[Random] Good photoshop tutorial

I use photoshop quite a bit to fix up pictures and whatnot. I had some problem figuring out how to remove red eye from photos. I tried a couple of tutorials but all the results didn’t look that great. However, I did find this red eye elimination tutorial which did work quite well and was easy enough for someone of my skill to use… I was happy with the results.

[Software] Microsoft Live Local

Microsoft has had the bird’s eye feature in live for a while, but just today I actually tried it out and saw just how detailed it is. Since it’s coverage is limited (no Chicago), I looked up the place I lived at my second summer in Redmond.

The detail is amazing! I can see the apartment complex from all angles and I can pick out the apartment I lived in.

While the imaging is better with Live local than with Google Maps, They still lag behind Google maps in their interface, both in terms of intuitiveness, appeal, and speed (live local is actually quite slow on my computer)

[Software] Web 2.0 Amoral

Why the title is kinda obvious, this post, in Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type blog, is intriguiging in its treatment of recent trends in web development. The amorality of Web 2.0

It takes a more pessimistic look the effects of the trends that are commonly called “Web 2.0″. One sentence struck as particularly interesting…

“I’m all for blogs and blogging. (I’m writing this, ain’t I?) But I’m not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere – its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation.”

Blogs certainly allow anyone to become a publisher or columnist. The great hope is that allowing everyone to publish whatever, ideas will exchange, people will broaden their horizons. Additionally, a big hope is that blogs will “flatten” information by allowing Joe Smith to be as powerful at the New York Times in his ability to reach an audience. The world would benefit from this, as power spread in many hands is much better than power concentrated in one place. However, I realized that likely this trend will be subject to human behavior…

What happens is that people will merely find it easier to find reflections of their own opinion or stance. People will do this and accept the writings reflecting his or own opinions over writings with contrasting opinions because people assume they are right and won’t change their opinion until proven wrong. This is an interesting thing to consider with respect to blogs, as people will be able to more easily find similar views through the internet and on blogs rather than through main stream media.

Additionally, The whole of bloggers as a whole may at some point have the same power to dissimate information and influence opinion at the same level as mainstream media (I actually think is quite likely within 10 years). While through this, blogging may “flatten” information but at the same time it will create an “information mob”… On one hand, this is good as no outside force can control this mob without shutting down the internet entirely (won’t happen). On the bad side, mobs in general have tend to be volatile, irrational, and even destructive.

Despite the hazards, the “flattening” of information will be a good thing overall.

[Random] Best job according to forbes.com

Forbes.com has released a list of the best jobs in America. #1 on the list is Software Engineer. I would have to agree, mainly for the flexibility and potential in software, you can work on a huge variety of things. If you are talented and hard working, there really is no limit to what you can do in software. As a testament to that I have worked on web services (Indigo), an operating system (Vista), identity managment (Tivoli FIM), and now quantative finance (Citadel). I am only 22.

My two older brothers do software, one has started a Virtual Reality company and the other writes a chess engine and sells it. Pretty interesting stuff. In software, you can do just about anything as it seems everything in the world now has a software problem attached it. Also, it no longer works to be a general software developer unless you are entry-level because there are too many bright and hard-working entry-level (read, unspecialized) programmers. As you get older, to advance your “career” you need to become specialised in a certain field. By this I don’t mean a specific area of technology (ie, web programming versus databases) but more along the lines of being specialized in a certain business area / domain.

I find it interesting that Money magazine chose the story about director of technology at EA as having the best job in America. ( story ). EA is notorious for making its software engineers work ridiculously long hours. There is a blog about it… ea_spouse: The Human Story. I believe they were even sued over this.

Indeed, you do work long hours in software, even outside of gaming. I would say high-acheiving software engineer works around 45-60 hrs a week from what I’ve seen. I would also say the places I’ve worked that pay more on average also had employees working longer hours.

[Software] Upswing in the software industry

“Venture capital and private equity funding for software and software-related companies have
grown by over 32 percent annually since 2002 [See Exhibit 3 ].External investors contributed $11 billion to the software industry in 2005 and $5 billion of this sum came from venture capital.Software represented a healthy ~20 percent of total investments,second only to life sciences (~25 percent).” – McKinsey report.

Also, VC funding for Bay Area companies in Q4 2005

As you can see, the software industry is beginning a decent sized upswing. When will it continue? I’d say at least 2 years, barring any sort of economic disaster that would preclude the upswing.

[Software] Business Software vs. Consumer Software

While I will not claim that this is a definitive snapshot of the software / internet industry, I do think it captures an interesting point. I’ve listed some of the better known and bigger software businesses by their profitability margin. I noticed a very common trend… The software companies in profitability margin either are companies which have individual consumers are its customer or are security software companies. On the other hand, the volume of business done by the Business software / internet companies is far, far greater. I think in some ways it’s harder to make money in business software as the customers are better informed (ie, less information asymmetry) and more efficient in their purchases. Business customers also have more bargaining power as they are larger. The exception is security software. 

Business

Ticker

Revenue

Margin

Primary Customer

[Globalization] Saved the rights… Lost the economy

France is committed to saving their rights…
France drops labor law

Not in the next 5 years, but over the next 20 years, unless France open’s up their economy they will fall behind economically. France’s economy simply isn’t competitive if you make it a pain for employers for hire and fire employees. Economies get stronger by becoming efficient. The bill was aimed with this in mind, as France is now actually competing not in a vacuum but in global economy.

