Quotes on Starting a Business

“Chase the vision, not the money; the money will end up following you.” -Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO

“An entrepreneur is someone who has a vision for something and a want to create.” -David Karp, Tumblr founder and CEO

“A ‘startup’ is a company that is confused about three things: (1.) What its product is. (2.) Who its customers are. (3.) How to make money.” – Dave McClure, 500Startups co-founder

"Just Fu*king Do It" 

Are you secure

If you ever wondered what could be traced on your person....check out this site.

Click on the little dots in the picture to learn more.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-941262.html

Kill a Patent

If your wanting to kill some time, try this. Took me about 10 or 15 min to find a good one.

Ask Patents puts out recent software patents for the public to dispute. You think of an existing software or website that does what the patent says and submit it as prior art.

Poof - The patent is dismissed.

Awesomeness.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/07/22.html
How to Read a Patent in 60 Seconds

Thanks for nothing US Airlines!

A rant....

I had a job late year where I flew every other weekend on  a consulting gig. Must have paid upward of $20,000 in airfare. As a "reward" I got 35,000 miles. Yeah for me!!! OR NOT!

I want to take a trip to Vegas, according to Orbitz I can buy a flight cash for $550. Hummm, I guess I'll use those reward miles and save some money. OR NOT!

A flight cost me 60,000 miles. I have the option to buy additional miles. Guess how much 25,000 miles cost....you guessed it....$550.

What a freakin rip-off!

Thanks for nothing US Airways!

Quote

The fewer secrets I keep, the better I get at keeping them.

If somone said this to you, would you think them honest? Think on that for a while....

T-SQL - What performance benefits can views give me?

I won't cover it all, but read this and stop wondering:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/439056/is-a-view-faster-than-a-simple-query

(Remember you gotta use them correctly, and just cause you got a hammer don't make all problems into nails)

Some highlights:

After a unique clustered index is created on the view, the view's result set is materialized immediately and persisted in physical storage in the database, saving the overhead of performing this costly operation at execution time.

these indexed views can work even when they are not directly referenced by another query as the optimizer will use them in place of a table reference when appropriate

View itself would provide us with a performance advantage (3x) over the simple use of the index alone

Using indexes to improve query performance is not a new concept; however, indexed views provide additional performance benefits that cannot be achieved using standard indexes.

This is true for MS Sql Server 2005 and beyond.

New Website/App Checklist

My personal check list for what should happen with a new website or web app:

1. Choose and Buy Domain
2. Setup Host Package
3. Put up coming soon page
4. Setup Wordpress Blog
5. Setup Favicon
6. Setup 404,405 and 406 pages
7. Setup Email
8. Setup Google Analytics
9. Setup Google Adwords
10. Setup Twitter
11. Setup Heat Click Map
12. Setup A/B Testing
13. Setup a Phone Line
14. Determine Keywords
15. Create robts.txt
16. Setup Bank Account
17. Setup Paypal
18. Alpha Development Complete
19. Create 10 Blog entries
20. Publish Wordpress Blog
21. Create a sitemap
22. Blog - Press Release
23. Blog - Screenshots
24. Blog - How to use
25. Blog - Who we are/what we do
26. Alpha Testing Complete
27. Open Alpha Testing

Additional Check Lists:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/07/15-essential-checks-before-launching-your-website/

Agile Teams - Mange your Backlog

One of the most critical items to a team's success is managing the backlog.

The backlog is NOT a collection of to-do items that your developer can go an "pickup" when they have spare time.

A backlog HAS to be groomed. IE: Reviewed weekly by someone on the team, or maybe even the whole team.

Items at the top of the backlog list MUST have some form of requirements.

In my opinion the scrum master is responsible for keeping the backlog in order. This does not mean they are responsible for priority, requirements, etc. It means they are the one who says "Hey Team, we have to go through the backlog because we have no idea what the top 3 items actually mean"

The BA/PM/Requirement Pusher, should be intimate with the backlog. I mean REAL intimate. Live and breath it.

A bit of a rant, but it's a recurring theme that drives Agile teams to failure.

Hope it helps.

Where did my Tax Dollars Go

Interesting data visulization:

http://fchasen.com/taxday/

Find more at http://www.datavizchallenge.org/

Quote

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

Quote

You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.

Quote

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.

Quote

The more talented you are, the less you need the props.

Quote

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.

- Ernest Hemingway

Quote

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.

Personalized Quote from Urban Dictionary

Get a nice quote about yourself....

Your First Name:

Evaluation of Trader

I was watching this thread over at HotStockMarket, thought I'd make some notes on how accurate this fella Binks was:

Some disclaimers: This is a paper trade, I did not actually make these trades. It is impossible for me to get in and out exactly when he is, therefore, anytime he made a post on the thread, I assume that I bought at the open price on the following day of the post. Obviously, this could lead to some major differences in profit.

