Richard Kuo's Personal Blog

How to use an electronic drum kit with Rock Band

rkuo — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:52:00 GMT

So, I've been playing a lot of the drums in Rock Band lately. I don't have any experience playing real drums, but anyone with half a brain can tell that drums in Rock Band are way closer to the real thing than the plastic guitar is.

The first time I tried them, I was at a friend's house. I did pretty well for someone who had never played the drums before...although I have some musical background, so I'm not a total loss at these things. And then we got to "Here It Goes Again" ... you know, the one with the YouTube video where the band is dancing around on treadmills. The alternating hand hits + kicks (syncopation) totally destroyed me. My hands and feet would simply NOT do what the notes on the screen were telling me to do.

Occasionally, I'll make myself good at something just because I know I'm bad at it, and I want to see if I can do better. This was one of those times.

I picked up a copy of Rock Band a few weeks later and screwed around on some of the songs on expert difficulty. I probably got through around 20 out of 45 songs or so...and mind you, this is passing the song according to the game, not actually playing the song well by hitting most of the notes. And then I ran across a thread and video where someone had hooked up his top of the line Roland TD-20 V-Drums to Rock Band.

Well, we just HAD to try this.

Long story short, it's two months later, my hand foot independence is not 100%, but it's off the charts compared to where I was before, and the whole experience has been fun every step of the way. It's also been interesting observing my own progress starting from basic timing to syncopation to faster and faster BPM songs and kick heavy songs, etc. My leg used to feel like it was going to fall off in the middle of certain songs...now, it's just not a problem. Don't get me wrong ... leg/foot endurance is still an issue, but rather than just falling apart completely, it just affects my consistency near the middle/end of songs. Still, I've been seeing improvement every step of the way, so I'm sure this will continue to improve. And frankly, I'm starting to nail a bunch of the songs that aren't so kick heavy.

Anyway, I enjoyed the whole process so much that I wrote an uber FAQ a few weekends ago collecting all of the information anyone new might need to do the modification themselves and posted it to the relevent community forums. Probably the equivalent of 10-20 blog posts...so yeah, that's why I haven't been posting. And surprisingly, quite a few people have gone ahead and used the FAQ to get themselves set up as well. Nice to know. =)

Anyway, I have zero personal illusions about "real drumming", so to speak. In between work and other learning/social pursuits, taking things to that level isn't high on my list of priorities. But the whole process has been an interesting personal challenge, and I thought it was worth mentioning.

Anatomy of a "House, M.D." Episode

rkuo — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:59:00 GMT

Like a lot of other people, I really enjoy the series House. At its core, it's a medical drama. But the chararacterization is what really makes the show tick. House is a brilliant *** of a doctor. Everyone else on the show is a foil for his antics.

By its fourth season, however, House is incredibly formulaic in the structure of its episodes. To their credit, they did manage to shake things up a bit this season with the Apprentice-esque setup in the first half of the season.

Each episode typically opens with the person in question getting sick in some rather dramatic fashion. If you're lucky and blessed with a special episode, there may be some misdirection involved where one person acts woozy, but then someone else gets REALLY sick.

The next 5 minutes of the episode involve someone trying to convince House why this case is interesting enough for him to spend time on. The next ten minutes are spent testing various theories and cures, at which point something dramatic happens ... either vital signs crash or some really weird symptom manifests itself. Cut to commercial!

We come back and they've managed to do something to buy some more time. At this point we come in for a mish mash of the following.

1. House insults patients.
2. House insults his proteges.
3. House makes inappropriate comments about Cuddy's cleavage.
4. House suggests a dangerous treatment.
5. Someone has to talk the patients into a potentially dangerous treatment.
6. Someone mentions lupus or couple of other goto diseases that are never actually the disease in question.
7. Proteges break into patient's home to get more info.
8. House catches the silly patient lying about something.
9. Small bits of character development that rotate between anyone that isn't House.
10. House notices something small about a regular and correctly deduces a major piece of new and hopefully saucy information.

I'm sure there's a drinking game for this show somewhere.

At around the 50 minute mark, it's time for the episode to wrap itself up. Nobody has any idea what's going on and things are looking grim for our Jane Doe. Luckily, House will be having an innocuous conversation with a colleague, (usually Wilson) during which something will be said that will trigger something in House's stream of consciousness. It typically goes something like this.

Wilson: You're a bitter and small person, House.
House: Yes...yes...small...just like the parasitic amoebas of the Lower Nigerian Basin! (runs off to cure the patient)

There's about a 50/50 chance that the diagnosis will come in just before the patient is about to go in for some major life changing surgery that is based on a previous incorrect guess. Thus, our patient is saved in an appropriately dramatic fashion.

Despite the above, I forgive the writers because House definitely isn't a show pretending to be something else. They do a pretty good job of giving the audience what they want...which is an irascible guy who says what everyone is thinking in the most creatively mean way possible and still gets away with it. It's sort of like watching Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in the form of a genius doctor.

Um, I think I just came up with a brilliant Conan skit. =) Too bad the strike is over!

Kill a tree, read a book

rkuo — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 08:13:00 GMT

I have a lot of gadget related things to blog about ... like the new phone I just got (Sprint Touch ... SERO plan), bluetooth headsets, and so on. But, somehow, I feel it's bad form to saturate this blog with too many posts in a row on gadgets. So why don't we talk about something else?

Recently I bought some books off the "Books Recommended by Charlie Munger" list. When someone as smart as Charlie Munger recommends a book to read, why not listen? I haven't felt like I've had the time to read a lot of books since joining Google, but as I've roughly settled in after a year or so, I'm making the time now.

The first book I chose to read was "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor?" I'm about halfway through.

My takeaways right now...

I thank my lucky stars that I live in a country as safe as the United States. Civilized behavior is not the default state of the human animal. The fact that it IS by and large the default in this country is something to be immensely respectful of. Barbaric acts were simply the normal status of affairs a few centuries ago. Placed in a modern day context, I cannot imagine that a soldier in Iraq, for example, would easily be able to turn that switch off and on.

