Noteworthy Individual: George Shultz
With George P. Shultz
Just met Mr. George P. Shultz. The former US secretary of state, among other positions he has held.
Noteworthy Individual: Chuck Armstrong
With Chuck Armstrong
Today I met Mr. Chuck Armstrong, president of the Seattle Mariners.
Squanderville vs. Thriftville by Warren Buffet
This has been out for a while now, but I really liked how Buffet explains how a trade imbalance is hurting us big time.
Boeing Outsourcing ADDS $12 to $18 Billion to Cost of 787
An excellent tale of Outsourcing meets Comparative Advantage. Many slash-n-outsource execs just apply outsourcing blindly and forget the most basic principals of economics. While many things can and should be outsourced, this doesn't apply to everything. There are many critical parts of an operation that are best served by keeping them in-house. Here is what happened in the Boeing 787 project:
Boeing was forced to compensate, support or buy out the partners it brought in to share the cost of the new jet's development, and now bears the brunt of additional costs due to the delays.
Some Wall Street analysts estimate those added costs at between $12 billion and $18 billion, on top of the $5 billion Boeing originally planned to invest.
In a classic Dilbert's Salary Theorem move, those who knew less made the decision.
And yet, at least one senior technical engineer within Boeing predicted the outcome of the extensive outsourcing strategy with remarkable foresight a decade ago.
...
Hart-Smith, who had worked for Douglas Aircraft and joined Boeing when it merged in 1997 with McDonnell Douglas, was one of the elite engineers designated within the company as Senior Technical Fellows.
…
Hart-Smith argued that it was wrong to use that financial measure as a gauge of performance and that outsourcing would only slash profits and hollow out the company.
Read the full article at The Seattle Times.
Dilbert’s Salary Theorem
This is a funny oldie, but it still bares repeating.
I originally saw it here.
Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work
Nigel doesn't really go into details in this TED talk, but he does say something interesting:
“There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet screaming desperation. Where they work long hard hours. At jobs they hate. To enable them to buy things they don't need. To impress people they don't like.
It is my contention that going to work on a Friday in jeans and t-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue.”
My opinion is if I want to attain a work-life balance, then it would only be fair that my employees deserve the same. It makes sense really yet, as Nigel states, corporations are designed to suck as much energy out of you for their commercial benefit. That is essentially a short-sighted view of investing in human-beings. In economic terms, this is known as the increasing marginal opportunity cost.
Snippety Snip: Goodbye CableTV
I did it. Actually, I did it over 3 months ago. I called Comcast and canceled my CableTV. I wasn't watching any of the stupid junk they had. But I was paying a monthly increasing fee. My Comcast bill would grow a few dollars every month. I was being scammed. I decided to cut the cable and go cold turkey. I didn't know what shows I would be able to get over the air and on the Internet. But I just couldn't continue the insanity.
I kept their Internet service. I must admit, their Internet is the best I can find in my area. And it is very reliable. So what's my current setup? Over-the-air HDTV, AppleTV, and Netflix.
The free over-the-air HDTV carried virtually all the shows I was paying for, but for free (The Office, Community, Outsourced, etc…). My son found an excellent channel we didn't know about called Qubo.
Qubo.com
When I decided to get an AppleTV, I was sure I wasn't going to use it to rent or buy shows or movies from them. It was purely for an excellent easy to use interface to watch online content like CNet TV, The Economist, TED, and NY Times Video to name a few.
Fawlty Towers
So I got to save a bit more than $100 a month AND I got to significantly improve my TV content's quality. I have one thing to say to CableTV. Snippety snip.
Why High Food Prices in US Have Little Impact? We’re Not Eating Real Food
Citi's comment on US economic vulnerabilities concludes that high food prices have virtually no impact on the US economy. So while the rest of the world is up in arms fighting over the increasing price of food, we here in the US are essentially immune to that problem. We depend on relatively very little real food. Most of what we consider food-as we all know-is heavily processed stuff. Here is how Citi put it:
“For the U.S., vulnerability to a food price “shock” is very low, reflecting a low
share of disposable income. Importantly, food prices in the U.S. (and some
other developed countries) are also exceptionally stable, reflecting the very
high processing and marketing share of costs, and low “raw commodity”
content.”
Yes, you read that right. Our food has so little raw commodity content that when the cost of raw commodities fluctuates it means virtually nothing to our food prices. In fact, they are exceptionally "stable".
A better word that comes to mind now is independent; as in, our food prices are independent of the cost of raw commodities (real food). That would better explain our economic immunity to real food price fluctuations. We are not eating real food!
P&Q:What Happens When You Apply to Stanford B-School
John A. Byrne of Poets & Quants:
“What happens when you submit an application to the most selective business school in the U.S.?
