Day 2: Rosenlaui to Wengen

We woke up in the morning without any jet-lag, and to dry roads but overcast skies. I had previously booked Hotel Bernerhof in Wengen, the one part of Lauterbrunnen valley that I had not explored. With permission from Andreas, we left our bikes in Rosenlaui: there was no point carting the bikes around to Wengen where we would have no need for them.

The first stop of the day, however, was Reichenbach Falls, just above Meiringen. The falls is well known amongst Sherlock Holmes fans for being the site of "His Last Bow", where he struggled with Moriarty and fell to his "death." Holmes, of course, was far too popular with his readers for Doyle to keep him dead for long, and returned by popular demand.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We drove over to Lauterbrunnen Valley for a good look at the Staubbach Falls. This is the fall that greets you upon entering Lauterbrunnen Valley, and it has a hiking trail that goes up behind the fall. Due to strong wind that day, however, the falls were pulled away from behind the hiking trails so we got a view of Lauterbrunnen instead.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

This being XiaoQin's first time in Lauterbrunnen, we had to see the Trummelbach falls, so after buying a picnic lunch at the supermarket, we drove to the Trummelbach parking lot and ate. Phil chose to stay with the car and read while we paid the admission fees to look inside the mountain at the falls, which included a ride up the Funicular railway.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We then parked the car at the parking structure in Lauterbrunnen and hopped onto the next train up to Wengen. Even though it was overcast, the view down the valley with all its attendant waterfalls put Yosemite valley to shame.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Arriving at Wengen, we followed the arrows towards Hotel Bernerhof. After a few minutes of walking we came to an intersection where there were pointers to other hotels, but not to Bernerhof. A look around and we realized that we were standing right in front of it!

By the time we were settled, it was around 4pm, which wasn't much time for a long walk, but the visitor's center helpfully pointed us at the St. Mary's Cafe walk, which granted us nice views of the valley from where Wengen was at 4000 feet.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We had dinner at a nearby restaurant and prepared ourselves for a more intense hike the next day.

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Startup Engineering Management Beta Program Closed

Next up: Pre-orders! Watch this space for more details.

Reflections on Social Networks and How People Use Them

People keep asking me about my opinion on Google plus (G+). In the days since launching, I've accumulated well over 700 followers on plus, far more than my meager 400 odd followers on Buzz. The service has signed up 20 million users, which is remarkable for a social network. So has Google proven Paul Buchheit wrong? Will it indeed beat Facebook before it lands on the moon?

Google has placed privacy front-and-center on G+. To many, especially the early adopters that have populated G+, this is the holy grail, being able to segregate your friends into tiny tiny groups, including some groups of one. It serves as filtering, grouping, and no doubt some other features I haven't thought about all at once.

In practice, however, Circles are clumsy. You make a decision every time you add a person into one of your circles. I can't even keep the default "Friends" and "Following" straight. And maybe I want to think that people who are in my "Family" should also get to see everything that "Friends" see. Talking to a few people I know, the reaction seems to be: "In practice, most people can only cope with one or two groups." Great, but the default is 4: "Friends," "Following", "Family", and "Acquaintances." The result is sometimes I find myself wanting to add someone but faced with the Paradox of Choice, I end up not adding that person. This seems to be a fairly small matter, a mere resetting of defaults should fix it, right?

The reality is, that's not where the value of social networks lie. Let's take the typical use case. You meet someone while traveling, and wanting to stay in touch, she says, "Add me on Facebook." You say, "No, add me to G+ instead!" She dutifully visits G+ and adds you. But wait, not only does she add you, she adds you to the "Smucks I met while traveling" circle. Now you only get her public posts + anything that she remembers to add to the circle while posting, which is never. The purpose of staying in touch with someone you just met randomly just went poof. Even worse, when she went to add you on G+, she was reminded that she barely knows you, rather than you being that guy who was interesting enough that she wanted to use one of her precious 5,000 slots on Facebook on. I don't see the travel crowd being eager to switch to G+ for that reason any time soon. "Friend me on Facebook" has a very specific meaning, while "Add me to one of your many circles on G+" will forever leave the two of you guessing whether one of you slotted the other into an irrelevant circle, never to be heard from again.

You might think that this is of no consequence, but my argument is that these casual contacts are probably your most valuable ones on social networking sites! When I was single and dating, the act of changing my relationship status on Facebook announced to all my friends and casual acquaintances that I was single. On G+, you would default to announcing this to just your friends (or more likely, not announcing it at all). Now, on Facebook, there's apparently a way to make such changes not so public, but since few people know how to do that, nobody does, so the norm is that relationship statuses change publicly, and everyone makes these announcements. By making such announcements private by default on G+, anyone on G+ who actually does say, "Hi, I'm single now." is actually saying, "Hi, I'm single and desperate." No one's going to actually signal that. As a result of my relationship status, people started to set me up with dates. The thing is, these set-ups did not come from my closest friends! They came from the periphery of my social networks, in some cases from people I had completely forgotten adding to my social network! The book Connected explains why this happens. Basically, your friends who are close are usually exposed to all the opportunities that you already have, so you rarely find new opportunities from your close friends. It's your casual acquaintances that provide you with new opportunities. So by forcing all your friends into one "Circle", Facebook will actually provide you with more utility, which in my opinion is why even though Facebook long had groups, nobody actually used it --- you actually lose value when you segregate your contacts in this fashion. By placing it front and center, G+ is making a mistake and doing its users a disservice.

What about the digital detritus that people love to complain about, such as baby pictures that clearly no one cares about to even click "like" on them? Well, those are most useful to your loose contacts! Someone calling you up or sending you e-mail to catch up (either socially or for business reasons) but who isn't close to you would find the fact that you just got married or just had kids or just celebrated their birthdays very useful, whereas your close friends/family already know this stuff.

I think blindly implementing what users say they want in the context of social networks without considering how defaults are setup and how users tend to use social networks makes the resulting network less useful to its users. To a large extent I don't even think Facebook fully understands what it is about their current setup that makes them so successful (though at least one ex-Facebooker has it right). Ultimately, while G+ might prove to be useful (as a substitute for say, Friendfeed/Buzz/Twitter when RSS input is finally implemented), I consider it no threat to Facebook in terms of overall effectiveness and usefulness as long as G+ chooses to put Circles front and center.

Day 1: Sarnen to Rosenlaui

We installed our chintzy $60 bike rack on the A180 with no problems whatsoever. Not only did it fit well, the bikes did not stick out far enough to block our exit from the tiny garage entrance. Prior to the trip, we had calculated that the savings from train tickets would justify carrying the bike rack onto the plane.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

I was not surprised that the drive out to Sarnen along the freeway was faster than taking the train, but was surprised to discover how much faster it was! The drive was an hour while the train (including transfers but not including waiting for the first train) was more than 2 hours long! That meant that we could wake up later (not that we would be able to do so given our jet-lag), and still get to Sarnen with plenty of time. The cloudy skies looked like they would bring rain at higher elevations and block out any views we could get on the Melchsee-Frutt adventure, so we opted for a traverse over the Brunig to the Lammi restaurant. After setting XiaoQin's Phone to navigate to the Lammi, Phil and I got our bikes out, and began the ride after synchronizing our cameras to the GPS unit.