Personal freedoms and property ownership were the harbingers of economic growth in societies. Cities all over Europe attracted industrious individuals with the promise of these freedoms, precisely because there was no other way to do it. Another funny thing ... free men not only work harder, they fight harder too.

Similarly, honesty and fairness were also quite rare, but eventually became required social lubricant for the really productive societies. I always got that feeling from reading other Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger material, but it was nice to see it here in another context.

The "wrong" cultures and religions dragged many societies down. The Chinese and Muslim cultures had opportunities to advance just as the European societies did, but those opportunities were never seized. When religion stamped out everything (like science) that didn't agree with its preconcieved tenets, it also stamped out innovation and discovery along with it. Cultures where serfdom reigned didn't care to do anything productive with their discoveries...after all, only the ruling class was going to benefit. Who cared about being more efficient?

However, the fragmentation of religion and culture in Europe helped to stunt the negative impacts of "bad" culture, government and religion. In fact, that division may have been the primary reason for Europe getting ahead of the rest of the world. You also have to think that this is very much the model the founding fathers were going for in designing the United States...limited federal government and different states competing with each other on the merits. Unfortunately it seems like as a country we've increasingly moved away from this.

Many stagnant societies, amazingly enough, contributed to their own failure by driving out their most productive members...often new and ambitious immigrants looking to create a better way. Such ignorant behavior caused irreparable delays in advancement.

Finally, war is an exorbitant drain on resources and stalls the development of any country engaging in it.

My thoughts on this book, of course, can only be partially expressed since I'm only halfway through the thing. However, one thought I do continue to have as I read is "Do our presidential candidates bother reading any of this stuff?" It is abundantly clear that there are certain things that are just bad ideas based on past experience. Yet we seem quite eager to repeat these mistakes as a country. Surely we should know better?

A quick analysis of the MacBook Air

rkuo — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:16:00 GMT

So Apple finally announced their ultraportable notebook. One question ... what took you so long, Apple?

It's a nice option for Mac lovers. It's not so competitive, however, compared to the options in the PC space.

Pros

There's finally an ultraportable Mac option. Yep, if you been wanting a really light and portable Mac, the wait has been long and painful....and now it's over.
13.3" screen. A screen of this size is unusual in the ultraportable class. You tend to see 11.1" or 12.1" screens.

Cons

Design scheme is tired. Come on guys, the aluminum look is starting to wear thin. Add some color to the lineup or shuffle things around a bit.
Storage options are below par. 80GB max? The Sony TZ can have both a 64GB SSD as a primary drive and a 250GB HDD as the secondary drive.
Battery is not user replaceable. Apple does this with a lot of their products for the sake of aesthetics...but in a two thousand dollar investment, it's more painful issue. Batteries tend to go bad within a couple of years, so if you're planning on hanging onto the notebook for longer, you might find yourself having to service the notebook. Also junky if you're hopping on an international flight or doing some heavy traveling.
Ports and accessories are lacking. One USB port? No ethernet jack? No integrated WWAN option? These are livable problems, but smaller laptops have already done much better in the ports department.

Still, let's face reality. If you want a Mac and you're a fan of traveling light, you have no other options. Grin and bear it. Life could be worse. =)

Personally, I went with the ThinkPad x60 last year (and painted it to take care of the looking nice part) and if I were to buy a notebook right now, it would probably be the Sony TZ.

Hello again - some advice on wireless networking hardware

rkuo — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:09:00 GMT

Thought I would get back into the groove of things here.

Let's start back up on wireless hardware. Seeing as how I live in an apartment complex, getting this right has been a bigger issue for me as of late. I've run through more wireless hardware than I care to admit, but I've finally settled on the right combination of stuff for me and I'm going to share that with you in the hopes of saving you folks the same pains I went through.

First of all, if you want the simple advice...buy the D-Link DIR-655 as a home router or wireless gateway. I use it personally and have recommended it to tons of friends, all with basically flawless results. Check out the review of this device at www.smallnetbuilder.com for more info.

For more complicated advice, read on.

Solving the home gateway/wireless access point problem

Initially, I had a cheap 802.11g Netgear router. This was crashing and slowing down constantly, so I decided to upgrade. I'd already had pretty bad experiences with a lot of networking hardware, so this time I decided to try something with a bit more of a reputation ... Apple hardware.

I bought the AirPort Extreme 802.11n (Fast Ethernet version) and installed it.

Initially, I was pretty happy with the AirPort Extreme. Aesthetics matter to me and this thing actually looks nice in addition to doing its job. However, after a couple of months I eventually ran into a problem. I was testing a lot of Ubuntu based server installations, including a DHCP server on my home network. The problem is that you simply cannot disable the DHCP server on the AirPort Extreme. This isn't an issue for most people, of course ... but keeping up to date on this stuff is important to me both personally and professionally. So I reluctantly went looking for new hardware.

I eventually stumbled across SmallNetBuilder and read their review of the DIR-655. Without a doubt, SmallNetBuilder is one of the most thorough sites around to review networking hardware. I purchased an DIR-655 to replace the AirPort Extreme.

The DIR-655 is a great piece of hardware ... it did everything that the AirPort Extreme did, but was more configurable, handled P2P traffic better, and even has a Quality of Service engine that prioritizes gaming/VOIP traffic over other types of traffic. It's also extremely stable.

I'm currently using the gaming variant of the DIR-655 today. We'll get to that in a moment.

Solving the wireless bridging problem - Intro

The next problem I had to solve was that only a couple of rooms in my apartment are wired. The unwired room needs a high speed connection in it because that's where I hide the big ugly servers I own. I did not want to run a cable between the rooms for aesthetic reasons. So that left only one option ... a fast wireless bridge.

Wireless bridging does not appear to be a very common scenario in consumer networking hardware...and is even less common amongst draft 11n hardware. I was going to need draft 11n performance, though...bridging HD content over the wireless wouldn't be acceptable over anything slower.

We're not done yet ... most networking hardware today uses the 2.4GHz band. This is fine, but if you live in an apartment complex, there are tons of other people around using similar networking hardware...on top of the microwaves and cordless phones that are all sharing the same frequency. Do you want to lose the connection to your HDTV server if someone decides to microwave some food? Not a good idea.