Stanford’s admission department is headed by Derek Bolton, who got his Stanford MBA in 1998 (Bolton, by the way, applied in round three and actually got through the screen.) He heads up a group of about 15 full-time staffers and a handful of additional readers who come on when applications hit their peak level in the fall and early winter. Bolton’s staff handled a record number of applications for the Class of 2011: 7,536 applications for just 385 spots, a fairly dramatic rise from the 4,868 who applied for admission three years earlier. The end result was that only 6.5% of those who applied received an offer of admission.”
Read the rest at Poets & Quants.
The article quoted above goes through essentially what I've been telling others who are trying to get into b-school. Here are some excerpts from a long reply I wrote when I was asked if I did anything special on my application:
No nothing special. And if there is one thing I would stress upon you it would be to not obsess on doing anything special. I went to a Harvard information session and the attendees were trying to figure out a strategic angle to use when writing their essays. Harvard alums were also saying that it took them months of painful agony to write their essays. The Harvard rep replied that if you try to get into their heads then you will fail. So don't do it. Do not go for a "special" elaborate essay. They will see right through it.
I did a quick glance over some websites that advertise their best way to write your essay and what you should and should not say. I must say I did not pay any attention to any of that stuff... I simply answered the questions asked concisely and without much theatrics or strategies. The questions are pretty straight forward and require very little creativity. You are applying to a business school, write like a business person. The basic rules of an essay will do.
Mentally focus on what they are asking, have a one paragraph introduction, and then tell the story of the answer and conclude it. Do not miss anything they asked for. For example, they usually ask you to talk about two major accomplishments at work and why you consider them to be major. Don't forget the part in the end that explains why you think they are major.
The way I looked at it was, if I read my essay as an investor who was being asked to invest $100K of my money in a person, would that essay convince me?
...Don't try to make things up. Just be yourself and be honest. Everyone goes through the same struggles at work. Your task is to do some self-reflection and describe how you've grown during that time. Be formal and have a calm tone. If you try to make it artificially special they will see right through it. They read thousands of these essays every year. They know all the tricks. I know you know what I'm talking about...Do the right thing. And if it does not work, then it wasn't the right school for you anyway.
On studying for the GMAT:
My advise on studying for the GMAT is to use prep material like Veritas (or any other you like) very early before you sit with the official GMAT guide. For me, Veritas covered things in much more detail and defined the scope of what's in and what's not. Then when you are done with that material move on to the official GMAT guide. I would suggest Dabral Review's videos. They are free, to the point, and very well done. You might also avail yourself of Dabral's tuition servires.Veritas Prep Material available at Amazon and Apple iBooks
Another excellent free and amazing resource is Khan Academy. The videos are pretty good. Do not go into the exam without reviewing the official guide. Veritas was good, but the style of the actual GMAT test is very close to the official guide and nothing else.
I'm not affiliated with any of these recommendations. I just think they are excellent.
This reminds me of a little tool I built to help me get a few things drilled in my brain. I did a quick Javascript-based flash card page. Here is the link:
http://ahmad.baitalmal.com/gmfc/
I designed it to run on iOS devices just by loading it and keeping it open. Just one file, HTML and JS. You can modify it if you like. Enjoy.
A Quick Update from WSU
The good folks at Washington State University (my alma mater) were kind enough to do a follow up piece on their blog.
All I can say is, GO COUGS!
Amazon Prime Fail-Shipping to the Past
I ordered a book from Amazon (yes, Amazon fulfillment) on January 30th. Since I'm an Amazon Prime subscriber, I was told I could have it here by the 2nd. But today (Feb 3rd) I am informed that it just shipped. And here is my tracking information:
Shipping to the past
What’s Productivity? Office Time or Throughput?
Early in my career, I realized that the idea of working in an office seemed strange. I knew people went to offices and sat there working on something all day. The thing that I noticed over and over was that offices never struck me as focal points of productivity. You can walk into the average office today and point out a dozen activities that seem like an absolute waste of resources. If you ask the people running those offices, you would get the impression that the last thing they wanted to hear was inefficiency. So how come offices seemed like massive sink holes for productivity?
The first drain is scheduling. In most cases, a workplace is really nothing more than a physical location that drains money. It becomes a black hole of resource consumption. It is expensive to open an office, so you need to produce more, so you hire more, so you get a bigger office, so you produce more, and you hire more, and so on. People expend energy every day to get there. They waste time and incur costs getting ready and travel to and from that workplace. And they all have to do it at the same time. Synchronizing alone eats up more resources. Then when they are there, they are all there at the same time. Essentially clogging up the office environment.
In Operations Management, this would be called a deliberate bottleneck. The office as we know it today is a system that seems to be designed to deliberately make us much less productive (like the Qwerty keyboard layout, see the Dvorak layout). The current notion of a workplace seems to have been blindly copied from the production factory model. When producing physical items, synchronizing, scheduling, and capacity planning are essential to increase productivity. But while we view our offices and office workers as factories, we never apply the same concepts that we learned from our experience while running factories.
