James Zhuo 卓宇翔: Blog

The Dynamics of Change and Fear

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:36:28 GMT

Great talk for entrepreneurs.

On a more personal front. I used to go through emotional ups and downs a lot more. In retrospect, this was probably because of fears, fear that while others make money in a full-time job to pay off their house, that I would come out of it with nothing. These self-doubts can sometimes kill one's entrepreneurial spirit, I am just glad that I no longer seem to suffer from these mental struggles.

Python Decorators

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:50:35 GMT

Using python decorators you can easy do inject behaviours through declaration.
A good example of how this might be used in an web application is as follows

@authenticated
def home(request):
""" a function to handle web request for the home page """
.... code to handle web request ....

@authenticated injects authentication functionality through a decorator implemented
as either a Python decorator function or decorator class. Here's a great 3 part tutorial on
python decorators http://muharem.wordpress.com/2006/10/18/3/

One of those lovely things about python.

IDKWTF - Learn the Value of Wasting Time

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:30:20 GMT

How's this for a way of differentiating yourself? With all these video sites around, people's got to find a way to differentiate themselves somehow. I guess this is how idkwtf.com does it.

Python Humour (Sorry if you are not a programmer)

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:23:50 GMT

This was some python geek's signature in a python mailing list that I've recently joined. I thought it's quite funny.

"Thus spake the Lord: Thou shalt indent with four spaces. No more, no less. Four shall be the number of spaces thou shalt indent, and the number of thy indenting shall be four. Eight shalt thou not indent, nor either indent thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to four. Tabs are right out."

How's this for originality?

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:01:33 GMT

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff261/ikaika_34/check.jpg

Lion Reunited with Man

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:52:40 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adYbFQFXG0U

Al Gore being really Funny (TedTalk)

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:14:24 GMT

This TedTalk is pretty average but Al Gore was being really funny.
You wouldn't think a presidential candidate has the funny side in him.

Now if you want an interesting TedTalk and has 20 minutes to spare now, "Classical Music with Shining Eyes" by Benjamin Zander

Glassdoor.com is turning companies inside out

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:29:55 GMT

Glassdoor.com is a really cool site. If you are like me and constantly try to understand how companies and businesses work. Glassdoor enables (ex)employees to reveal a different side of every company. These reviews are subject to individual opinions and experiences but taken together they are a great insight into a company and its culture. For example, Google has been seen as this great company to work for that does great things, but perhaps they are more like the next Microsoft than most people think, here's a few extracts

“If you enjoy your individuality and time alone, Google is not the place for you (keep in mind I’m not an engineer). Google pushes a highly "googley" atmosphere, which is something akin to what the Brady Bunch would be like if they lived in communist Russia. ... People are encouraged to have googley attitudes, wear plastic smiles, and not to question the infallible nature of the executive management group. Marathon hours are the standard because, after all, employees are practically encouraged to bring a cot and sleep there…barracks coming soon (really?! no, not really). If you like feeling awkward during forced group activity, Google is your haven. ... if you don't participate you become labeled as "ungoogley." Once deemed “ungoogley”, you're practically viewed as a rotten apple that threatens to spoil the bunch.”

“Real life at Google has NOTHING to do with what you read in the papers. Management is mostly useless and doesn't know how to manage projects, let alone people. Folks like Marissa Mayer (who appears on every news magazine of the world) have 200+ people reporting to them. As direct reports. Also when you are not kissing your way up, you not only have no job progression or promotions, but you also will get ousted at some point. No matter if you are good or bad. In fact, most of the super intelligent people at Google are bitching because they are put on dumb jumps which makes them feel undervalued and miserable all the time.”

See for yourself here.

PS: tradevibes.com is another great site, a new startup trying to be wikipedia but for information related to startup companies, they seem to be attracting enough people to their site to get the whole movement going. This is another 1 dollar bet for me and Michael. I think they might just make it, though they do have a formidable competitor - crunchbase.

Would you buy Google shares? What about Apple and Amazon?

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:53:57 GMT

Everything about Google looks so promising, bar the following Google sued over 'unwanted ads', or more specifically the fact that their revenue relies solely on online Advertising which is unreliable and potentially a bottomless pit hole. Perhaps I am overly concerned since Google's revenue has been steadily increasing despite these lawsuits. But instinctively I see no substance in Google's online advertisements. I've asked many around me and none of them pay any attention to Google's text based ads, their acquisition of DoubleClick is probably a good sign that they've realised this. Personally I am much more inclined to click on ads with pictures or Flash similar to TV ads and even then I might click on at most 3 ads every year (yes I can count the number of times I've clicked).

What's most promising about Google for me is their push into software as a service (Saas). I can see Google becoming a leading enterprise software maker in the not too distant future. In fact I would argue that they already are, Gmail is the proof. But there are also Google doc, Google site (wiki), Google reader, Google calendar and let's not forget their newly launched App Engine service. We are boot-strapping our startup operation using all of these Google technologies and we see absolutely no reason to use anyone else. In a sense we are at the bleeding edge of using all these technologies and we see many others following swiftly in the same direction. This is really the root of my optimism about Google.

Google may face competitions from Microsoft in all of these areas, but I just can't see Microsoft transitioning from their existing business model to the new cheap, on-demand, commodity based, enterprise, web solutions model. It's the culture of these companies that ultimately dictate what they become and I think Google's culture is much more well-suited to the new economy built around the web.

