership demands doing what's right and not simply placating executives.
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+On incentives: Align management objectives with company objectives by using strongly differentiated incentives. Push for employees to hold an equity stake in the company, and have top executives hold the vast bulk of their ownership as long as they work for the company. This provides incentives for everyone to work together for long term success. Develop skill in getting others to follow your lead: insist on informality, develop personal relationships, include spouses, so people have support from home as their partners can see what they work for and feel part of it.

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+ posted by Frank at + 21:51 + + + 0 Comments + + +Links to this post + + +

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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

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+ + Peopleware + +

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Productive Projects and Teams, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
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+This is a classic text on software project management. DeMarco and Lister cover much of the same ground, as in DeMarco's novel The Deadline.
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+The major new idea introduced here is that software is written by people, and writing software is creative, intellectual work, which needs immersion and flow. So one has to create conditions where people are able to concentrate on that work: offices without constant interruption. Kind of obvious, but still ignored, even today, in a lot of workplaces. Doors that can be closed, phones that can be muted, fewer meetings that need to be attended, no public announcement systems. Having enough space. Having a human touch to the offices also helps.
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+Second, Scotty-like deadlines ("How long to fix the flux compensator, Scotty?" "Three days, Jim." "You have two hours.") are counterproductive. There is a limit on how much you can work, and if you put in overtime every day for months to meet some ridiculous arbitrary deadline, you will burn out. People do not work better under pressure, and Parkinsons law (that work extends to fill the time allotted to it) does not mean that work can be compressed arbitrarily by cutting the time allotted to it.
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+The third important insight is that you can not force creative work. You can not theory-X (people are lazy and need to be forced to work) manage programmers. Controlling what they do in detail would be so costly, that it is entirely uneconomic. So software is all about self-motivated people doing great work. Therefore, it is important to get the right people and keep them happy. DeMarco offers such wisdom as letting people demonstrate they can code in interviews for the "get the right people" part (you wouldn't hire a juggler who can not show you how he juggles, either). For the "keep them happy part", it means combating bureaucracy such as software Methodologies with a big M -- lots of paperwork that keeps you from doing useful stuff. It means investing in training and growth of your staff, giving them the best tools money can buy, and giving them responsibility. It means pride in the workmanship. Quality is free, if you are prepared to pay for it, as it creates pride in the work, and it lowers followup problems so massively. It means providing a clear goal for the team to fight for -- together. It means not wasting their time with ego-driven status meetings. It means respecting people.
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+Originally DeMarco believed in the value of measuring software development (Glibs Law: Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all). However, this is a tricky issue for knowledge work, because the measuring it may be too costly and complex, and if simplified will lead to "You get what you measure" simplistic and wrong solutions. DeMarco also changed his view on the subject later.
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+ posted by Frank at + 11:55 + + + 0 Comments + + +Links to this post + + +

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Monday, March 30, 2009

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+ + Web Analytics in a nutshell + +

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Web analytics is measuring what people do on your web site, to understand how you can improve your site.

The goal of web analytics is to make it easier for people to complete the tasks both of you want completed.

This article assumes that you do not have a lot of money to spend nor are able to hire a dedicated team for web analytics. You just want to educate yourself on web analytics 101. Other blogs to learn about web analytics:


First: Why do you have a web site? Lead generation, e-commerce, customer support? As a distribution channel, for brand building, for sharing information about your company? Or because everyone has one?

Second: what do people want on your site? This is hard to answer in general, as they all are different.

What can you measure?

1. Clickstream data, what people click on in your site. The traditional province of web analytics, showing you what happened.

2. User feedback from surveys, testing, usability studies and so forth, helping you to understand why it happened.

3. Business outcomes like revenue, leads generated, lowered support and distribution costs. Tells you if what you do with the website is actually doing any good.

When you measure data on the web, where you can track what people do in a level of detail never before experienced by the unwashed masses, remember one thing: data quality still sucks. Also, don't bother with real time data. Looking at stuff a day or two later is more than enough.

How do you measure success?

The visitors who did what you'd like out of all visits are your "conversion rate". Typical conversion rates are about 2%, because many people are on your page for reasons entirely unrelated to being converted. In practice you can only measure where someone clicked, so you often measure some proxy for conversion rate real outcomes.

For e-commerce or lead generation conversion rate is straightforward to measure, you tag suitable pages like "Thank you for ordering" as a conversion. Use this to segment your other data, so you can understand what makes people convert or how traffic from search engines does compare to pay-per-click traffic. If you can assign a monetary value to your conversions, you also will be able to calculate a rough ROI on link advertising.