In his book The Goal, Eliyahu Goldratt attempts to explain this efficiency concept through a fictional character who tries to save a factory from being shut down. The main point of the book is to uncover the false belief that productivity can be measured through the rate of consumption of resources to produce items. In fact, productivity should be measured by what he calls Throughput. And Throughput is the rate at which a system generates money through sales.
So how does this apply to our typical office? The typical manager throws resources all in a big jumble on a daily basis and attempts to extract productivity out of it. True productivity comes when the office is producing the most value with the least resources. Yet the typical office experience chomps off at least three hours out of every workers day during the commute alone. Not to mention lunch hour, work chatter, interruptions, mindless meetings, and shoulder tapping. The office is the slowest and least efficient operating facility in most companies. The most valuable and most creative workers in a company would all tell you that they are most productive anywhere but the office. Isn't that just swell?
In this TED presentation, Jason Fried does a better job visualizing what's wrong with what we call the office life. The popularity of "The Office" show is in large measure the result of many of us identifying that nonsensical experience. In the US and in other knowledge worker societies where production has shifted strongly into the services industry, the typical office today is as productive as a zoo. And indeed, it is not hard to find that sentiment coming from the typical office worker.
The Internet has ushered in the age of telecommuting. Some of the most productive people I have worked with for years have been people I have never met in person. And I relied on them to do the most complex and critical tasks in my company. Still, to many managers today, the idea of telecommuting is abhorrent and almost vile. They subscribe to the factory slave mentality. If they can't see the worker working, then how do they know work is being done? Their answer is always to ask for more resources. More money for a big office with office furniture and office equipment. More money for office assistants and administrators. More money for maintenance, utilities, Internet, entertainment, and cheesy activities. They will cite the need for face-time and give it so much weight you would think the office is really a social club. Not to mention personal conflict issues and the potential risk of office environment litigation. Yet the real valuable of converting inventory into sales (Throughput) is almost undoubtedly completely independent of all of this malarky. This erroneous view is mentally limited and probably the main catalyst of inefficiency.
If the goal of a company is to create value, then productivity is the most important measure to focus on. Thinking that forcing the physical time and location of a worker guarantees the most productivity is juvenile. Yet it is common practice even today. Whether a worker is here or there does not matter. What matters most is Throughput. If the work is being done on time and on spec it does not matter where it was done. The important thing is that more and more of it gets done. Yet many managers are still stuck in that assembly line of exhausted workers cracking a whip and trying to squeeze out more from a broken system. You will always here "we need more resources" and when you add more, you get less.
It is simple, office time does not translate into productivity. Only Throughput does.
The Time has Come. No More IP Addresses. Time for IPv6
A couple of weeks ago I was watching this video of Vinton Cerf talking about the soon-to-come shortage of IP addresses (see timestamp 3:30).
Well, this morning I read the headline Internet Runs Out Of Addresses As Devices Grow.
Right on time. Let's see how much dancing Comcast and the other US providers will do before they do the right thing.
“I can’t spare this man. He Tweets.”
Ulysses S. Grant was Abraham Lincoln's tenth general to head the Union Army. The president was frustrated with each of the previous generals but he noticed Grant's trail of success and decided to put him in charge. Grant was a winning bet for Lincoln.
The tech industry today is analogous. Tech warriors battle it out on the market-share landscape. From the moment you open your browser or use any internet service you are transported into the battlefield. Bombarded with all sorts of methods and tools to pull you into some company's slice of the market share pie. Thus it becomes clear that finding and retaining good generals is essential to winning.
HR practices in a company essentially make or destroy a company. Before Google offered any public stock it made headlines because of its extreme attention to employee qualifications. Is that a 100% guarantee that a company will succeed? Of course not. But it does make sense and greatly improves the odds for the company. The questions then becomes how to find the Grants out there.
It took Lincoln 10 tries. He had to use a brute force algorithm to find his general. He went through them one after the other until he had enough information to suggest that Grant was the man. It all boiled down to his track record. When he was criticized for choosing Grant, Lincoln simply said "I can't spare this man. He fights".
I find it amusing these days to hear that company X hired a hot shot from company Y with no real tangible track record of any kind. It is the same misguided attitude we experienced in the first tech bubble but now there is a social-networking twist to it. Could you imagine a CEO saying "I can't spare this person, S/He is popular on Twitter for some reason".
To Beat the GMAT, You Must Become the GMAT
A big part of embarking on the graduate b-school saga is the GMAT-Graduate Management Admission Test. I don't think I have ever been as stressed as I was when I was preparing for this test. It was everything I thought about day and night for at least three months. Understandably so, most top schools require it. The only exception is MIT. They have their own reasoning and I do agree with it. The GMAT is culturally biased towards the US. This is most pronounced in the verbal section of the test. Requiring thorough knowledge of American idioms seems a bit off especially when a school is trying to build an internationally diverse set of cohorts.