Having said all of these, is $552.12 USD at a P/E of 38.81 a good buy given the current state of the US economy? Or would you buy Apple at a similar P/E, an equally promising company with arguably less risk and more prospects for growth? Or Amazon with a P/E of almost 70, again very promising with the release of Amazon Kindle and Amazon web services. I think in the long term all these companies will be good buys, for me it's just a matter of what price to buy into them. If you've any valuation model to share with me, I would love to see it.

JZ

DHH Talk - Startup School 2008

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 03:32:43 GMT

http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97862/DHH_Talk__Startup_School_2008

This is definitely one of the better presentations that I've seen from DHH.
He sounded a lot more matured and his arrogance seemed to have subsided.
But great advices on how to build a startup. I think many internet entrepreneurs
or indeed any other entrepreneurs would really appreciated this information.
DHH was just being honest and trying to help, which is really good to see :)

Great video!

You don't need a Mac Book air to fit your laptop inside an envelope

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:45:23 GMT

I was just chatting to my friend Michael about how the MacBook Air fits into an envelope. I had a thought and thought i should try it with my MacBook pro. Voila, IT FITS!!! hahahaha, well that just kills Apple's MacBook Air promotion doesn't it?

China and Tibet from a Chinese Australian perspective ...

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:40:49 GMT

Before I start my rant, here's a more balanced perspective about China and Tibet from my friend George who has a passion for East Asian cultures, and who understands China and Chinese more than most westerners because he has studied and lived in China and Korea. After reading my post below, another friend has sent me a post on a public forum by M.A.Jones who presents some empirical evidence on the subject matter. His view is consistent with mine below but he goes into much more details.

Let me start by revealing the true face of western media as the author of this video puts it.

BBC, CNN, Washington Post, N-TV, Bild Zeitung, RTL, Berliner Mogenpost, Der Spiegel, the list goes on ... If you are reasonable about it, you would agree with me this is shameful stuff. It is no wonder why people in the west think the way they do about China.

This is from Time Magazine, March 2008 "Playing the Games" by Joshua Kurlantzick - "the unrest in Tibet stems from years of brutal Chinese religious, economic and political repression". Let me dissect each one of those 3 repressions for you since Time Magazine is unwilling or unable to do so.

"Economic repression" - China has pumped billions of dollars into Tibet since its economic revival. Tibetan region enjoys tax exemptions and a large capital inflow for its infrastructures and tourism-based economy. Tibetan has been treated in the same consistent way that 54 other minorities have been treated in China, i.e. being given special privileges and economic support. People must also understand that China's rise is a step by step process, The 3 special economic regions in China have been given priorities to kick start the Chinese economic engine. The rest of the country will prosper along side as investments spread in-land for lower costs over time. The Tibetan Automous Region already enjoys a lot of benefits from the Chinese government. Chinese Han and Muslim entrepreneurs are doing great businesses in Tibet, why don't Tibetan people do something for themselves instead of rioting and looting from those who have?

"Political repression" is rubbish. Tibet is an Automous Region in China which means they get to govern themselves with funding provided by the Chinese government (not to mention the tax exemptions). But of course Tibet must still be governed in line with the Chinese constitution because it's part of China. It's no different to how states in Australia are governed by local state governments, but each state must still be governed in line with the Australian constitution while the central government overlooks everything.

"Religious repression" may have occurred in the era of communist ideals (pre 1980), but this applied across all of China, and it is in the past. Tibetan are free to practice their religion today, only political dissidents are suppressed in light of social unrest, some of them being monks. If you ask Tibetan monks whether they like the Chinese government, of course they will say no because their authority and power has been stripped by the Chinese government when the slavery system was overthrown in Tibet (where the monastery, monks and the upper class enjoyed privileges and power over the ordinary people and slaves). If you ask descendants of Tibetan slaves whether they like the Chinese government, of course they would say yes. This is about interests of particular groups, not about religious repression.

But most westerners would never understand these because they hardly understand a thing about China and Tibet. Yet they are happy to stand along side those exiled Tibetans and protest for Tibetan independence, claiming cultural genocide and human rights abuse. Sure, the Chinese cultural revolution was wrong, the Tian An Men Square event was wrong. But the west can be less hypocritical by not talking about China like the west haven't done worst. Europeans have done far worst things than what China has ever done to people of other cultures, you name it, ethnic cleansing, cultural genocide, the list doesn't end. But the world has largely put this past behind and wants to move onto a better future, so why don't the west do the same when looking at China instead of nitpicking on every little thing. Why not stop looking at China with prejudice and stereotype and learn more about China if you so wish to talk about China.

I've brought this topic to the open table with my business partner and friend Michael who is a white Australian, and his view is that surely I would understand why Tibetans wants independence, and sure I do. If I was a Tibetan I would probably do the same, well maybe not the rioting and looting and killing but I would certainly have joined the independence movement. Having said that, the west must surely also understand that Tibet is situated at a very strategic location in China and for this reason alone China would never allow Tibet to become independent. Same story goes with Taiwan but that's another story all together.

Some people like to talk about the legitimacy of Chinese claim to Tibetan land. Tibet has been occupied and controlled by China since the 13th century, i.e centuries before the founding of European colonies in America and Australia. Ask why Britain won't allow independence of Northern Ireland, ask Canada why Quebec is not allowed to become an independent nation, Ask Germany why Bavaria is not an independent nation, Ask Belgium why Flanders is not an independent nation. I don't think I have to make my point any more explicit.

