向刘润老师学习

那些不能把你击倒的，终将使你变得更加坚强

不要高估自己的实力，不要低估自己的潜力

一个人之所以成功
不是因为他改正了所有的缺点
而是最大程度地发挥了自己的优点

在生活中
一些东西可以去学
另一些东西需要去悟
还有一些东西，则是需要去闯
哪怕一开始撞得头破血流……

Reference:
面对变化的思考
榨干你所能学习的一切东西
时间管理三招
“自己2.0”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the ∑- GALAXY

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the ∑- GALAXY

Part I – Introduction

"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back."
- Chinese proverb

In the beginning, there was NEO. And for a while, it was good. Then someone said, “Let there be some guides besides that!”. And here it is ......


PART II – Work [Mainly for Coding Guys, NOT for Papering Guys]

First of All, Remember Where this Space is Located:
1. It’s located at 39°58'32.60"N, 116°19'52.35"E and just looks like this and also this
2. Don’t forget to come to this fantastic place every morning, when you wake up with a feeling of exciting for difference technology will make for people's life.

Then you can ……

Get to Know $, ∑ and Your Team:
1. $ Internal Portal. http://$w
2. ∑ Internal Portal. http://∑
3. Your Team Internal Portal. Depends on your group, X’s portal is located at http://teamsomewhere/sites/X/default.aspx .

Get Hardware/Software Access
1. $ Beijing File Server. \\/\|-=-
2. ∑ File Server. \\∑
3. ∑ IT support.
a. Alias: ∑IT
b. Phone: 38**
4. All software on these severs are free and have register key embedded, no need to crack, no need to search a valid CD Key from Baidu ,Google or Live.

Get Familiar with ∑ Development Environment:
Option One: Using internal tools
1. Source Control: ** - http://**/Pages/default.aspx
2. Build Tool: ++XT - http://++xt
3. Editor: Visual Studio [VI/EMACS is also permitted as far as this guide’s author know]

Option Two: Using Visual Studio Team System
1. Source Control: Team Foundation Server
2. Build: MSBuild
3. IDE: Visual Studio
4. Go to MSDN for these tools’ documentation.

Script Language
1. With Power Shell, you can throw away batch file and command window now.
2. Internal Portal: http://@@/Pages/default.aspx

Do Some Performance Profiling
1. Visual Studio Integrated Tool:
a. Access Path in VS 2005: VS->Tool->Performance Tools;
b. VS Performance Team Site: http://team/sites/!#$/^&*/default.aspx
2. Office Profiler:
a. http://!@#$%^&*

Or You can Make Code Analysis
1. FxCop for Managed code
2. PREfast for native code
3. VS Code Analysis Team Site: http://*&^%$#@!/Home.aspx

Then Have a Look at Our ∑ Internal Tools:
1. ∑ Jump Start
a. To Share Your Knowledge With Colleagues, please go to ∑ Jump Start: http://$wikis/∑jumpstart/Wiki%20Pages/Home.aspx
2. MOT
a. Want to resolve more algorithm/data structure problems than what you had done in your interview? Please go to ∑ Online Training site: http://...
3. Springfield
a. When you feel you are short of labor force, please go to Springfield to hire intern: http://,,,
4. XXX Brown Bag
a. XXX Brown Bag is a regular meeting for group members to share the latest technical information and new technology
b. You can find the historical documents and slides HERE.


PART III – Life [Drinking , Eating && Playing]
We have dining room in B1, which is not free, but most likely, you will never pay for it using cash.

We have cookies, little bread and popular instant noodles in our front desk.
We have Coca Cola, Pepsi and other similar drinks in the refrigerator of our tea room. [Yes, totally free]
We have a fruit time at 3:00 PM, every work day, which is happed in tea room.
So, we also have food within one hundred paces, although we have no super Chef, nor luxurious “乌鸡甲鱼汤”.

You eat, you drink, and so you need to do another stuff. Fortunately, there are Water Closets in every floor, which will meet this kind of requirement. Use your nose to locate them - corporation service team put so much perfume in those rooms, you can smell it beyond 100 paces.

