Why I am good at getting things done but not good as a programmer

When confronted with a problem that needs to be solved my approach is to solve it quickly, not necessarily elegantly. If I find a problem in an application I will try something to fix it... Doesn't work? Try something else? Solves the problem but creates a new one, if the new one seems smaller fix it, if it seems bigger try something else.

This approach is excellent for getting things done and working quickly. But not so good for writing large amounts of elegant code. A real programmer would look at the problem, analyze the code, and figure out what is the best and most efficient way to rewrite the code to eliminate the problem. My approach is get rid of it as soon as possible.

While my approach is great for getting stuff up and running without taking a lot of time it usually results in some pretty jumbled code. Lots of band-aids, spaghetti code, ad hoc fixes, etc. It works but it usually ends up being pretty inefficient, lumbering and kludgey.

I think this is why I am better at being a manager than a programmer. As a manager I don't have to sit and think things through, I can let the people who are good at that do it and I can just worry about getting things working.

Andy Dick on George Bush

Random things I am reading

Interesting article on how to gain muscle mass doing minimal exercise. Really not all that groundbreaking, but still interesting.

Yet another article on why geeks make good lovers.

Mark Cuban's Rules for Startups

Mark Cuban's rules for start-ups, and how my company broke almost all of them.

1. Don't start a company unless its an obsession and something you love. My company was started by some people obsessed and in love with the technology but my guess as to the primary motivation of the majority of the founders is that they say the dollar signs.
2. If you have an exit strategy it's not an obsession. Our founders all had exit strategies built in to the initial round of funding. The exit strategy was actually put in by a very unscrupulous investor but I think he got the founders to agree to it by giving them an out as well. None of them got the chance to use it.
3. Hire people you think will love working there. This we did in the tech department. Sales I can't really speak for.
4. Sales cures all. This is where we failed big time. We started off with decent revenues, built the revenues up to close to $1 million a month, and then let it die. We assumed credit risk for payments and got shafted for a couple million. Then we changed the business model to get rid of that risk and no more sales happened, and thus no more revenue. As a public company it seems that the CEO thought that our money should come from the public markets, not from sales.
5. Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. This we did, although some people tried to do more.
6. An expresso machine ? Are you kidding me ? Shoot yourself before you spend money on an expresso machine. We didn't buy an espresso machine but we did spend tons of money on worthless crap that was not needed. Money that could have been reinvested into the company.
7. No offices. Open offices keeps everyone in tune with what is going on and keeps the energy up. We had offices. Big offices for some people. We had three suites in our building, two of them connected, the third, for C-level officers, was completely separate. The developers were in open cubicles. The developers were the only part of the company that functioned properly.
8. As far as technology, go with what you know. We did this to the most part.
9. Keep the organization flat. If you have managers reporting to managers in a startup, you will fail. This we did at first but as the company grew (spent more money) we started putting in hierarchies. Things were to the most part kept flat but in some departments there were long, complicated hierarchies.
10. NEVER EVER EVER buy swag. We didn't do this other than spending fortunes attending trade shows which didn't get us a single customer. We didn't make branded swag though. Actually there were some golf balls, but that was it.
11. NEVER EVER EVER hire a PR firm. We hired several PR firms and dumped them, hired our own PR guy, then hired more PR firms. This goes back to the C-level people focusing on the public markets rather than the core business.

Make the job fun for employees. I think I did this as much as I could.

James R Berry Predicts 200

Via Valleywag, some guy in the 60s gives a pretty good prediction of the year 2008.

David Paterson for President

How's this for honesty? NY Gov David Paterson calls a press conference to disclose that he and his wife both had affairs. Then he does an interview where he admits his drug use. But not just pot like Pataki - he tried cocaine.

As a little side note Pataki's mother was very shocked that her son had ever tried marijuana like everyone else who was alive in the 60s did.

This is honesty I could vote for.

Cash My Phone

I sent an old cell phone of mine in to CashMyPhone.com. I considered using SecondRotation but they didn't have that particular phone model listed on the web site so rather than send it and wait to see what they decided it was worth I just used CashMyPhone.

I got an email a few days after I sent the phone saying that they had received it. Then a couple of months later I got an email saying it had been "disqualified" and I had to pay $8 to get it back. So I replied saying please send it back to me, and no reply and no phone. A few more weeks pass and I get a "final" email warning me that if I don't request the phone back they will keep it.

I have sent it at least 4 emails to these people and have received no reply. The phone had no physical damage to it when I sent it to them. I'm starting to wonder if this whole thing is a scam - they either get $8 to ship the phone back to me or they get the whole phone for free.

Anyone have any experience with these guys? If I don't hear back by the end of the week I will file a complaint with the better business bureau.

Crayon Physics

Reblogged via Marc Andreesen, this looks really cool. I'd love to play with it and I'm sure my kid would too. Crayon Physics.

Another nice pic of NYC

NYC

Great picture of NY:



Done being sick. Back to writing shortly, I hope.

The Wire

I watched last night's finale of the Wire. It was good, not as good as the rest of the show has been, with a few exceptions. Like what was Season 2 all about? Did they try to take them away from the streets and fail so they put them back? Or was the whole season setting up for the Greek connection this year? I can't imagine they'd spend a whole season setting up for a few episodes much later on so I have to assume it was the former option.