IMHO, if Tibetans are smart, they can take advantage of Chinese investments, take advantage of the tax exemptions, take advantage of special privilege that the Chinese Government has given every ethnic minority cultures in China, all 55 of them including Tibet and make a better Tibet. Independence is only for the idealist.

I am interested in what your think.
twitter me: jamesz
email me: james.zhuo [@] gmail.com
MSN me: yuxiangzhuo [@] hotmail.com

You can get to know a bit more about the cast system that was in place in Tibet from the video below.

Hirem.com is on Google App Engine service, woohoo!!!

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:46:41 GMT

24 hours after Google's beta launch of App Engine, we've put our first website on the service. It's only a couple of relatively static pages, but it goes to show how easy it is to put something onto Google's App Engine service without any infrastructure of our own. All credits to Michael my friend and business partner for so eagerly embracing new Technologies.

[Singing Out Loud]: I am so excited, and I just can't hide it, and I know, I know ..... took me a while to find this, so enjoy :)

Google App Engine, Amazon AWS, the era of grid computing is dawning...

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:41:23 GMT

Google has just launched their App Engine service.

The service allows anyone to deploy python based apps onto google's grid computing infrastructure. The fact that it's a grid is transparent to users. So you don't have to worry about your application infrastructure and any related maintenance. If this sounds a bit like Amazon AWS, it is, sort of. Google App Engine is more a integrated service while AWS a set of isolated services. Amazon AWS gives programmers a set of highly scalable services that could be combined in use to build their applications. Google tries to provide the whole package so you don't have to worry about managing your operating system, but the storage capacity Google is providing is insufficient and lags far behind what Amazon is offering with S3.

It's too obvious that the two services could be combined to very quickly launch a highly scalable python based application on highly commoditised infrastructure for the very first time in history. If Google decides to support Ruby I am sure a lot of people from the Rails community would be very happy. Imagine running Rails on Google App Engine, using Amazon S3 for file storage, Amazon EC2 for batch processing, Amazon SQS for message based application. Zero custom infrastructure, zero maintenance, we should all be rejoicing!

Here's a video introducing how to make a quick message book and deploy it onto Google infrastructure. I couldn't get an account to play with yet, in the queue. Most interesting points from the video are
1. Object Oriented DB (at least it looks that way to me) - storage magically made available as soon as you define the object oriented Models in python
2. GQuery - looks like SQL to me but maps directly to the object oriented models

So would i use Google App Engine? For projects to play around with, my answer is absolutely. For relatively static websites, my answer would be yes again. For commercial applications, my answer is probably no at this point in time.

PS: see how much smugmug saved switching to Amazon S3 as their storage solution.

Ruby, Rails, Gems and Plugins Demystified

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:44:29 GMT

Ruby, Rails, Gems and Plugins ...

It's enough to give any RoR first timers a headache.
So let me quickly demystify this for you

Ruby is a programming language.
Rails is a web framework created using Ruby, and is used to build websites and web applications
Ruby Gems are Ruby programs/libraries packaged for easy installation. The installed ruby programs/libraries can then be used by other Ruby programs in your system, e.g. A typical Rails application makes use of many Ruby libraries.
Rails Plugins are Ruby programs that has been packaged for reused in any Rails applications. Rails plugins can be installed in a Rails application by simply copying all the contents of a plugin folder and can be deleted equally easily.

So really, a Ruby Gem is not much different from a Rails Plugin in that they both enable reuse of ruby code/library. But a Ruby Gem only needs to be installed once per system before it could be used over and over again. Ruby Plugins are only installed per Rails application so if you create a new Rails application that needs the same plugin, the plugin will need to be installed for the new Rails application.

here's a treat for sticking with me for so long

These base jumping dudes are nuts, but it's exhilarating just watching the video

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:56:22 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0tU3Hy7et8

C# Coding Standard

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 10:55:22 GMT

I've been using this as a guideline for my C# based projects for a while now. It's by Juval Lowy. They call him .net legend. I've met him once at a user group, very smart guy no doubt, but as you would probably expect, also came across as being a bit arrogant. Juval's guideline has served very well, but the reason for this post is really because I've found an alternate guideline published by Microsoft which is 99% identical to Juval's that I think is much quicker to skim through because it focuses mainly on naming conventions .

The Microsoft naming guideline can be found here. enjoy :)

Handy SVN commands, much faster than using a GUI tool

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:34:28 GMT

Here's some handy SVN commands I use on a daily basis.

> svn help
Lists all svn commands

> svn update
Compares and updates all files under version control in the context of the current directory

> svn add [directory_name]or[file_name]
Add a file or directory under version control

> svn help [command]
If you want to know more about a particular command

> svn delete [directory_name]or[file_name]
Remove file or directory from version control

> svn commit -m "commit message"
Sends all changes to version control

This is generally enough to get me through the day :)

Oh almost forgot, svn stat this is a really useful one, you will never miss another uncommited file again.

PS: If you ever need to delete all the .svn folders, use these unix commands
> find . -type d -name .svn
> rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`
I've found it here and it works really well.

Furnitures packed into a box the size of a filing cabinet ...