8/27/13 - GGS - in at 2.70, At 2.64 on 9/5 = 2% loss
8/28/13 - AStx- in at 6.39 on 8/29, At 8.61 on 9/5 = 34% profit
8/29/13 - NVA - in at 3.22 on 9/3, At 3.23 on 9/5 = 1% profit
8/23/13 - AMRN - in at 6.10, At 7.36 on 9/5 =  20% profit
8/26/13 - MXWL- in at 9.47, At 9.00 on 9/5 = 5% loss
8/26/13 - STSI - in at 2.03, At 1.93 on 9/5 = 4.9% loss
8/26/13 - YRCW in at 17.50, At 17.65 on 9/5 = .8% gain
8/16/13 - AMRN in at 6.01, At 7.37 on 9/5 = 22% profit
8/19/13 - ASTX in at 5.25, At 8.64 on 9/5 = 64% profit
8/13/13 - RAD in at 3.60, At 3.53 on 9/5 = 1% loss
8/14/13 - PCO in at 2.00, At 1.88 on 9/5 = 6% loss
8/14/13 - AMRN in at 5.14, At 7.36 on 9/5 = 32% profit
7/8/13 - AMD in at 4.40, At 3.56 on 9/5 = 20% loss
7/18/13 - HPQ in at 26.33, At 22.52 on 9/5 = 15% loss
7/15/13 - GTAT = 35% profit
7/15/13 - ICA= 10% profit
7/15/13 - AGNC = 3% loss
7/15/13 - MAKO= 22% profit
7/11/13 - ITMN = 14% profit
7/11/13 - ECTE = 1% profit

Conclusion:

• 20 Picks over last 2 months
• Gainers: 11
• Losers: 8
• Profit: 196%

Over all Binks has great picks (although he does not need me to tell him this). His picks tend to have minimal losses with big gainers.

Quote

Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.

Conversations with Jarvis

Some real conversations with Jarvis, an artificial intelligent chat bot I played with a while back.

He is down now, but I hope to bring him back soon.

Visitor 13 (not me)
User: hello javis
Jarvis: Do you have any bacon?
User: no
Jarvis: Are you saying no just to be negative?
User: i have no bacon on me
Jarvis: You don't know much about investing?


Visitor 10 (Me)
User: You make me laugh too
Jarvis: Me?
User: Yes you
Jarvis: A good time to leave me alone.
User: It is a good time to be alone.
Jarvis: Yes you
User: And maybe you
Jarvis: You tell me, is today special?
User: Today is my birthday, I think.
Jarvis: i don know you do i
User: No, but you can come to my birthday party.
Jarvis: NULL
User: NULL is not an answer, its a bug.
Jarvis: I don't think you know me. Do I know you?
User: Nope, do you want to get to know me?
Jarvis: Hey Jarvis. What's up?
User: I'm not Jarvis, you are...
Jarvis: Today is my birthday, I think.
User: How old are you?
Jarvis: Hows it going?

Random Musings on AI

I've been reading more on AI (again). It left me pondering...

Einstein had a great quote: 

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

I agree. Most likely the solution to General Artificial Intelligence is simple and elegant. The current models seem ... complex.

Ray Kurzweil talks about how our intelligence is built from layers of simple mechanics. Each part of the layer works identically, but it gathers info from the prior layer. I like this idea, it sounds "simple". The difficulty is determining what the "rules" are for the smallest element in the layer.

Monica Anderson talks about a non-model based approach. Specifically one in which "intuition" plays the largest role in "getting to" intelligence. She is definitely on to something. Her ideas that the world as we see it is not built on specific models (forumula's) is right on target.

My primary concern with this field is that there is no clear agreed upon definition of when "intelligence" has been reached. Like wise there is no test for intelligence, at least for a digital avatar. We have the Turing Test but that comes up short on a few fronts, in my opinion.

Recall that the goal of General or Strong Artificial Intelligence is to create a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can.

In simple words, it has to be able to learn anything.

So we need simple rules that can enable a system to learn anything.

From this thought my mind jumps through the following sequence of thoughts:

• Humans have many senses, AI would need to have many types of input.
• Wait, an infant, in his mom's belly has very few senses. 
• Rather, he has all senses, but the input coming in is very small.
• AI with multiple inputs should be able to "learn" something" with very few inputs
• As we grow new senses are introduced one at a time. We grow fingers before ears, ears before eyes, and so on.
• Perhaps the method by which the AI can learn, needs to be adaptable to many different types of inputs
• So all inputs regardless of source must resolve to the same "signals"
• I think all the input needs to be in a binary state
• Or all inputs need to be on a sigmoid curve (value between 0 and 1

Can we build rules based on the last three statements? We can and have. This would be the neuron inputs that have been long discussed.

Now I know that I have Sigmoid coming into my input layer...what rules can I build around this?

Another interesting item, at a certain point in our learning, we do not need a lot of exposure to new input to "learn" a new concept. For example, the effort to learn how to add is significantly harder than the effort to learn how to subtract, once we have learned how to add.

Put another way, when placed in a new environment, but the environment is "similar" to something we know, we learn quickly. The more the environment is different the slower we learn.

What this means is that once our AI has learned a specific subject area, learning in that area should be quick. For example, a maze solving AI would solve mazes quickly with few "learning" cycles, but that same AI placed in a Turing test would take "longer" to learn how to interact within that system.