Gabor hits Send

Sometime in the last 10 years, we stopped using paper printouts

2010-08-28T12:54:00.000-07:00

I guess it's all email now. I can't remember when I last printed out a document at my job.

-- from this BusinessWeek article on Lexmark

What's a "Maserati Problem"?

2010-08-26T20:30:00.000-07:00

"A Maserati Problem is when you worry about what color Maserati you should buy when, years from now, you sell your newly-started startup for millions of dollars. It's a problem you shouldn't be worried about at the current stage."

-- via Quora

If you own a D-Link Router, reset your Wifi Channel

2010-08-17T19:54:00.000-07:00

I've had a DGL-4300 Wifi router for the last 2 years. After moving into an apartment complex in SOMA, my Wifi became mindnumbingly unreliable: I barely ever got an IP address. Even if that succeeded, the connection would be so slow as to be unusable. Plugging in my network cable would work perfectly, though.

Last night I had an epiphany. I checked my router settings, and it seems like D-Link routers are preconfigured to use "Super-G with Dynamic Turbo" which in turn forces the router to Wifi channel 6.

My apartment complex is so heavily populated with techie types, and all of them have Wifi. A large percentage of Wifi routers is made by D-Link. Yeah, all of the D-Link routers in my neighborhood were probably fighting each other for airtime on Channel 6.

I logged into my router's admin console (usually at http://192.168.0.1) and chose a different channel [1]. My Wifi has been speeding along ever since.

----

Notes:
[1] Humans are bad at randomly selecting Wifi channels. Open up python on your console and type:
>>> import random; random.sample([1,2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10,11],1)

Average Revenue per Apple Store Location

2010-08-17T00:07:00.000-07:00

I was reading this 2001 article the other day. It predicted that Apple Stores would fail since they would need to bring in $12 million dollars of revenue each just to be able to pay the rent.

Despite the doomsayers, the concept has succeeded. So how much revenue does each Apple Store bring in today?

One Quora question and a friendly pointer later, I was reading this Bloomberg article which estimates Apple's flagship Fifth Avenue store to be grossing $350 million dollars a year. That’s the equivalent of selling one Mercedes-Benz C300 sedan per square foot each year. Impressive.

But the 5th Avenue Apple Store is hardly average. What about the average Apple Store location?

This article on AllThingsD puts Apple's total revenue from Apple Stores at $2.58 billion per quarter. That would mean that all Apple Stores make a total of $10.3 billion per year [1].

Scouring through the location list on Apple's website, I counted 301 Apple Stores worldwide [2]. That would put average revenue at $34 million per store. While that's only one-tenth of their flagship location in Manhattan, this kind of revenue should easily cover the rent.

---
Notes:

[1] While Q2 is traditionally a weak quarter compared to Q4, Apple released both the iPad and iPhone 4 in Q2 of 2010. That's why I'm relying on Q2 as the indicator for the average across the rest of the year.

[2] Not that Apple boasts with "200 stores worldwide" on that page, but at a closer look has already surpassed the 300 store mark.

"But Will It Make You Happy?"

2010-08-12T18:55:00.000-07:00

This is a great article in the New York Times about how people are getting rid of their stuff, rather than buying more, to achieve happiness. It echoes the sentiment that instead of you owning stuff, it instead end up owning you.

“Scholars have discovered that one way consumers combat hedonic adaptation is to buy many small pleasures instead of one big one. Instead of a new Jaguar, Professor Lyubomirsky advises, buy a massage once a week, have lots of fresh flowers delivered and make phone calls to friends in Europe. Instead of a two-week long vacation, take a few three-day weekends.
“We do adapt to the little things,” she says, “but because there’s so many, it will take longer.”

Before credit cards and cellphones enabled consumers to have almost anything they wanted at any time, the experience of shopping was richer, says Ms. Liebmann of WSL Strategic Retail. “You saved for it, you anticipated it,” she says.

In other words, waiting for something and working hard to get it made it feel more valuable and more stimulating.

In fact, scholars have found that anticipation increases happiness. Considering buying an iPad? You might want to think about it as long as possible before taking one home. Likewise about a Caribbean escape: you’ll get more pleasure if you book a flight in advance than if you book it at the last minute.”

How can do developers make their coding time as effective as possible?

2010-08-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

(This post is part of my Quora reblogging experiment)

Coding is hard. procrastination is easy. How do squeeze the most productivity out of the time you spend coding?