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:50:08 GMT

1 wardrobe
1 large desk/table
1 desk cabinet with locking drawers
1 revolving, height-adjustable desk chair
2 stools
1 single bed
1 mattress
1 tall set of shelves

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYCTcPkIIBI

it's called CASULO

Handy MySQL 5 commands to help you navigate the database

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:01:13 GMT

I've found MySQL Admin/Query Browser very cumbersome on OSX. So I've resorted to using command lines instead to get an overall picture of the database. This has worked surprisingly well, there is a bit of typing, but you can get every where on the keyboard which is generally much faster than using a GUI interface for programming tasks.

In Mac OSX you can install MySQL5 using mac port
> port install mysql5

To login to mysql5 (no password has been set for root user in this case)
> mysql5 -u root

To get a list of databases available
> show databases;

To use a particular database
> use [database_name]

To show all tables in the database
> show tables;

To show fields from a table
> show fields from [table_name];
> desc [table_name]; (much shorter)

To show indexes for a table
> show index from [table_name];

From just those few commands you can pretty much get a good picture of the database, particularly hard-to-remember field names. There's a more comprehensive list from someone else here.

Ratatouille, Le Festin

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 05:38:53 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBe2jvEbGr8

Greenspan does this when making hard decisons ...

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 12:53:13 GMT

From "The Age of Turbulence", Greenspan shed some light on how he goes about making up his mind when reviewing economic policies.

"In reviewing a policy, I always asked myself the question, What are the costs to the economy if we are wrong? If there is no downside risk, you can try any policy you want. If the cost of the failure is potentially very large, you should avoid the policy even if the probability of success is better than fifty-fifty, because you cannot accept the cost of failure."

I think this applies for all of us in our every day life.

JZ :)

The landlord - lol so cute

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:31:37 GMT

The Landlord on FunnyOrDie.com

12 Things I Wish I'd Known Before Building a Web App

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:09:00 GMT

| View | Upload your own

the Secret ....

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:09:33 GMT

Some people thinks this is a scam, but hear me out.

This short video talks about The Law of Attraction, which basically says "the more you think of something the more you get it". This principle resonates with every single personal development book or programs I've ever read or heard. The thing to take away is "focus on what you want, not what you don't want". It reminds me of the many great quotes we all know:

"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" - Wiliam Shakespear

"give, and it shall be given unto you" - Luke 6:38

"for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction" - Newton's Third Law of Motion

"you must be the change you want to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi

"the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer"

All these well known quotes resonates and substantiates the law of attraction talked about in this Video. Dale Carnegie in his best-selling book preached "don't complain, condemn or complain" as one of the principles for dealing with other people, for if you do, you shall get it in return. Anthony Robbins' personal development program talked about "focusing on the things you want, not the things you don't want", for most people focus on the things that they don't want and wonder why it keeps coming to them over and over again in life.

The law of attraction is not bias, what ever you think of, you will get more of.

Ever been angry? Notice the more you think about it, the angrier you get?
Ever been worried? Notice the more you think about it, the more anxious you get?

You can begin to feel wealth.
You can begin to feel love.
You can begin to feel happiness.
You can begin to have feelings of gratitude.

For those are the feelings you want and desire, focus on them and have a wonderful life :)

Chuck Jones draws Wile E. Coyote

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:13:23 GMT

For whatever reason, it is very heart-warming watching this. enjoy :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqaedNnx2nE

Google’s Chief on What’s Different

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:11:24 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/technology/16ericmemo-web.html

".... We’ve recognized, and now embrace, our biggest challenge — the changing nature of time. The relentless pace of technology improvement continues to make time management more and more critical for business leaders. While this has certainly long been true, the big difference now is the immediacy of information and action. Technology’s primary role has long been to speed up the transfer of information but now we increasingly contend with its unpleasant byproduct, information overload. ... "

See full article

Ruby Snippet to add Australian time zones as priority time zones

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:01:32 GMT

Here's a little snippet o add Australian time zones as priority time zones to time_zone_select with Ruby on Rails.

Add the snippet to the application helper so that it can be accessed from any view or controller.
Once you've done that, you should be able to do the following

<%= time_zone_select :account, :time_zone, TimeZone.us_zones + TimeZone.au_zones %>

module ApplicationHelper
  
  def TimeZone.au_zones
      [TimeZone.new("Sydney"), 
      TimeZone.new("Canberra"), 
      TimeZone.new("Brisbane"),
      TimeZone.new("Melbourne"),
      TimeZone.new("Perth"),
      TimeZone.new("Adelaide"),
      TimeZone.new("Hobart"),
      TimeZone.new("Darwin")]
  end
  
end

You can do something similar with UK zones or any other country really.

code happy :)

What Video Game System Should I own?

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:19:07 GMT

credit goes to whoever that created this, i didn't do it. a friend sent this to me a while back. if this is yours and you can prove it let me know.