To my surprise, my GPS unit routed us around the Sarnensee on the West side rather than the East side that I was familiar with. I didn't complain much, because it gave us nice beautiful views of the Sarnensee as we approached Giswil. After the intersection with Highway 4, we found a bike path signed for the Brunig with a 12% grade. That sounded like fun, so we immediately rode up it to get beautiful views of the area.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The bike path flattened out and turned into dirt soon enough, as bike paths are wont to do, and then dropped us off into Lugern where a steep climb took us along the railroad tracks on a dirt path. The climbing got fairly hefty as the train tracks went into a tunnel and the bike path went over the tunnel, but we soon got high enough for some decent views at Chappeli.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From there, it was a hop skip and a jump over to Brunig pass, where we abandoned the bike path in favor of a fast road descent into Meiringen. The consequence of going fast when it starts raining is that rain drops at 55kph hurt! Nonetheless, we soon arrived at Meiringen and rode up the Kirchet pass to the Lammi restaurant, where XiaoQin had been waiting. The rain had turned into just occasional drops, so we opted to eat lunch outside under the umbrella. Lammi produces what I consider to be the platonic ideal for sausages, and this time was no exception. The onion sauce is a must have.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

After lunch, XiaoQin drove off after I gave her the very simple directions to Rosenlaui followed by instructions to pull aside for the post bus. The climb started dry, but by the time we got to Zwirgi it had started raining and was getting heavier. I abandoned taking pictures, put on my jacket and just hammered at the pedals trying to get to the hotel.

I arrived at the Hotel in due time to find that XiaoQin had already checked in and was taking pictures. Christine, assessing her condition, had immediately gotten someone to help her with the luggage and so we were all moved in! I parked the bike at the usual place and then XiaoQin and I took a walk after I gave Christine a copy of the touring book so they could see the picture of Andreas and I on one of the early pages.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Rosenlaui in the fog is no less pretty than in the sun, and while the rain was annoying, it's still a magical place. Upon returning, Andreas greeted us and said he really loved the book, asking if I had plans to get it translated into German. "There are plenty of cycling books in German," I said. "Ah, but no how-to books. They're all region guides!" I haven't the faintest idea as to how to crack the German book market, but if that's true I'd be willing to sell my German rights.

Dinner was the usual four course meal: soup, a salad, lamb, and panna cotta, all cooked to their usual high standards. Andreas said that the weather was due to change by the weekend, so we hoped for less rain for the next two days.

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Prologue: June 21st-22nd

For the first time, we used AirBerlin to fly from San Francisco to Dusseldorf, then a quick transfer to Zurich. I was warned against them previously by friends in Munich who said they were a small airline that nobody used. However, their bike policy was more than reasonable: pay an annual fee of 79EUR for the topbonus service card, and you get to bring your bike of up to 32kg for no charge. I was struck by the general competence of the customer service agent. We needed a ticket change for XiaoQin because she needed to return to work unexpectedly early, and he would get on the phone to Frankfurt and get information for us. Unfortunately, we had ordered the ticket using Orbitz, and Orbitz's customer service was much worse. Given the price difference ($50), we would have been better off ordering the tickets directly from AirBerlin.

The checkin process went smoothly and the flight transfer went with typical German efficiency. We were through the customs and transfer process within 20 minutes, and what I thought was a ridiculously short transfer time turned out to be enough. Arriving at the airport, we quickly found the airport shuttle for Hotel Flyaway, but it was too small to carry two giant bike cases, our carry on, and additional checked baggage. No problem, the shuttle drive negotiated with another shuttle bus driver who had a trailer attached to his bus and he drove us to our hotel immediately and with no hassle, even delivering our luggage for us.

While XiaoQin took a nap, Phil and I started putting together the bikes under the awning of the hotel restaurant while it rained ominously. If it kept going like this, our first day's plan would be wrecked. The bikes came together quickly enough, and soon we had empty bike cases and fully assembled bikes. While we were putting together the bikes, Phil observed that there was a bike shop across the street from the hotel, so even if we had any missing parts we were conveniently located as far as replacements were concerned!

We had a quick dinner, we took the airport shuttle to the airport for to acquire Swisscom SIM cards for our phones. Phil and Xiaoqin had N1s, which meant they could use the Easy BeFree plan with 4CHF per day of surfing, and unlimited calls for 3CHF. My blackberry, however, was not supported by Easy BeFree, so I ended up with the easy liberty uno. In retrospect, we weren't making too many phone calls with the phones, and we should have put everyone on the easy liberty uno plan, since one phone call a day cost 3CHF on the Easy BeFree plan, which was usually all the phone calls we would make that day on one phone.

We shopped for some groceries, including breakfast, because the Hotel Flyaway's breakfast was priced for Kings. Then we went to pick up the car. We had booked a Ford Focus, but Hertz was out of them so we ended up with a Mercedes A180, a small that that felt like an upscale version of my Honda Fit. XiaoQin was freaked out by how small the roads and parking spaces were, but we managed to get the car into Hotel FlyAway's garage.

Because of XiaoQin's flight plan changes, we had to rebook our return to Hotel Flyaway and change the return date of the car, all of which was accomplished with only minor hassles. We slept well that night, hoping for the rain to stop.
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Tour of the Alps 2011

In June and July, XiaoQin, Phil Sung, and I visited Europe to do a cycling and hiking tour of the Alps. The cycling portion of the trip went over 862 miles with 94,957 feet of climb. The hiking portion was 27.9 miles with 7,963' of climb. We had one flat tire, one derailleur mechanical, and a strange dust cap melt-down. We had several days of rain, but only a couple of days where rain stopped us or forced us to cut a ride short.

This is the index page for the trip report, and collects all the photos.

My photo collection:

Tour of the Alps 2011

Phil's photos
Phil's Highlights
Phil's Trip Report

Trip Report

• Prologue
  
• June 23rd, Sarnen to Rosenlaui
  
• June 24th, Rosenlaui to Wengen
  
• June 25th, Wengen
  
• June 26th, Rosenlaui to Realp
  
• June 27th, Realp to All'Acqua
  
• June 28th, All'Acqua to Brig-Reid
  
• June 29th, Brig-Reid to Vinadio
  
• June 30th, Vinadio to Barcelonnette
  
• July 1st, Cime de la Bonette
  
• July 2nd, Col du Parpaillon
  
• July 3rd, Barcelonette to Briancon
  
• July 4th, Briancon to St. Michel Maurienne
  
• July 5th, Saint Michel Maurienne to Beaufort
  
• July 6th, Beaufort to Carouge
  
• July 7th, Carouge to Zurich
  
• July 8th, Zurich to St. Moritz Bad
  
• July 9th, Engadin Hike
  
• July 10th, Corvatsch
  
• July 11th, St Moritz Bad to Glorenza
  
• July 12th, Glorenza to Bormio
  
• July 13th, Bormio to St. Caterina
  
• July 14th, St. Caterina to Fondo
  
• July 15th, Fondo to Moos
  
• July 16th, Moos to Mils
  
• July 17th, Mils to Bludenz
  
• July 18th, Bludenz to Rorschach
  
• July 19th, Rorschach to Munich
  
• July 20th, Rest Day in Munich
  
• July 21st, Munich to Neuhausen
  
• July 22nd, Neuhausen to Kloten
  
• July 23rd, 24th, Epilogue
  

Appendices

• Conclusion and Thoughts
  
• Review: Olympus EPL-1
  
• Long Term Review: Garmin Edge 800
  
• Review: Air Berlin
  

Review: Queen of Arlin

Queen of Arlin is TC Southwell's novel about a post-apocalyptic world that initially looks like a fantasy novel. The story revolves around the Queen of Arlin, who would be forced into marriage by her suitors if she did not go to war and die. Since she didn't like any of her suitors she went to war hoping to die a warrior queen. But part of her inheritance was a super-soldier, a cyborg illegally imported into her planet, and he rescues her.

