Last weekend, I participated in the BSA Hercules Duathlon organized by RFL.

I did the 10 km running + 20 km cycling thing.

I was the last-but-one guy to finish and I did take twice the amount of time as the first guy to finish.

But I didn’t care about that. I expected to finish in 3 hours and I completed before that. And I finished strongly, not crawling to the end as I used to. I enjoyed the run, I enjoyed the cycling and I was satisfied.

Photos by Vikram:

It reminded me of the book “What I talk about when I talk about running” by Haruki Murakami that I read recently (borrowed from Varun).

I really liked the book, because Murakami puts into words the things I have felt as a runner but is almost impossible to truly explain it to somebody else.

Just to put things into perspective – Murakami started running in 1982 at the age of 30, running everyday since then for nearly 23 years. He has run at least one marathon every year, i.e., 23 marathons till date [when the book was published], and many more long-distance runs.

Some of my favorite passages from the book are below.

About the rhythm:

As long as I can run a certain distance, that’s all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the ponit where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed – and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

About why we run:

Most ordinary runners are motivated by an individual goal, more than anything: namely, a time they want to beat. As long as he can beat that time, a runner will feel he’s accomplished what he set out to do, and if he can’t, then he’ll feel he hasn’t. Even if he doesn’t break the time he’d hoped for, as long as he has the sense of satisfaction at having done his very best – and, possibly, having made some significant discovery about himself in the process – then that in itself is an accomplishment, a positive feeling he can carry over to the next race.

… Marathon runners will understand what I mean. We don’t really care whether we beat any other particular runner. World-class runners, of course, want to outdo their closest rivals, but for your average, everyday runner, individual rivalry isn’t a major issue. I’m sure there are garden-variety runners whose desire to beat a particular rival spurs them on to train harder. But what happens if their rival, for whatever reason, drops out of the competition? Their motivation for running would disappear or at least diminish, and it’d be hard for them to remain runners for long.

For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

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What is it that I like about IMDB?

• Shows me what are the movies that are popular in theatres right now
• Shows what new movies are releasing this week
• The first item on every movie page is the average user rating
• It links to every individual artiste involved (actor, director, etc.) so that if I like to follow a particular actor like Russell Crowe, then I just have to visit his page and I have all the details right there in a compact list.
• Trivia and Quotes from the movie – the amusing/fun aspect.
• The information is not cluttered with random reviews, that is on a separate page if you are so inclined.

But IMDB is for movies only.

What about an IMDB for music?

Yes, there is last.fm but it concentrates on the actual playing of the existing music content that they have (which it is very good at), but not about the people who make the music or their discographies. For example, I don’t think they list albums/songs that are upcoming or are not part of their playlists.

What about an IMDB for books?

Yes, there is Amazon and there is WeRead.com but I notice the same problems as last.fm.

What I’m looking for is something like the burrp of music and books: showcasing (1) the latest, (2) the best and (3) the right kind of information, nothing else.

Also, are there similar sites for India? For example, I’d love to see the list of the top rated movie soundtracks in 2009 by “Shankar, Ehsaan & Loy” or the top songs ever by Pentagram (I just love “Bad Man”), and so on. Are there such lists and information already out there?

I think IMDB-equivalents for music and for books can be successful online businesses and communities.

Update : “Good Reads” seems to be a good option for books.

Update 2 : Looks like “MovieDB.in” wants to be the IMDB of Indian movies.

Note: This blog post is part of the “Ideas are Cheap. Execution is Everything.” series where I pen down thoughts on what I see is a need in the market or what could be a successful idea/business.

I just finished reading “Idli, Orchid and Will Power”, the autobiography of Vithal Venkatesh Kamat.

Just a few days back, a friend was telling me that the famous Utility building Kamat restaurant in Bangalore no longer has quality food and hence no longer a popular place. I read this book and it gave the background to this situation – it is no longer being run by the Kamats for whom hospitality is everything, it is now being run by the Kamat that usurped the properties. At least, that’s what the book says.