10 tips using a Mac

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 00:11:55 GMT

I've been using a Mac for the last couple of months. I must say that a programmer is much better suited to a unix-based platform. There just seems to be so much more freedom with a unix platform. I am not sure about "Mac being more user friendly", I think windows users would probably struggle a little with navigating between windows (even with expose). But I've found a right mix of tools to help me gain a better user experience, this is only a subset of tools I use which I find immensely helpful

1. Quick Silver - launches all application within 2 key strokes, it can be trained (ctrl-space to activate)
2. Skitch - take screenshots and share it with your friend easily. i use this a lot, this is by far the coolest app
3. Stickies - built-in mac sticky, much more useful than a text-editor for quickly jotting down notes (QuickSilver - st), auto saves
4. Parallel - great VM to run Windows (QuickSilver - pa) for things that mac can't do
5. Safari's built-in tool: History -> Reopens all windows from last Session - I don't use browser bookmarks any more
6. Mozy - backs up important files onto the internet, all files are encrypted and its silent (install, config and forget)
7. EyeTV - i watch SBS and ABC on this, also records show if i don't have time to watch
8. Last.fm - great music for free, like a internet radio station but you get to choose what you want to hear, try "Slow" and hit play
9. Miro - for all my video consumptions, e.g. Ted, Hubblecast
10. Expose - a nifty little navigation interface built-in to the mac operating system, very visual way of navigating around

Here's some great utilities
* Monolingual - to remove unnecessary localisation files http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/
* SmartSleep - to change sleep/hibernate settings http://www.jinx.de/SmartSleep.html
* iSync - synchronising contacts, calendars etc with my Phone using blue tooth (QuickSilver - sy)

Even with this impressive list of tools and my initial excitement with expose. I still found the mac somewhat cumbersome to use because I still had to think about what to do when navigating between different application windows. I loved expose initially because I was able to get to the windows I want within 1 click, but once I have 20+ windows opened at once, it starts to become a little cumbersome, finding the right window becomes a trial-n-error exercise.

Clearly, expose is not sufficient to solve my problem, here's how I've got around the problem
1. QuickSilver - a consistent way to switch between applications within 2 strokes
2. Safari - for web apps that I use every day, e.g. gmail
3. Firefox - is my default browser, any links sent by friends over IM or twitter will be opened using Firefox, for reading
4. expose - i only use this within a particular app, e.g. safari or firefox. I set this to activate by moving my mouse to the top-right hand corner of the screen. expose for all windows is unusable for me, but can sometimes be useful.

Here's a fantastic list of software for Mac (I use most of them).
Here's another list of really good sharewares.
Learn how to use short cut keys and some other tips and tricks here
Here's another list of keyboard shortcuts

Let me know how you go, JZ :)

Amazing 2D to 3D Rendering Technology

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:32:12 GMT

This video demonstrates a 2D to 3D approximation techology. It is simply "Amazing". Watch it and think about the implication of this technology for the movies and games industry. This will take days or even weeks worth of work off every animated character. Photo realism is no longer a problem even for the novice 3D artist. This means more time spend creating stories rather than worrying about the technical details. It would be interesting to think of other applications of this technology.

Ruby vs .Net - too funny

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:18:34 GMT

The God question - finding my way ...

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:23:08 GMT

I've been pondering the God question for quite a while now. Every time I meet a Godly person, I would ask them "Why do you believe in God?". What's surprising is that no one has been able to answer this question to my satisfaction. The usual response is "I can feel God through my life and personal experience" or "I just know that God is there", and others simply have faith that God is in heaven over-watching them.

I grew up in a Christian family, so I've been going to Church since I was a baby. But that day came, when I asked myself "Why am I going to Church? I don't believe in God". So I've stopped going to Church but the question still lurks, "Is there a God?".

In school we were taught the theories of "Natural Selection" & "Big Bang", and for quite a while I was convinced that Darwin's theory was sufficient to explain the existence of life and Big Bang sufficient to explain the beginning of our Universe. But of course I've never asked in-depth questions on how Darwin's theory can explain things like evolution at the cellular level or, how the Big Bang managed to create a life-sustaining environment.

Today, I can say fairly definitively that Darwin's Evolutionary theory cannot explain cellular evolution, if you go and see this video at Ted you will see that the mind-boggling complexity of a living cell cannot possibly have come about through micro-evolutionary means. This is probably to many people's surprise, but a lot of scientist are well-aware of the flaws in Darwin's theory and have publicised widely in the scientific community. Even Darwin himself apparently acknowledged that future discovery of complex organs may invalidate his theory. The worrying thing is that our schools are still teaching Darwin's theory as scientific truth. This is not to discredit Darwin's genius in coming up with such a theory as an alternative explanation to the origin of life. I am still trying to find God but I thought it's worth-while documenting my thoughts on my journey to find god.

So how did I come to believe that there might just be a God out there. My dad an atheist and my mum a devoted Christian, so maybe it's not that much of surprise that I became an agnostic. But my journey of discovery began at home where Mum often hosts bible study groups. I would often join their discussions and ask them tough questions like "If God is a creator of all things, who created God?". No one has ever been able to satisfactorily answer my questions. But it's from one of these discussions recently that I was pointed to a book called "The Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel.

I must say that after reading the book, I am now pretty convinced that there must be a God. Although I am not yet convinced that this God must be the Christian or Muslim god. In any case, I think I have to read it again to get it all in me so I can reprocess that information and make my own interpretations. This experience also taught me to ponder less and do more. Pondering won't bring me knowledge, reading with a critical mind will. Pondering won't create value, doing with thoughts will.

I am happy to say I am now a theist, but there's much to discover ... until next time, bye.

Profitability - Fundamental Analysis using Financial Ratios - Part II

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 22:08:49 GMT

In Part I of my series on Fundamental Analysis using Financial Ratios, I've talked about Current Ratio and how it can be used to broadly interpret the financial health of a business. This is Part II of the series, and I going to talk about financial ratios related to the profitability of a business. This part is not really applicable to running your own business but is very helpful when it comes to investing in public companies.