For support or brand building, you need to use surveys. You never know if someone read a knowledge base article and left because his problem was solved, or because he just got frustrated and gave up. The best way around that is to ask them through embedded surveys and hope they will answer.

Surveys are annoying, so keep them minimal. The simplest, and best would just run:

1. Why are you here today? (Always provide the ability to answer free text together with any predefined options.)

2. Where you able to complete your task? (Yes/No.)

3. If not, why not? (Again, free text.)

Other "soft" data come from observing customers either through click-density overlays, or on the web (Userfly), or in usability tests, the hallway kind where you pull in an unsuspecting coworker, or formal ones with studio recording equipment, or in follow-me-home studies. The costs increase here.

For collecting click-stream data, there are many options, but honestly, just sign up with Google Analytics. This uses JavaScript tags, small code snippets which call a logging function on a remote server. Advantages: only measures stuff people see in the browser, can be highly customized, decouples the data collection and processing from your site, so less dependence on IT folks' mercy, sophisticated, powerful analysis reports for free. Disadvantages: your data is stored by someone else, who may not give you access for in house analysis and integration. You will be blind to people who have switched off JavaScript, about 6%, of average users. (Another free for the basics is www.statcounter.com, there are also many commercial ones.)

An alternative are Server logs. These have the "advantage" that you also see robot traffic, disadvantage that you need access to them and the cooperation of whoever runs your IT. (Free tool: AWstats.) There also are exotic or outdated solutions like "beacons" (embedded image URLs pointing to a third party server, think tags, but less functionality) and ISP packet sniffing.

How to analyze

Data without context is powerless to provide insight. Compare data against past performance. Look at different time frames to see if there are seasonal fluctuations. Segment your data, for example by source, to find areas of weakness.

Compare against your competition. There are several sources of free competitive information:

Panel based: this works best for sites with millions of visitors per month and can be detailed. A number of people sign up by to be monitored and the data is extrapolated. (E.g. comScore, or Alexa, free and Compete, partially free).

ISP data based: data is harvested from raw traffic and is more superficial. (E.g. Hitwise, also not free).

Search engine traffic. Again this will not tell you how people behave in detail on some web page, but a lot about what they are interested in (E.G. Google Trends, free, or Microsoft AdCenter Labs, free.)

Link based: ranking popularity by links to a page (Marketleap, which also has a report ranking how you and competitors do for a key phrase on several search engines, or just Google with the link:yoursite.com syntax.)

Other interesting sources for external benchmarking (mostly for bigger firms) are the American Customer Satisfaction Index, or the Fireclick Index of typical web site metrics.

Adoption

The best way to get started is getting your hands wet with a practical tool. Produce a report. This will allow you to gather feedback on how to change that to support decision making and work out problems with your site's URL structure (which may impede measuring the same page as the same page) and which features you need, should Google Analytics not suffice.

Technical hints

Tag all your pages, best at the end of the page and not in tables or such, so the tags execute and do not hamper loading. Make sure the tags work as you'd like them to. Run a link checker (eg www.relsoftware.com/wlv, not free) to make sure all pages are tagged.

Identify your unique page definition. What is a page? Care about link coding; parameters and session ids tend to muck up URLs.

Be careful of redirects, use 301 permanent ones wherever possible, as only these pass along referrer information. Be careful about links wrapped in JavaScript, which make clicks on them hard to track. Also about rich media like Ajax or Flash.

Collect source info (website, campaign, search engine etc); page info; and user info through persistent anonymous id cookies so you can identify repeat visitors. Use first-party cookies with your own domain name, not the vendors so they survive stricter cookie security settings. Google Analytics does all that automatically (except campaign tracking). Measuring cookie rejection rates gives you a better idea of the quality of your data. You can also collect if someone is logged in, part of a test etc.

What metrics are useful?

Overall traffic ("unique" visitors and "total" visits). Be careful that while unique visitor usually refers to someone identified by a persistent cookie, so that repeat visits would not increase the count, some tools incorrectly record each session as a unique visitor.

For most of the following metrics, segmentation is needed for understanding, because they are mashing together users with different intent.

Conversion. Without some way to measure success, knowing all these other things will still find you helpless what action to take to improve them. Try hard to come up with some proxy for this. Don't try and measure it by page or link, it makes no sense, but it is possible and very useful to see what pages converters visited before, because these may be the ones with the convincing arguments.