But that’s not what the book is about. The book is about the entrepreneur’s journey. What I liked about the book was that it was written in plain and simple English, and Vithal writes about his life and the hard work he put in, the mistakes made and the lessons learned from it. It sounds familiar like any other entrepreneur’s autobiography, but what made it special for me was that this was an Indian and almost everyone has heard about the famous Kamat restaurants! It was good to read the story of the restaurants and the people who make the place what it is.

During the story, some good traits of entrepreneurs were demonstrated:

• Having knowledge, great ideas and executing them. For example, when Vithal was a kid, his uncle’s son was getting married and in that event, the soft drinks were not cooled and there was just 15-20 min before the guests started arriving. Young Vithal then used his knowledge of how kulfis are made, took fistfuls of salt and threw it on the ice which made it drastically go down in temperature and hence all the soft drinks were chilled in 15 min. The same goes for many of his tactics such as putting free buses to and fro the airport to his hotel, the Kamat Plaza, to make waiting less stressful for travellers and that became an instant hit. He said that brought in more customers than any amount of advertising could have done. Eventually, the airways people would suggest travellers to rest at Kamat so as to make them less annoyed about delayed flights, etc. A win-win-win situation indeed.
• Doing a lot of networking. Vithal proves time and again how his networking and at the same time being known for their hospitality and credibility helped him in many a situation.
• The importance of preparation. This is everything in the hotel business, he says. For example, that’s how you get your food so quickly when you order (instead of the hours that it would take if you cooked at home yourself).
• Having a great dream, a great passion. Vithal has lost a lot while trying to make his dream ‘The Orchid’ come true, especially after all the property was usurped by his younger brother, and he had taken many high-interest loans so that he could build his dream hotel while his father was alive (who was dying of cancer). And yet, all the goodwill that he had generated and his will power slowly helped him eke out of the pit and the dream came true. This part of the story was heart-wrenching and inspiring at the same time. These are the kinds of stories that we see in movies but this is a real true story.

The only downside to the book is that you have to read the parts about the perfect character/attitude with a pinch of salt, because it sounds preachy at times and frankly, sounds too good to be true.

If you ever wanted to know what entrepreneurship is about, don’t read MBA sites, just read this book, if you can find it*. And then decide whether you are prepared for it. At the same time, you’ll finish the book feeling inspired.

^* It is such a tragedy that this book is not available in any online Indian book store that I know of.

I read Outliers, The STORY of SUCCESS by Malcolm Gladwell last week and found it fascinating.

Here’s an excerpt:

Cultural legacies matter, and once we’ve seen the surprising effects of such things as power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter as opposed to a third of a second, it’s hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our twenty-first-century intellectual tasks.

What redeemed the life of a rice farmer, however, was the nature of the work. It was a lot like the garment work done by the Jewish immigrants to New York. It was meaningful.

First of all, there is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward. The harder you work a rice field, the more it yields.

Second, it’s complex work. The rice farmer isn’t simply planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. He or she effectively runs a small business, juggling a family workforce, hedging uncertainty through seed selection, building and managing a sophisticated irrigation system, and coordinating the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while simultaneously preparing the second crop.

And, most of all, it’s autonomous. The peasants of Europe worked essentially as low-paid slaves of an aristocratic landlord, with little control over their own destinies. But China and Japan never developed that kind of oppressive feudal system, because feudalism simply can’t work in a rice economy. Growing rice is too complicated and intricate for a system that requires farmers to be coerced and bullied into going out into the fields each morning. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, landlords in central and Southern China had an almost completely hands-off relationship with their tenants: they would collect a fixed rent and let farmers go about their business.

Here’s a second excerpt:

Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world called TIMMS. The point is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another’s.

When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friendss are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.

Now, here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.

Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe’s point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math question. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they are willing to work. In fact, we wouldn’t even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.

So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn’t surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. They are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

See how the two excerpts are related? This explains how your cultural legacies matter (and don’t worry, maths is not the criterion for success, this is just one example in the book). Another example is how cultural legacies are related to plane crashes of the respective national airlines.

