MisterWilliam - William Chang

Theory of Social Hierarchies

2007-08-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

The clearest way to observe a social hierarchy is to observe who dates who. People rarely date a person that occupies different level of the social hierarchy than they do.

Thirteen in the morning

2007-07-24T23:23:00.000-07:00

If you ever stay up past lunch time till 1 PM you should be able to call it thirteen in the morning to underscore your achievement. Maybe when I get back to school I will try it out.

2007-05-09T23:30:00.000-07:00

New Product Idea:

.Mac clone:
* combines:
blogging,
photosharing,
file sharing,
desktop publishing,
email,
calender

2007-05-09T23:26:00.000-07:00

"Even though it's been my primary professional tool for over 13 years, I swear to God I still don't know what most of the icons do."
-Jason Pontin Editor in Chief of Technology Review

2007-01-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

Reading "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"

2005-12-31T04:06:00.000-08:00

I am reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I can't believe that they use this as a textbook for an introductory course at some schools. It's really a pretty hard book. I think I am going to have to skip a lot of the exercises and material if I want to finish the book in a sort of timely manner. A free online copy of the book is available. I'm reading that version right now, but I think I will buy it eventually. (If you look at the Amazon comments you will see that Peter Norvig and Paul Graham highly recommend this book.)

Paul Graham's Strategy for ViaWeb

2005-12-29T14:39:00.000-08:00

This is what I claim Paul Graham's winning strategy for ViaWeb.

"We were a tiny startup, programming as hard as we could in order to put technical barriers between us and our competitors." -Paul Graham in "Beating the Averages" article

Wall Street Programmer

2005-12-27T16:09:00.000-08:00

Wall Street Programmer is a blog by a Wall Street Programmer. He describes it as "Thoughts, insights and justified profanity from a Wall Street Programmer" which is a good description. His posting title "Finding a Programming Job on Wall Street" is an example of some of the great postings he has.

How to learn Ruby

2005-12-26T12:33:00.000-08:00

Recently, I have been trying to learn Ruby. In case anybody else is trying to learn Ruby here is what I think is the easiest way to learn Ruby without buying a book.

Read the book "Programming Ruby" to get the syntax down. The first version of "Programming Ruby" is available online for free. (The second version which is the most up to date version you have to pay for.)
Read the online book "Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby" for coding examples.

I don't mean that you should read either in it's entirety, but you can jump back and forth between the books. They seem to go through the material in pretty much the same order. The "Programming Ruby" book seems better at describing the syntax. "Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby" seems to be better at helping you remember it.

It took me about 1.5 weeks to learn Ruby up to the pointt where the books start talking about metaprogramming. And I think I am stopping at this point because I have decided I feel like refreshing my Python right now.

Microsoft is releasing it's Office format

2005-11-21T19:25:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is public releasing the format of it's Office product line. Now people can create their own word processors that are compatible with Microsoft products without having to try to reverse engineer the formatting. Microsoft has long kept it's format secret to prevent competitors (OpenOffice) from successfully creating office productivity that were fully compatible. Refer to my Oct. 19 post that links to an written on Sept. 2005 predicting the the doom of Microsoft if they did not open up their format because the EU could force all it's countries to use Open Document Format.

The [European Union] Commission is eager to promote e-government services, but is concerned about access to public documents created in proprietary formats such as Microsoft Office. It is keen to ensure that all EU citizens are able to access electronic government documents without being obliged to buy a specific company’s software.

Had Microsoft failed to act on the issue, the Commission could have stopped using Microsoft Office for the creation of public documents and advised all 25 national governments in the European Union to do the same.

People trump process, and politics trump people

2005-11-02T12:30:00.000-08:00

I don't remember when Boehm said this but he said recently in lecture that people trump process, but politicis trump people. In other words having good people in your company is more important than having a good process model. (People trump process.) But good people can be prevented from doing good work by office politics. (Politics trump people.)

I was thinking about this and it occurred to me that office politics has a lot to do with how the reward structure is organized in a company which is very related to process.

However if I think the bottom line is that you can over optimize your process model. You just have to optimize to the point where it is good enough. Having good programmers should be the focus point. To tie it in with framework that Boehm mentioned about people trumping process and politics trumping people, you just have to get your process mature enough that the politics stop trumping the people. Stated another way, your process has to be good enough so that programmers can do their job.

Alternative viewpoint reference:
Joel Spolsky has something interesting to say related to this. He says that if you build a company where good programmers want to work, they will come. And through having good programmers at your company you will have good software and ultimately be profitable. Best place I could find where he talks about this is in his article title "Converting Capital into Software that Works". I seem to remember there being a better article somewhere though that even has a figure or something like that.

Why is MyFace so Popular?

2005-10-28T01:18:00.000-07:00

Link to a blog about why MySpace is so popular in spite of it's horrible UI. I have been wondering a similar thing about Xanga recently. I don't get why so many people us Xanga when it's interface is so horrible. Even some of my programmer friends use it. Of all people they should know better. Anyways, the conversation that is in the comments section discusses a lot of interesting ideas. I don't really know if I really agree with it all, but something to think about.

What Should I Do Next?