A much better alternative is the 5GHz band. Because the channel spectrum here is so uncrowded, you can bond two channels together to double the throughput. You're also unlikely to have interference from anyone else around you because of the huge legacy investment in 802.11b/g.

So ... now it becomes clear what the ideal solution is. A wireless 802.11n bridge that supports 5GHz, without any other weird gotchas, will let you create a high performance bridge between rooms in your home or apartment without having to run ugly wires or knocking holes in walls. Splendid!

It's not that easy to search out the above requirements, but long story short, I eventually realized that the AirPort Extreme has an "Extend a wireless network" function which actually does exactly what I needed at the time ... creates an 802.11n wireless bridge. It's highly unlikely that wireless bridging will work with hardware from different manufacturers... but I just happened to have one AirPort Extreme lying around, so...

Trying the AirPort Extreme as a wireless bridging solution - Spotty at best

I went out and got another AirPort Extreme (Gigabit version). The DIR-655 would be the home gateway and the two AirPort Extremes would bridge the unwired room in my apartment.

In theory, this should have worked. In practice, it didn't, and it was for the following reasons.

1. Reconfiguration of the AirPort Extreme can be unstable. By this, I mean that you can set things a certain way on the base station and they won't work. However, if you reset the base station to its default settings and configure it from scratch, things do work. Because I was switching frequently between AP/bridging modes to test certain parameters, I would spend an hour trying to figure out why something wasn't working, only to reset everything and have the AirPort Extreme suddenly fix itself. This leads to tough issues with troubleshooting since you have many "What the hell, I did that already, why is it working now?" moments.

2. 7.1.1 firmware transmits at an amazing 10MB/sec using WPA2 encryption. Unfortunately, the latest firmware is 7.2.1. 7.1.1 is also, as I learned with some pain, unstable with P2P traffic running over it as a wireless bridge. Last, but not least, the newest Gigabit versions of the AirPort extreme are only valid with versions 7.2 of the firmware or higher.

3. 7.2.1 firmware fixes the stability issue mentioned above, but kills bridging performance. You can actually get 10MB/sec throughput over two bridged AirPort Extremes with the 7.1.1 firmware on the main AirPort Extreme, but 7.2.1 on the main AirPort Extreme drops that to around 2.5 MB/sec. The throughput rises to around 6MB/sec if you disable encryption, so presumably there is something weird going on with accelerated onboard encryption and the AirPort Extreme. Frankly, 2.5MB/sec for most people is still OK, but if you want to stream HD wirelessly, it's too close to the edge to be decent.

4. Several advanced options are hidden by default and can only be accessed if you know to ctrl or option click on the dropdowns. For example, the stability of the connection on my AirPort Extreme to other 5GHz band hardware was spotty until I manually forced the channel to a high band frequency (153 instead of the default 36).

You would not believe how much time it took to track down all of the above issues. =)

Well, I put up with the junky throughput of the 7.2.1 firmware for a while, hoping that Apple would release some firmware to fix these ridiculous problems. They didn't.

Solving the wireless bridging problem - DGL-4500 + DAP-1555 = success!

After a few months of putting up with low throughput and no new firmware in sight, I decided to try again. Some things had changed.

The D-Link DGL-4500 was released a couple of months ago and is the gaming equivalent of the DIR-655. I have no idea why the DGL-4500 would be better for gaming compared to the DIR-655 as they both have the same QoS engine...but the major difference in terms of hardware is that the DGL-4500 can use either the 2.4Ghz or 5GHz bands.

On top of that, the D-Link DAP-1555 was also recently released. This is a product designed specifically to be a wireless 802.11n bridge and works with either the DGL-4500 or another DAP-1555.

Since I was so pleased with the DIR-655, I bought the DGL-4500 to replace the DIR-655 and packed up the DIR-655 as a Christmas gift for a lucky and unsuspecting friend. The DGL-4500 has behaved exactly like the DIR-655 in other respects ... remarkably stable and fast.

The DAP-1555 arrived and was very simple to configure via a web interface. It immediately bridged to the DGL-4500 and has been working flawlessly ever since.

Final thoughts

1. The DGL-4500 is now acting as my home gateway and as a 5GHz access point.

2. The DAP-1555 is wirelessly bridged to the DGL-4500 and is getting around 5MB/sec of encrypted throughput...no weird gotchas doing so either, which is remarkably important, as you can see from the above. It's not the 10MB/sec of the AirPort Extreme with the 7.1.1 firmware, but it's enough that I'm happy with it.

3. I reconfigured one of the AirPort Extremes to be a 2.4GHz b/g/n access point for visitors.

4. I brought home the other AirPort Extreme to be a 5GHz access point at my parents' house.

So, the story is over. After all of the above ... I finally have a home networking setup I can be happy with. The wireless bridge handles P2P downloads easily and has plenty of bandwidth to stream the TV I record to the other rooms in my apartment. Simple in theory, but difficult in practice to implement.

I'll leave you with these words. Every time I go through something like this, I am reminded constantly of how much of a gap there is between saying something like "I want to stream HD wirelessly around my home" and actually implementing it. Good product philisophies find a way to magically translate those English statements by normal people into reality with a minimum of fuss. And we're not even close yet, folks. Not even close.

Optimize your life #10 - When to stop planning and start acting

rkuo — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 00:27:00 GMT

I often tell folks that schools teach bad habits as well as good ones.

For one thing, your typical college course habituates students into believing that everything consists of neatly packaged problems that they can be graded on. Is that how people are evaluated in the real world?

Similarly, most college courses teach students to cram random bits of information into their heads at certain intervals so that they can pass big bang tests. Is that how projects and breakthroughs succeed in the real world?

What is the actual value of trying to memorize everything? Can we actually memorize everything we need to know? I think the answer is clearly no, or else search engines like Google wouldn't exist. Would you rather have access to your own memory for information, or access to Google?

Schools assume you have all the information you need available to you. Schools assume you should be able to perform tasks and recall information without referring to a book. These assumptions are simply not correct. Perhaps that's why there's no shortage of stories of people who did well in school but didn't in the real world, and vice versa. The correlation is there, but it's not in lock step like it should be.