If you need to entertain yourself, we have table tennis, foosball, billiards and cool Xbox 360 games in 4th and 5th floor’s lunge room.

If you want to do some “add water” stuff, we have a most powerful web2.0 application called Tango. Please go there to find those interesting undocumented features. The more time you spend on investigating it, the happier you will be. As to the unexpected behavior or so called bug, be patient about it. Tango dev team will deploy the latest version weekly, most likely it will get fixed in next deployment.

PART IV – Conclusion

We know you come here to follow your heart, it’s really great and welcome! You will make big progress as time goes by, because there are so many stuff you need to learn and get familiar with.

Your FTE career in ∑ will start in a cool training. Your training instructors are very experienced and nice, you can learn a lot from them. But as to the training projects, I can only say, “MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU!”.


Welcome to ∑, welcome to the HOTTEST lab on this planet! (You will know how hot it is this winter, especially for those sitting in XXX corner)


Best Regards
-It's Me

读书笔记 - The Tipping Point, Part III

The last thing Gladwell mentioned is about the Environment. He named the affect of environment as "the Power of Context (环境力量法则)" and pointed out that "Human behavior is strongly influenced by external variables of context". To make it more clear, he summarized it as the following rules/theories:

Broken Window Theory[3]
“If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken.”

So, if you deployed a web site externally, be careful about the features you promised. If there is any feature that didn't keep your promise, people will doubt on other features and they may think your whole system is not so stable and it may also doesn't have product level quality. This will harm your success.

Bystander Effect
It says that "a psychological phenomenon in which someone is less likely to intervene in an emergency situation when others are present than when he or she is alone."

There was a crime in New york 1964. A women was killed under the sight of her 38 neighbors, it lasted for about half an hour, but no one called the policeman. The public blame those witness be be cold blooded. But some psychological research results show that, it's just an normal human reaction when they know other people may also see it. Every body think some other people will call the police, so no one called by their own. It's just humanity, nothing related to these people's morale level, those researcher said.

I think this give us a good hint that, when you are managing a team to accomplish some tasks, you'd better assign your task explicitly and clearly to individual members. This will reduce the bystander effect.

Rule of 150[4]
Another thing Gladwell mentioned is that, according to some scientific research result: "Human Beings can only have stable social relationships with about 150 people, due to some biological limitation in our brain."

Thus, any group larger than this will automatically segment into factions and decrease efficiency. The existence of small groups helps the spread of a message because each member of the group knows each other very well.

So if you want something to get popular through a social network, you should turn this kind of social network/organization structure

in to this


This will undoubtedly improve the efficiency of your organization.

In a word, I think Gladwell did a great job on explaining those social epidemics, although whether these conclusions can really help us to make things get popular is not proved in this book.

Anyway, the author of the book gave us some very good suggestions we can take a look and have a try, maybe it will help our success.

Reference:
[3]”Broken Window”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows
[4] “Rule of 150”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

读书笔记 - The Tipping Point, Part II

As to the stuff itself, Gladwell summarized it as - the Stickiness Factor(附着力法则): "The quality that compels people to pay close, sustained attention to a product, concept, or idea."

To get user stuck, Gladwell suggested the followings:
1.Simple and Intuitive UI. Don't make the user think, no more effort is needed to use it.
2.Make it Practical and Personal: user can complete the operations easily, and let user feel the view is specific to him/her.
3.Interactive with User: Let user feel involved, let user feel being part of the whole system.

Let's use the Internet industry as study case. In web design community, there is a popular book named "Don't Make Me Think". The main idea is the same as Gladwell pointed: simple and intuitive user interface, then there will be little cost for the user to try the features you provide.

Personalized view is another core value of modern web applications. In past time, there were many portal web sites, like yahoo, cnn, msn etc. When people visit these sites, every one get the same thing, nothing different. But people are different, they have various interests and personal preferences, they wish to own their personalized view of these information. As web information keep on exploding, the need for customization keep on rising. Many pioneer content provider now exploit these results, they provide personalized view of their content. For example, Yahoo provide myYahoo, and CNN provide rss feed that user can subscribe, both enable the personalized view of the whole content.