The techniques I use are all for minimizing distraction and for making getting back into flow easier:

Block off as much uninterrupted time as possible
Keep a list of TODOs in a Google Spreadsheet with mini-tasks (as small as reasonably possible) so I can glance at it when returning from a break. I always keep the cursor on the current task I'm working on.
When doing backend work, I try to scope all tasks so I can see the effect in the UI. The ability to visualize the intended result makes long-winded work bearable.
Test-driven development: Write unit tests first, then try to make them green. A clear goal keeps the mind on track.

(See this question on Quora)

Quora Reblog Experiment

2010-08-12T10:06:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged much lately. Thus I'm trying a new experiment whereby I will reblog some of my answers to questions on Quora to this blog.

There is no grand theory behind this. If you're subscribed to this blog, you're likely interested in stuff I like and write about. To write something, I have to come up with both a topic and the contents. On Quora, the questions are provided, so I need to only write up the answers. I'm not exactly sure where this will lead, or how long it will last.

President Obama on Comprehensive Immigration Reform

2010-07-01T14:21:00.000-07:00

"Of course, the tensions around immigration are not new. On the one hand, we’ve always defined ourselves as a nation of immigrants -- a nation that welcomes those willing to embrace America’s precepts. Indeed, it is this constant flow of immigrants that helped to make America what it is. The scientific breakthroughs of Albert Einstein, the inventions of Nikola Tesla, the great ventures of Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel and Sergey Brin’s Google, Inc. -– all this was possible because of immigrants.

[...]

So this steady stream of hardworking and talented people has made America the engine of the global economy and a beacon of hope around the world. And it’s allowed us to adapt and thrive in the face of technological and societal change. To this day, America reaps incredible economic rewards because we remain a magnet for the best and brightest from across the globe. Folks travel here in the hopes of being a part of a culture of entrepreneurship and ingenuity, and by doing so they strengthen and enrich that culture. Immigration also means we have a younger workforce -– and a faster-growing economy -- than many of our competitors. And in an increasingly interconnected world, the diversity of our country is a powerful advantage in global competition."

-- from the Remarks by the President on Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Is there enough Lithium on earth to make all cars run on batteries?

2010-06-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

I've now heard this from several people: "While electric cars like the Tesla are a great idea, there's not enough lithium on earth to replace all gasoline driven cars with electric ones."

Not Quite Enough
I spent some time investigating this and found this paper: "The Trouble with Lithium". It argues that while there is enough lithium in the earth's crust to make all cars run on lithium ion batteries, not enough of it is extractable:

The world automotive fleet is 1 billion vehicles worldwide.
A battery electric vehicle needs at least a 30 kWh battery to be usable (30 kWh will go for 120 miles or around 190 kilometers).
A lithium-ion battery requires between 1.4 and 1.5kg of lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) per kWh of capacity. That's between 42 or 45 kg of lithium carbonate per car.
To equip all cars in the world with lithium batteries, we will need (conservatively) 42 billion kg of lithium carbonate. That's 42 megatons ("MT") of Li2CO3.
The paper estimates the global reserve base - the total amount of known lithium in the earth's crust - of lithium carbonate to be 58 MT, which would cover it.
Of these 58 MT of Li2CO3, we currently know how to extract about 27 MT. That's not enough to turn all cars into all-electric vehicles.

Afghanistan

However, keep in mind that all these numbers stem from a time before the discovery of vast mineral riches in Afghanistan. But I couldn't dig up numbers about how much lithium was discovered. This USGS report from 2007 lists out detailed megaton estimates for most metals that were discovered, but provides no estimate for lithium.

Geopolitics

Leaving aside Afghanistan, South American countries hold about 80% of the world's lithium reserve base. If the world was to switch from oil to lithium-ion batteries, it's possible that South America could turn into the next Middle East. Bolivia, the country with the most reserves, is one of the poorest and least developed countries in South America, and not a close ally of the US. Since China has plenty of lithium deposits in Tibet, "the USA would again become dependent on external sources of supply of a strategic mineral while China would have a certain degree of self sufficiency."

Alternatives

Lithium ion batteries are light and have high energy densities. But they're not the only alternative. For example, zinc-air batteries are relatively light but hard to recharge. You need 39 MT of zinc to equip the world's cars with a 30 kWh battery. Contrast those 39 MT with the global reserve base of zinc, which clocks in at 1.4 BT - there's plenty of to go around. However, zinc-air batteries are a little harder than lithium-ion batteries to recharge, and only allow for 500 recharges. Yet they're much cheaper to manufacture, which may be their ultimate reason to succeed.