The premise is initially interesting but the main character is willfully ignorant, and worse, does not try to actually learn what she does not understand. The resulting interaction is repetitious, predictable, and one reads it hoping the queen gets an ugly and untimely death. Imagine my sadness and annoyance that instead this is the first novel of a long series.

If you're stuck in a hotel room in the rain this is barely readable. Not recommended.

Review: Throne of Jade

It would have been easy for the follow up to His Majesty's Dragon to be another conventional story about the Napoleonic Wars with Dragons with tactical set-pieces, but Novik cleverly declines and takes us into a completely different direction. We visit the China of that region, but of course, a China completely infused with dragons and with dragons as part of the society.

Throne of Jade starts of with what seems to be a really contrived plot, with the Chinese demanding one of the stars of the first book to return to China. For all sorts of political reasons, our protagonists are bundled onto a boat and shipped off to China. There are some minor adventures on the way, but what's great is upon arrival, we get a view of a society that's completely integrated another sentient species into its society, as opposed to our view from the first novel, which treated dragons effectively as replacements for fighters and bombers.

I thought this was a very clever twist, and wondered how Novik would draw the plot to its conclusion, having written herself into a corner as far as the characters were concerned. Unfortunately, her solution's not very novel, with palace intrigues and betrayals being par for the course, but with some not very believable situations (even given the presence of dragons).

Nonetheless, the book had me engaged all the way to the end. While I don't find myself in a hurry to read Novik's follow on novels in this series, I'd be happy to read them in the future. Mildly recommended.

Review: His Majesty's Dragon

His Majesty's Dragon is Naomi Novik's novel about the Napoleanic Wars on an alternate world where dragons co-evolved with men. This co-evolution is obvious because dragons apparently learn human languages while still inside the egg, and easily adopt human companions/riders on a one-on-one basis.

Once you put aside that bit of suspension of disbelief, the novel works very well. We're given a run down of how squadrons are organized, how aerial warfare is conducted in an age where sailboats still rule the waters, and what the social organization and hierarchy of the aviators would be in relation to the rest of the armed services.

The novel is entirely readable and a lot of fun, though one cannot help but think about how much more interesting it would have been to read about the domestication of dragons in that universe, for instance. Recommended, especially for airplane reading or while resting during a bike tour.

Review: Assassin's Apprentice

Assassin's Apprentice is the first in Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy. It starts with a boy abandoned by his family at the Kingdom's keep, with the grandfather noting that the boy's the King-in-Waiting's bastard son.

The story starts slowly, with the story being told in first person from Fitz's point of view. He is seemingly abandoned at first, left to the care of the stable-master. But we observe the repercussion of his appearance on the political scene shortly after in the abdication of the Prince and the political intrigues begin.

The world itself is fairly non-descript, though as a fantasy world there's magic in the form of telepathy and ability to communicate with animals, magic is not a major force in the world. The story moves along at a good clip; Hobb's a good enough writer that you're never left wondering why a scene is in place but are simply carried along by the narrative. Ultimately, Fitz becomes initiated in the ways of stealth and poison, and is sent on missions for his king.

The narrative speeds up in the last 10% of the book as Fitz is sent to help bring about a closer union with a potential ally by poisoning a prince, and everything comes together at once. Hobb is not afraid to pour hell on her characters, and the ending of the novel leaves us with some long running loose ends but with a satisfactory climax. I'm going to keep reading other books in this series. Recommended.

Startup Engineering Management Beta Program Reopened

I've just finished a substantial revision of Startup Engineering Management and am about to start the print proof process. To get some fresh eyes on the book, I'm reopening the program. Since the book's much further along, the price is set at $14.95. I'll close the program as soon as I get enough beta readers.

To buy, click through.

Review: The Last Wish

I started playing The Witcher, and found myself really like the world and the cynical main character, Geralt of Riva. So on my recent tour I found myself grabbing The Last Wish off the Kindle store and reading it one rainy day.

There's a coherent plot, which revolves around the opening sequence from the game, and Geralt's subsequent recovery. We don't find out how he loses his memory at the beginning of the game, but plenty of characters in the game make references to the events described in this book, which makes reading the book while playing the game very satisfying.

The story is told in little vignettes, short stories that provide some insight into the world Geralt lives in, or into Geralt himself. Though the game would have you believe there's a lot of sex, the book is much more restrained, and everything happens off the camera. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks later, I find myself without much recollection of the details of the book. Nevertheless, the writing is good enough that I'd be happy to read it again, either as an airplane novel or otherwise.

Mildly recommended.

Review: The Story of the Giro D'Italia

Bill McGann is at it again, this time documenting the history of the Tour of Italy. As with the story of the Tour De France, this history is mostly a year by year accounting of the various Giri, each with its dominating rider, scandals, and rampant cheating, both by riders and fans.

There are a few interesting titbits, like how Northern Italy speaks German (it used to be part of Austria and was given to Italy for picking the right side during World War 1), but by and large the history isn't as interesting, though McGann makes the very good point that the Giro is a far more contested race and therefore more interesting to watch than the Tour de France.

It's fun reading, especially if you're touring or planning to tour in the area. It does give you a good idea of why doping is so hard to stamp out in cycling though! It's been in there since the beginning!

Recommended.

More Photos, and a plug for Photosynth

I lied: I wasn't completely done with photos. I have a bunch of panoramic stitches, and they're still uploading to PicasaWeb (very slowly). But the reality is, PicasaWeb (and Facebook) are designed to be social network tools: low resolution pictures posted by drunk teenagers taken by lousy camera phones. Neither of them are designed to show off high resolution photos stitched together by people who care using powerful desktop computers.

The alternative, however, is Microsft's Photosynth.

Here's an embed of my Moos stitch:


And another from the Engadin:


For the entire collection, please view my Photosynth stream.

Tour of the Alps 2011 Photos

Tour of the Alps 2011

Between XiaoQin, Phil, and I, we exposed about 4200 frames over a month of touring and cycling in this year's tour of the alps, which included 5 days of hiking, and a week of almost daily rain. Those of you who remember past tour patterns will probably expect a tour report to come soon. This year, however, I've got a series of talks at REI coming up, so I'd be preparing a presentation for that, featuring some of the photos here in this album, so things will be delayed a little bit.