Real life, of course, is not simple. Problems don't fit into neat testable boxes. The information you need probably isn't in a book on your desk. Sometimes problems solve themselves without you even needing to lift a finger. And other times, the solution itself becomes unnecessary.

So, with that in mind, here are some questions I often ask when deciding when to stop planning and start acting.

What is the cost of failure?

Failure has a rather negative connotation associated with it in our society. Nobody likes to fail. However, it only takes a single flash of insight to realize that it is not failure that one should be afraid of, but rather the cost of that failure.

Failure doesn't feel good to most people. However, the amount of planning you perform before acting should be roughly proportional to the actual cost of failure and not to any psychological hang-ups related to failing.

Can the cost of failure be lowered?

You will find that, most of time, the cost of failure is negligible. However, when failing is expensive, that's when you will need to be on your toes.

When encountering a situation where failure will hurt, it's important to understand that you have two variables to work with. The first is to plan more. The second is to reduce the cost of failure. Call it the "walk before you run" strategy.

Reducing the cost of failure has advantages over simply planning more. Changes in the problem to be solved or project priorities can quickly invalidate even the best laid plans. Most importantly, planning lacks a direct connection with reality.

The great takeaway here is that there are often ways to reduce the cost of failure without changing the nature of what needs to be done. For example, releasing a buggy software product can easily kill a company. However, if you restrict the releases of a product to a smaller group of users who are willing to deal with problems and provide feedback, you locate more bugs but affect a much smaller subset of people who are also more tolerant of those bugs.

Simple changes in process like this can easily mitigate huge amounts of risk at a fraction of the cost. Try doing anything once or twice before you do it a thousand times. It's simple advice, in theory, but you'd be surprised how often people still don't follow it.

What have you learned?

The second important point, after acting, is that you have to learn from what you've just done. You might think that this is patently obvious…after all, who does something and doesn't learn from it afterwards? Trust me, people and teams repeat mistakes more often than you think.

In many cases, it's simply enough to make a mental note and move on. You're either the type that takes something away from the process or you aren't. Unfortunately, I don't believe I can offer specific advice on how you become the type of person that learns from everything happening around him. So we'll move on.

However, as tasks become larger in scope, the correct takeaway does become more specific. I think that it probably comes as no surprise to you that memories are quite fallible. In software development, for example, an engineer often writes code to automate all the little things that previously had to be performed by hand in order to accomplish a task.

While writing code to automate tasks is somewhat beyond the reach of most people, creating checklists isn't. In fact, writing everything down that you have to do is one of the core tenets of the popular Getting Things Done system. If an activity seems to occur often, something anyone can do is create checklists. That speaks directly to the entire point of acting quickly, which is to expose new information, remember it, and feed it back into the process as soon as possible.

Summing up

So there you go...three simple questions that tell you when to get over your "analysis paralysis" and get on with it.

I've done a lot of background chatting here on the topic of planning vs action, so let's wrap this up by summing up the general strategy. My general opinion on deciding to act is as follows. Most of the time, the cost of failure is cheap or can be made cheap. In these cases, you should favor a very brief period of planning, followed by immediate action. Make sure to write down things as you act so that you retain the extra knowledge and experience for the next run.

Nintendo gets it

rkuo — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:08:00 GMT

Are you impressed at how Nintendo has managed the development, announcement and launch of the Wii? I am.

It's been pretty clear that the suicidal game of chicken being played by Sony and Microsoft is fraught with risks to anyone caught in its path...Nintendo included. Both companies are willing to lose mega millions of dollars. Both have other interests in play. It doesn't look good for anyone else who wants to be in the business.

It's a rather classic business move to adopt a differentiation strategy when market conditions like this occur. Nintendo is executing on this masterfully.

First, look at the Wii. The physical form of the device has been designed specifically to appeal to both male and female sensibilities. I've said this before and I'll say it again...megahits cross gender and ethnic boundaries.

Second, look at the price point...250 dollars. The system hardware isn't as advanced, but that's not really the point...it's made up for in other ways. At 250 bucks, the system is clearly sending a message to anyone who doesn't want a 400 to 600 dollar system. Buy me instead!

Third, look at the pack in. The system itself comes with Wii Sports, which is a simple and intuitive set of sports mini games that are very easy to pick up and play. In fact, the interesting thing about Wii Sports is that it's a party game that practically screams for you to bring over your friends to try the Wii out with them. It's basically the equivalent of "E-mail this link to a friend", except it's been packed in with the system. Viral gaming, anyone?

Your friends try the Wii, some of your friends get hooked. The Wii-mania spreads.

You have to question at this point why anyone would ever release a system without a game like this.

Not only that, but Nintendo has to be making a killing with the remote and the extra nunchuk. At 40 dollars for the remote and 20 for the nunchuk, three extra controllers is a LOT of extra revenue just waiting to be sucked in. The odd thing is that even though it's a bit expensive, you don't really mind that much because you're getting a gaming experience in the process that no other system can give you. Which brings us to the last point.

Fourth, look at the games. The motion sensitive controller and philosophy of game design mean that games on the Wii will largely be unique. In many cases, people aren't going to be choosing between the Wii and the Xbox 360 or PS3. They are going to be choosing between the Xbox 360 or PS3 and playing games they can't play anywhere else on the Wii. Exclusive content has always been a key crutch for Nintendo ... Mario, Zelda, and countless other franchises have kept Nintendo's consoles going, but the Wii brings it all front and center.

Meanwhile, Sony's killer game for the PS3? Resistance, Fall of Man. The cover of the game is a human skull sitting in a helmet, for god's sake. I dare you to bring over your friends and their girlfriends and get the entire room engaged with a game like that.

USBCell now available

rkuo — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 10:07:00 GMT

The USBCell seems to be available for ordering now in the US. For those of you who haven't seen this yet, it's basically a rechargeable AA battery, except it has a built in USB plug so that it can recharge via the USB ports on a computer.

Capacity is only 1300 mAh, which is a little over half some of the highest capacity rechargeable AA batteries...but that's somewhat understandable, considering the USB plug takes up about a third of the battery.