Liquidity (Part I)

Profitability (Part II)

Market valuation

Operational Efficiency

Human Psycology

Manufacturing vs Services Industry

Accuracy of financial information

Sampling financial data (picking meaningful time periods)

Analysing the profitability of a company is important because we want to be sure the company we are investing in is making money. This line of thinking is broadly applicable if you are investing in established businesses as oppose to startups. Keep in mind that profitability in the past is not indicative of profitability in the future, and this rule is applicable for all financial indicators we will look at through out this series. In fact, it is worth pointing out that when working with financial ratios or financial statements in general, always remember that this information is just a snapshot of the company taken at a particular moment in time. So don't treat it as the absolute truth, instead use it as a gauge.

When deciding on which company to invest in, we want to know "If I invest 1 dollar in this company today, how much it will returned in a year?", another word we are looking for the Return on Equity (ROE). You might think we may also be interested in ratios like Profit Margins and Earnings Per Share, and you are probably right in saying that these ratios are related to profits. But, these ratios are not really indicative of the profitability of a company because they don't really address our question. So the formula for calculating Return on Equity is as follows:

		Net Income
	Return on Equity (ROE) =	--------------------------------------------
		Average Stockholders' Equity

Before we go into how to calculate this value, I want to give you a rough gauge on what ROE you should be looking for. For example, is a sustained 20% Return on Equity is considered a good investment? Let's answer this question by applying the compound interest formula. You will find that based on a 20% ROE, your investment will roughly double every 4 years. Or to put it more usefully in the long term perspective, if you invest a principal amount of $10,000 now, your money will grow to $380,000 in 20 years. If you have the patience to wait another 10 years, it will grow to a whopping $2.37mil (237 times the initial principal).

That might sound all impressive, but it's not the whole story: the caveat is that I haven't taken into consideration inflation. Let's assume an average inflation rate of 4% per year and this would be a reasonable assumption in the developed economies of the world. If you invest your money for 20% ROE over 20 years, you would have to adjust the actual amount back by 2.19 times (1.04^20) to get a realistic view of how much your money is actually worth compare to today's standard.

Now, we want to calculate the ROE based on information already available in annual reports. It is worth stressing again that obtaining the ROE is simply an exercise to provide a gauge on a company's profitability performance, this figure is not intended to be precise. Let's start by examining the formula itself, the variables Net Income & Average Stockholder's Equity used in the formula and how we can obtain these values from annual reports.

Net Income (NI) is quite simply a company's total retained earnings (or profit). Net income is calculated by taking revenues and adjusting for the cost of doing business, depreciation, interest, taxes and other expenses. This is often referred to as "the bottom line" since net income is listed at the bottom of the income statement. In the U.K., net income is known as "profit attributable to shareholders/members". I will encourage you to grab any annual report and flip to the income statement, this should give you a fairly good idea on how net income is being calculated.


	Net Income = Retained Profit

To explain Average Stockholders' Equity, let's break it up in two parts

What is Stockholders' Equity?.
Why we are interested in the "average"?

Stockholders' Equity is often referred to as the book value of a company, but how do get this value from an annual report? If you look on the internet or any text book, you will get a formula that looks like this:


	Stockholder's Equity = Total Asset - Total Liability

This roughly says that the asset of a company derives either from contributions made by stockholders or through some form of borrowing. The problem with this formula is that for most people, it doesn't mean much as far as how to calculate ROE is concerned. The easy way to get the value for Stockholders' Equity is to flip open an annual report and look at the Balance Sheet, you should be able to easily identify the Stockholder's Equity item, this is the value you will use in your calculation. If you examine closely, you will see that we can better express Stockholders' Equity as:


	Stockholder's Equity = Equity contributed by Shareholders + Retained profits

This formula is not entirely accurate, but it's accurate enough for our purpose in calculating ROE. Now if we rewrite our ROE equation by substituting Net Income & Stockholder's Equity, the resulting equation should be pretty intuitive

		Retained Profit (Net Income)
	Return on Equity (ROE) =	---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
		Equity contributed by Shareholders + Retained profits (Average Stockholders' Equity)

This equation answers our original question "If I invest 1 dollar (my equity) in this company today, how much (profit generated by my equity) it will returned in a year?" You can IM me or leave a comment if you still don't understand.

Some of you might already be crying out loud "Hold on, you've just substituted Average Stockholder's Equity with Stockholders' Equity, what the deal here?" In my opinion, it's not that big a deal, it depends on how you look at Return on Equity. But let me explain why the average value is desirable when it comes to calculating the ROE. Remember I was saying before that any financial information presented in annual reports are snapshots taken at a particular time? Stockholders' equity is not a constant, it changes as people buy and sell shares on the stock market, more importantly it can change quite substantially if a company decide to raise money by issuing new shares. Another word the equity contributed by stockholders that has been used to generate profit for the company changes over the entire financial year, this means we can't simply use the starting value for Stockholders' Equity for calculating ROE because doing will mislead us. In an ideal world, you would want the running average for Stockholders' Equity, but this information is not readily available because financial reports are generally produced once every year (as part of the annual report, although some companies do report more frequently on a half-yearly or quarterly basis). For this reason, it is appropriate to simply take the average of the starting and ending ROE values for the financial year concerned:

		Starting Stockholders' Equity + Ending Stockholders' Equity
	Average Stockholders' Equity =	-------------------------------------------------------------
		2

In conclusion, Return on Equity (ROE) gives us a gauge on the profitability performance of a company. Although it's pointless comparing share prices, comparing ROE makes a lot more sense. Having said that, would you base your investment decision on by simply comparing the ROE of one company against another? I would say "No". I will answer why as we continue with this series.