Nevertheless, I do intend to write a trip report eventually. In the mean time, enjoy the photos!

Review: In The Plex

In The Plex is Steven Levy's book about Google. After Levy's last book, The Perfect Thing, I was really unimpressed and expected a typical English major assessment of Google. Fortunately, Levy's mostly redeemed himself with this book.

Levy had unprecedented access to top level executives for this book. This meant that you got all the details about Google's funding, it's approach to top secret projects (including the Android acquisition as well as Book search), and what really happened with the Analytics acquisition. Well, not quite. You could take Levy's book at face value, but it's peppered with all sorts of little inaccuracies that point to the fact that Levy was painted a very nice picture, and as an outsider and not someone who lives Silicon Valley culture, the most he could do was to be a little bit skeptical about it.

For instance, there's a little bit about how Google Docs killed Gdrive in a brilliant play of executive politics. But Levy leaves out the context: Dropbox has made a billion dollar business out of that lack of vision by the Google executive. Then there's minor little details like a remark about Jia being famous for Sushi. Uh, no. The big sushi cafes at Google at the time were Pacific and 5IVE. It's very clear that Levy regurgitated whatever line he was fed very well and entertainingly, but obviously his fact-checking was limited or he's clearly preserving future access to Google executives by being as uncritical as possible. The only place in the book where he takes a skeptical look at Google's actions was in relation to China. Even then, there's careful avoidance of the internal craziness at that time (seriously, "blame the intern" didn't go over well with the rank and file at that time, and sticking to that line is definitely something Google's executives should hang their heads in shame about).

On the other hand, there's plenty to like about this book. There are places where he foreshadows the tension between Schmidt and the founders. There's an excellent exposition of Eric Veach's re-invention of the Vickrey auction, and the sun-setting of early versions of Adwords (known at the time as Adwords Premium). There's even a somewhat extensive coda about Google's failure to copy and the consequences thereof.

If you're an old Google hand, you'll get a few kicks out of all the names mentioned in this book that you're familiar with. If you're not familiar at all with Google's story, this is a great book and is recommended. After all, if you wait for a definitive account, you could be waiting a long time.

Review: American Born Chinese

I read that American Born Chinese is so far the only graphic novel to have been nominated for the National Book Award. That blew my mind, since graphic novels rarely get that kind of recognition.

The book is short and a quick read (30 minutes or so). It starts off with 3 separate threads, the first of which I realized (with a groan) that was a mere retelling of the opening of the classic Journey to the West. The second tells the story of Jin Wang, who starts elementary school at an American school and despite having been in San Francisco all his life, is treated like a foreigner. My impression of American schools from popular media is that it's a traumatic experience, especially if you're a nerd, but being a short graphic novel means that Gene Yang only really touches on this at the most shallow of levels (like "I hear that Chinese people eat dogs."). The final thread tells of an American, Danny, whose Chinese cousin Chin-Kee visits and embarrasses him by being extremely Chinese.

The threads all tie together at the end, and we get a neat little resolution that turns the entire book into a nice little parable ("Learn to accept who you are"), but left me wondering why it became a National Book Award finalist. While it wasn't a waste of time, I'm not sure I gained any more insight to how the American Born Chinese experience is all that different. Mildly recommended.

Review: Norton Ghost

Windows Image backup does the right thing in the majority of cases --- if your replacement hard drive is as big or bigger than your old hard drive. Unfortunately, if you own an SSD and it dies, what you'll usually do is to drop in a HDD that's bigger, RMA that SSD, and then try to restore from backup from the Windows Image backup and then discover that it doesn't work.

The solution, according to my brother, is Symantec Norton Ghost 15.0 (1 PC). The price is fairly cheap, and it was easy to setup and test. Now that I have the SSD back from OCZ, I had a chance to test drive it.

The verdict: it works, mostly. What it does is to restore your drive from the image, but for whatever reason, it refused to restore the boot sector. Fortunately, I had the Windows Recovery Disk sitting around, and when I inserted that and told it to fix the boot sector it did so without any fuss. Result: one fast PC with SSD.

I hate recommending products like this (partially working products are lame), but there's really nothing else out there that will do the trick, so there you go. And yes, one more SSD RMA, and I'm just going to sell my SSD on Craigslist.

Startup Engineering Management Beta Program Closed

Due to overwhelming response to yesterday's post about Startup Engineering Management, I have all the beta-readers I need for now. (And yes, the feedback has been coming in, and I'm very grateful for everyone who's sent me e-mail)

Needless to say, I'm inspired by the response and will proceed with the project. Thanks to everyone who has participated. I may reopen the program later as rewrites and revisions warrant.

I know the web page originally said June 18th was when I would close the beta, but when beta-signups got to the point where they were almost overwhelming I had to change the plan. I honestly had no idea I'd get this much response.

Independent Cycle Touring presentations

Independent Cycle Touring, in some ways, is the book that I spent 18 years cycling in order to learn how to write. As a cycle touring book, it includes everything I've learned, but as a writer, I honestly have no idea how to sell the book, other than a traditional book tour. Unfortunately, traditional book stores attract literary types, not outdoor types. Bike shops, on the other hand, usually attract racer-wannabes, rather than tourists.

One of my favorite outdoor stores is REI. I've been an REI member since 1992, before my very first bike tour, when I bought tents, sleeping bags, and to the bemusement of my parents, started to learn how to pitch and strike these fancy high-tech American tents in our front-yard. I am very pleased to announce that I've arranged with REI to tour most of their Bay Area stores and give a presentation about my recent adventures in Europe. This will not be a rehash of material already in the book, and is timed so that I would be back from a trip through the French and Swiss alps and will (hopefully) have fresh pictures to share.

If you're an REI fan and live in the Bay Area, mark your calendars for the appropriate stores. Registering for the talk/presentation is free. Thank you very much to Polly from REI for helping me organize this. A full calendar of events will be posted on the book's Facebook page.

Independent Cycle Touring in Europe:

Imagine pedaling through quaint mountain hamlets in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, past fields of wildflowers in Germany’s Black Forest, along the shores of lovely lakes near Salzburg in Austria, or high above the Mediterranean in the French Pyrenees… With its diverse landscapes, vast network of roads and cycle paths, and bike-friendly accommodations, Europe is a fantastic cycling destination. Tonight, independent cyclist and guidebook author Piaw Na will share his expertise on planning bike tours in Switzerland, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, England, and Scotland. Piaw will cover the nuts and bolts of organizing an independent tour, including route-planning, seasonal considerations, lightweight gear, training, transporting bikes on planes/public transit, navigation tools, accommodations, and more. Following the program, he’ll sign copies of his new how-to guidebook, Independent Cycle Touring: Exploring the World by Bicycle. If you register for this free presentation at www.rei.com/stores, we will hold a seat for you until the scheduled start time. Seating may be available at the door, even if registration is closed.