There’s a lot more in the book like the Matthew Effect, the 10,000-Hour Rule, why “practical intelligence” matters, why “concerted cultivation” matters, about the KIPP schools, and so on.

The book is a must-read IMHO, just for the thought-provocativeness, even if not how to learn to be “successful.”

Many people have asked me on why I released my Vim book under a Creative Commons license instead of getting it published.

(1) First of all, I did try to talk to publishers, hoping that I would convince them to release the book simultaneously under a free license as well as a printed version (which is true for many technical books these days). All the publishers I spoke to said there is no market for such a book and said no to the idea. But that didn’t deter me, because I really wanted to see such a book out there, so I wrote it anyway.

(2) Technical books readership is on the decline. It seems very few techies buy and read books, they just google it and solve their immediate problems vs. reading a whole book.

If you don’t believe me, see what John Resig, Charles Petzold, Jeff Atwood and Eric Sink have to say on the subject.

(3) I had a concern bigger than not getting it published, it was that nobody would get to know about the book and hence the book would go in vain. Since money was not a motivating factor in this particular case, I was far more interested in seeing lots of readers and widespread usage than to see fewer readers with the published book although the latter would make me more money.

Tim O’Reilly’s words remained stuck in my mind:

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”

Of course, I did have a printed books option, so I still could have made money just like 37 Signals did with their “Getting Real” book which was free to read online plus available as a paid PDF download. Unfortunately, it seems I lack their marketing pizzazz.

(4) The book was intended to be a contribution back to the open source community. We constantly keep taking and taking – whether it is using Linux, Vim, Firefox, or countless other software, so it felt great to be useful to the community in return.

As Steve Jobs said:

You know, we don’t grow most of the food we eat. We wear clothes other people make. We speak a language that other people developed. We use a mathematics that other people evolved… I mean, we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.

(5) My experience has been that a lot of people would like to translate such books to their native languages to help more people use the software. So, I’m happy to see volunteers now translating the new Vim book to Chinese, Russian and Swedish languages!

I needed a balanced approach to what I was trying to achieve, and all the above reasons led me to use a Creative Commons license.

I just finished reading “Subject To Change: creating great products and services for an uncertain world”. This book is written by Adaptive Path, the same guys who invented the words “blog” and “ajax”, as well as creators of the Aurora browser concept.

It has been a revelatory book for me, a developer who considers himself to be the last person to know about “design.” The book mainly focuses on the lessons learned from their experiences in working with clients to design and create products and services.

Design

They define design as an activity, as opposed to a look and feel that is added later on. The activity incorporates:

• Empathy – Design must serve a human purpose, and so design requires an understanding of how people will interact with whatever you’re designing.
• Problem Solving – Design really shines when it’s used to address complex problems where the outcome is clear, many stakeholders are involved, and the boundaries are fuzzy.
• Ideation and prototyping – Design produces things, whether they’re abstract (schematics, blueprints, wireframes, conceptual models) or concrete (prototypes, physical models). Design is a creative activity and thus requires actually creating something.
• Finding alternatives – Design is less about the analysis of existing options than the creation of new options. Sometimes that means looking at existing options in new ways, and at other times that means creating from scratch. An effective design process typically offers many solutions to a problem.

They repeatedly explain that the experience is what matters to the end-user and that’s the real product rather than how it is delivered.

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Ever since college days where I got hooked onto the Internet, I have been an avid reader of self-improvement websites and books. I used to prowl for content, before the advent of lifehacking and productivity websites. I eventually stumbled upon good websites like 43Folders.com, and my friend Pradeep cajoled me to read Steve Pavlina’s blog.

I was so glad he did. I ended up spending hours reading Pavlina’s articles. Reflecting upon the ideas in these articles was very beneficial. When I read that Steve was releasing a new book, I jumped at the chance to get it.

The book was different from most self-improvement books because it didn’t focus on productivity or time management. Steve claimed that he has discovered the essential principles of life!

According to Steve, there are just three core principles – truth, love and power. The secondary principles are:

• Oneness = Truth + Love
• Authority = Truth + Power
• Courage = Love + Power
• Intelligence = Truth + Love + Power

I found it incredulous to see someone make such a claim. So I started reading the book with a sense of disbelief.