The episode tied things up a bit too nicely for my taste. Actually not nicely at all, but everything was wrapped up. I prefer loose ends, like the Sopranos did. If they did have to wrap everything up and put a bow on it at least they wrapped it with really crappy paper and put a used stick-on bow on. Carcetti not being able to look Rawls in the eye when appointing him superintendent, Daniels having to eat it and resign just as he was getting settled in, McNulty resigning without pension, none of it a perfect wrap-up.

Thinking about the episode last night I was thinking about how everyone's morals kept shifting over the season. Only a very few number of people had a real moral code and stuck to it. Those people being Chris Partlow, Wee-Bay and Omar.

As horrible as Partlow was made out to be, he certainly had a code and stuck to it. He took life without parole apparently without a peep out of loyalty to Marlow and his family. As many people as he killed, I have to give it to Chris for sticking to his principles. Same for Wee-Bay.

Omar apparently started off with his code as a child, if you watched one of the two minute long things On Demand. When he was like 7 his friends robbed some poor guy and he took the money from them at gunpoint and gave it back. Omar was possibly the only noble character on the show. He only killed in self-defense although he did shoot a lot of other people. He only stole drug money, he wasn't in it for the money, he was a good guy.

And Michael is the new Omar? Wow... That was a shock. I was expecting Michael to either be the new Bodey (dead) or the new Marlow. But the new Omar? Possibly the only shock in this episode. I was hoping for more of Michael but we only saw him for a few seconds in the ending montage. I also liked how Chris stuck by Michael to the end, when it seemed to Marlow that he was guilty beyond a doubt Chris stuck by him.

I will miss this show.

Clip from Colbert last night

Warren Buffet is the world's richest man again. Bill Gates fell to third place. Me, I am slowly pulling into 5,999,912,234 place with a rise of $1,000 since last year.

Alphas and Betas part 2

Polar Rose
Polar Rose is supposed to be face recongition software. Rather than trying to write algorithms to duplicate what the human mind does, they are doing something very popular these days - using the wisdom of crowds.

As far as I can tell, Polar Rose will scan any web page you load for images that contain what it thinks are faces. If it finds one it puts a little icon on the screen. You click the icon and it either gives you a form to enter who the person is, or if it thinks it knows, you can confirm or reject the name.

I am not sure what the end goal is - to be able to recognize faces in images on the web, or to come up with a complete facial recognition database - but whatever it is Polar Rose seems to be doing pretty well on getting there. I keep the Firefox plugin disabled most of the time as I load a lot of web pages with a lot of images and it slows the browser down noticeably. When I enable it it seems to recognize faces occassionally. Mostly I think it is someone else who tagged the same photo, but it seems to be a pretty solid approach.

How they plan to make money with this I have no idea.

Wuala
Wuala is actually still in alpha. From their site:

Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. It's a free desktop application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that brings you a convenient and secure online storage. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This new technology has a number of advantages and it allows us to provide you a better service for free.

Wuala is basically an online storage system. It works pretty well, the app crashes every now and then. I have never used the file sharing sections, but I do use it to keep files I want from different locations available.

My own gripe is that the 1GB of disk space it gives you is about what I can fit on my USB thumb drive, making Wuala not terribly useful to me. And everytime I load it it tries to let me know about new wallpapers and screensavers and such.

It seems like a pretty good product and it is definitely a good idea as people move onto using the web as an application platform. I have not yet had the need to try out the file sharing portions, but maybe I'll play around with that a little bit when I have some free time.

Update - On further reading the description of Wuala it appears that you can trade local hard disk space for online space. I guess it stores things on users machines to achieve it's decentralized structure. That makes it a lot cooler than I previously thought it was.


I have a couple more I will post about either later today or tomorrow.

Some Web Apps I am Beta Testing Pt 1

Lately I have made it a bit of a game to wrangle invites to private beta tests for web apps. I lost interest in the game a while back, but I got into some pretty interesting betas.

Twine
Twine was supposed to be this great new semantic breakthrough product. It was supposed to finally be able to gather information on the web, parse it, and make it useful and relevant. So says their PR and the article in the NY Times. My experience has been very different. As far as I can tell all it really is is an online bookmarking tool that automatically tags things you add to it. This would be great if it would go out and try to get more data on stuff it thinks you might be interested in, but all it does for me is give me links to other documents with the same tags.

I kept thinking that if I just kept adding stuff eventually it would start doing what I thought it was going to do. But I kept adding stuff and it kept not doing much of anything.

The semantic web is going to be huge when someone finally figures it out. The internet has way too much data and it needs a simple, intuitive way to organize all of it. While Twine seems to have the right idea they do not have it working yet, sadly.

Evernote
This is supposed to allow you to remember stuff. Like Twine the goal is a better way to organize information. The way the information is collected is a bit different than Twine, data can be clipped from a web site, emailed, or sent as an image. The latter is the most interesting part of the process to me. If you are on a web page and you want to save it you can either save the whole page, or highlight an amount of text and just clip that. You can email text to it, and you can take pictures and it will use OCR to try to decipher the text. All of your stuff is searchable by a number of methods.

I just started playing with this one recently, and my one critique is that it wasn't able to decipher the text in the pictures I sent from my phone. Other than that it works as described, which is pretty well.

This isn't an end-all to the problem of organizing data online but it is a good start. The concept is simple, the implementation is effective and it does what it says it does.

Later some others including Kango, Wuala, Polar Rose, and more.

Cody Diablo

Ellen Page makes fun of Cody Diablo's writing style on SNL. I don't watch SNL anymore but the incessant, ridiculous hipster patter in Juno was extremely annoying. Not as annoying as the Wed Anderson-rip off, overly precious and stylized direction, but I guess easier to make fun off.