Top referring URLs. They help you understand where your visitors come from. Segment them by conversion rate, to understand the quality of traffic they send you.

Top search phrases and top viewed pages. These give you a good idea what people are looking for. For the top search phrases, do a competitor analysis to see how you are doing. Especially important are category terms, that represent the general term, not a vendor specific one, like car instead of BMW. Have a look at search funnels to understand what people searched before and after that phrase, you can even get a forecast on what might become popular with demographics. Some additional sources to check what people are looking for: Google Insights for Search, which is great in showing also related searches and changing trends. For bio-scientifc work, GOPubmed is a great tool to track trends by publications.

Search phrases in your on site internal search engine are also a good source for this, and may hint at things that are hard to find with normal navigation. On average, 10% of users use site internal search to navigate a page.

Top entry pages. As a lot of traffic tends to come from search engines directly into a page deep within your site, the top ten entry pages are probably just as important as the home page. Less than half of your visitors ever see the home page, so do not waste to much time in optimizing it, better spend that time on seductive navigation. Exit pages, in contrast are pretty useless, unless you are looking at a multi-page checkout process, because people can exit for many reasons, and exiting is not necessarily a bad thing.

Bounce rate. A "bounce" means someone came to your page and did not click anything but directly left within 10 seconds. Bounce rates of 40% are common. There is no way (at least without Ajax) to see if someone still has a page open, and if the page is open if they are still reading or left for dinner. Therefore, usually tools decide that if someone doesn't click on anything for half an hour, they have left. If someone left from their entry page, this is then counted as a bounce. Bounce rate is critical because every bounce is a valuable visitor wasted. Time on site suffers from the same malady as bounce rate that you have no idea how much time people spend on the last page they visited, unless they navigate off that page through a link.

Abandonment rate. This is only relevant for e-commerce sites, and describes the rate of people who leave after putting stuff in the cart or initiating checkout. This can be measured on a small number of pages, and affects people who already wanted to buy - ripe ground for optimization.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Measure raw page impressions, click-through-rate, bounce rate. If you also have conversion rate, with monetary value attached from overall cost by conversions you can get the cost per conversion, and revenue/cost for PPC gives you ROI. You also should make a reality check the PPC cannibalism of your natural or "organic" search traffic. In the long run, a more helpful and appealing page (and product!) is a better investment than PPC.

Dashboards

When you create dashboards or reports from these metrics, make sure that numbers show context (against the past, against a benchmark), that it is limited to an overview, and that you annotate it briefly with insights and recommended actions. If it takes more than one screen/page at normal font sizes and borders, you have a report, not a dashboard. Use graphical representations like pie charts, bar charts or scatterplots to make the data intuitively accessible. A good test if a metric should be on a dashboard for management is: can you clearly explain how it maps to a business objective? If popular exit pages can not, they should not be on.

Testing

A great way to improve your site without annoying the users with questionnaires they do not like to answer anyways is variant testing, where you show different pages (A/B testing) or different elements on a page (multivariate testing) to different users. If you have some way to measure success, you can then see which of these performed better, and use that in future. This is really awesome: it is observing users to give them what they want, and it is non-intrusive and cheap. It also frees you from assumptions or following the HiPPO (highest paid persons opinion -- you know, when the VP of thisorhtat really likes the mauve pages with puppies, that's how it will look like).

You can test different images, lots of text vs little text, flashing moving stuff vs quiet elegance, a big hero image on the home page or three smaller ones ... the possibilities are unfortunately endless. There should be a hypothesis behind the different things you try. Start out with one single goal and with a simple test. A great way to get buy-in and interest is to have people bet on the outcome. Start to a high-traffic page.

A test plan should contain:

1. The hypothesis, eg "Customers come for scientific soundness, so lots of formulas and text will work better than a smiling babe in a bikini."
2. Business case. What are you trying to optimize, and how does it help the business goals.
3. Audience. Who will be in the test: what percent of traffic, what source of visitors, people who do what on the web site?
4. Details: How will the alternatives look like (Mock-ups), what pages are affected, what tracking code needs to be put into place.
5. Success measure: what are the metrics, how do they look now, and what will count as success for one of the test options?
6. Outcome actions: who needs to be notified, what will be implemented?
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+ posted by Frank at + 09:44 + + + 0 Comments + + +Links to this post + + +

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Friday, February 06, 2009

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+ + My years with General Motors + +

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By Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.