Thus, while we may not be able to mine enough lithium to make all cars run on lithium-ion batteries, it's entirely conceivable to replace all the world's gasoline-guzzling cars with vehicles powered by batteries of some kind.

"Their style is 'Grant autonomy, review frequently, but rarely prescribe'"

2010-06-03T09:51:00.000-07:00

-- Anonymous Quora user (not me) on "What is it like working with Larry Page and Sergey Brin?"

I wonder how many Miele appliances were sold in Silicon Valley because of this quote.

2010-05-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

Is there anything well designed today that inspires you?

Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn't have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better - but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don't trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer.

We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We'd get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.

We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They're too expensive, but that's just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we've bought over the last few years that we're all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.

-- Steve Jobs in Wired in February 1996

PB on what to do with your millions

2010-05-27T18:13:00.000-07:00

Great post today by Paul Buchheit:

Although today's poster only asked, "What do I do with my money?", there's a second, related question that's also very important, "What do I do with my life?" In both cases, I think the right answer is, "start slow, and avoid making any big decisions now", though as always, there are exceptions.

Mark Andreesen Q&A at Stanford

2010-05-17T12:38:00.001-07:00

This is incredibly interesting stuff.

via Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner (Download)

"From Hopes and Dreams to the Real Thing"

2010-05-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

"Companies start out as hopes and dreams and stay there for at least a little while. Even after the product has been launched and users are jumping aboard, the company is still in hopes and dreams mode.

[...]

There is a big chasm between hopes and dreams and the real thing. Companies need to grow up and go through the ugly adolescent phase. They start to doubt themselves, they start to churn employees, they may even go through a management change or two. Getting across this chasm is hard, it takes tenacity, both from the entrepreneur and team and from the investors. Everyone has to stay the course, buy into the plan, and execute it.

Crossing the chasm to the real thing is not nearly as fun as the hopes and dreams phase. It is hard work and it happens after the gushing media has left your company for the shiny new thing. Your company will take a morale hit and you will have to lead it through this phase.

But getting to the other side is worth all of it. There is nothing as satisfying in entrepreneur land than having a profitable growing sustainable business that doesn't need another dime of anyone else's capital. I have watched entrepreneurs stand up in front of their teams and tell them that they've reached that point. I get chills every time I see it."

-- Fred Wilson

A Moment of Zen-Like Calm

2010-05-11T08:15:00.000-07:00

I came home last night to an empty inbox. No new messages had arrived. It was a moment of Zen-like calm.

That is, until I realized that I had misconfigured my MX records in the move. But SMTP is a surprisingly resilient protocol: Minutes after I fixed my MX records, emails started streaming in. I'm hoping I have everything now.

Lost in the Move

2010-05-10T22:03:00.000-07:00

I just finished moving my personal website from the late 1990s to the future. Two open source snippets I wrote a few years back got lost in the move. I had forgotten about both of them. I promptly got some emails about where the persistent queue implementation went. Here's the new location for both:

Farmville Cash

2010-05-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

I went through a weeklong phase of playing Farmville a few months ago. Then when I got my iPad, I tried Godfinger. All these farming games have two things in common: An attention-based and a money-based currency. In Farmville, these are called coins & cash.

You get coins for farming, but if you want to buy that fancy tractor, you have to pay in Farmville cash ("FVs"), which in turn is about $0.05 per FV. This Hot Rod tractor costs 55 Farmville cash, which in turn is about US$ 10.00:

I realize I'm not the target audience to purchase FarmVille cash (or Hot Rod Tractors). I guesstimate that's only about 2% of the userbase. But in comparison, I'm happy to shell out US$5.00 for high quality iPhone games. But why?

First, I'm offended by the fact that Zynga and its competitors have trivialized making money on PNGs. It used to be that your dollars would get you a whole new game experience. You would spend $50 but get a whole new episode of Monkey Island, a masterpiece of vision and sound. Today you spend $2 and all you get is essentially a PNG file. The creative value per dollar spent is at new lows.

Second, I'm annoyed that these currencies are essentially like airline miles: Zynga is the central bank. If they decide there needs to be inflation, there is inflation. This cash doesn't really store value.

I'm hoping that as more and more gamers realize this, there will be a race to the top. Games are going to deliver more creative value. The people who play them are going to stop playing the games that take them for a ride.