7 pm–8:30 pm, Tuesday, August 2 at REI Marina

7 pm–8:30 pm, Wednesday, August 3 at REI San Carlos

7 pm–8:30 pm, Tuesday, August 30 at REI Berkeley

7 pm–8:30 pm, Tuesday, September 13 at REI Fremont

7 pm–8:30 pm, Wednesday, September 14 at REI San Francisco

7 pm–8:30 pm, Monday, September 19 at REI Saratoga

7 pm–8:30 pm, Thursday, September 29 at REI Mountain View

Beta Test My Next Book!

My next book has reached a critical juncture. It's called Startup Engineering Management, and you can read all about it (including seeing a free sample) at the above link. At this point, all the content is mostly there (though if I'm missing content please let me know about it!). While I've tried to get proof-readers by giving free copies away, that's not worked very well --- I've learned that people who get something for free don't attach very much value to it. So what I've decided to do is to offer the advanced reader copy at a massive discount. At $4/copy, there's not much room to cut the price further, and you're not out very much money if you dislike the book. I'm offering this for a limited time, and will decide whether or not to put more work into the book (more content, table of contents, index, cover) if the response is positive. If you provide feedback that affects the book substantially, I'll give you a free copy of the final book. If you provide any feedback at all, you'll get to upgrade to the final version at a substantial discount.

I've decided not to use Kickstarter this time. Even though I'm a fan of the site, it's not like I'm going to need a ton of money to finish off the book. The question is whether the book has an audience at all.

Because the book is being offered at such a discount (albeit in rough form --- I've found several grammatical sentence agreement issues already even on a rough read-through, but will hold off fixing it until I figure out whether the book will sell), I am requiring that you disclose your e-mail address so I can add you to a mailing list for reader surveys, etc. I won't sell the mailing list or spam you, I just want honest, direct feedback, and I can't ask for it if I don't have your e-mail address.

With that, go ahead and visit the book's web-site, and if you like what you see, buy!

Review: Feed

Feed is the second novel in my current Hugo Nominees reading list. It's a surprising good novel, even though the subject matter was for me a turnoff.

First, it's a Zombie novel. I feel like Zombies have been way over-exposed in the media. Even worse, one of the characters is named Shaun, as in Shaun of the Dead, a movie that didn't do anything whatsoever for me, and felt really silly. Third, the main narrative voice is a dead-panned cynical young journalist stereotype. Veronica Mars did that really well, but Mira Grant didn't do quite so well.

Then there's the world. Grant does a little better than her characters in constructing a post Zombie-apocalypse world. Many things are well thought out, including frequent blood tests, the CDC's improved status in that universe, the need for licensed journalists to carry firearms, and varying degrees of false positives on testing kits. There are several places where it's obvious that Grant, like many science fiction authors, doesn't actually have a good grasp of science, technology, or even marketing, but this is forgivable: it's quite obvious from the start that Grant's writing a throwaway airplane read, not literary fiction.

The plot involves a very close brother-sister pair who blog for a living and get selected to follow along a presidential hopeful in the campaign of 2040. Then there's a zombie outbreak that turns out not to be an accident but an active act of terrorism. The journalists investigate the secret and figure out who the bad guys are. Then they pull a series of bone-headed-stupid moves that ends in tear-jerker scenes that by no rights should have been necessary. But if you read it with your brain turned off it's not such a bad book.

While this novel would make for a great airplane novel, or a gift for your Zombie-obsessed nephew, I don't see it as a serious contender for the Hugo. If the Hugo was nominated by a committee I would say the committee would need its head examined. If SF fans end up voting for this novel and it wins over say, The Hundred Thousand Kingsdoms, then it would be a travesty. At $9.99, there's probably cheaper beach reads for your summer vacation. Nevertheless, it's so far more readable than the other two nominees that I have left to read.

Review: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

This is part of a series of reviews for the Hugo awards. One of the other novels, Cryoburn, was already reviewed and found wanting, so I was apprehensive about having to read novels I wouldn't necessarily like.

Well, the first, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms blew me away. It's not science fiction; it's fantasy, but not the elfy-welfy fantasy that populates the bookstores nowadays. It's bold and imaginative in a way I haven't seen for a while. If more novels were like this the world would be a better place.

The protagonist of the story, Yveine, is called away from the "uncivilized" kingdom she rules to Sky, the center of all the hundred thousand kingdoms. There, she learns that she's to be designated an Heir to the Kingdoms. Except that there are already 2 other Heirs, and they're out for blood.

That sounds very mundane. But this is not a human empire. It's a theocracy enforced by the reality of gods. Sky's inhabitants control the very gods themselves, and the politics and possibilities are all tied to the war between the gods that led to this situation and we get shown drip by drip how the situation both corrupts the gods and how this power in turn corrupts humans.

If that was the only theme in this novel it would have been enough. N.K. Jemisin works in feminism, atheism, the proper use of power, and love in this novel. There's a reveal nearly every other page, and little of it is predictable, even though every reveal makes sense as a piece of the greater puzzle. Despite this being a long book (432 pages in the dead-tree edition), it doesn't feel like as the plot and action moves at a breathless pace. In a brilliant move by the publisher, Orbit, the Kindle Edition is $2.99. At that price, forget about the library and just buy it. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I now look forward to reading the rest of the Hugo nominees if they are of similar quality.

My Hugo Votes

Best Short Story
Ponies, by Kij Johnson. The shortest of the lot, and a brilliant portrayal of children's cruelty to one another.
Won the Nebula, and deserves a Hugo.
Best Novella
The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window, by Rachel Swirsky. A great opening, a good story. Not quite science fiction, but good enough. I'd vote for The Lifecycle of Software Objects as a runner up.
Best Novelette
Plus or Minus by James Patrick Kelly. Close one between this and Emperor of Mars by Allen Steele. I tipped Kelly's story instead because I think it reflects a good sensibility about genetic engineering: you might eventually be able to engineer your kids, but you still won't be able to get them to do what you wished them to do.

Novels and Graphics Novels will get reviewed separately. Needless to say, all these stories come recommended, especially since I'm breaking my rules about reviewing short stories.

First Impressions: Garmin Edge 800

My Garmin GPS 76CSx works as well today as it did when I got it years ago. The Achille's heel of the product, however, is the bike mount. Despite mine and Pardo's best efforts, the mounting was arcane, and unreliable. On rough roads, the GPS unit would work itself loose.

So when the Garmin Edge 800 GPS-Enabled Cycling Computer showed up as an item eligible for this weekend's promotional sale for 15% off, I jumped at it. Note that just as with the Edge 500, it's cheaper to buy the unit separately from the other items in it, even if you want everything in the bundle. In my cases, I already had the cadence unit and HRM strap, so it made no sense to buy the bundle. I also ordered the Garmin City Navigator Europe NT for Detailed Maps of Eastern and Western Europe (DVD). The DVD is useful for people planning routes, but if all you plan to do is Dynamic Routing, you can buy the chip for slightly less hassle. If you're not a Windows user, I'm not sure how useful the DVD would be.