One thing that really bugged me about many fellow GMAT takers was their attitude towards the GMAT itself. Many-though not all of course-treated it as an annoying requirement that returned no value. I totally disagree with that. Preparing for the GMAT is a solid business learning experience in and of itself. If the GMAT preparation process is not taken seriously, earning a graduate school degree will be reduced to a feeble exercise in mediocrity.
As master Yoda once said, do, or do not… there is no try.
I’m Going to Stanford GSB Sloan
I had an acronym for my target list of graduate schools; HSBC. No, not the bank. That stood for Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley/Columbia. I guess I also have to mention MIT as well even though they don't really fit in that nice acronym. But they were definitely on my list as well. The Sloan program is offered by only three schools in the world. MIT, London School of Business, and Stanford GSB.
Going through the ivy graduate school experience I met various people. Each with their own trajectory towards a goal of some sort. The common theme right before the application deadlines was having a first choice school and a list of backups. My first choice was Stanford so when I got the phone call that I was in I was extremely happy. I didn't have to worry about my backups. It does feel awkward to consider those schools as backups. They are excellent schools in their own right. But my heart was set of Stanford (the Sloan program specifically) so I am extremely pleased.
Folly of Many a CS Major
Nerd George Bush. source: FreakingNews.com
After reading this article on Business Insider today, I must say it is not really their fault entirely. It is rather the collective misunderstanding of this emerging phenomenon we call computers. Perhaps it is the luddite archetype still lurking in our subconscious whispering “them puter’s be too much math for me". It is understandable that there are people who still do not have email addresses, or even cite their lack of fast typing ability as the only thing keeping them from logging on to the “Internets". Chalk that up to not having put much thought into it.
But if you decide to go with Computer Science (CS) as a major, one would think you gave that a bit of thought. Right? Apparently, not necessarily. But again, it is not entirely their fault. Our society has a really messed up vision of what CS majors really do.
When Gandalf the White gave the Friday Sermon
If you've ever experienced a Bollywood movie you will know exactly what I'm increasingly witnessing these days in our mosques. Consider this comical clip of a guy knocking out six guys in a row all at once.
I'm not sure if this came from a Bollywood movie, but it bares the traits of what has become the signature of silly Bollywood movies. In Hollywood movies, you would only see this over-the-top physical comedy in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kind of movie. But when you are asked to swallow this kind of silly theatric in any other context, say a drama or an action movie, it becomes distracting at the very least, if not downright painful and awkward to watch.
Sadly, our Friday sermons have long suffered the effects of creeping Bollywood-ness. The Imams, and/or their assistants, have discovered the reverb and echo dials on their amplifier boxes and have been going to town with them. I sat through sermons that went on for 30 minutes without being able to discern a full sentence. The amp echo was cranked up so high I couldn't tell when one sentence ended and another started. It was like hearing seven clones speak out of sync.
Advancing Human Civilization Through Open Source Software
Epistemology is an area of philosophy that is concerned with studying human knowledge and justified belief. Human civilization advanced with the increased ability to transfer and propagate knowledge. Computing and the internet are the tools we rely on in the information age to advance human knowledge and civilization. Open source software provides a model for sharing and retaining knowledge equitably throughout the world.
However, it lacks mainstream adoption for various perception-related reasons. This research paper studies current computer usage through a survey of social network users as primary research. The results show that users, regardless of their philosophical, civil, or social beliefs, are significantly more accepting of open source software through the prism of the internet. Coincidentally, this is an area open source software is strong at.
Read more to download the research document.
Featured on WSU’s Blog
Washington State University (WSU) featured me on their blog, and here it is...
http://wsu-online.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-wanted-more-much-more.html
Suffering the Pseudoscience of Sorcery
Ali Sibat with his kids
On the morning of Friday, April 2nd 2010, in a Saudi Arabian jail cell in Riyadh, a father of five from a rural village in Lebanon named Ali Sibat was told to get ready for his beheading later that afternoon. The horrible news fell hard on his mother, his wife, his children, and his brother. Adding to their pain was the fact that they had no voice in the matter. Sibat had not been assigned a lawyer in the Saudi court system.
His family did receive legal counsel from a Lebanese legal expert but they have no real access to the Saudi legal system. They decided to go public with their plea by enlisting the help of the satellite television station where Sibat worked. Sibat hosted a TV show about fortune telling and sorcery. He was a popular TV fortuneteller, made popular to a large degree by Saudi viewers and callers. His viewers were strong believers in superstition and fortune telling. It is ironic that the Saudis want to kill him for the very reason many members of their society made him so successfully popular.
Exporting Oil Back to Saudi Arabia
Like many Americans, I have struggled with my weight for the majority of my life. I said “majority” instead of “all” because it wasn’t always like that. There was a time when I didn’t have this problem. And I didn’t grow up American. I grew up in Saudi Arabia.
