Archive for May 2008

Motivation: pay new employees to quit

This is an interesting way to motivate your employees: pay new employees to quit.

Zappos sells shoes online. Their new employee hiring process? Spend a month getting trained, and immersed on the company’s culture, strategy and its obsession with customers, and at the end of it all, ask if people want to quit, plus give them a $1,000 bonus to do so. Why?

  • Shows one’s commitment level to the company
  • This way you’ll keep the most motivated employees around
  • Some people may have signed up for the job, and after a month’s training realise, that its not for them… Its an easy exit path
  • Keep employees engaged

Zappos only loses about 10% of their new employees this way. And they’re all the better. The leaving bonus started at $100, moved up to $500, and now its $1,000 (they will increase this as the company expands). They are large – 1,600 employees and growing.

From what I gather, they have a very connected culture… Their CEO has a blog, most of their employees are on Twitter, and they really are obsessed with customers – read I Heart Zappos. This is Customer Relationship Management 2.0!

Definitely a thing or two to learn from the way Zappos operates. From a business perspective, it just goes to show that while it might have made sense to sell books online (Amazon), it also definitely makes sense to sell personal items like shoes (Zappos) and designer clothing (Net-a-porter) online too. Items that one might think are too personal to buy at the click of a button…

Books: The Art of the Start, The Logic of Life, Blink

Not strictly read this month, but here are my quick reviews of these three books:

  • The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything – a great book by Guy Kawasaki, you can only imagine how dog-eared my copy of the book is. There can be no summaries, as the whole contents of the book is worth reading. If you’re thinking of the start up world, or running your own company, this book is a must read. Guy has also linked to a talk he gave on this topic.

    Disappointed I was, when I found out guy was recently at a satellite event (NetBash @ WCIT), something I could have definitely attended had I known about it (I was at WCIT, the expo hall though) – Guy Kawasaki: 45 hours in KL.

  • The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World – always interested in economics, this is the second book by Tim Harford, and its fabulous. He touches on game theory, talks about the teenage oral sex craze, crime, and lots of other illogical behaviours. Highly recommended, especially, if you’ve read his previous book, The Undercover Economist.
  • Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – yet another book by Malcolm Gladwell (if you’ve read The Tipping Point, this is a must read follow-up), its a very quick read (pretty thin book), and it covers the two seconds or so that we take to make snap judgements. Should we trust our snap judgements? Generally yes. I tend to agree with the book, especially when it comes to reading strangers (and sizing people down, for example). There are of course, caveats about jumping to conclusions when you’re in a business that focuses on dealing with people, and its covered too. Anyone can definitely learn a thing or two about trusting our subconscious from the book.

Trends, started by (new) media?

Ever since re-entering the world of the iPod’s by getting my iPod Touch, I’ve been listening to podcasts again. One of the ones I listen to regularly, is Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code (the DSC).

Of late, it seems like he’s been talking a lot about something he calls the “Prostate Cancer Prevention Quota”. He’s quoting old (from 2003) research, that says regular masturbation cuts the risk of prostate cancer. The study, conducted in Melbourne, Australia, has not seen anything new in the last five years. But thats digressing.

Question I have is: do podcasts start trends, just like regular commercial radio?

Commercial radio is subject to a code of conduct. There are topics that may be taboo. These obviously vary from region-to-region. Podcasters don’t have to follow through, naturally.

I’m impressed with the number of folk calling in, leaving voice messages for Adam, to tell him where they stand on their weekly quota. This almost reminds me of the previous “trend”, which helps “condition” you to think of Senseo, every time he burped.

With Senseo, it was great advertising. With the cancer prevention quota, I have no idea what the benefit is, besides maybe actually wanting to improve men’s health.

Did Adam start a masturbating trend? Watching an episode of House the other night, House ordered a prostitute to his apartment. Did this increase the number of outcall‘s that night, amongst television watchers?

It would be interesting to find out… statistics that seem interesting.