The unit weighs in at 98g, 40g more than the Edge 500's 58g. Being a color display, the battery life is also reduced, at 15g. Some friends described the UI as being arcane, but coming from the 76CSx and the Edge I found it intuitive, though I found the touch screen UI a little bit balky. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it prevents accidental shifts in display, etc. The screen isn't as visible in bright sunlight as the Edge 500, but you can turn up the brightness, though with a corresponding decrease in battery life. Since the battery itself is bigger, it takes longer than the Edge 500 to charge up, but 2 hours seemed to do the trick from 40%. The Find City feature seems easy to find, and of course, has the "Spell City" option which I love, which never made it into the GPS 76CSx.

What I wasn't prepared for, however, was that Garmin majorly upgraded the connectivity with the PC. My Edge 500 sometimes took 10 minutes to download all the data to the PC. With the Edge 800, the download is nearly instantaneous. This was a pleasant surprise and very welcome, since I'd gotten used to the setting the synchronization window off to another display while I did other stuff or went for a cup of coffee.

Since I haven't bothered with US maps yet, I can't say how well routing works. Needless to say, Garmin's units at their worst outperform Google Map's bicycle routing any day, especially if you reprogram the GPS unit. The key for me is whether the unit would corrupt its own boot sector in the middle of the trip like the Edge 705 is the big question that I hope to find out during this year's tour.

In short, if you're an Independent Cycle Tourist, the Edge 800 is a no brainer compared to the Edge 500. Recommended.

Review: The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen's Window

The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen's Window is the fourth of my Hugo Voting Packet reads. This is the best of the bunch that I've read so far, with themes touching on magic, betrayal, love, and the justification of coercion.

A woman shaman's betrayed while serving her people and her soul placed into a magical totem for re-summoning. Her subsequent summonings, responses, and view of a fantasy history grants us the views of a very flawed narrator and her response to the world around us. The narrator is reliable but unflinching in who she is and what she is about, and overall this is a very entertaining read. The ending's a bit clichéd, but that's unimportant to the story. Highly recommended.

Review: The Sultan of the Clouds

Continuing on my Hugo Voting Package, next up is The Sultan of the Clouds. Geoffrey Landis is an honest to goodness scientist, and he gets all the science rights in this one. How would you construct a city in Venus, the "hell planet"? Could you terraform Venus? What would be the result? Landis answers all these questions in this novella while giving us an interesting society.

The big science fiction tropes here are cloud cities, sky pilots, and a damsel in distress. The story left me wanting more, and in a good way. Recommended. (The link points you to a free PDF, kindly posted by Asimov's Science Fiction)

Review: Troika

I'm slowly working through the Hugo Voting packet. Alastair Reynold's Troika was next in the pipe. If you've read any of Reynold's previous stories you'll be impressed. (I recommend starting with Revelation Space)

Troika is set in a fictional Soviet Union, one very different from the one which we know now. An obviously alien object has been injected into the solar system on a wildly eccentric orbit, and a manned expedition has been sent to explore and investigate it. The results of the expedition sends one of the cosmonauts mad, and we see another one escape to try to tell his story to a dis-credited astronomer.

The plot and story is interesting, but the characters are not, and the conclusion feels empty. Upon noting that the piece first showed up in Godlike Machines, I realize that the problem is that Reynolds was writing to spec. Definitely not one of his best works. Not recommended.

Review: The Lifecycle of Software Objects

I don't usually review works shorter than a novel, but this year's Hugo voting package included Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects. I reviewed Chiang's earlier collection Stories of your life and raved about it.

The novella is about digital entities (digents). It details a startup's creations of them as pets (tomagochis), the relationships between the trainers, the pets, and each other, and the eventually failure of the host companies and what happens to the digents.

This is a Ted Chiang story, so all the angles behind the technology are well thought out. The technology involved, the use of open source technology to help speed up adoption and development are all there. There's a very mild romance that leads nowhere (come to think of it, Chiang's stories rarely have any romance at all), but for me, the ending kind of falls flat. You expect a climax and resolution but instead you get a fade-away.

Nevertheless, even medicore Ted Chiang is still very good fiction, so I'll recommend this novella.

Review: Something Ventured

I got a chance to see Something Ventured as part of UC Berkeley's alumni events. It's a movie about the early days of the venture capital industry. One of the executive producers was Paul Holland, who was at Pure Software the same time I was and then became a venture capitalist.

Part of the story is well known to many: the defection of the traitorous eight from Shockley Labs (because Shockley was hell to work for), and then the start of Intel when Bob Noyce was denied his promotion by Fairchild Semiconductor. When I tell entrepreneurs that they should strive for a culture that promotes from within, I often remind them that their engineers do have a choice to work for other companies or start their own thing, and denying good people promotion opportunities is a good way to create highly motivated competitors, and lose good engineers. This movie shows how that was a driver even in the early days of Silicon Valley.

The stars of the show are of course the venture capitalists. The producers and directors had access to legendary VCs: Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, Tom Perkins, and some legends of the early days of Silicon Valley, Mike Markula, who was Apple's second CEO, Noland Bushnell co-founder of Atari. The most poignant story came from Sandy Lerner, who was pushed out of the company she co-founded, Cisco. The movie shows the story from both Lerner's side and from the perspective of the VCs, and entrepreneurs should definitely find a way to see this movie to see why Facebook, for instance, was structured the way it is.

Holland says that he had this movie made as an archive of what it was like in the early days of venture capital, and to a large extent it has succeeded. It's definitely made the multi-billionaires accessible and personal in a way no other history of the valley has done. Holland points out that this movie has been very well received largely because unlike other documentaries of the current era, you're unlikely to walk out of the movie pissed off and ready to fight "the man."

The movie is unlikely to open at a movie theater near you, but since Holland knows Reed Hastings of Netflix, you're likely to be able to put it on your Netflix queue in the near future. I recommend that you do so if you have any interest in Silicon Valley history.

My Backup/Restore Nightmare

Ok, we've established that Solid State Drives fail frequently. But the computer now feels slow without solid state drives, so now we have to learn how to deal with it. Fortunately, unless you're Google, you can't afford terabytes of SSD storage anyway, so all you have is your OS and your key applications.

On my desktop, I have a 1.5TB data drive, and attached to that a 1.5TB external USB drive to store image backups. Backups go to the external drive every night using the Image Backup Utility. When my OCZ Vertex failed, I restored from this to my old Western Digital 500GB drive just fine. It worked like a champ with one glitch: rather than restoring to the full 500GB partition, it restored to a 107GB partition, just as though I was on my SSD. At first I didn't like it and then I realized that this was pretty smart: it ensures that I can restore to the 107GB SSD when it comes back from RMA.

OK, so the RMA returns, and I install it onto my PC. I insert the Windows Recovery Disk, I try a restore from image and I get an error code (0x80042412) with 4 suggestions as to what could be wrong, including a reference to the Windows Recovery Environment. After trying everything to no avail, I finally google the error code and discover that it's because I'm restoring to a 120GB disk from a 500GB disk, even though the 500GB disk had only a 100GB partition.