Up until I was 9 years old, I weighed the normal weight for my age. Then one night, my dad came home with dinner. It was something we had never seen before. We could tell this was something different. It didn’t smell like the usual stuff he brought home like lamb gyros, beans, or chicken with rice. This dinner had a logo, and it spelled Hardee’s.
travelpod.com
Even before he opened the bag, the smell quickly drew the family towards it like a cube of sugar in an ant farm. It smelled different, it spoke to our deepest desires, and we paid attention. As we sat down at the table we set out the plates and spoons. We soon realized, however, how redundant that new food made those eating devices. There were burgers each wrapped individually, and french fries portioned in little paper holders for each member of the family. The fries were crunchy and salted enough to drive us towards those Hardee’s labeled soda cups pretty quick. The meal was a new wonderful and fun experience. There was just one thing that didn’t satisfy me. I wanted more. Much more.
Are you really “Buying” an eBook?
I saw a link today to buy a textbook online and decided to checkout the latest shenanigan the textbook publishers were peddling these days. I found myself at CourseSmart.com looking at what appeared to be the best eTexbook experience I could imagine. They had everything figured out and addressed pretty well. They had full text search, allowed reasonable copy and paste, allowed printing, enabled online and offline reading, even page numbers were made to match the printed version. I was hard pressed to think of an eBook sore-thumb they haven't tended to.
For just a few moments I wondered if somewhere out there in some distant forest a lion laid peacefully besides a lamb.
Alas, my poor eyes were swiftly and ruthlessly assaulted with this sharpest of insults:
This publisher and I differed to no insignificant measure on the simple concept of "Buying". One would innocently assume that by pressing the green button captioned "Buy Online Version" that one would respectively "Own" something at the end of this "Buying" exercise. Not so with this dimwitted excuse of a technologically progressive publisher.
It turns out, what you are really "Buying" is a mere 180 days ownership of self-evaporating book. That's right, 180 days after you "Buy" this book, you will automatically be relieved of your ownership burden.
If you don't realize how insulting that is, consider that at the very least the emperor owned and got to keep his imaginary new clothes.
How pathetic...
You’ve Never Seen Saudi Arabia This Beautiful
Yousef Raffah did an amazing job capturing the essence of Jiddah like I've never seen before. I recognize some of the locations, it just never occurred to me...
Jiddah By Yousef Raffah. Click to see slideshow of his latest work.
Check out his website at http://yousef.raffah.com
I Have Found Beauty & Elegance
...in the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. The answers this nugget provides are amazing. I’m blown away. Learn more about it at Wikipedia.
I’m Speaking at O’Reilly OSCON 2008
This is one of the biggest Open Source events around. It's really exciting to be part of this conference.
I plan on talking about how we at Etelos support and advocate open standards, open source developers, and the impact that is having on the industry.
What’s Blogging?
What made blogging popular? What changed from the days when blogging was not known? The internet has been around much longer than blogging has, yet blogging is a relatively recent phenomenon.
The trigger is differentiation. It is the same thing that made us drop $5 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks as we abandoned Dunkin Donuts and their fried carbohydrates. They both served coffee, but if Dunkin Donuts started charging that much for their coffee we would not have bought it. We knew what coffee was and have come to expect it in a certain style and environment. Starbucks weren't really selling coffee, they were selling something else. They were different. In our minds, it was not coffee as we expected it.
But there was one more trick; the moniker. Starbucks didn't call it coffee, joe, or -even the exotic favorite- java. They called it something else. Indeed, I didn't know what a Latte was until I had tried it.
Blogging, is the moniker that stipulated the experience we expected when we "blog". Along with the environment that blogging software provided, these two innovations made blogging what it is today. Before, a person would "publish" content on a "website" that was run by a "webmaster". You had to be cool, proper, or otherwise straight-up interesting for your thoughts to be "published".
But now, those layers of complexity have been peeled off. You just be yourself, relax, say what you may. Your posts needn't conform to any editorial style or a webmaster's timeline. And that is a different experience that has a different name; a different moniker. That is the differentiator.
How could this post be useful to you? Think about what you are producing, is it different? should it be? should it go by a different name?
Vimeo: YouTube in HD and On Steroids
So far, Vimeo looks awesome. Let's see how far these people will go. I like them because they are much cleaner that YouTube, and they seem to be quality driven. Here is a sample.
Fresh Arabic Coffee and Dates
In 1994 my father passed away in my arms. It was Eid, the day after Ramadan. Every Muslim knows that day very well. It is the single most celebrated day in the Muslim tradition. It shouldn’t be that way really since it is also know as the Small Eid. Yes, there is the Bigger Eid. The day after the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. That really should be the bigger celebration but for our human nature. The Small Eid marks the end of a month long state of fasting and reflection. Many Muslims do take advantage of the holy month and pray, read, and remind themselves that it might be their last Ramadan. But for many other Muslims this is just a disruption to their daily routine. So when the fasting and the praying is over they celebrate it with passion. Or at least that’s the story I made up in my head about it. To me and my family, that day has a much different meaning.
