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.

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.

(more…)

It was Day 2 of my trip (Dec 23 Sun). My plan was to go in the DHL balloon so that I can get a good view of Singapore. When I reached the MRT station, I suddenly got interested in randomly walking around. I really wanted to see the place.

After more than an hour of walking around in the hot sun, I came across a really huge building. I got curious and tried to figure out the name - it was the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library. It’s a library?! I just had to get in there, for the AC as well as to explore the books collection. I thought it was a good idea since it would be relaxing. After all, the point of a vacation is to do things you wouldn’t do in daily life, as well as to have a relaxing or invigorating fun time. At least, that’s my definition of a vacation.

I went in, saw many rows of shelves. I clearly avoided the row which had some books with some strange titles like “Java & XML”, I wonder what that’s all about. I picked up a few books from the other rows and went and sat down at the benches. Lots of people were studying, with music on, writing down notes in their laptops and utilizing the free wifi.

I started reading a book titled something like “The Practice of Philosophy - A Handbook for Beginners”. Unfortunately, within ten minutes, I was sleepy. Either it was the exhaustion and lack of sleep the previous night, or it was the subject. I went and sat on the couches and started to doze off. I was encouraged by the fact that there was some other Indian dude also sleeping.

After a while, I realized I was snoring, and there were other new people around trying to read, so I went and washed my face. Then, I went down to Level 1 to give a phone call to Abishek Nair (my gracious host for the trip). He was laughing that I came all the way to Singapore to sit in a library and read some books! He told me to come over to his company VHQ Post (an advertising post-production i.e. visual effects company) in an hour so that he can show me around.

After that, I stood near the wide glass and I look left and see the DHL balloon right there! It was funny since I wasn’t actively looking for it.

I went back inside the library, the books were still there. This time I started reading a book more closer to my tastes - “The Runner’s Handbook” by Bob Glover, and I went prepared with my iPod. Music always gets me going. I started playing “Sutrum Vizhi” and started reading. I started with the nutrition/fuel section because that’s where most of my problems are. Then started taking down some notes:

• Hitting “the wall” refers to that point when you run short of glycogen. This is an experience that every runner should try
  • once. After you’re survived it, you will respect the need to prepare better for your next marathon.
• Learn the values of long training runs, tapering, eating plenty of carbos, and not starting too fast. Ignoring these factors all contribute to hitting “the wall.”
• Most often associated with marathons. After an hour and a half or so of running, you begin to run low on glycogen. For most runners that will be 10-13 miles into a run. The average well-trained runner may store enough glycogen to last 15-20 miles, depending upon such as factors as pace, body weight, fitness level, and how well they loaded up on carbs going into the race.
• When you run low on glycogen, your body attempts to conserve what remains by burning more fat for energy. But since fat is 15% less efficient than carbs as an energy source, you are unable to hold your pace and have to slow dramatically (even though fat releases 9 cal/gm compared to 4 cal/gm for carbs and protein)
• Long training runs develop mechanisms for your body to utilize fat more efficiently throughout your race, thus “sparing” some glycogen for use later. Workouts at marathon pace and faster will also train your muscles to utilize carbs more efficiently at these paces. In addition, starting your race at a conservative pace will help conserve glycogen for later in the run. Tapering for a marathon combined with carb-loading is the key to surviving “the wall.”
• Back-of-the-pack runners benefit most from carb-loading.
  • Dr. Costill notes: The difference between elite and average marathoners is that even if both started out with the same amount of glycogen, the elite marathoner would spare it by burning a higher ratio of fat. Although more oxygen is required to burn fat, the highly developed oxygen transport system of the elite runner allows this. Furthermore, he moves more economically, which means that he uses less oxygen to accomplish the same task. The average runner, on the other hand, depletes his glycogen supply sooner and doesn’t have as efficient an oxygen transport system to burn fat. That’s why hitting the wall is so devastating and why carbohydrate loading is more important for the average runner than for the elite runner.
• For shorter runs (< 90 min), glycogen stores don’t get depleted much and hence carb intake isn’t as critical.

The best part is that I realized that this problem is not unique to me! It’s a documented scientific problem experienced by enough runners to have a section dedicated to it in a runners’ book. Now I know what the problem is! Next, I need to actually figure out how to train to tackle this which the book didn’t explain satisfactorily.