According to Bill Gates the single most useful book you can read on business. I agree it is great. This book states Sloan's business ideas in the unassuming voice of a personal memoir. Sloan must have been one of the best managers the world has ever seen. Read this book, and understand where all the stuff that Drucker wrote came from. Enough laurels, what does it say?

Sloan introduced organizational structures balancing central policy with decentralized execution (a lot of the most difficult issues he considers really come with size). He gave employees freedom to act guided by objectives and incentives. He was big on grasping reality, by collecting key operational data, by working out solutions by meetings of stakeholders. He looked ahead to preempt problems and see opportunities for innovation. And he did this on a level of success where it really becomes a bit scary.

Some concrete points:
Energy and logical action in accordance with facts and circumstances.

Purpose: The primary objective of the corporation is to make money, not just to make a product -- pay dividends and increase capital value. ROI is the unifying measure for each business unit.

Value: The future of the corporation depends on the ability to design and produce products of maximum utility in quantity at minimal cost. To succeed in business in the long run you must render service to the public.

Strategy: Companies compete in broad "policy" (i.e., strategy) as well as in products. Every enterprise needs a concept of its industry and the CEO must understand the industry. Think about what you are trying to do, in addition to the constraints imposed by customer demand, competition, technology, economic conditions and evolution. Establish principles and work from them.

Measurement: Measuring, organizing and presenting the significant facts about what is going on in and around a business is one of the chief bases for strategic business decisions. Finance can not exist in vacuum but has to be integrated with ops.

Consensus: Co-ordinate by committee. The executive committee is to pass policy in a clear cut way to supply the basis for authorized executive action, e.g. on quality standards, price schemes, market and competitive moves. It should have enough representatives from operations to come to realistic conclusions. The role of the executive is policy making. Have an operations committee of all unit heads. Gets all available data about performance, and includes executives. The goal: to bring about common understanding.

The Executive: There is a need need for authority of the chief. If possible have the boss be in charge of operations. A group can make policy, but only individuals can administer policy. If a company does not execute well, all policy is for naught.

Capital approbation for projects:
- what is the relative value of the project as compared to other projects in ROI and in necessity to support company operations as a whole
- does it work as a commercial venture?
- has it properly been developed technically?
- is it proper considering company interest as a whole (not just for the unit proposing)

Small projects can be authorized by the unit manager, large ones need a procedure and approval by top management/finance, and need to present their economic and technological benefit.

Organisational structure: Independent units coordinated by central management. There is need to separate divisional and corporate functions. The juncture between staff and line can be paralyzing if it turns into a battlefield. Have line representatives on staff committees to get buy-in and adequate representation of needs. Functions include development, engineering, production, sales, finance. There should be a separation between advanced product engineering and long term research.

Have representative members in parallel function from each unit get together to exchange and co-ordinate, give them authority and power so this coordination can be constructively applied. Confine the scope to problems/info exchange of common interest. Keep away from details, focus on basic problems. Keep sessions business like and to the point. Have a secretary to support the committee.

Personal productivity: Spend days with inspection and observation, nights with discussion. Only 5 direct reports to have time for large scale issues thinking. Put all your energy and experience into your work. Even at the cost of personal sacrifice.

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+ posted by Frank at + 16:56 + + + 0 Comments + + +Links to this post + + +

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+ + Three Welch Ideas + +

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1. Tell people the truth because they know the truth anyways. (About evaluating your employees. Does not mean you cannot do it in a friendly manner.)

2. If you are working 90 hours a week, make a list of the top 20 things that take your time. 10 of them can either be scrapped or delegated. (Works only if your have someone to delegate. Well at least you can scrap some.)

3. Bullet train. You can add ten mph by optimizing existing trains, but, if you want to double the speed, you need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a whole new idea.

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+ posted by Frank at + 16:36 + + + 0 Comments + + +Links to this post + + +

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Thursday, January 29, 2009

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+ + Innovation and Entrepreneurship + +

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by Peter F. Drucker

"The entrepreneur shifts resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield" -- J.B. Say.


"Creative destruction." -- J. Schumpeter


One of my favorite Drucker books.

Entrepreneurship: To work like a demon for long years and to choose grave risks rather than security in a big organization. To do something new, something different, rather then to do better something that is already done. The Entrepreneur always searches for change and exploits it as an opportunity. He innovates.

In the long run, defending yesterday is more risky than making to-morrow.

Principles of Innovation

Don't wait for the "big" innovation, the "bright, billion dollar idea".