While I started reading the book, I didn’t appreciate its brevity but the upside was that I got through the book more quickly. The basic concepts were things I understood but concepts like ‘oneness’ was something I couldn’t fathom.

Eventually, a friend called me up and was describing a personal problem, I started to test whether Pavlina’s principles were applicable, and voila, I was amazed to pinpoint to something which I was convinced was the root cause. It was at that moment that I started thinking that Steve might be on to something.

I had a hard time reading through the book, not because it was bad but because for every other page I would stop and reflect upon the concept being described and I would do some journaling to help me clarify my thoughts. In the process, I realized I was applying the ‘Truth’ principle and finally accepting some things that I “delayed thinking about” (read as “avoid”).

Eventually, I started reflecting upon the past ups and downs of life and see if the good things were as a result of cohesion of the three core principles. Well, it did. And at the same time, I could place a lot of my faults into the categories under “Blocks to Love” and “Blocks to Power” sections.

Strangely, I felt like I was reading one of those Linda Goodman books which claim to know every detail of the character of a person just based on the date on which they were born. The logical portion of my brain simply refuses to accept something like that is possible. Similarly, I have a hard time believing that someone can boil down the psychology and well-being of humans to such a simple list of things.

Nevertheless, the true impact of a self-improvement book is only felt months later, so I’m still in the process of applying some of the concepts and thinking to my daily habits. I find myself aligned with the principle of truth, but not with the principles of love and power. I hope some of the 30-day trials (as described in the book) in applying these concepts will pay off.

All in all, I would highly recommend Steve Pavlina’s book “Personal Development for Smart People”. It will make you think and hopefully make you grow as well.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers to read a physical book vs. online books, then you’ll be happy to know that the A Byte of Python book is now available as a printed hard copy.

The best part is that the hard-working translators can also publish their translations and sell the printed copies, benefiting both the readers and the translators.

I had received many requests from readers for hard copies of the book and I’m glad to finally get this working. Interestingly, I was previously trying to get the book printed via CreateSpace because the book would automatically get listed on Amazon.com (since CreateSpace is owned by Amazon). However, their process was not streamlined and confusing. Worse, I couldn’t get the PDF in their required size formats because of a bug with mwlib.rl.

I got tired and decided to try Lulu and I was very surprised. They are miles ahead in terms of usability of their service as well as wide range of options and sensible defaults. For example, it was a pain waiting for manual approval of the book by the CreateSpace staff and it is an unnecessary delay every time I upload a new version. On the other hand, Lulu made it very easy to design a rudimentary cover using their process. Overall, I was able to make the printed copy available for purchase in a single evening.

Of course, all this is possible because of the ability to generate PDFs from a wiki, thanks to the nice people at PediaPress.

Update: For Indian readers, the book is now available via pothi.com.

After a gap of 3.5 years, I’ve finally updated the ‘A Byte of Python’ book.

The interesting news is that it is updated for the upcoming Python 3.0 language making it probably the first book to be released for Python 3.0.

The book is now a wiki too at www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python which means you can contribute too!

The book and wiki are now under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. The Non-Commercial clause present in the previous edition of the book has been removed. It was becoming a hurdle for translators as well as people who wanted to use the book for genuinely good activities, so I decided it to drop the clause.

Since it is a wiki, volunteers can directly create their translations on the wiki. This eliminates the need to learn DocBook XML and its tools which had become a hindrance for many translators, and I’m glad to see this already bearing fruit with Eirik Vågeskar starting off a Norwegian translation at www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python_nb-no:Forord.

I will soon be making a printed version of the book available as I have had many requests for this.

So back to the main question: Why an update after nearly 4 years? Two reasons.

First, because of foss.in. I dedicate this new release to the foss.in community for their spirit and enthusiasm over the years which have rubbed off on me and kept me working on the update of the book.