I had lost track of time because of the awesome reader-friendly environment and suddenly realized I was late. I then headed out to meet Abishek. I got to see all the whizbang gizmos they use to create all the special effects that you may or may not notice in the advertisements you see. These guys have amazing talent and patience to do the things they do. But that’s a story for another day.

I recently read the “It Happened in India” book. It is the story of Kishore Biyani, the man who created Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Bangalore/Hyderabad Central, EZone, and much much more - effectively, the one person who made retailing a roaring success in India and who had envisioned it much before anyone else dared to even think about it.

I had first known about the book when glancing over Ashish’s book review, and so when I happened to see it in a book store, I had to buy it. I was most surprised to see the price of just Rs.99. Later, I realized that this was true to the philosophies behind all the businesses that Kishore Biyani has built till now - “value for money”.

I have to admit that I found the first half of the book to be boring. I mean listening to ten different people eulogizing Kishore Biyani can get really tedious.

The second half gets really interesting - about how KB (that’s Kishore Biyani for the rest of us) takes pride in doing things in an India-centric manner and creating strategies that are derived from the Indian mindset, the poignant motto “Rewrite Rules. Retain Values.”, about how they use the concept of “memetics” to design what kind of products to stock in their stores, the various retail formats they created after analyzing the traditional bazaars, about the various people involved and the viewpoints they brought in, and so on. I found it fascinating that people actually think to such deep levels, and all this to try to understand what the customer wants, many times even before the customer themselves know it.

One of the most amusing sentences was his Time Pass Theory:

I interpret life very differently and I have this belief that we all come to this world to kill time. Therefore, we pick up some activity that we like doing and call it our profession. I call this the Time Pass theory.

One of my favorite passages in the book was from the last chapter of the book:

The last century marked the transition from the industrial economy to the ‘knowledge economy.’ However, within a few decades of the knowledge economy, we are again witnessing a major shift.

Knowledge as we know it is being commoditised. What was once central to organisations - systems, processes and much of the left-brain, digitised analytical work associated with knowledge - is being outsourced. The most successful organisations in this new era are the ones that harness ideas, creativity and innovation to generate top-line growth.

…

The central objective for earlier businesses was to bring in stability and consolidation. They were built to enforce order. However, in the new era where nothing remains constant, the dominant theme for businesses need to be speed and imagination. Going forward, companies will be lucky if they can write a five year plan for their business.

…

For organisations to survive and succeed in the Creative Economy, innovation has to take centre stage. Soon, the nature of innovation will also change and organisations will have to keep up with that. Macro-innovation, like a new technology, a new product or a new business model will continue to be important. But what will become far more important and decisive is micro-innovation - the ideas and imagination driving day-to-day innovations based on how well a company pre-empts its customers’ changing needs and consumption patterns.

…

The new macro-differentiator can be design. Design is helping companies to sell differentiated experiences and solutions that connect with the consumer’s emotions. It’s no longer about selling products and services alone. Nor is it just about completing transactions. Every time a customer walks in, it is an opportunity to build a relationship and invite the customer to become a part of the transformational scenario. Design management is helping us position the customer at the centre of every decision we take and also operate with true entrepreneurial spirit.

…

It is proven fact that diversity leads to creativity. From popular culture to sport, diversity has helped teams perform better. In corporations too, diversity has to be brought in. That is why we have begun to develop cross-functional teams. Having swarms of male management graduates, engineers and accountants isn’t good enough. We need more anthropologists, ethnographers, social scientists and most importantly, more women to be part of every team within the organisation.

…

It cannot be a zero-sum game anymore. We need to create win-win-win scenarios - where we can win, our business partners can win and the customer can win.

Another interesting passage that I liked was where he describes himself as the creator and destroyer (and re-creator) of all that he builds - he doesn’t believe in preserving because that’s when the company starts stagnating. So, every few years, KB changes their entire organization structure to adapt to the current and future environments, and that’s why they now have a new name “Future Group”:

“Future� – the word which signifies optimism, growth, achievement, strength, beauty, rewards and perfection. Future encourages us to explore areas yet unexplored, write rules yet unwritten; create new opportunities and new successes. To strive for a glorious future brings to us our strength, our ability to learn, unlearn and re-learn, our ability to evolve.