KL, the land of watered down beer

Fireangel doesn’t like her drinks watered down. Neither do I.

However, it seems to be common practice in Kuala Lumpur. Anywhere I go, it seems like beer is watered down. It doesn’t matter if its more “exotic” beers like Kilkenny or Hoegaarden; it also happens to the common local beers like Tiger. Its just a sad thing.

Take for example, the RM28 for a pint of Hoegaarden on tap (ok, its a few bucks more, but when you buy 18 beers, they seem to give you a discount). This at Deutsches Gasthaus 2, in Taman Tun Dr Ismail (TTDI). Its definitely watered down. The atmosphere is nice, the service is fabulous, the range of beers available are definitely impressive (lots of imported stuff, in bottles), but I don’t see myself returning by choice, if all I get is expensive, watered down beer.

The one place I found that serves good draught beer, is Decanter, located in Sri Hartamas. Its relatively cheap, non-watered down, but sadly they only serve Tiger beer (I’d prefer Carlsberg on tap, any day). Backyard in Sri Hartamas also seems to be true blue beer.

Where else in the Klang Valley does one get real beer?

Identifying portrait/landscape in a set of images, with ImageMagick and BASH

I haven’t written much BASH of late, so was a bit rusty. The goal? A script that would go through a directory of JPGs, find those that are portrait shots, and place them in an appropriate folder. Do so similarly for landscapes.

Use cases? Those new digital photo frames. Buy two, and have many images scroll by, eh?

What’s been done?
Making use of ImageMagick’s identify is what needs to be done. You’ll be using the -format option, which normally takes a type or string. A full list of what options are available for -format are available.

The choice is to use -format '%[exif:orientation]'. The output of identify -format '%[exif:orientation]' is either:

  • 1 – portrait
  • 6 – landscape
  • 8 – portrait (the way I normally shoot, with the battery grip)

I’ve not seen much documentation about the above, so it seems like these values come from trial and error… They apply for Canon cameras that have EXIF orientation details. I’d be interested to hear from others what values they’re getting (or getting pointed to some documentation).

The shell script?

#!/bin/sh

mkdir portrait
mkdir landscape

for i in *.jpg;
	do
	type=$(/opt/local/bin/identify -format '%[exif:orientation]' $i)
case $type in
	1)
	mv $i portrait;;
	6)
	mv $i landscape;;
	8)
	mv $i portrait;;
esac
done

Other bits of BASH?
If you do: type=$(/opt/local/bin/identify -format '%[exif:orientation]' $i) , you can grab the value from the command (1, 6, 8) and manipulate it. Check by doing echo $type.

If you’re after getting the return value from a command (i.e. 0 for success, 127 for error, and so on), you can do echo rv: $?.

All in all, remember to read the BashFAQ. Tests and Conditionals was also essential to my reading.

ImageMagick rocks nonetheless. I’ve used it before to resize, append and much more… I’m thinking that maybe its time to read The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick, written by Mikal.

GSoC Updates: Start your engines

MySQL is featured on the Google Open Source Blog
Just after leaving JavaOne, Leslie pinged me on IRC to inform me that the MySQL project was featured on the Google Open Source blog. Go on, read Moments of Inspiration.

In other news from mentors, Colin Charles, former mentor and 2008 organization administrator for MySQL dropped a note to let us know that their Community Bonding period is moving along swimmingly. So well, in fact, that their students are already delivering weekly status reports. Colin mentioned that their student Filippo Bollini had crafted a particularly well written update; it’s worth checking out for mentors wondering what sorts of information to collect from students or for students wondering what kind of details are most useful to their mentors.

Congratulations Filippo. I expect great things from you (as does Brian.)

Start your engines!
Students, and mentors alike, this is the week that the Summer of Code starts! Well, coding anyway. Its very encouraging to see all the weekly reports flow in, and once I catch a breath, I’ll be summarising them for all to see and keep up with how the MySQL SoC students of 2008 are doing.


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