Solving Rubik's Cube

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 18:37:12 GMT

A kid, about 5, popped over to my house and started playing with my Rubik's cube last night. I've tried to solve the cube on my own a fair few times before, but I haven't been successfully.

Since I am mostly relaxing at home this APEC holiday weekend, I've decided to look for a way to solve the cube. It's surprisingly easy if you have the techniques right in front of you to follow. There are only really about 5 move sequences that you need to remember, the rest is pretty straight forward (a bit of logic, nothing too fancy). Trust me, before I used these techniques I thought I needed to have photographic memory to do this thing, but now I think anyone can do it.

The instructions I've used can be found here. Don't use it if you decide to try, it's too verbose. I've ignored most the instructions and simply used the 5 moves and 4 goals found in there to solve my cube. I don't think it's the most efficient way to solve the cube, but it works. Here's a shortened version of the technique (all pictures I've used have been taken from the original source).

Rubik's Cube Instruction - a 4 step process

Let's disambiguate with some illustrations, the Rubik's cube has 6 faces and 26 cubes that needs to be rearranged in order to solve it. Like any other puzzle there's only one location where each cube can go.

1. The first step is to get a cross on one face of the Rubik's cube, choose any colour you wish.

2. The second step is to get a cross on all 6 faces of the Rubik's cube.

3. The third step is to get all the corner cubes in the correct corners, e.g. the corner cube for red, blue and yellow faces must have all 3 colours. Note: we are not solving the cube yet, so the orientation of the corner cubes are not important. Just get the corner cubes in the corner where they belong (Remember there's only one location where each cube can go).
4. The final goal is to solve the Rubik's cube by reorienting(turning) the corner cubes to match each face of the cube.

The first goal is relatively straight forward, so just do it yourself! The 2nd goal and 3rd goal will need some techniques to follow. The techniques I refer to here are move sequences that will allow you to move a cube to a desired location yet retaining the position of most of the existing cubes.

You will need the following 5 move sequences
1. EDGE SWITCHER
2. EDGE SWITCHER WITH FLIP (use sequence 1 & 2 until you complete step 2)
3. SWITCH THREE CORNERS (use sequence 3 until you complete step 3)
4. CORNER FLIPPER RIGHT
5. CORNER FLIPPER LEFT (use sequence 4 & 5 to complete the final step)

See illustrations below for each of these move sequences.

The EDGE SWITCHER sequence.
Hold the cube like this before performing this sequence.

The EDGE SWITCHER WITH FLIP sequence
Hold the cube like this before performing the moves.

The SWITCH THREE CORNERS sequence.
Hold the cube like this before performing this sequence.

The CORNER FLIPPER RIGHT move sequence.
Hold the whole cube like this before performing the sequence.

The CORNER FLIPPER LEFT sequence.
Hold the whole cube like this before performing the sequence.

My finished cube :)

if i remember correctly it took me about 2 hours the first time i did it, but now i can do it in 20 min by following the sequences. If i remember the sequences i could probably cut that down to about 5 min. I've just been taught a new way to do it by another kid (about 16 years old) and it's much faster, I will post the new instructions later.

It's too easy to scale?

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 14:03:50 GMT

In the age of web 2.0 software. Building scalable software is becoming a increasing necessity for many web-based software/websites. Many online software vendors, particularly web 2.0 companies experience sudden growth and often find themself caught short with the problem of scaling.

To be honeset I've never built anything that needs to scale like Amazon or Ebay. But it's not hard to imagine the scaling problem some of these companies would have run into at one stage of their product lifecyle. It's thus worth thinking about these. I want to share a simple strategy to help distribute and partition data right at the beginning of a product. In my opinion, it's not that much extra effort to build this extra layer in order to avoid potential catestrophic problems down the line.

The first step taken when people hit the scaling problem is "Load Balancers". These will often do fine, at least for a while until you hit the ultimate but inevitable bottleneck with the database. This is the devil, very scary stuff. How do you ensure you don't lose any data when you have Terabytes of it? Back it up? It's not impossible, for analytics application or web crawlers this can often be the case. So how do you build software that scale like Google does?

If Google's share price impresses you, you should see how they manage their server infrastructures. Not that I've seen it, but I've heard they've built something that's almost infinitely scalable, if a machine dies, it's automatically detected by software and can be replaced by simplying swapping out the machine. Everything is presumably automatically replicated, but I guess the web can be crawled again if data is lost, so it's not too critical. Still, bloody impressive eh?

So if you have a database bottleneck problem, how do you solve it? Too obvious, split the data right? Try splitting a 300 table database (bloody nightmare, you might as well start from scratch). But regardless of what approach you go down, you will have to split the data and make sure that related data are close by to enable efficient queries. I haven't researched in depth, but I think there are a couple of general data partition strategies: by date, by geographic location or by some special business rules.