As to the "Interactive with user" principle, I think this is the most important character that makes web 2.0 differ from conventional web 1.0. In web 1.0 age, the web site owner is the creator of all the content, they determine what the site looks like, what user will get. While in web 2.0 ages, the user of the web site created the content, they have control on the finally view of the whole system. For example, in Digg, Slashdot, there is no such positions as editor, every user is author and editor. You can submit news to the site, you can rank/comment it, which will affect the finally popularity of this news.

Another observation is from modern search engines. Nowadays, both Google and Yahoo provide login/personalized search. These search engines will record your search history and will use these information to customize/tune your search result, which will form a good feedback loop to improve the search quality. This feature exploits both "Personalized view" and "Interactive with user", although there were some privacy risks.

When you interactive with the web application, when you submit content and when you got personalized view of the content, you feel like becoming part of the whole system. You will never think of leaving out of it, because you lose too much if you do so.

Thus, the web site get you stuck to it successfully, which forms another important factor of making something get popular as Gladwell pointed out in this book.
[To be continue]

读书笔记 - The Tipping Point, Part I

-The Mystery of How Things Getting Popular & Lessons learned from the book: “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell.

"The tipping point" is a book written by GladWell, a famous New Yorker columnist, in around 2002. It gives some profound explanations on social epidemics. This is a popular book in the Web 2.0 community including Chinese Internet industry community. Here are some sum up in my own opinion about this interesting book.

In the beginning, Gladwell gave a brief description about the meaning of the term 'Tipping Point' : “The Tipping Point(引爆点) is that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”[1]

To identify what makes a social epidemic and what makes a small stuff get popular, Gladwell pointed out three main factors in such an social phenomenon:
1.“What”: the Idea, Concept or Product itself;
2.“Who”: the People who transmit them;
3.“Where”: the Environment where those things spread and turn popular;

The main body of this book is telling the characteristics of these three factors in social epidemics.

Gladwell titled the people factor as "the Law of the Few"(个别人物法则). He said, before an idea, concept, or product can reach the tipping point, a few key types of people must champion/advocate it.

These few people can be divided into Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Connectors are individuals who have ties in many different social networks. (Just as Hubs/Routers in Computer network) While Mavens(内行) are the information gatherers of the social network. They can be aware of tiny changes around. Finally, Salesmen are people who are extremely persuasive in inducing others’ buying decisions and behaviors.

An typical social epidemic works in this way: First, Mavens Find the Sensitive Information (Idea, Concept or Product) and Tell the Connector. Then, Connectors Transmit it to Massive People through his various social relationships. Finally, Salesmen Persuade People to Take Action. If all phases are successful, the Tipping Point is reached! Another thing he mentioned in his book is that Maven/Connectors/Salesman are just roles, one people may play multiple roles.

I think it's a reasonable explanation. Think about those people around you, they can be roughly divided into these three types. Let's study the case of Douban[2], an success web2.0 website in China.

Douban never do any massive media advertisement on TV station nor Radio station. But today it has millions of registered users, very active user created content and many people use it in their daily life(includes myself).

AhBei, the creator of Douban, is somewhat a book Maven, he likes reading books and sharing them with others. As a pioneer in web2.0 wave, he has some connections to those popular bloggers in China, such as Laobai and Keso etc. These popular bloggers act as Connectors - they have many friends and social activities in real world, and also they have many blog subscribers. They told other people about the Douban web site by means of talking with his friends or acquaintance in social party or meeting , and they can also do this by blogging.

As these people have big influence in public and have good reputation, blog subscribers or his acquaintance, who heard of Douban from him will try this website undoubtedly. So they also behaved in another role of Salesman.

Thus, many Internet users in China know this website, if this website itself has some basic factors that can attractive normal user and can get them stuck to this site, this web site reaches its tipping point and gets popular consequently.

We all know that, on Internet, in the time of web1.0, it's very easy for the user to leave for another similar service provider, it's nearly zero cost. So, to reach tipping point, to make a social epidemic, how to get those users stuck to your website in web2.0 time? What's the characteristics of those popular things themselves? What makes users get stuck to them and make them get popular?

[to be continue]
[1]http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/
[2]http://www.douban.com