Through Globalization, the more efficient and stronger competitors will be huge winners (winners of a magnitude not imaginable before globalization) and the weak competitors will be reduced to nothing. This is because the stronger competitors have an increased ability to reach markets, giving the weak competitors less room. There is also a flattening of information (ie, less asymmetry) so weak / inferior competitors are more easily known to be inferior. Example: When I bought my Canon camera I read about a hundred reviews of digital cameras before choosing mine.

France needs to understand your economic standing now is becoming an increasingly unimportant to your economic standing 5 years from now. Over the last 200 years how much less important it has become what you inherit versus what you do and what you earn. Consider the last 10 years, where the average age of a billionaire has dropped significantly (thank you dot com boom).

Who will be the winners of Globalization? The U.S. will win so long as it continues (and even expands) its importation of talent from the rest of the world. Saturday night I was out with some friends from work. If you were to classify the group, we would be classified as hard-working with long success records (given our age). Out of the 6 of us, my family has been in the U.S. the second longest. My family emigrated to the U.S. in the early 80’s. One guy’s family emigrated in the ’70s. It was similar to when I was an intern at Microsoft, where 30-40% of the people who worked there had emigrated to the U.S. to work. These guys didn’t come to the U.S. to not contribute to the economy. They came to the U.S. and are now acting as leaders and pushers of the economy.

To bring it back to France, I think the leaders of France realize that they’re at a competitive disadvantage economically if its very difficult to hire and fire someone in France but very easy to do so elsewhere. It’s simply a matter of efficiency. If there’s a X overhead to hiring / firing someone in France versus another country, that person in France needs to be X more effective at his or her job or be paid X less than the person in the other country. It’s because now that employee is not part of the French job market but part of the global job market and located in France. While some jobs by nature will be localized (McDonald’s), the jobs driving economic growth will not. If you have a very high value job and you have some person who’s very good at said job, the company may be willing to “import” that person to where the job needs to be done.

Thus, Companies will be less willing to employ in France and as a result France will lose the top talent who may leave for better opportunity elsewhere. It’s a vicious cycle.

[Random] You know your company’s got an overblown public image when….

Articles like this come out… How to Spend a billion (Google) dollars .

Basically, Google has a philantrophic arm which is called google.org. Google.org has $1 Billion endowment and will be giving out ~$50 Million a year. This is great and every significant company should look up to Google for doing this. Not many other companies actually commit so much money as a corporation to humanitarian efforts. However, what I find amusing is what the author thinks Google will be able to do with the $1 Billion.

“How about leveraging the Google billion and joining with other billionaire philanthropists to do what world governments have proven incapable of doing?”

“Why not establish a globally operated “just in time” detection and transport system that redirects surplus food and supplies to everyone who needs them, when they need them. “

“Further, it could try to connect and empower communities all over the world via virtual community centers that offer self-organizing and social-collaboration tools, including real-time feedback mechanisms from individual households on community needs and the performance of elected and community officials. “

Last time I checked, Google employed some very good software developers and as a company, they are mainly known and distinguished from the rest of the software world by their keyword based search engine. Perhaps the author doesn’t realize that these are problems that won’t be solved by having a superior ability to process information… there are aspects of politics, supply-chain management, economics, computer network infrastructure, and culture involved. Google has no demonstrated ability to do any of these things effectively. However, the author blasts past these logical issues and shows that Google infact employs magicians and wizards (they just hide in the basement while the software developers get all the credit).

The author also implies that Google’s philantrophic organization ($1 Billion) can have a greater impact than Bill and Melinda Gates’ ($28 Billion). In order to acheive that, Google will have to be 28 times as efficient with their money. I will put the odds of that happening at 1 in 1 googol.

Google’s hype is much alive and well.

Salesforce.com outage

Salesforce.com is a Customer relationship management software which provides its applications excusively via the web (otherwise known as software as a service (SaaS)

Anyways, Salesforce.com experienced an outage of service today… News story. It started at 8:11 PDT and was expected to be resolved by 12:15 PDT. They could not provide get the service back up by 12:15PDT. While this is not terribly exciting news in of itself, compare this news with the stock ticker for salesforce.com for today…

As you can see, Salesforce.com’s stock price drops more than 2% right at 3:15pm EST (or 12:15pm PDT). This is the exact time that salesforce promised they would have service back and failed to deliver. For any SaaS that sells to business, you absolutely have to deliver on availability…

Once in a lifetime moment?

I got this email today..

Tomorrow, Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. That won’t ever happen again.
But you probably already knew that

To which I responded…

I object to this assertion on the following grounds…
1) 06 is due to our current era, AD. This could possibly change in ourliftetimes after the unix timestamp overflows in 2038(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time, under 32 bit overflow). Bythen what a computer considers time will be far more important thanwhat humans consider to be time. I’ll get to see another 06, possibly.
2) 04/05… This applies to western calender-following folks only.Maybe I’ll go to China and get to see another 04/05 before end ofyear…
3) 01:02:03… Ok, maybe I’ll buy this one.. but which time zone wereyou thinking we should celebrate this moment? I could have this timein Japan and later in Hawaii on the same day!

That won’t ever happen again? Please…

FYI,
“At 03:14:08 UTC on January 19, 2038 (+2³¹), a 32-bit signed integer representation of Unix time will overflow. Systems using a 32-bit signed integer Unix time_t will therefore be unable to represent that time, or any later, and will likely wrap around to 20:45:52 UTC on December 13, 1901, with integer value -2³¹.” – source, Wikipedia (source of all knowledge)