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From Zappos.com’s CEO: Everything I know about business I learned from poker

// December 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // Business

Zappos is an online apparel retailer that started out selling shoes but ended up in as a full apparel retailer. Their mission statement is not unique, but I feel what is different about them is how they align themselves to meet that goal objective. They have a great sense of humor and they really are embracing the whole social media thing.

Today I came across this excellent blog post from their CEO, Tony Hsieh, and there are a few bullet points I just want to re-iterate here:

• Table selection is the most important decision you can make. [Evaluating market opportunities]
• Figure out the game when the stakes aren’t high. [Strategy]
• Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience. [Continual Learning]

These are excellent ideas. Lets try apply them to Brunei’s ICT industry [report by Dr Yong Chee Tuan and Hj Abdul Rahim Derus].

These two posts by Tony Hsieh and Dr Yong Chee Tuan are such rich sources of material for us to talk about. e.g. the Digital Review of Asia Pacific 2007-2008 report mentions a lot of OSS, and re: Brunei “many of the e-government project proposals that are based on open source applications are not usually lower in cost than those based on proprietary systems. The lower initial cost of open source systems is sometimes offset by the implementation/customization and the long-term maintenance costs.”.

But that’s a story for another blog post … more after the break:

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Live Mesh is the son of Groove, the son of Notes

// December 28th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

I bought the December issue of Wired magazine because it had a feature on Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes and Groove. Lotus Notes is an interesting technology that is one of the best enterprise collaboration tools available today. It seems that the major global “knowledge enterprises” pick Lotus Notes as their collaboration infrastructure. Some of the Big Four (PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and E&Y) use Lotus Notes. And a market leader in the management consulting industry: McKinsey & Co uses Lotus Notes.

Ray Ozzie, as the new Chief Software Architect, envisions Microsoft leveraging it’s market power in the new “Cloud Computing” market. And they plan to do this with a 4-prong strategy. After the break, we look at these 4 strategies and talk about how the open source world is going to respond.

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Rapid development frameworks – CakePHP, Django, RoR

// December 26th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

Last month I blogged about a comparing rapid development frameworks. These are tools that help you develop web-based applications. They provide building blocks of functionality that you can readily glue together in a larger conceptual framework [like Lego, you can build complex machines from simple blocks]. This is opposite to other tools, like “Content Management Systems” (e.g. Drupal, Joomla) which are less flexible, one-size-fits-all approaches, which make some assumptions about how you want to organise your content [like those scale model cars, they're intended to be used with the supplier's other accessories].

So in that blog post … we didn’t get to much of a conclusion, except that “It Depends”. Depends on what kind of resources you have available, what kind of deployment options you want, whether you’re more comfortable with PHP, Python or Ruby, etc etc.

After playing around a bit with these 3x frameworks, I’m going to be concentrating more on RoR (Ruby on Rails).

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Fedora 10 graphical boot splash

// December 26th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

For a little bit of extra eye-candy, Fedora 10 users can try the “Plymouth boot splash loader”

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Merb merges with Rails 3!

// December 24th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

In a bit of surprise news, Rails merges with the Merb team.

The implication will be that the efforts of the two frameworks won’t be duplicated across the teams. Users of merb will be able to enjoy the third-party support that Rails enjoys – for example Rails is bundled with the latest Mac OS X, and Eclipse has the awesome RadRails.

My previous reservations re: RoR may now be fast disappearing. Look for future blog post that re-evaluates the position.

We are none of us alone

// December 23rd, 2008 // No Comments » // Musings

Courtesy of Detective Cruise from NBC’s “Life”

Mirror mirror … on the wall

// December 21st, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Technology

I’ve been thinking about ways to promote OSS here in Brunei. One suggested method is to set up an OSS mirror here.

A mirror is essentially a local copy of software, that is sync with the providers. Changes in the central sites are reflected here locally. This can save bandwidth for all users, and improve the availability of OSS here in Brunei.

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3 of 4 undersea cables severed

// December 20th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

Bloomberg reports that 3 undersea cables were severed in the Mediterranean (between Italy and Egypt). This may inadvertently affect some outsourcing contracts and work being done in Asia. The cuts affects Brunei to some degree … since it’s the FLAG, SEAMEWE4 and SEAMEWE3 cables that are affected.

From the article:

Experimenting with Ruby and Merb

// December 15th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

I’ve been looking through Ruby on Rails and I find many of the conventions fascinating. Convention-over-configuration is cool one … it means instead of having to tirelessly configure every single aspect of your application … RoR does some things automagically, provided you name things correctly. This cuts down on the amount of time spent tinkering with configuration (editing large XML files, a la Hibernate) and more time actually dealing with the problem at hand.

But what is perhaps RoR’s greatest strength is also likely to be it’s greatest weakness. Although you can get apps up and running very fast with a framework like RoR, you may find yourself tied to a certain way of thinking – because the framework was prescriptive like that.

And now Merb comes along. Although it’s not got as big a user base as RoR, Merb seems to have a lot of good potential. Losing some of the “automagical” convention-over-configuration pixie dust has its downsides, but the upside is that Merb seems to be a lot more flexible and lightweight, and less prescriptive. We shall see the results of these new experiments …

Fedora 10 co-operating with Windows XP – part4

// December 14th, 2008 // No Comments » // Musings

Awesome! I got suspend and 3D graphics working fine on the Dell E6400!

Searching the Fedora / RPMFusion repositories revealed this:

NVIDIA proprietary display drivers … hrm … my laptop has an NVIDIA GPU Quadro NVS 160M.

Get some more info:

Installing this with yum -y install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia enables 3D acceleration (Desktop Effects now works) and suspend works perfectly now.

I now pronounce the Dell E6400 as sufficiently “Linux Friendly” for use. My only remaining hardware issue seems to be the Bluetooth device, and I haven’t tried the memory card reader (I’m not a photographer).