The Strangest Secret
January 2, 2009
We become what we think about.As ye sow, so shall ye reap.Simple words. Recently, the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell was making its round around the hands of those who aim to be inspired to greater performances or results. As is often the case, people often look towards outside influences for inspiration towards greater heights. Some great source of information that provides a genuine albeit temporary advantage, some gadget or technique that triples or quadruples a person’s productivity or some catalyst that will trigger a permanent lasting formation of a talent that will become the tipping point for a person’s life.Some great secret. However, in this case, it appears that the underlying message behind Outliers was something that everyone knew all along. Something that your parents and mine knew and have repeated often enough. Something that our teachers and mentors have conspired to hammer into our psyche. Something that we, ourselves, knew well enough.Hard work.Pure hard work.10,000 hours of it. At least. If not more.Strangely, this universal truth often gets lost. Only to be repeated again and again and again.
Buzzing Arsenal & Joey Barton
August 31, 2008
adebayor’s not an out and out striker & denilson needs to try simpler passes was to have been the title.
First half of the new 2008-2009 EPL season with Arsenal at home vs newcastle.
At half time, it’s already 2-0 courtesy of two Van Persie strikers, the first a penalty kick from a supposed handball and the latter a neat interchange between a half right Adebayor and backheeling assist from Eboue to Van Persie for a toe poke finish.
Adebayor
What’s Adebayor doing on the right ?
He’s going after the ball because he’s not an out and out striker. Prior to his assist-assist, he’s already missed an easy chance off a outside left sidefoot from Van Persie. He tends to pick up the ball and run with it instead of latching onto a through pass and firing a 1st time strike like what Van Persie would do.
Denilson
Arsenal must have had something like 70% possession in the 1st half alone. The main contribution towards Newcastle’s possession % must be Denilson’s wayward passes. His passes just tends to be picked up by Newcastle players. His decision making has got to improve. Most of these wayward passes can be prevented since they are short passes to team mates in poor positions or long tries to forward players. Then, he got his 1st EPL goal from a silky smooth interchange between Nasri and Adebayor and it’s kinda hard to fault him too much especially when he’s putting much effort into tracking opposing players.
Nasri-Denilson-Fab4-Eboue
The 4 of them were switching positions in midfield so quickly I was having trouble catching up, let alone the Newcastle players. The Arsenal way of playing had certainly switched from a more static standard flat four into a dynamic inter-switching runners type midfield. On paper, Nasri-Denilson-Fabregas seems too light weight of a midfield. In practice, Nasri was tracking back a lot and contributing a lot to closing defenders down. Denilson was getting his tackles in. And, Cesc. Well, Cesc was being his typical tactical self. He’s so similar to Edu sometimes in that he could put himself in a position to nick the ball or knock it loose without getting into foul trouble.
Subs
Walcott and Song were introduced with Walcott showing that he still needs a couple of games to get up to speed and Song not having much to do. Vela came on for Van Persie but didn’t have time to do much.
Newcastle bad bad boy Joey Barton came back from jail and proceeded to reintroduce himself into the game with a series of loud boos at his entrance/exit, making a late tackle on Nasri, receiving a retailation clip from Nasri and getting nugmegged by Clichy.
starting over again
January 21, 2008
Back a few years ago, I managed to get myself down to 70+ kgs and do a mini biathlon 800m swim + 5km run.
now 3 years later, it’s 87kg and another uphill battle.
passed ippt last year. so it’s the same target this year. I’m going to change my routine this time.
no jogs or long runs. instead, it’s going to be sprints both on land and in water.
did my first round of lap sprints this evening. 14 laps with 7 freestyle sprints.
my triceps and trapezius haven’t been aching this much since months ago.
we’ll see how it goes.
ebook catalogue
June 10, 2007
So I was looking for a way to catalogue/catagorize my ebooks and apparently, there are no real open source software out there that allows you to do that. I needed something to auto catalogue my ebooks based on the filename or perhaps some content-based heuristics to find out whether an ebook belonged to a certain category.
Ideally, my choice of ‘shelving’ ebooks would be by category as seen in bookstores like borders and not by the dewy decimal system utilized by libraries. Libraries commonly use dewey decimal but some are (or at least one) phasing them out. There are some thoughts here. Quite a few. There will always be some fans but I’m not one of them. In fact, for ebooks, i’m more in favour of some form of tagging.
A few months ago, i was googling and found nothing. zilch. Today while trying my luck in getting a hit before i start to really get down to coding my own, i ran across eKitaa (link) which was started as recent as April 2007. It retrieves ebook information using a basic amazon search and lightweight xml parsing code.
OpenBerg also interests with a significant list of items in its roadmap.
Simplicity Rules
March 24, 2007
In my daily day-life as a developer, i’ve come across complex software design and architecture. Some of it absolutely necessary for scalability and performance. Some of it just looks twisted and mangled, like a round peg that’s shaped out with play doh to fit snug into a square hole, for reasons to fitting it into some framework(s) that promises much but takes away more.
This adds maintenance costs to the project as developers dislocate joints and make constipated faces while they break up their otherwise sensible design to fit into the project framework.
More often than not, simplicity reduces costs. Both development and maintenance costs since they play to the developers’ advantage by appealing to their intuition.
Should it work like this ? This looks simple enough, let’s look under the hood. Ah, there it is. alright, we’ll just have to add this to the chain of responsibility and kaboom, we have it done.
Need a quick fix? let’s see. Going by our developer guidelines, it should be clear that the entire object graph should be serialized here. Interoperability issues ? None that i can think of. They pretty much use the same mechanism. Let’s just do a prototype and run it by the debugger. There, it works.
So this week, i chanced upon Simplicity works everytime and it’s joining the plugs on singaporean(or in singapore. see how pressed i am ?) programmers.
Funny thing is, as I write this, I can’t help but think of the fact that ‘programmer’ is like a lowly title to some clients. But that’s a topic for another time.