Of course, the nice thing is that if you travel a lot, using USBCell batteries means a battery recharger is one less thing you need to carry around. I figure that pairing these batteries with the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000 gets you pretty close to the ideal notebook mouse. No wires since the mouse uses Bluetooth, and you'll be able recharge via the laptop itself when needed.

Short update

rkuo — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 01:50:00 GMT

Things are busy out here, as you might expect. But as the frequency between posts grows, so does the guilt. So to talk about current events...

I'm excited about Borat...it's getting fantastic reviews. 95% on Rotten Tomatoes last I checked, and for a while it was even in the top 250 on IMDB. Unfortunately due to logistical snags we ended up not seeing it on Friday. We'll have to correct that problem this week. The movie was compressed to only 837 theatres this opening weekend to build some good buzz and word of mouth, so supposedly the showings have been absolutely packed. This is precisely the kind of movie experience I enjoy, so perhaps I'll wait until next Friday to hit up the theatre.

In other news, I opened up my web browser on my Treo and saw a link to Google Maps for Treo, which I'd heard mentioned around here but hadn't tried yet. An easy click or two later and I popped open the application.

I'm just going to say that I was thoroughly impressed. Easy to use, decently fast even over my EDGE wireless connection, and much, much easier to use than any WAP site. I guess there's still a place for rich clients after all!

I've been quite happy with my Treo to date...the only complaint at the moment being the crotch jabbing antenna. Am looking forward to one of the newer models that rids us of that particular issue.

Optimize your life #9 - Planning vs action

rkuo — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 02:37:00 GMT

Everybody has to get things done. That's just a fact of life. However, how you go about getting things done varies tremendously from person to person.

You might say that every time we do something, it consists of two simple phases…planning and action. You could also say that, in essence, each person cycles through these two phases hundreds of times a day. Figuring out when to correctly transition from planning to action, then, has got to be pretty important, considering how often the cycle is repeated.

Planning is a vital activity. It basically consists of researching all your available courses of action, considering various outcomes and trying to predict what will happen, and eventually committing to one of the available choices. It's obvious, of course, that one has to eventually move out of the planning stage to get results.

Action is vital as well. After all, nothing happens if you don't take action. Since there are typically many more ways to do things incorrectly than correctly, you don't want to simply shoot off without any planning whatsoever.

Action, however, has some inherent advantages over planning. The first advantage is that many people simply learn better in context, while acting, than they do out of context. The second, and likely the most important, advantage is the fact that action is simply what Scott Berkun refers to as a forcing function. Me, I just call it a type of reality check or a way to reduce risk.

Let's divert for a second.

Psychologically, humans are not objective creatures. This fact alone is worth burning into your brain. You are not objective. Worse yet, you aren't even wired to realize that you are not objective. For example, within any company, roughly 75% of the people rate themselves as above average within that company. In a survey of drivers in Europe, 90% of the drivers rated themselves as above average drivers. These perceptions are not based in reality.

The point, of course, is that each of us has a window through which we see things, and the walls around that window hide the complete truth from us. Those who recognize their inherent biases and force themselves to cut through them have a significant advantage over those who deny their biases.

A forcing function or reality check, then, is some sort of action or process that cuts through subjectivity and exposes reality. It's a crucial step in any important project. If you leave these until the end, you're likely to get lots of nasty surprises.

OK, now let's get back to the point.

When activities are disconnected from reality, the return on investment in those activities drops off because the risk of those activities being correct begins to outweigh the incremental benefits of additional activity. It's analogous to making a bullet fire faster or do more damage when it's not even aimed at the target. Or looking at the butterfly you can see through your window when there's an elephant hiding behind the wall. Because planning is significantly more disconnected from reality and rooted more in our subjective perceptions, it is inferior in many ways to simple action.

Now, some of you are probably thinking "This is crazy…planning more is clearly the best thing to do in many situations." You're not insane…this is absolutely true. Up to now, we've basically ignored the issue of cost. Since action often costs more, and planning frequently costs much less, planning more can often be the most cost-effective approach.

Pay attention here, because this is the important part. The decision of planning vs action is based on the cost of both activities plus the fact that action is a much better reality check and experience builder than planning. The trap many people fall into is generalizing their approach into "planning is always good" or "acting is always good". Perhaps it's personality issues that determine where people tend to fall on this issue or a faulty assumption that what worked once should work again…but regardless, the correct approach to a situation isn't determined by personality.

If you act too much, you incur a lot of costs associated with a lot of misfires. If you plan too much, it costs you valuable time, money, and magnifies the risk involved with not taking action to get a reality check on your assumptions. Deciding how and when to do both is simply an issue of cost and risk.

In general, from my experience, the usual best approach involves

A minimal and considered amount of planning. The 80/20 rule means you probably want to do a small amount of preparation.
A lot of action intended to force reality to the surface. This is because there are usually courses of action which are fairly cheap reality checks or costs you would have to incur anyway. You just need to bother looking for them. Once you realize that the decision is based on cost and risk factors, you know how to look for and spot opportunities.

The most interesting situations are where the exceptions to these guidelines appear. So, in my next post, I'll present some simple questions to ask when you're trying to figure out how much you should plan before acting.

Thanks for reading!

Flash storage and the 80/20 rule

rkuo — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 04:26:00 GMT

Flash memory based storage is starting to make serious headway into the PC realm, and with good reason.

It's far more reliable. It can be squeezed into many different form factors...from 2.5" notebook drives all the way down to MicroSD cards. It consumes almost no energy and is completely silent. The random access times obliterate traditional hard drives and, while not quite on par yet, raw transfer rates are now beginning to close in.

To dispel a common myth, one thing you commonly hear about flash memory is how it's limited to around a million write cycles. So eventually, the memory will die. Yes, this is true. However, objectively speaking, when you look at the typical lifecycle of a hard drive, a million write cycles actually buys you much more time than the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of a hard drive. Flash memory is just being more up front about it.

Flash drives use all sorts of tricks and have some extra capacity in them to distribute the write load across different blocks. This is called wear-leveling. Furthermore, the roughly million write cycles required to wear out a block is a gradual failure. What you'll usually see happening to a flash memory drive is a gradual loss of capacity as impending block failures are detected and rerouted. Traditional hard drives are not nearly as nice about failures. They tend to blow up all your data at once...which, in my humble opinion, is a big nail in the coffin of PC friendliness.