The Death of Files

2010-05-10T09:41:00.000-07:00

The iPhone OS completely removes the concept of a “file." It promotes apps to being the primary level of user interaction, and it stores related things inside databases that are content-specific. When you pick up your iPhone and want to view photos, you open the Photos app, which connects to the photos database and shows you all of your photos. When you want to listen to music, you open the iPod app, which connects to the music database. Everything on the iPhone is task-centric, not file-centric. The “file” part of completing tasks is completely insulated from the user.

-- Dustin Curtis, The Death of Files

Blog Move Complete

2010-05-10T00:58:00.000-07:00

Wow, moving this blog wasn't easy. But it's done.

Update your bookmarks to http://www.gaborcselle.com/ (the old location was http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/, but that's no longer supported by Blogger).

More posts to come soon ...

In the Process of Moving this Blog

2010-05-01T11:48:00.004-07:00

Time is up for moving this blog off of publishing via Blogger FTP. Blogger is turning that feature off later today.

I'm in the process of moving this blog to a new home. It'll end up either at www.gaborcselle.com or blog.gaborcselle.com. I'm not sure about the destination yet. For SEO purposes, I'll also need to set up all the right redirects in all the right places. Sounds like work.

Since gaborcselle.com is on a budget hosting service whose DNS config interface predates modern civilization, and a process that might involve faxing them stuff (if you can believe it), this page will likely be static for a few days until I complete the move.

Until then, you can check out my other blog here on Posterous.

Google Core Libraries for Java

2010-04-30T10:38:00.006-07:00

I've been writing some Java code lately. Do you know that sinking feeling you get when you realize that a data structure you need isn't part of the Java library (JDK)? Or when some String operation isn't just a static method away?

No more. I just discovered that a lot of my favorite library code from Google's internal source tree has recently been open sourced as Google Core Libraries for Java 1.5 aka Guava.

Bidirectional maps (bimaps), hash multisets, multimaps, String operations, compact preconditions, a beautiful Splitter class, utility functions for value types - it's all in there!

Somehow, I missed the announcement because I was spending time in C#, Python, and Objective-C land. I'm happy this internal Google magic is now available to all. If you write Java code, you should probably just add Guava to your project. I promise you will find it very useful, very quickly.

A Suggestion for iPad Developers

2010-04-22T09:58:00.004-07:00

I just got my iPad the other day. From browsing the App Store, it seems like most apps in the store are between $4.99 and $9.99.

I think it's hard for most users will shell out 5 to 10 dollars based on a plaintext description and some pretty pictures. This is a model that holds for very early adopters (the types that are buying the iPad right now), but long-term I think publishers should switch to a try-then-buy model. This switched worked well for reMail: Initially priced at $4.99, I switched to a free app for Gmail which upsells you to IMAP support - download numbers increased along with revenue.

Adding an in-app store to sell features and levels is surprisingly hard - Apple provides docs but no sample implementation. If you want to add a store into your app, I suggest you download the reMail open source code and check out the Store* classes. They're fairly generic and should be easy to adapt for your purposes.

Blog Options

2010-04-05T00:17:00.003-07:00

This blog is turning 5 years old next month! When I started this in May 2005, it was meant more as a joke than a real project. It's come a long way.

One secret of this blog is that it's actually hosted on a server in East Germany and is published via Blogger's FTP feature. Unfortunately, the ability to publish blogs via FTP is getting turned off in May 2010.

What should I do?

Migrate to blog.gaborcselle.com, host on Blogger, and set up some redirects.

Migrate to Google App Engine and use this open source blog app I once wrote and used for reMail.

Start a new Posterous blog and pay a virtual assistant to copy over all the old content to it.

Start a new Tumblr blog and pay a virtual assistant to copy over all the old content to it.

The final two options have the advantage that I'd likely post more often. On the other hand, I wouldn't be using a Google product and Siobhan (Blogger PM) might get mad at me. Also, I'm wondering if I could lose all my PageRank.

Thoughts on this? Let me know what you've decided if you're in a similar situation.

Facebook acquires Divvyshot

2010-04-02T13:23:00.003-07:00

Facebook has just acquired Divvyshot. Congrats Sam, Paul, and Michael!

Here's a random factoid for y'all: Divvyshot and reMail were both subletting the same office space at 589 Howard Street. There was even a Divvyshot/reMail ski trip to Tahoe at one point. One company went to Google, the other Facebook. In the same office: Ninite and Disqus - let's see what happens to those guys.

The Collapse of Complexity

2010-04-01T19:21:00.001-07:00

It's no secret I love Clay Shirky's stuff, and his latest piece is no exception:

In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.

The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, though a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.