We, in Future Group, will not wait for the Future to unfold itself but create future scenarios in the consumer space and facilitate consumption because consumption is development. Thereby, we will effect socio-economic development for our customers, employees, shareholders, associates and partners.

It all happened (and is happening) in India

I read the iCon book recently and have been wondering what makes people (like me) so fascinated about Steve Jobs?

• He didn’t create any great technology or product, it was people who worked with him who did all that, for example, Steve Wozniak and John Lasseter.
• He was a leader, a manager, that was his role. He’s an inspiring leader, is that why he’s admired?
• Or is it because he’s ruthless in executing his visions and ideas?
• Or is it because he gives such enrapturing keynote speeches that they are now called “Stevenotes”?

I guess it just goes to show that he’s a man of many contradictions.

The best example that I’ve come across of how he can inspire people is his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 (the official video is available for download using iTunes). This speech was so powerful that I know of one friend who quit his job after hearing that speech and decided to go chase his dreams. That was a huge risk but guess what, he’s doing much better than before now.

The book has some interesting accounts of how Steve came to India in search of “truth”, wore a lungi, went travelling in cities and deserts, and even meeting a baba in the Himalayas (which itself is quite a story). Another story was how he hung out with his New Age buddies at an apple farm in Oregon, which is eventually how the company was named Apple. Then there are the accounts of how Steve demanded absolute loyalty from his friends to accounts of his taste in the kind of ads that Apple made and so on. It was a good read.

The bottom line is that he led Apple and Pixar and collectively changed three major industries for the better - the computer industry, the animated movies industry and the music industry. And he has battled cancer and survived. All this in a single lifetime. And he’s only fifty. That’s why I admire him so much.

I managed to catch the last day of the Bangalore Book Festival 2006 - I was surprised to see the number of people thronging the fair! It was truly a family affair - and we bought nearly a dozen books ranging from spiritual to tech to comics to Sherlock Holmes :). I’m glad we visited the fair in the afternoon because, judging by the size of the audience, this place would have been suffocating in the peak evening time.

It was nice to see that the habit of reading real books hasn’t been lost and hasn’t been overtaken by the ubiquitous internet. And it was good to see a wide range of books (from a never-ending list of book vendors) other than the usual copies of Paulo Coelho and Mein Kampf. The disappointing thing was that most of the vendors were generic - everyone catered to everyone’s needs, and in turn, there were no books for specialized audiences - whatever happened to art books, or medical books, or travel books?

Relatedly, I just finished reading Digital Fortress by Dan Brown, it was fun to read. Any recommendations on novels in the same genre?

Bangalore is such a happening place that there are more things coming up:

• foss.in/2006 is just around the corner on Nov 24-26! Register now.

• Bengaluru Habba is happening on December 3-10 - It’s a pity that the official site is still under construction (and the dates on this logo seems to be “outdated”). The official website is BengalooruHabba.com (Thanks to Karthik for pointing it out).

• More events listed at eventsbangalore.net:

A while ago, I was trying to explain internet business models to a couple of friends of mine, who are part of the brick-and-mortar business world.

Some of the points I tried conveying are:

• What makes internet business models work is economy of scale - the more customers you have, the more economical and the more profitable your model is.

• Internet users expect things for free (search, mail, etc.), so advertising-based model usually works (via Adsense or sponsored search)

• Subscription-based services are also common and popular (such as Flickr and 37signals’ products)

• Due to the internet’s inherent nature, the barrier to create a global business is less.

• It’s very easy to lose a customer to a competing portal. So, user engagement is important.

• The brand is important. Mindshare, marketshare, and all that stuff.

• Innovate or die?

Today, I came across this list of business models by Professor Michael Rappa that covers pretty much everything that is on the internet.

I’m looking for more articles on the subject that make it more clearer and easier for me to explain these things.

Update: I was wondering if the Amazon.com model of ‘Get Big Fast’ still works today. I think there are some hints of that in bloglines and del.icio.us which have an amazing number of users but do not have a business model (at least that is known to public) yet.

Ashok Banker has started a new novel called The Vortal that’ll be released online in episodes format. The blurbs remind me of Jumanji, but knowing Banker’s writing style, he will have some fast-paced stories ready.

There are already 4 parts posted.