Around the end of the Ramadan of 1994 in Saudi Arabia my dad, for some reason, wanted to go traveling to Jeddah and Mecca. We were in Taif at that time and those three cities were about 100 km apart. His diabetes had progressed to the point where his eyesight was too weak for him to drive safely. I jumped at the chance to spend some father-son time with my dad. We set off on a trip together to go where ever he wanted.
We spent the next two week hopping from relative to friend to memorable location. Along the drive he told me things I had never heard him mention before. Stories about his youth, about his friends, and about life in general. I remember a moment when we just enjoyed listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen out of all things.
The most interesting thing he talked about was a great grandfather of ours who made it his life’s work to collect every kind of musical instrument he could get his hands on. He was an enlightened explorer who journeyed the world and brought back many of its wonders. Sadly, this was frightening to many people. So after he passed away, his collections and library were mostly burned and thrown away. My dad said that with sadness in his voice.
On our way back to Taif, we spend a day at my aunt’s house. He went to the market and bought fresh arabic coffee and dates. He gave them to my aunt and told her it was for Eid. The next morning I got up ready to head home, but I couldn’t find him in the house. He woke up early and went by himself to a Quran reading he used to attend when he was younger in Mecca. I was worried a bit because he fasted every single day during Ramadan. For a diabetic it is perfectly fine to skip the fasting part. But he insisted on performing a full month of fasting. When he came back I was relieved and surprised. He had the biggest smile on his face. He was beaming with happiness that he had the chance to attend one of those readings again. Shortly after that we got in our car and headed back to Taif. “One more small trip please” he said. He wanted to go to the Holy Mosque in Mecca. “It’s the end of Ramadan”, I said, “its extremely overcrowded.” But he insisted and so we went.
The Kaaba
I was never able to drive up so close to the main gate of the Mosque before but that day it was clear. Our car was the only car in that big white marble expanse. It was a scene like that of the King’s carriage approaching the gate. We walked out of the car and into the heart of the Mosque. I could feel he was very happy to be there. Little did I know that we would both be back in that same spot in a matter of days.
We finally started the trip back to Taif. Taif is at a higher elevation than Mecca and Jeddah. The climate is generally much cooler. That’s where my mom and the rest of our family were. We joined them as they were preparing for the gatherings of Eid. The night before Eid everyone was busy with some last minute shopping. My dad and I were just hanging out together ignoring everyone. My mom walked in and suggested we had better get our clothes ready for the morning. We all got ready and looked our best for the Eid prayer at 5 am.
Unfortunately I fell asleep around 4 am. So when it was time to go, I was deep asleep. Everyone in the house left and I stayed in bed. I heard them come home tired and exhausted. My dad laid his head next to mine and went to sleep. During Eid day, at least in Taif, after the early Eid prayer, people go home for a nap then wake up around noon time and start visiting each other. So you generally got to meet folks at least twice that day.
While I was deep in my extended nap, I was shaken up by my mom’s frantic voice. “Wake up!, help me”, she yelled. I couldn’t understand what she wanted but I immediately realized my dad next to me wasn’t looking right. He was confused and unresponsive. My mom was at his right, and I was at his left. I held him and I said “Dad, are you OK?”, but he just closed his eyes and stopped moving. He was absolutely motionless. I slowly noticed that my hand had been gripping at his, but now his hand felt empty. Like an empty glove. At that moment my mom and I looked at each other and dared not say a word. We didn’t want to say it or even think it for fear that if we acknowledged the situation it might come true.
The window above his head was open and a breeze of air came in. Nothing made a sound. The silence was broken by the call to noon prayer. And there in my arms, lay my father. The sun was shining on his face as the cool breeze gently waved his hair. Amidst the prayer call to come to God, my mother and I knew he was gone. Still we stood there calming each other. “It must be a coma” I said, my mom nodded her head in agreement. But her eyes had already betrayed her.
When the paramedics arrived, they pronounced him dead. A heart attack. Diabetes had finally got him. That’s when it really hit my mom, she fell to the floor and the paramedics turned their attention to her. It wasn’t easy for her to lose her life long companion, the father of six children. It still isn’t to this day. I on the other hand couldn’t even shed a tear. I had been telling my self for a very long time that this day would come. There is no point in acting all surprised and upset. I guess it was my way of denying my self grief. If I knew that day was coming and prepared for it I had no right to feel grief. That exercise didn’t last long.
The relatives and friends that he met in the morning came back in the afternoon only to be surprised to learn of his death. It feels awkward to meet someone in the morning and find them gone by the afternoon. I kept hearing the words “but I was talking to him this morning” all day long. Our Eid was never going to be the same again. Every Eid, around noon time, my mom and I look at each other. We both remember that moment all too well. I silently say a prayer. I’m sure she does too.