Fortunately, Microsoft did the right thing and let me rollback the image back to the night before the OCZ Vertex crashed, which meant that I could restore my state roughly to where I was 10 days ago. But what about my saved data files? Never mind, I still have the 500GB Western Digital, so I cannibalized my external USB enclosure and stuck it in. Guess what, Windows takes the disk offline because it matches the diskid on my C drive!

I dig into the Windows DiskPart utility and learn to online the disk. Then I bring back that drive online and can copy my data over. The entire process took well over 3-4 hours, and I'm going to recharge my power screwdriver from all the use screwing and unscrewing hard drive screws.

My brother claims that Symantec Norton Ghost 15.0 (1 PC) will do the right thing and let me restore to a smaller drive from a bigger one, so the next time my OCZ Vertex dies, that's what I'll do.

Definitely not something I planned to do this afternoon!

Review: OCZ Vertex 2 SSD

Roberto Peon and Pengtoh had both raved about their SSDs, so when a good deal came up on the OCZ Technology 120 GB Vertex 2 Series SATA II 3.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD3-2VTX120G, I jumped on it. 120GB is enough to install most programs, and still have enough space for the occasional video game, as long as you don't try to get more than one or two big games installed at a time.

The machine, once everything was installed boots fast. 20s boot times were not uncommon, and once you logged in, the browser would just open up in a snap. I didn't realize how quickly I'd gotten used to how fast it booted until my SSD failed last week! Fortunately, I had weekly image backups on Windows on Sundays, and the machine crashed on Monday morning. The image restore went smoothly, unfortunately, the Dropbox process got confused between drive reassignments and duplicated everything I had on Dropbox. I'm untangling the results from that disaster. Needless to say, I cannot recommend Dropbox as a back up solution since if you screw something up on one machine, you get screwed everywhere. Fortunately, Dropbox does let you retrieve previous versions of a file.

Once I figured out that it was my SSD that was having the problem, I went through OCZ's RMA process. What a disaster. It took two days for OCZ to get back to me with an RMA number. Then it took a day for them to receive the disk. Then another 2 days for them to ship me one, and I finally got my new disk back today. Installing the replacement SSD was problematic, since it shipped unformatted. As a result, I've had to make a new windows install, and then recover that way.

The net net: it took 10 days, but my machine is finally fast again. Would I do the SSD upgrade? Yes. Would I buy the same SSD? No. I'm more likely to get an Intel 320 Series 120 GB SATA 3.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive - Retail Box SSDSA2CW120G3B5 for my laptop. My experience with OCZ has definitely soured me on any more of their products, benchmarks not withstanding.

Review: Pegasus

I rarely write negative reviews of books because I usually give up reading them before getting to the end. Unfortunately, Pegasus is one of the ones that fooled me into thinking there might be something worth reading. I remember liking previous McKinley novels such as The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown.

Pegasus is ostensibly a story about a girl and her horse. Uh, Pegasus. Pegasi are an intelligent group of beings that have formed an alliance with the humans against incursions of more belligerent creatures. Traditionally, the rulers of both races have been bonded at a young age as one of the terms of the alliance. Sylvi, the heroine of the story, however, finds that at her bonding she can actually talk to her Pegasus. This is unprecedented and leads to her visiting the Pegasi in their homeland, despite opposition from the magicians who fear that their prior jobs of interpretation between the two races will be at risk.

That's it. That's the entire plot. Nothing happens while all this exposition takes place. Worse, the story ends at a cliffhanger as the real story begins. Why all this couldn't be summarized in a prologue I don't understand. The positive reviews on Amazon discuss the world-building, but I don't see any world-building in the story: there's no ecology of the pegasi, since if they were on the verge of being driven extinct how could they have existed in the first place? Most of what we see has to be taken on faith. We don't even see why there's a dependence between humans and Pegasi.

All in all, I wrote this review to warn you away from reading this book. Highly not recommended.

Culture

I recently ran across a couple of articles about Google. The first was an interview with one of Jaiku's co-founders. The second was an assertion that Google needs to hire people other than engineers. Then there's the common assertion that big companies (such as Google) don't innovate enough, and finally there's the phenomenon that I've always wondered about, which was that Microsoft at its height of influence had the entire valley in fear, while startups in the valley today (and elsewhere) seem to thumb their noses at Google with impunity. One startup I talked to said to me, "Google is incapable of moving fast enough to compete with us even if they wanted to." In this blog post, I'm going to attempt to tie together all of these threads and make them coherent. Feedback, of course is always welcome.

First, it's a myth that big companies do not innovate. One of my favorite books on the topic, How the Mighty Fall, shows that even failing large companies throw more money at innovation, not less. Google's continuing to innovate on multiple fronts in distributed computing, self-driving cars, image processing, and countless other areas that has computer science faculty leaving their tenured jobs to join Google. In fact, if there's one thing that Google is really good at, it's the ability to bring computer science research from academia and make it real in products for millions of people. Google voice actions, for instance, required gobs of data, statistical machine learning, and fast servers to do what it does. The need to do so is now driving Apple to build large data centers despite Apple's notable failure at network and cloud computing. This is an area that Google has a decisive advantage and it must drive Apple nuts. Similarly, Google navigation on the phone requires a huge investment in cars that can crawl the world's streets and send back imagery and image data, coupled with investments in smart routing algorithms, not to mention the ability to stitch together all that data and turn it into maps. I have no doubt that further innovation on the front of real time data processing will enable Google to stay way ahead of the competition.

Then where does Google fail? I think it's not instructive to look at outright failures here, but to look at how Google's approach is completely different from the competition. The most popular feature of Facebook is photos. If you think about Facebook as a photo site with a few other features I think you'll not be far wrong. Why is Facebook photos so popular? It's got crap resolution, not that great a user interface, and is uninteresting. The answer as detailed in The Facebook Effect is tagging. If you look at the act of tagging, there's no real computer science involved: the amount of image processing required is minimal, since the user is the one providing the information about where the faces are. The Google answer here is to spend millions acquiring Neven Vision and then to integrate it into PicasaWeb and Picasa. Not only was this expensive and late (as compared to merely copying Facebook's hacky Face tagging feature), it proved to be nearly useless. Early versions confused people's faces enough that you couldn't trust it to run without a verification (even Google today doesn't let you do this). Further more, the "tagging" didn't copying another important Facebook feature: that of notifying your friends that they were tagged in a photo. Since all that data is locked away in the privacy of one person's account, you couldn't share, improve, and get better. And nobody used the feature. Here's the thing: the guy who did the tagging feature at Facebook probably got lots of recognition for it. Even if some smart engineer decided to simply copy Facebook's feature at Google, it would be very likely that he would be blocked at launch, or that he would simply not be recognized for doing this important work! The concept that a smart hack could be far more important than a computer science breakthrough does not exist at Google!