Search out opportunities. Look, ask, listen -- be awake.
Keep it simple. Don't try to be clever, most people are morons.
Do only one thing. Don't diversify.
Aim at leadership. Focus on one area of expertize, build on your strengths.
Start small. Forget grandiose plans.
Innovate for the present. Don't innovate for the future!

The strategies must be very simple, as they face large uncertainty. Innovation needs to be immediately applicable, or you'll never get there, and besides, the future will not be what you expect it to be.

Sources of Innovation

New knowledge, both scientific and non-scientific is a source of innovation. It does not exploit change, it creates it. It is the most powerful, least predictable, and hard to manage; it has the longest lead time. Often there's a window period of a few years with hundreds of companies founded when a technology becomes ripe through convergence, followed by a shakeout that destroys massive amounts of capital, and leaves few survivors standing. One cannot do market research on something that does not exist, expert opinion is as often wrong as right about receptivity: one must take the risk. Areas not 'hot' or in the public eye carry less risk, as there is less competition and more time.

Since change creates opportunities for innovation look for change: change in industry or market structure, for example rapid growth, most easy to spot -- but beware, fast growth tempts to skim the cream, which invites competition. Society wide change, for example in demographics: the aging society, education trends, income distribution, labor force participation. Change in perception, mood, and meaning.

Practical sources for innovation are unexpected success or failure, also customer's, suppliers, competitor's. Unexpected 'outside' events, that do not show up in regular reporting by numbers, and may be qualitative, not quantitative, but may be even more important. A mismatch between reality as it is, and as it "should be" according to your assumptions or experience. Look closer and try to understand: what is going on? Investigate. Go out, look around, listen: to customers! Don't study and run 'analysis' within in your company in isolation. You must be able psychologically to accept the unexpected that does not match your views, especially success, which is easily overlooked or disregarded. If too much research is still needed, it is not yet ready for the entrepreneur. The solution should be obvious and straightforward in hindsight.

The "bright idea" is the riskiest and least successful of innovative ideas.

Innovation is not just in products, you can also innovate by improving processes. Another source is when existing expertize can be applied to a new area.

Timing is essential. If you imitate, you will be too late. (I think this is not always true; if you're better in execution, you can copy a good idea and outpace your competition -- see Microsoft).

Decisions: The essence of any decision is uncertainty.


Entrepreneurial culture

The temptation for existing business is to feed yesterday and starve tomorrow.
Entrepreneurship requires looking at change as an opportunity for new rather than threat for old. It needs policies to abandon whatever is outworn, obsolete or misdirection of effort. Have the performance report show two first pages: of opportunities, overshooting goals and of problems, failing targets.

Put every single product, process, tech, market, channel, staff activity on the block every few years. Ask "Would we start this now, if we were not already doing it?" If the answer is no, ask "What do we have to do to stop wasting resources on it?"

Slough off past successes, near-misses, failures. Make a business x-ray, list all products, their markets, channels, stage in life cycle. Make a plan to determine efforts, deadlines, manpower for innovation projects.

Nothing so concentrates managers on innovation, then knowing the existing will be abandoned tomorrow. Put your best performers on innovation. Success exploitation must be staffed with the ablest people available, rather then with whom we can spare.
Match org structures, staffing, incentives.

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+ posted by Frank at + 15:15 + + + 0 Comments + + +Links to this post + + +

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by Richard Branson

Another book by a successful entrepreneur, even much more so than Felix Dennis. This expanded edition is laced with green awareness stuff, which my be well for the survival of mankind, but I doubt it had anything to do with Branson's success.

My main impression is that he was successful, because he (1) combines a deep belief in that he can do it with (2) trying another way. He's just not giving up, and he's not so dumb to keep doing what does not work. He finds ways around the obstacles. It's like skeptical optimism.

Dick's the secret formula to get rich: do not try to. It's not so important. Enjoy your life. Work hard, believe in what you do, enjoy what you do.

Success is driven by goals. Aim high. Always try. Challenge yourself.

Do the hard sell and promote yourself. (He spends about a third of his time on this)

Just do it. Do whatever you do with your whole heart and as good as you can. Once decided, put all your strength into it.

Never give up. (This contradicts killing off failures quickly. I think it comes back to believing overall, but trying different ways.)

Try to be different rather than compete in a crowded market.

Plan and prepare -- if you want to do anything well.

If work is not fun anymore, ask yourself why? If you can't fix it, stop it.

You have to invest money to make money.

Avoid risks -- that is, take risks, but don't be stupid. Limit them as much as possible, and estimate them. Be bold, but do not gamble. Calculate risks and take them.