The Holy Mosque in Makkah
He was born in Mecca, so we decided to bury him there close to his family. Before a Muslim is buried he is taken to a Mosque where all attendants get to make a prayer for him. We went back to the Holy Mosque in Mecca, where he and I stood there only a couple of days earlier. You might have seen the Holy Mosque on TV. It has a black cube at the center of a white marble court. That black cube is called the Kába, it was built by the prophet Abraham and his son. During the holy month of Ramadan and Eid, around 2 million people gather there. They put my dad at the footsteps of the Kába and the whole Mosque stopped for a minute to pray for him.
That night, after the burial, all our friends and relatives went to my aunt’s house in Mecca. She served them fresh arabic coffee and dates.
Traps of the Cognitive Diameter
In his movie “Bowling for Columbine” host Michael Moore interviews the creators of the popular TV show “South Park”. One of them tries to explain the absurdity of the logic the killers followed. He points out that to those misguided kids, there was no world outside of their school life. And because they were unhappy, they wanted to do something about it. They should have understood that school is not the end. Even if they were abused or ridiculed unfairly, there certainly were other options to solve the problem. However, the size of their circle of understanding left them with the one option they finally took. I call that circle the Cognitive Diameter. I believe it is a measurable property in every human which may hold the key to predicting human behavior.
A Bit More “Orange” Please
Yes, we practice what we preach. I'm kicked out of my office these days awaiting some minor renovations to be done.
Over-Engineering
I believe this is one of the most destructive and under estimated bugs that inhibit devs (not code, but developers).
The outcome of over-engineering is heartbreaking on so many levels. Not only is the product destroyed, but resources are wasted, careers are ruined, and egos get crushed, in this case needlessly. But worst of all, this disease goes on undiagnosed decimating project after project.
I know I will get lambasted for saying this, but I honestly see this most (not all, most) with devs coming from a specific discipline. One that mainly uses a technology that starts with J and ends with AVA, referred to as J*** from here on.
Consider the following diagram to better understand what I'm noticing.
As I said, this behavior appears to manifest itself mainly within the J*** community. It is already an established fact (if it isn't, I'm establishing it now) that computer languages and the characters of the devs using them are tightly woven and intertwined. To know a dev is to know his languages.
Case and point, I indirectly got involved in a project that had been in the works for about 8 months already. The requirement was the classical multi-data-sources that needed a single merged view. The solution that was proposed and worked on by your friendly neighborhood J*** dev was a central data warehouse that collects data from many sources into a single Mega-DB. Then that DB would provide that data by merging it chronologically.
In 8 months, work on plug-ins that connect to many different kinds of sources and protocols was about 50% done (to my knowledge). The client was very unhappy, after all that time there wan nothing to show yet.
I cannot take credit for this one, so I must give credit where credit is due. Danny (our CEO) was asked to look at the problem and suggest a solution. Three (3) days later, the site was up and the client was pleased to see data flowing.
So how did he do it? the answer was RSS!
It was very easy for any data source to provide the data in XML. Not just any XML, but RSS XML. Then using any plain RSS aggregator, data would be merged chronologically. No Mega-DB to build and maintain, no periodical data dumps, no plug-ins, and almost no code involved at all.
We did spend some time fixing up a PHP RSS aggregator and adding a search facility, but the solution was dripping of simplicity and elegance, it was art.
I have no idea why all those protocols were used before, I don't know why they didn't ask for a standard form of data from all sources, or if a Mega-DB was actually part of the requirement. Maybe there was more to it than what I was told, but it remains an example in my mind of how devastating over-engineering is.
I would advise that you at least be aware of the possibility that you may be committing over-engineering at any time. And be brave enough to re-evaluate your decision (another Agile Software Development principle).
Agility In Practice
Update: Upon request, I have changed the post to protect the innocent. It's hard trying to discuss issues like these without stepping on people's toes and pointing fingers. So forgive me if I leave out some major details in the spirit of conveying knowledge without hurting feelings.
Back in the year 2000, we had a field trip to one of our customer's agent offices to see how they were using our flagship product. We had recently updated their site so we were excited to see how they react to the cool new chrome.
I sat down with an agent that proceeded to show me her work day on our tool. Midway through the process we hit a page that stopped her in her tracks. We tried over and over and we hit the same bug and it kept taking more and more parts of the site down. Obviously the site was broken, and productivity level was at 0.
My first reaction was to call the office and have that update rolled back. But you see at that time I wasn't CTO, I was Lead Dev and thus considered to be the pure embodiment of evil as far as the Network Admin's were concerned. The servers were under the Network Admin's jurisdiction, so no roll back was ever going to happen that day no matter what.
Adobe, fix’n to take over the internet
For a very long time, I've been an advocate of Python and wxPython. I could not understand why wxPython wasn't at least as popular as Java. But honestly, I did know why, but that's another post.