The strategy I am going to suggest should probably be categorised as data partition by business rules. For many web applications, especially ASP-based applications, there is the concept of an account and many users within an account. Each account and the data associated with this account could be regarded as an atomic unit, atomic in the sense that the data within the account is largely unrelated to data in other accounts. For this reason it makes sense to partition data based on accounts. This strategy also allows data associated with a particular account to be easily separated, e.g. if a client introduces special information security policy in their company, it is stilll possible to split their data out of the shared databases and build a standalone environment to meet this special requirement. I would also argue it's a great selling point to have the ability to scale over time.

So.. what if you need to perform analytics over several accounts? Build a datawarehouse! What if you need to do it on a continous basis? Build a replication service to gather the data you are interested in! I can't see any problem with this strategy yet but show me if you think I am wrong. (Keep in mind, there are only 6 billion people in the world, so don't go mad thinking about an infinitely never ending scaling problem, there are a lot of bots though)

Ok, so is there a catch? It can't be that simple right? Well, we haven't got rid of the bottleneck, we've shifted it. You can never get rid of complexities, it will always there. But shifting complexities can make it manageable (anyone remember OO?). We've shift the database bottleneck to a DB connection switching service, this is where where the application decides which database to talk to for a given user. But the beauty is that it's not a bottleneck. Because these DB connection switching service resides on a web server which has already being load balanced.

Genius!!! It can't be that simple right? Let me know if you think I am wrong. There's something else ticking in my head about scaling, I will share it if I get time to think more about it.

Liquidity/Current Ratio - Fundamental Analysis using Financial Ratios - Part I

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 14:09:48 GMT

In the past year, I have been looking into investing in both the share market and businesses in general. I've concluded that investing in other people's businesses as an outsider is a risky business. But, not investing in anything with your money is probably more risky in the long term. So, in order to reduce the risk of loosing money through direct investment, I've decided that I need to be able to read financial statements to help myself better understand the financial health of prospective companies I am looking at.

In my previously article (about half a year ago), I've outlined some financial ratios used to evaluate a company without going into any detailed explanations; nor giving any context of where these financial ratios would be useful. I've done so to create a check list that I can cross off over the the next year as I learn.

In this article I want to take a top-down approach to explaining what I've learnt so far. It is my hope that this approach will provide better context of where and how different financial ratios would be used. (Please leave your comments with IM details if there's anything unclear, inaccurate or incomplete).

I will start by introducing a number of key considerations when evaluating a business, I will try to explain these in the context of running a business. This will then be followed by an explanation of relevant financial ratios and how each applies to each key considerations. I will try to do this in a multi-part series as it's quite impossible to cover them all in one go. Please keep in mind that when it comes to financial ratios, the list is endless, so the key is not necessarily to know them all, but knowing which to apply in the right situation (easier said than done)

Liquidity (Part I)
Profitability
Market valuation
Operational Efficiency
Human Psycology
Manufacturing vs Services Industry
Accuracy of financial information
Sampling financial data (picking meaningful time periods)

The liquidity of a business is a very important measure when evaluating a company because it helps assess whether a company is having cash flow problems. Most small business owners would agree that cash flow is what kills a small business. I would argue that the same applies even for multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies.

A company with cash flow problems is probably not worth investing in as there's no telling when it will go bust. If the cost incurred by a company in its operating cycles, such as paying off suppliers and making interest payments cannot be covered by the cash that the company has at hand, then the company opens itself up to bankruptcy petitions filed by creditors. This could shut the business down very quickly. This is bad news for investors, as the company would be put into the hands of administrators, and guess what will happen to the shareholders? Yep, they are typically at the bottom of the food chain. If I am not wrong, in the case of One-Tel and Enron, shareholders got absolute zilch. (Ok, ok, these are no great examples of why companies go bust but you get my point)

Liquidity refers to a company's ability to convert its assets into cash in order meet its current liabilities including paying off suppliers, paying off salaries and making interest payments. The financial ratio used to measure a company's liquidity is Current Ratio. A company with reasonable financial health must have Current Ratio > 1.

Current Ratio = Current Asset / Current Liabilities

In order to better understand the variables used in this equation. I suggest that you find a balance sheet of any publicly traded company (inside their annual report) and have a look at the Current Assets and Current Liabilities columns to get an idea of what items goes into these columns. But for now, current assets is basically anything that the company can turn into cash in the near term (within one operating cycle) in order to meet its current liabilities. Current liabilities are costs that must be met by the company in a operating cycle such as morgage payments, supplier payments and salary payments. A company with poor financial health will have a current ratio of < 1. And this should signal trouble, this is the case even for start up companies that are expected to make a loss in their infancy. Start up should have have plans to raise sufficient funds to cover the expected operating costs in their infancies.

In summary, before you look into investing in a company, the very first thing you probably want check out is the company's immediate financial health. One good financial indicator of financial health is a company's Current Ratio. This information can be easily obtained from the balance sheets of publicly traded companies. But if you are looking at a private business to buy and operate, you would probably need to spend a little bit more effort making sure the information you've been given is accurate.

Pitfalls: if you have studied accounting or have run a business before, you would know the 2 sides of the balance sheet: Asset = Liabilities + Equities, it is worth pointing out that current asset and current liabilities are not in anyway related to this.

In my next article I will try to cover the topic of profitability. Until next time ... zai jian, ciao, bye :)