Now, the upsides of flash memory are obvious, but so are the downsides.

As I mentioned, the raw transfer rates are in the same order of magnitude, but in most cases flash drives are currently a good deal slower than mechanical drives. The biggest problem, by far, is cost. Flash memory still costs far more than magnetic storage on a dollars per GB basis. The first 64GB flash based hard drives to be released will probably cost around 2000 dollars. Meanwhile, you can buy a traditional 500GB drive for just 180 dollars. Hardly seems appealing in that context!

Now, both flash memory and magnetic storage technologies continue to improve. But it's interesting to note that if you look at a 12 month magnetic storage cycle, flash memory is improving on an equivalent basis in just 9 months. Obviously, this means at some point, flash memory will overtake magnetic storage on a pure cost per GB basis if the cycles continue to hold. But we're still a good way off from that happening.

Still, aside from the cost per GB, the benefits of flash memory may show up sooner than you think. Instinctually, you might think...2000 dollars for 64GB? What the heck? Sure, the tremendous amount of storage we get from magnetic drives is not something people will give up easily. But stop and think about this for a second.

1. Only a relatively small portion of data needs to be cached to avoid hitting the mechanical drive most of the time. This is where the 80/20 rule comes in. In general, e-mail, source code, documents, and other work related data simply don't take a lot of space. I'm guessing that the OS + most applications + application data can easily fit into 16GB for most people. Maybe bump it up to around 64GB to be safe.

For large files like audio and video files...well sure, keep them on magnetic drives and just spin those up when you use them. For most people, this won't be very often. For all the times in between, several GB of flash memory augmenting a system will draw less power, run apps and boot faster, and keep running more reliably.

2. Flash memory doesn't have to replace mechanical storage. Because flash memory is easy to produce in small form factors, it's going to be very easy to add flash memory as a complement to any desktop or portable system. A good system will play to the strengths of both. Simply use as much flash memory as you need to get a nice performance boost, but not more. And continue using mechanical drives to store large quantities of data in a cost effective manner.

And at this point, you're not really talking about dollars per GB at all. You're asking a different question...how much is someone willing to pay so that

1. The computer loads programs more quickly and boots much faster
2. The computer is less noisy.
3. The computer, if it's a laptop, has more battery life.

An entire community of users exists that is quite willing to pay a lot for any possible performance boost. Using flash memory in a system unlocks new performance characteristics that have previously been unavailable to users. Some of these users are going to bite.

Dollars per GB is important as a metric for flash memory in some respects, of course. But given the above discussion, you can imagine the following use cases for flash memory.

1. Performance/power/silence booster for systems
2. Convenient way to add storage (possible, not sure if it's likely)
3. Mass storage replacement for mechanical drives.

1 will obviously happen much earlier than 3 due to cost considerations.

In almost all cases right now, the cost of flash memory is currently prohibitive. However, I think that if you figure out what amount of GB in flash produces the bulk of the performance benefit, and then you figure out what that performance benefit is worth to your target market, you start to get a pretty good idea of when flash memory is going to hit its first breakpoint in the PC market. The second breakpoint will happen when flash memory starts to reach cost parity with mechanical storage + some added premium for the performance advantages afforded by flash memory.

Enough expounding on the subject for today. I hope some of you found that interesting.

Optimize your life #8 - Read faster

rkuo — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 02:34:00 GMT

Well, that's an interesting title for an article. While I'm at it, I'll advise you to eat less. And make more money too.

Actually, odds are that if you are reading this blog post you probably read pretty quickly already. But there are some people who don't...and for them, I'd imagine the information here can make a huge difference.

Reading is probably the fastest way we have to take in large amounts of information. The words in a book may not resonate with you in the same way that a presentation or speech might, but if you are prepared to make sense of what you are reading, it is undoubtedly the most effective way to learn....faster than listening or sitting in a lecture, for sure.

One thing you'll also notice in the biographies of really successful people is that they read. A lot. Incessantly, in fact. Just a good data point to have, I think.

First of all, why not try taking a reading speed test and see how you do? You might find the results interesting. In case the pressure affects your reading style, you might try timing yourself as you read a book or have someone time you. A good long chapter in a book will generally give you time to zone out and not worry about being timed.

Now that you've done that, let's talk about the "right" and "wrong" ways to read.

Ineffective reading generally consists of the reader saying each word to himself as he reads. This is called subvocalization, and if you are hung up in this pattern of behavior, you have a maximum reading speed of around 100-150 words per minute. The ineffective reader also tends to focus on each single word in a single line as he proceeds across and down the page. The reader is focused more on the mechanical process of reading than treating it as an invisible step between himself and the ideas on the page.

Effective readers use a different approach. They don't see words on the page; they see phrases and paragraphs. Their field of vision is taking in about 10 lines at any moment in time. They are not hearing the words in their head completely in their head or reading them back to themselves. Rather, they are actually rapidly visualizing the concepts of the text as they proceed down the page. On average, these folks are reading anywhere from 250-500 words per minute.

Effective readers can also skim information extremely rapidly. When one tries to find a piece of relevant information, it often is not necessary to read everything in detail. In such cases, your words per minute can easily rise into the thousands if you are able to scan quickly and pick relevant phrases out of the page as you scan.

Now, I'm not sure I can offer much better advice on this topic than what's out there on the Internet. The reason I point this whole topic of reading out is that if you happen to recognize your own style of reading as being in the former camp, this post should be helping you realize that you might be able to learn how to read more effectively, starting with some of the points above. And if you recognize yourself in the latter camp...well, at least you know more definitively where you stand. Nice to know when you're doing something right, isn't it? =)

It is very difficult to overstate the relative benefit that a person gains when he is able to take information in more quickly. It's something that will, like interest, multiply its effects upon you for the rest of your life. So I'll leave you with the following link, and a suggestion to use Google to read up on the topic a bit more when you finish with that. =)

Wikibooks article on speed reading

Bill Gates and education

rkuo — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 14:42:00 GMT

The funny thing about computers is that, despite all of the time they save people, they really can't help us make big decisions yet. Peter Drucker made similar observations many years ago...starting with the famous quote "The computer is a moron". The computer crunches and shows you numbers really quickly. It can show up that a graph is trending upwards. But ask it *why* that graph is trending upwards, and you'll be waiting a very long time. Sometimes even people interpret the same things two different ways. There are problems which are still very difficult for a computer to answer.