Keep your word. Do not commit, do not make a promise if you do not want to keep it.

No regrets, no looking back (other than to avoid repeating mistakes).

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+ posted by Frank at + 14:49 + + + 0 Comments + + +Links to this post + + +

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Thursday, December 11, 2008

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Find processor information under linux on the command line:
cat /proc/cpuinfo

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+ posted by Frank at + 12:11 + + + 0 Comments + + +Links to this post + + +

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Sunday, December 07, 2008

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+ + The equation that couldn't be solved + +

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By Mario Livio



I'm gumming up this blog with book reviews, even if there is no real insight gained from them. In this case, my take home message is that Evchariste Galois was a genius and a romantic who forever changed maths by inventing group theory before he was shot at the age of 20 in a duel, and his life would make a fine subject for a hollywood movie a la "A beautiful mind".



The life stories of him and a bunch of other mathematicians who quested to solve quadratic, cubic, and quartic formulas and prove that there can be no general formulistic solution for the quintic make up the bulk. There is an explanation of what a group is (closure, associativity, identity, inverse) and a few simple examples of groups plus explanations that they are used to describe symmetry. There is a nice section showing that if you are looking for the best mate, but can't go back to earlier ones you separated from, sampling about one third of the overall you could have and then sticking to the first one better than all these after that is the best strategy - which means if the best one was in the first third, you'll have to try all and will get stuck to the last one ... I assume unless you'd turn out to not be their final choice and end up alone.

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+ posted by Frank at + 16:33 + + + 0 Comments + + +Links to this post + + +

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Saturday, November 29, 2008

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+ + Speed reading + +

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I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia. -- Woody Allen

Unfortunately it seems that speed reading is just so much snake oil. In practical terms, speed reading is apparently just skimming.

There are two limitations to how fast you can read: first, the physical limitation of how fast you can move your eyes and how much text you can recognize with each time you fixate your gaze. Second, the cognitive limitation of how fast you can understand ideas.

Your normal reading rate should be somewhere between 200 and 300 words per minute (wpm). Mine is about 230 wpm. At this speed comprehension and recall should be near 100%, although apparently most people fall short and do only get about 75%.

Speed reading proponents claim you can improve that rate up to 1000 wpm and more without significant loss of comprehension. What techniques do they propose to improve speed?

First, improve the physical limit by training to fixate on larger groups of words, and avoid jumping back to words already looked at. This will cut down the time your eyes need to move and focus, which is time spent not actually recognizing and parsing words. Holding the text at a moderate distance helps to see more than holding it close up. Good light and concentration helps. You also can use a reading aid to help you guide youir eyes - a thin pen seems to work better than a finger. I believe these techniques are reasonable, and may allow you to speed up to somewhat above 300 wpm. Even without training you can achieve this rate if you just work very concentrated.

Second, you can use typical browsing techniques like first reading the table of contents, quickly leafing through or glancing over the pages to get a general idea about the structure and content, or skimming the text to pick out important ideas. This also works quite well and allows you to see the larger patterns of organization which you might miss when mired in the details of reading word for word. But you pay for it by missing a lot of these details and possibly a lot of the important ideas. I'm not sure how far this actually speeds you up if you want to parse everything. But in cases like a newspaper or scientific journal, where you do not want to read every article, this can significantly cut down the time you need, by allowing you to just read those parts which are of interest. Again, these techniques do not really require training.

Finally, there are techniques that speed reading vendors promise will enable you to read thousands of words a minute without loss of comprehension: You train reading at speeds faster than your comprehension, to train your ability of absorbing ideas, just as running repeatedly would train your endurance or pushing weights would train your strength. You use a pointer to swipe over pages reading text in both directions and several lines at a time, until you're gobbling up whole paragraphs at a glance. You're supposed to train like this for several minutes every day. I read the eponymous "Speed Reading" book by Tony Buzan, which is all pseudo-scientific gibberish, anecdotal hearsay evidence and promotional hyperbole both for speed reading and his various other endeavors. Disgusting. I have low hopes that this stuff would work out.

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+ posted by Frank at + 22:10 + + + 0 Comments + + +Links to this post + + +

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/test.cc b/test.cc new file mode 100644 index 0000000..13b2384 --- /dev/null +++ b/test.cc @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +#include + +using namespace std; + +int main(int argc, char **argv) { + cout << "it is a test of cpp!" << endl; + cout << "the patch test of git" << endl; + + return 0; +}