Once you realize this, several things fall into place. For instance, it explains why PicasaWeb's storage pricing in the early days was insane (it was something like $20 for 6GB per year). While sites like SmugMug, etc., could help defray storage costs by selling photos and revenue sharing with users, copying that feature would not have been an important computer science breakthrough, so Google never did it. While other sites made photographers happy by allowing them to change the background of their photos, Google never did it --- you wouldn't get recognized for doing this. Letting Picasa do something easily useful like stitching together photos automatically wasn't important, because that was a solved problem. This explains why gtags is still a 20% project despite a large number of engineers inside Google depending on it for productivity --- there's insufficient computer science content there for it to get engineers behind it. An alternative project with much more computer science content (and requiring correspondingly much greater resources) was funded and staffed instead.

Orkut, for instance, never got sufficient engineering resources behind the property despite the founders clearly saying that it was an important product for similar reasons. And of course, startups thumb their nose at Google because while most startups do not have the resources to put together GFS, Bigtable, or a major computer science breakthrough, they mostly have no problem coming up with and implementing great applications such as FourSquare (no computer science there), Farmville, or even finding alternate revenue sources for their great photo site. Google, by contrast, isn't hungry enough for that, and at this point, even if Larry Page wanted to change Google's culture to make it capable of recognizing such contributions as being important, there would be too much resistance from the upper ranks of the engineering organization that he probably could not make it happen.

This shows how important corporate culture is to the kind of projects Google should and should not undertake, and my guess is this is why Paul Buchheit made the statement that Google will land on the moon before it beats Facebook. Google certainly has all the engineering and product capability to do social products. Its missing the cultural capability, and that's what matters in this race.

Review: Pump Six and Other Stories

Pump Six and Other Stories is Paolo Bacigalupi's collection of short stories. You can buy a DRM-free ebook version from Baen's Webscription website. I reviewed Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl last year, just before it won the Nebula Award for best novel of the year.

The stories in this collection are varied: two of them, The Calorie Man and Yellow Card Man come from the same world as The Windup Girl. Many of the stories are dystopian, covering mankind's recovery from or descent into a darker age, with either technology being lost, or being slowly doled back to humanity as it "matures." Conflicts over water, food, and loss of knowledge are common themes. No stories come from the "space flight meet aliens" genre of science fiction.

One unusual story, The People of Sand and Slag, depicts a world of nano-technology made real, where humanity gains freedom from the ecosystem and body plans the evolution provided us. The result is not pretty, and in this case I think Bacigalupi's vision is too pessimistic (something that's an unusual accusation from me!). The title story, Pump Six by contrast drags us into a world very similar to that of Idiocracy, where giant sewer systems built by corporations of years past can no longer be repaired because such corporations built themselves out of business. As someone very familiar with bit-rot, I can assure you that we are not at risk of something like this ever happening.

Two stories cover the nature of childbirth. Pop Squad postulates that in a world of immortality, the only way to prevent overpopulation would be to tie the immortality to sterility. The consequences as depicted in the story seems false though. Small Offerings takes us into a world in which environmental toxins are so rampant that unusual measures have to be taken for normal reproduction.

There's only one story that's not science fiction. Softer is a character study about a murderer about to turn into a serial killer. It's also by far the weakest story of the collection.

All the stories are well written with good characters, though as pointed out above, the postulates are sometimes suspect, and perhaps the consequences as well. As with The Windup Girl, use of non-English languages, etc., is done to perfection. All in all, while not as good a read as The Windup Girl, this collection is still recommended.

Review: Nurture Shock

Someone suggested that I read NurtureShock after reading my review of Brain Rules for Baby. Coming in right after Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, this turned out to be excellent timing.

For instance, if you read Quora or other internet forums, it's filled with whining about being raised in such a hot house environment. The section on Praise explains why (contrary to the whiners) Asia isn't filled with suicidal overachievers:

the moms were told their child's actual raw score and were told a lie---that this score represented a below average result... The American mothers carefully avoided making negative comments. They remained fairly upbeat and positive with their child. The majority of the minutese weree spent talking about something other than the testing at hand, such as what they might have for dinner. But the Chinese children were likely to hear, "You didn't concentrate when doing it," and "Let's look over your test." The majority of the break was spent discussing the test and its importance. After the break, the Chinese kids' scores on the second test jumped 33 percent, more than twice the gain of the Americans. The trade-off here would seem to be that Chinese mothers acted harsh or cruel... While their words were firm, the Chinese mothers actually smiled and hugged their children every bit as much as the American mothers (and were no more likely to frown or raise their voices).

(Chua, in her book leaves out any reference to this literature.)
What about Chua's strict rules, like no sleepovers, etc? Bronson and Merryman dig a little further, and finds a couple of researchers, Drs. Nancy Darling and Linda Caldwell. Surprisingly enough, permissive parenting is actually less effective than strict, disciplinarian parenting.

Darling found that permissive parents don't actually learn more about their child's lives. "Kids who go wild and get in trouble mostly have parents who don't set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But the kids take the lack of a rules as a sign their parents don't actually care---that their parent doesn't really want this job of being the parent."l... Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth.

As with Brain Rules, the book's peppered with references to actual research and real studies about what's going on. A lot of it is counter intuitive. For instance, the section on childhood obesity pins the phenomenon neither on food/nutrition or exercise. The section on teaching self-control covers Tools of the Mind, a fascinating program for kids to gain control over their cognitive abilities, leading to incredible improvements in behavior as well as performance in school. Other chapters cover racism, lying, and IQ testing and its failures. One busts the stereotype that only childs are less socially capable than children with siblings. The book rounds off with research on how to speed up language skills in infants.

This is all fascinating stuff, and much of it is actionable. I consider it a good companion to Brain Rules, and a great follow up to Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Highly recommended.

Review: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

After all that mess in the media about The Tiger Mom Controversy, I didn't expect Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother to be fun to read but it was a lot of fun. Chua can definitely write with sarcasm and wit, and some of her antics as a mother are to be read to be believed.

Funny thing is, while I agree with her stance on discipline and learning (Western-style education, for instance, is not very good at getting good enough at basic skills so that higher level skills can build upon them), I'm the kind of person who finds classical music pretentious and silly, so I find it amusing that she would devote so much of her energy (and her daughters' energies) to classical music and then call it "traditional", given that none of her choices of instruments would ever be a traditional Chinese instrument. She even discusses her distaste for Chinese musical traditions in the book! Then, even though she only speaks Fujian (she calls it Hokkien, because she doesn't even know Mandarin, let alone pinyin), she has her daughters learn Mandarin while celebrating their Jewish heritages with Bar Mitzahs.

One particularly poignant story has her rejecting her daughters' birthday cards as not being well made enough. She definitely sent her message to her daughters on that one, but I'm not sure it reflects a lot of self-awareness as a person.

I am amazed by the amount of energy Chua has in bringing up her children. She has two daughters practicing 2-3 hours of music a day, in addition to scoring straight As. She stays on top of everything, and does an insane amount of driving and spends huge amounts of money on lessons, travel, and so on and so forth. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have the energy to do so.

Irregardless, I think the book was light fun reading and very entertaining. Chua's generated a lot of controversy out of the book, and claims she was misquoted (I don't think so, by the way), but as long as you have a sense of humor and an active sarcasm detector when you read this book, you'll find it enjoyable. Recommended as light airplane reading.