Adobe just released Flex2 and I'm way impressed. It seems they took a very good look at wxPython and really did it right.
Check out the component browser and the style browser to see what I mean.
Things that wxPython had that Flex2 does even better include:
- Cross-Platform, its really a flash file, how much more cross platform can you get? I don't even think Java is that good.
- Consistent + elegant, usually you can have one or the other, but Flex2 is right on target.
- XML-based UI Layout. This is what XUL of the Mozilla project was/is trying to do.
- Built-in goodness, FLV + MP3 streaming, ActionScript (javascript done right), transition effects, etc...
- Tiny foot print.
- No installation required. Well, not so fast, you would need the flash plugin if its running in a browser. But as a Flex2 application, it gives you a single EXE file on Winder's and an App in Mac. Not sure what it does on Linux.
- Access to machine hardware like the Mic, the Camera, etc...
But you're going to bug me about Flex2 being a commercial application. True, the Flex2 Builder is > $500. I wouldn't buy it even if it were free. The SDK is totally free, that's all you need anyway. You can build a full Flex2 application using the normal C, C++, and Obj-C tools like make with the Flex2 compiler. It's way simpler than GCC folks 
If Adobe keeps this up they will hit a home run guaranteed.
QuickTime frame exporter blue tint fix!
I finally found the fix for the blue tint you get when using QCRenderer and QuickTime to export frames to a file.
On Intel Macs, you have to use
GL_UNSIGNED_INT_8_8_8_8
instead of
GL_UNSIGNED_INT_8_8_8_8_REV
In all of your OpenGL functions.
It makes sense since the the processor was switched from PPC to Intel. I would have thought Apple already took care of all these minor endian annoyances. Oh well, as long as I know what's going on.
Etelos Moves Again, from Renton, to … Renton
Finally, an even better office this time. We got the whole 4th floor at the 200 Mill Ave. South building (the old Renton Municipal building) next to I-405.
That is literaly 7 minutes away from from my house. The funny thing is I didn't plan it that way, it just happened.
I'm not totally comfortable yet (until I get a Seltzer vending machine installed that is), but I did get my new setup,... set up
This is the view from he conference room, yes those are airplane fuselages passing by on a train next to the I-405 highway. The only thing missing is a yacht and a space shuttle.
Did I mention we are in Renton, where Boeing is. So the next time you are flying in the air, remember me, that airplane passed by my office
Web 2.0 Summit in SF
That was way cool!
I met a ton of neat people, everyone was showing off their cool stuff. But generally I loved meeting some key industry folks. On with the show...
As usual we start off with a close up of Greg Ruff of White Space Strategy. He's basically the real highlight of every SF trip.
Our panel had the best speaker makeup of all time, from the left, that would be Tony Perkins (AlwaysOn), next is Danny Kolke (La CEO + Jazz Man), Richard McAniff (Corporate Vice President for Microsoft® Office), Dave Ferguson (Engineering Director at Google), Raju Vegesna (Evangelist at Zoho).
It did get very crowded, the Adobe folks were awesome!
That is John Battelle (Federated Media) at the first night dinner. We barely had anytime to talk as he was being hounded by everyone, but I did get a chance to introduce him to Lara Hanson (I'll explain in a later post). The lady next to him was introducing Hakia.
The first night, we hosted a Jazz Lounge (Yahoo had an Oxygen Bar, show offs!). We hired a couple of backups for Danny and he was off hammering the piano all night.
This dude I'm going to name "Rumpelstiltskin". He is a VC scout as far as I can tell, very nice dude but would not give me any info about him. All I know is that he is out looking for cool tech, he spent the whole night at our lounge, so I guess we made the cut.
Did I mention that Danny really hammered the piano? He didn't use a hammer, that is his blood on the piano. He was playing so hard his finger tips started to bleed, and no he didn't stop. Insane dude...
When I first met Cal Evans (of Zend, the folks who bring you PHP) I looked at him and said Thank You. We had dinner the next day and it was nice having him around as real developers knew what he was really about.
The last day we went out for a trip around SF, it was wonderful weather that day, I enjoyed it. The next Web 2.0 Expo will be in New York on January. I doubt it will be as good as this, but we shall see.
Featured Writing
- Advancing Human Civilization Through Open Source Software How we can continue advancing our knowledge in an increasingly proprietary world.
- Agility In Practice QA backward, introducing quality into bugs that break websites
- Exporting Oil Back to Saudi Arabia Witnessing the effects of industrializing the Saudi diet firsthand
- Fresh Arabic Coffee and Dates Personal article about the last few days I spent with my father.
- Over-Engineering: The Task of Touching One's Own Ear Ever wonder why you need to upgrade your computer every other year?
- Suffering the Pseudoscience of Sorcery The true story of a modern day witch hunt
- What’s Blogging? The power of differentiating by renaming
