Brij Singh's Random Musings

Sleep on it

From Innovation tools:

When handheld computing guru Jeff Hawkins is trying to solve a problem, he often likes to sleep on it. Hawkins says he's learned a technique over the years for getting his mind to work while his body's getting a good night's rest. Hawkins, the creator of the original PalmPilot and a host of handheld computer innovations since then, says he uses the technique to get his creative juices flowing and to get over stumbling blocks in his work.

Why do the best ideas always seem to happen in the shower?

Inc managazine article on perfect brainstorm and why do the best ideas always seem to happen in the shower?

Some findings -

Its better to write ideas down during a session
There should be plenty of breaks during the brainstorml
Best ideas come at the end of a brainstorm
alternate individual brainstorming with group sessions. Then there's what experts call "brainwriting." Rather than staging a face-to-face group, direct participants to write their ideas down on a piece of paper or electronically
Ask the right questions
Generate lots of ideas to find one good idea, generate-document-evaluate-execute

and finally answer to the shower paradox:
"Creativity requires an attitude that is a paradoxical blend of attention and relaxation". Shower gives you this as long as you are not in the plumbing business.

Database and open-source

Oracle India launches 'Standard Edition One' for SMEs

"Standard Edition One is a single processor version of Oracle Standard Edition database offered at Rs 2.81 lakh, a company release said."

For the SME market and that too in the emerging countries, why do they need to have high end commercial databases? Work with the good enough !! As computing solutions become more and more central to the business life, in less developed countries the platform softwares should be all open source version. Spend the money on other value-added applications software and on improving the quality of your product.

Curious who is doing ODSL type work in the database area.
Postgres community comes close to this model, but not sure how BSD license restricts the adoption. Interesting thing to observe is the lack of support/involvement from programmers in less-developed countries.

This could be a great software project for all the students out there. To build a opensource based high performance/scalable database which can take on the $10 billion market dominated by IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

10 Commandments of Research

From Big Picture

10 Commandments of Research

1) Be right on the fundamentals. Earnings growth drives stock price. There is essentially a 100% correlation with how a company does and how its stock performs over time.

2) Be Proactive -- Not Reactive. Reporting what happened is what a news reporter does. We get paid to look over the horizon and around corners.

3) When in Doubt -- Get it Out. The difference between value-added information and a commodity could be minutes.

4) When Wrong -- Admit it. The best investors and analysts are wrong a lot. The worst thing to do is rationalize a mistake. Be intellectually and morally honest.

5) The Cockroach Theory. You seldom find just one cockroach in a kitchen. Likewise, if you find a problem at a growth company, there are always more behind it. It's rarely a one-quarter issue -- the first loss is the best loss.

6) Research is About Information and Insight. Information is valuable if it is proprietary. Insight is valuable if we know what that information means.

7) The 4 Ps are Key for any Successful Growth Company. People, Product, Potential, Predictability. The first "P" (people) is the most important.

8) 5 Independent Sources for Each Initiation of Coverage. We will have regular dialogue with company management, but they will always see the glass as "half full."

9) 3 Main Reasons for a Stock to Move Up or Down. In addition, we will identify near term catalysts for price movements.

10) Make Clients Money -- and everything will take care of itself.

Expanding open source beyond software

Wired magazine article on how open source is expanding beyond software. RISC is including some of these open source prinicples.:

But software is just the beginning. Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars mission, calling on volunteer "clickworkers" to identify millions of craters and help draw a map of the Red Planet. There is open source publishing: With Bruce Perens, who helped define open source software in the '90s, Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers' improvements considered for succeeding editions. There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related project, Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are correct. There are open source projects in law and religion. There's even an open source cookbook.

Message-ID:
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
To: Newsgroups: comp.os.inix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system

Hello everybody out there using minix-I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat

Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)

Linus

Knuth's lecture event in Stanford

Knuth is giving a lecture in Stanford on 17th of this month -

“I have always liked the concept of universities as they were in Ancient Greece, where folks who had something cool to say would just come and say it,” says Knuth. “It wasn’t about recognition; the impetus was the thought that you were resonating with ideas.” These archived tapes resonate with not only his thoughts, but with insights from students, audience members and other legends in mathematics and computer sciences.

Industry-student collaboration can thrive in this kind of open dialog environment.

Movable Type supports hindi language

Movable Type: Vyaktigat Prakashan Pranali

For the Kanpur project we should try to publish news blog first in hindi and then expand from there.

Mobile lessons

Genevieve Bell , an Intel researcher on why Mobile phones are so popular in Asia -

"It is relatively robust, relatively small, you don't need a desk, you don't need to be a in particular place.

"And you don't have to be literate to use them or speak English. These are all constraints when it comes to operating a computer," she explains.

Growing importance of Klartext

I like the word Klartext, but it conveys a utterly disturbing trend. People trading instant gratification with the act of deliberations. I agree politicians and intellectuals alike use the kind of language which will put San Francisco's crooked street to shame. I think Greenspan and George Bush are the champions of two extremes.

Dangerous trend to watchout is that increasingly masses are loosing patience with the complicated issues and whoever has "humorous", "simple" and "fresh" view point usually walks away victorious in the public debates.

Could this be an offshoot of the information overload we all are facing?

U.S. Is Losing Edge

When Andy Grove says people listen (cause he is the most paranoid of all !!)

Some comments -

-India's booming software industry could surpass the United States in software and tech-service jobs by 2010
-torn between his responsibility to shareholders to cut costs and improve profits, and to U.S. workers who helped build the nation's technology industry but who are now being replaced by cheaper labor
-move offshore has been aided by the telecommunications bubble of the late 1990s
-He put the blame on slow patent process on slowing down the overall innovation train

Found more details on SV site.

He is recommending more emphasis on investing in pre-competitive technology.

I believe this is going to be a key battle ground in coming years. Once this cost rationalization dust settles battle lines will be drawn in terms of number of Phds, patents, research papers, incubation projects and cross discipline skillsets.