Second, Over the past few years, the readers’ reactions have been simply splendid:

Neil (bigdealneil-at-yahoo-dot-com) said:

“(I) got an if else to work and I can follow your tutorial, which I have never been able to do no matter who wrote the thing! you’re a genius Swaroop!”

Gao shuai (ejwjvh-at-126-dot-com) took the effort taken to write an email to me in English:

dear swaroop: I am a chinese student.My name is gao shuai,”gao”is my family name. Although your book is easy to understand,but my english is bad,so what I read is the chinese edition. I have made some programs now.It is interesting.I like it very much.

I emailed back and he replied:

Mr Swaroop: I am exciting to read your back. _(Editor’s note: I think he means ‘reply’)_ Tt is the first time that I talk to foreigner though the internet. I saw that you have your own mail ab.I think You’re a great man. Thanks for your back!(*^_^*) regards, gaoshuai

The interesting part is that this student somewhere in China was being benefited by this book and he “talked to a foreigner through the internet for the first time” and that person was me. It was truly humbling.

People are even putting ads for it, and I had no clue about it until I chanced upon it myself:

If that wasn’t enough, I found out that there are 8-9 university courses officially using the book, including Harvard and other institutions. And apparently even NASA is using the book in their Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Users have suggested that it should replace the official tutorial but I really wouldn’t go as far as that

Recently, I had sent a sneak peek for the book’s group of readers and within a day, I had the first 10$ donation by Horst JENS. I remembered seeing that name somewhere, so I searched my emails and found this:

On Mar 4, 2007:

“Hello Swaroop, i teach a class of (3) Children how to program in Python. Just want to thank you because without your ‘a byte of python’ (that i read one year ago) i would maybe never have begun to code in python and consequently would never leaved my old job to become a Python teacher.”

A person in Vienna, Austria changed his career from a sys-admin job which he didn’t like, to teaching children about programming, a job he loves. Wow! Again, this is so humbling. I could have never imagined that a small book can make such a difference.

The point is that I’m grateful for all these people writing to me and sharing their delight and stories. The book is still alive and kicking thanks to all these people.

Happy programming!

Today, I re-read a book called Super Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted by Ian Ayres.

So what is supercrunching?

Now something is changing. Business and government professionals are relying more and more on databases to guide their decisions. The story of hedge funds is really the story of a new breed of number crunchers – call them Super Crunchers – who have analyzed large datasets to discover empirical correlations between seemingly unrelated things. Want to hedge a large purchase of euros? Turns out you should sell a carefully balanced portfolio of twenty-six other stocks and commodities that might include Wal-Mart stock.

What is Super Crunching? It is statistical analysis that impacts real-world decisions. Super Crunching predictions usually bring together some combination of size, speed and scale. The sizes of datasets are really big – both in the number of observations and in the number of variables. The speed of the analysis is increasing. We often witness the real-time crunching of numbers as the data come hot off the press. And the scale of the impact is sometimes truly huge. This isn’t a bunch of egghead academics cranking out provocative journal articles. Super Crunching is done by or for decision makers who are looking for a better way to do things.

This is best explained by the chess example:

We tend to think that the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov lost to the Deep Blue computer because of IBM’s smarter software. That software is really a gigantic database that ranks the power of different positions. The speed of the computer is important, but in large part it was the computer’s ability to access a database of 700,000 grandmaster chess games that was decisive. Kasparov’s intuitions lost out to data-based decision making.

(emphasis mine)

The book starts off with the example of Orley Ashenfelter, a Princeton economics professor as well as founder and editor of the Journal of Wine Economics who wanted to apply supercrunching techniques to predict whether a wine from a particular year would be a good wine or not. He ended up with the following equation:

Wine quality = 12.145 + 0.00117 winter rainfall + 0.0614 average growing season temperature – 0.00386 harvest rainfall

You can imagine the commotion that followed. The wine experts brushed off this theory and that numbers can predict the wine quality better than they can. After all, “Just as it’s more accurate to see the movie, shouldn’t it be more accurate to actually taste the wine?”

And yet, the equation did indeed make better predictions, especially with the prediction that 1989 and 1990 wines would be bestsellers.

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