Given that computers can't yet replace people at some decision making level, I often imagine the impact of better computing on the world in the following manner.

People in this world have certain high level decisions to make. They also spend some associated time in supporting those decisions. In effect, you can imagine the person (say, yourself) as the top of a pyramid. Processes, software code, and physical infrastructure, like robots, form the body of the pyramid...a rigid structure of branching tasks that turn the decisions at the top into reality. At the bottom, all the tasks getting done lie in sleepy repose.

As we develop our processes to be better and computers get more powerful, the pyramid gets bigger. One person is doing more and more things. Life is better and society improves as a whole.

The key thing about this model is that there is always a human being at the top. We spend all this time and effort building this infrastructure, but, the simple fact is, none of these advances in productivity matter if you don't have a good solid person at the wheel. Until computers start thinking for us, people are important. Heck, you might even say that they become more important, since the absolute amount of work that one person is getting done, or screwing up, continues to increase.

Which is why I was really glad to hear that Mr. Gates is making education one of his biggest priorities. If you subscribe to the idea that everything fundamentally begins and ends with people, then building great people is the place to start. In fact, you can imagine that very little else matters, because in the grand scheme of things, great people can fix a lot of things.

But of course, it gets me thinking. Bill Gates is offering a lot of money. Which is a good thing, if money is the problem.

Is money the problem?

We've doubled our education spending since 1971, adjusted for inflation. Are schools 100% better? Heck, are schools better, period?

Internationally, other countries continue to deal us the double whammy of spending significantly less on education while scoring significantly higher on comparative tests. What does that mean?

It's hard to look at these facts and say that money is the issue. In fact, you might be able to point to the person asking for more money and make some sort of case that spending more money is hurting the United States, not helping.

I also have another mental model for evaluating the situation. Would I want a great person with less money dealing with the problem of education? Or a mediocre to bad person with more money?

Invariably, the answer is obvious. Take the great person. The wrong person in the wrong position will simply be throwing away more money with his decisions, no matter how much he is given. Money has to come after great people, not before.

OK, so if this really isn't about money, than what is it about? And what is Bill supposed to do with all that green? I think I'll save that for another day.

Buying notebooks

rkuo — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 17:43:00 GMT

I read Jeff Atwood's decision making process on buying a laptop (he picked an Asus W3J) with great fascination today. I suppose one of the main reasons anyone becomes interested in something often has to do with seeing parallels and similarities in one's own experiences...and I've obviously gone through the notebook buying experience a few times.

Buying a laptop is a very personalized decision if you are computing literate. The reason something like the W3J doesn't work for me is that it's a little too heavy (5 lbs) and the battery life is not great. But for the form factor and requirements Jeff wants, it's an excellent choice.

With that said, I've been eyeing various upgrades myself. The Toshiba M200 I have right now is getting the job done, but I find it fairly restrictive at the moment. I bought it mainly to get my feet wet with the Tablet PC concept. I feel I understand its strengths and benefits now, but the less current specs are otherwise holding me back.

So here's what I've been looking for from a new notebook.

1. Lighter weight (4 lbs max). Really, no reason except that I know it's possible and why get something huge if it doesn't have to be huge?
2. More drive space. I'm using VMWare and Virtual server a lot more lately to simulate automated deployments and I need space for the images.
3. Core Duo or better. Again, run some virtual machines and you'll want all the processors you can get. Solo's are out at this point.
4. Glossy screen, but still high-res (12.1" SXGA+ is my target). The screen on my M200 is frankly painful by today's standards. The resolution is still spectacular, though. A screen like that on the M400 would be perfect.
5. Seamless multimonitor while docked. Multiple monitors is a huge productivity improvement...and frankly, I see no reason to use the notebook as a notebook when I'm sitting at a desk most of the time.
6. Massive battery life. (6 hrs +) I'm tired of watching the clock on my notebook. I want insane battery life.
7. Integrated WWAN. When I travel, using the Internet through my phone is workable, but painful. Let's make this seamless.
8. Stylish. Hey, why not?

I hate to say it, but it seems like I'm going to have to drop the Tablet functionality. It's not that I don't want it, but I don't find myself using it much at the moment and the other specs are higher on my list.

Seamless multimonitor is a non-negotiable item on my list. Multiple monitor setups are a huge productivity improvement, and I want to make sure my next setup has it. Originally I was under the impression that I was going to need a docking station with a PCI slot to allow me to do this...which was becoming very frustrating because, if you look, you'll find that most manufacturers have basically eliminated these expansion options from their notebook lines. Only Dell and IBM have expansion slots in their docking stations.

Luckily, I got a bit creative and found a way around the issue. I tested MaxiVista a bit more and figured out that with a speedy host processor over a wired Fast Ethernet or Gigabit network connection, MaxiVista does the multimonitor story pretty damn well for productivity tasks, which is all that I need this stuff for anyway.

Stylish is another one of those options that is just hard to find in combination with everything else you want in a notebook. However, I ran across a site called Smooth Creations and realized that these guys can personalize pretty much anything.

Once I managed to factor out the stylish and multimonitor requirements, the field opened up.

As with most buying decisions, you examine the field and then you get an idea for what is extraordinary and what is standard. After a lot of searching, the notebooks that come closest to what I'm looking for are:

Thinkpad X60s - Definitely the closest to my target. It's incredibly thin and light, starting at just 2.7lbs, with options to get up to over 10 hour of battery life. It doesn't waste space and weight on an optical drive...which appears to have paid off, as they manage to fit more RAM, drive space, and processor into their package than competing models by using standard mobility parts instead of expensive specialized component form factors. The biggest problem for me is that the screen is only 12.1" XGA and the pointing device is a Trackpoint...no touchpad.