2005-10-27T16:07:00.000-07:00

Criteria for deciding how much planning/research is optimal:

Payoff varies widely among different options.
Probability of randomly choosing high payoff options is low.
Planning/research has a high probability of leading to high payoff options.
Cost of planning/research is great enough to negate the benefit of choosing high payoff options.
There exists significant side benefits to the planning/research.

Ideas adapted from a lecture slide Barry Boehm in CSCI 510 called "Conditions for Successful Prototyping (or Other Info-Buying).

On the other hand, there is always the "Do something even if it is wrong idea" which points out that you can spend so much time considering alternatives that you never actually end up doing anything at all.

Short auto-bio of Steve Jobs given as part of a commmencement speech at Stanford

2005-10-27T00:55:00.000-07:00

I was browsing on the internet and stumbled upon this transcript of speech given by Steve Jobs. I always thought that Steve Jobs was some arrogant jerk. I have no idea where I got this impression but some it got passed down to me. Sorry Steve. I just stole this photo of Steve Jobs of somebody's flickr (legally), but I have no idea if this has anything to do with the commencement speech even though banner is Stanford's. Here is an excerpt.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

Trying Picasa2 out

2005-10-27T00:18:00.000-07:00

Okay I'm trying the Picasa2 Blog this feature out. Old picture of me eating with some UCLA Grace On Campus buddies at A&W after a retreat.

Quote from Boehm

2005-10-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

"Unquantifiable goals require subjective resolution
But effective presentation techniques can help decision process"
-Barry Boehm

Barry Boehm makes lots of good points. Just a recent point from lecture.

I know it is pretty obfuscated, but basically he is saying that when you are trying to make (business) decisions based upon goals that you cannot quantify (represent numerically) you need to rely upon subjective reasoning, but using effective presentation techniques can help make these decisions a lot easier.

I guess what exactly is mean by effective presentation techniques would really be helpful. I'll get to that later.

Why OpenDocument Won

2005-10-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

An article, "Why OpenDocument Won" mostly about how Microsoft will lose the document format war. The article shows organizations that are picking up the Open Office format OpenDocument over the Microsoft Word format as their standard format. And gives reasons for why the OpenDocument format is more suited to these organization's needs.
If this articles predictions are true that Microsoft will lose the war over the document standard it is very significant to the future of Microsoft since their Office lines accounts for 40% of their revenue according to this article.

Sun and Google joining forces

2005-10-19T22:02:00.000-07:00

Apparently Sun and Google made some sort of a deal recently. The google task bar will come with any Jave Runtime Environment download and Google will help promote the spread of OpenOffice. Some parts of the deal are not yet publicized.

Old PC Magazine Article examining blogging phenomenon

2005-10-15T22:04:00.000-07:00

I was curious how many scholarly papers have been published about the blogging phenomenon. So I did a google scholar search on blog. I found no papers from academia of interest. (I really didn't search that long.)

I found an interesting old PC Magazine article from 2002. I guess it was an early article about blogging. The author lists 5 reasons why he thought people blog. I thought they were interesting.

Ego gratification. Some people need to be the center of attention. It makes them feel good about themselves to tell the world what important things they've been doing and what profound thoughts they've been having. Curiously, while this looks like the most obvious reason for a Web log, I think it's probably the least likely reason, since it's too trite and shallow.
Antidepersonalization. When people begin to think that they are nothing more than a cog in the wheel of society, they look for any way to differentiate themselves. The Web log proves they are different. Just read it. You'll see.

Elimination of frustration. Day-to-day life, especially in the city, is wrought with frustration, and the Web log gives people the ability to complain to the world. You get to read a lot of complaining in these logs. If you think I'm a complainer, oh boy!

Societal need to share. As a cynic who gets paid to write, I have a hard time with this explanation. But it seems some people genuinely like to "share," and this is one way.

Wanna-be writers. A lot of people want to be published writers. Blogs make it happen without the hassle of getting someone else to do it or having to write well—although there is good writing to be found. Some is shockingly good. Most of it is miserable. I expect to see those Open Learning classes around the country offering courses in Blog writing.

hiring only the best

2004-11-11T13:56:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the implications of various studies in Software Engineering that it is not so much the quality of the process one goes through to make software but the quality of the programmers that determines how good the software will turn out to be. The Mythical Man-Month by Brooks says "If a 200-man project has 25 managers who are the most competent and experienced programmers, fire the 175 troops and put the managers back to programming." In Joel Spolsky's article the guerrilla guide to interviewing is another article that sort of gets at the same thing. He recommends only hiring the superstar programmers and goes onto describing an interviewing process that allows you to find them.
The point is this, it seems that if you want to have a company that produces real good software you need to hire only the most capable programmers and nobody else. I think that points to a limitation of outsourcing. Sure outsourcing programmers will produce something good in many cases but writing good code is a difficult process and outsourcing just makes the problem more difficult.
It also points out that I need to become a better programmer. Okay, back to studying.

Getting a job

2004-10-24T18:42:00.000-07:00

For getting a good programming job here is some advice I found on the internet:
Joel Spolsky's Guerilla Guide to Interviews
Dan Kegel's Web Page - Dan Kegel works for google.

2004-10-24T18:37:00.000-07:00

SEO - search enginer optimization...
Phil Craven's website