Panasonic Y5 - This import packs great battery life and an incredible 14.1" SXGA+ screen in just 3.37 lbs. Actually, in terms of the number of features missing from my list, this is the closest notebook...but the one main problem with this laptop is so big that I can't get past it. It uses a less standard Micro-DIMM that can only upgrade the notebook to 1.5 GB total. Yarrrgh! That's a non starter for me, unfortunately.

Sony TX770 - I love this laptop. The screen is truly awesome...an ultrathin 11.1" 1366x768 screen. Unfortunately, the low powered CPU and 1.8" hard drive means it will fall on the low end of my specs, and the expandability of the RAM is limited too.

I'm not intent on buying anything yet. New processors and chipsets from Intel are due in about a month or two and if I can, I'm going to wait and see what happens then. But I'm definitely keeping my eyes open.

Optimize your life #7 - A practical guide to the perfect audio book system

rkuo — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 00:12:00 GMT

OK, in the previous article I wrote about why audio books are a great alternative to the radio. This time, I'm going to make some specific recommendations about how to get yourself started.

1. Get an MP3 Player

First order of business...you need an MP3 player. If you've joined the iPod generation already, no problem, you're set. Personally, I favor the convergent approach to gadgets...I've got a pocket in the back for my wallet, a pocket for keys, and a pocket for one more item...which means a smartphone. So I use a Secure Digital flash card in conjunction with the excellent Pocket Tunes on my Treo 650 smartphone. 1GB of storage is enough to hold a few complete audio books (although by now there are larger sizes available), and Pocket Tunes is simply the definitive MP3 player for Palm PDA's, hands down.

What this means is that you can get by with a really cheap 60 to 100 dollar MP3 player if you want to, or simply add some cheap flash memory to most phones. To really optimize the experience, though, you're going to want to pay attention to some of the extra details.

Try to pick a player that will remember your position in the book so you can pick up right where you left off when you get back in the car. For example, Windows Media Player doesn't remember where you leave off in audio tracks...and so we've found that audio books are a bit harder to manage on my friend's Windows smartphone than my Treo with Pocket Tunes.

2. Choose a source for audio books.

Second, you need the books themselves. Audible.com is the go to place on the Internet for audio books. You can also try the ever popular iTunes if you own an Apple branded MP3 player. In general, I recommend picking topics which you are unfamiliar with but would like to learn more about. You're getting some free time here, so why not branch out a little bit? That's my philosophy, but if you've been dying to read the latest Harry Potter book and haven't had the time, go ahead and listen to that too! There's no wrong answer here.

Podcasts are also a burgeoning category of audio programming. You can go to places like Odeo or iTunes for these as well. Podcasts do solve the selection issues associated with radio programming. On the other hand, they still suffer from the same information density problems. If a podcast is very narrowly targeted to a particular area of interest, you're more likely to extract some value out of it..which, I believe, is similar to what makes a successful blog. But given the choice between a book or a podcast, I'll usually choose the book.

Finally, friends and family often have books they aren't using any more. You can borrow them and return them when you're done. Simple and inexpensive!

One interesting thing to note about about audio books is that they can often take much less space than equivalent music. I won't get into the whole theory of audio compression here, but suffice it to say that you can squeeze a guy talking down much more than you can a guy singing with a bunch of instruments playing in the background. In many cases, you can fit more hours of audio book programming onto an MP3 player than you can of music.

3. Find a way to patch your MP3 player into your car

While we have all had images of dancing black silhouettes of people with white headphones hammered into our subconscious, for safety reasons, you should not listen using headphones while driving. Playing the books back through your car's audio system will be more comfortable and probably sound better too.

Try one of the following options.

A line-in or cassette adapter. Both of these are easy to pick up at a Radio Shack, but most cars don't have either of these input options nowadays.
An FM transmitter. This is the option I chose. You plug the transmitter into your MP3 player, and it broadcasts on an FM frequency of your choice. Tune your radio to that frequency, and you are good to go. Nearly all cars have an FM radio, so this approach is almost guaranteed to work. The downside to this approach is that you have to find a clear frequency to transmit on, and occasionally you'll get bleed-through interference from other stations if you're unlucky. I chose the iRiver AFT-100 because it got good reviews and is cigarette lighter powered to boot. Changing batteries? No thanks! Car powered is the way to go.
A Bluetooth audio kit. If you know what this is, you probably don't need me to explain it to you. A few cars support this option, and you'd probably need a smartphone MP3 player to even get started.
iPod car kits. The dominance of Apple's MP3 player has led to a well stocked ecosystem of accessories. Too many options here to count, go Google for them.

Once you have all three parts taken care of...the MP3 player, the audio books, and the connection to your car stereo system...you're ready to dive in to the last part of this guide, which is how and when to listen.

The philosophy of listening to books while driving

It's wise to remember that when listing to books and driving, your primary focus is still driving. For the sake of being illustrative, let's replace the word "driving" with the phrase "careening around town in a two ton block of metal at 70 miles an hour". Safety must be priority #1.

Don't be stupid. People cause accidents every day because they fumble with cellphones, try to eat, put on makeup, or do any other number of silly things while trying to stay in control of a speeding car. Messing around with your MP3 player while driving is pretty high on the list of dumb ways to go. So keep your eyes on the road, jack.
Build up a playlist beforehand. You can avoid messing around with your MP3 player while driving by building up a nice long playlist of the files comprising your audio book. And if you've followed some of the above tips, you also have an MP3 player that retains your position in the playlist. Combine the two, and the only time you'll have to touch your MP3 player is when you get in the car and when you get out.
Listen when you have time and when you are driving "routine" routes. If I'm traveling to a less familiar place where I'm not familiar with all of the turns and lane changes, I prefer to keep the books off and my attention on driving. By the same token, I also don't dive into my audio books if I'm just taking a 5 minute trip to the grocery store. That's too much context switching and not enough flow time. I generally listen to audio books on my commute, where I know every inch of the road. Interestingly enough, for me this creates a pretty good balance where I still get to listen to the radio without being saturated to the point where I'm completely bored by it.

Well folks, that's all I've got. Audio books are a great way to expand your horizons, and I hope this article has lent some clarity to the steps involved in making audio books a daily part of your commute. Thanks for reading!