Just did a quick hack on Movable Type engine so that it will use Trackback mechanism to do publicity instead of XMLRPC-ping.

Happy Birthday Singapore!

The Today newspaper today (the previous one is with a captial ‘T’) have a number of stories from various journalists who apparently have an overdose of MrBrown’s SNE.

Even the Letters from Readers section have 3 letters which sound like written by MrBrown himself.

Following my posting yesterday about weeding out the bottom, some folks have indicated that this system does not work all the time.

Well, the organization renewal process of weeding out the bottom 10% is actually an evolution system. And like all evolution system, the rules you set will determine what kind of organization you have at the end.

For example, if the selection criteria is based on “the ability to listen commands and follow rules” and you weed out the bottom 10% based on this rule, over time, you will have an Athena organization. e.g. government, military organization.

On the other hand, if the selection criteria is based on “ability to make sales”, you will get an organization which is have mostly sale people. e.g. MLM.

Hence, knowing what is the type of organization and the culture you want is very important before you apply this process.

Found a big problem with Microsoft IPv6 implementation.

Suppose you install IPv6 stack on your XP (type “ipv6 install” on your command prompt), MS will attempt to use Terado to connect your machine to 6bone. Because Terado dont work with the NAT, it will fall back and allocated a link-local fe80:: address.

This shouldnt be a problem unless of course the machine you want to connect is on dual IPv4, IPv6 stack (e.g. www.kame.net). In this case, your machine will (sometimes) attempt to communicate using IPv6 because it thinks it has a IPv6 address…but it doesn’t…it only has a link-local address which is not connected to the 6bone.

So after you installed the v6 stack on XP and unable to connect to 6bone for any reasons, you would also lost your ability to talk to any of the dual stack site, even though you can reach them via v4.

For the last few months, I was trying to complete the RPG game Breath of Fire IV. (Yes, “Months” for a simple game. I dont really have much time for game, you know!)

Anyway, in BoF IV, there is this cute mini faeries game. This game allows you manage a colony of 20 faeries. Each faerie has 3 attributes: endurance, knowledge and style and 4 possible personalities. The faeries game also has a “culture rating” which represent the sum of these attributes of all your faeries. If you have high culture rating, you get better faeries.

So what do I learnt from this game?
Read the rest of this entry »

Any good general knows that a plan for a mission is valid until you meet your first enemy.

But this is not to say we don’t do any planning. It is still important to do planning but vision & strategy become critical in an always-changing world.

A good vision is one which is clear and simple. It leaving no room for doubt or interpretion and have buy-in from everyone in the organization. Plans may change but the vision must not.

A good strategy is one that explains the “WHAT” and does not specify the “HOW”. It is not a “howto” guide for someone who is lost. Instead, that person should be able to ask himself “what should I do that is inline with the strategy?” and able to make his own decision (aka “empowerment”).

With a good vision & strategy, what you also need is the best people or a “A player”. Jack Welch defines an A player by 4E: Energy to do work, ability to Energize others, Edge to make critical decision and lastly, ability to Execute.

So really, good management is really as simple as 1,2,3: (1) set a simple vision and articulate the strategy (2) hire the best people and (3) and leave your best people alone to do the job. ^_^

During lunch with Alvin (Karloff), we have an interesting discussion about the future of SME in Singapore.

From the macroeconomic perspective, one MNC probably creates more jobs and output (GDP) then 100 SMEs. Hence, logically, it makes more sense trying to get MNC to based in Singapore. And by some economists estimate, we probably need about 4 MNCs in Singapore moving forward.

So why are we wasting time & money promoting entrepreneurship & helping SME?

Well, the old strategy of giving incentives to oversea MNCs to based in Singapore is not working anymore. For one thing, the opening of India & China and the fact that these countries have more talents at low cost means that even without any incentives from these governments, they are more attractive then Singapore.

Hence, if we cant find MNC overseas, then hopefully we can create a few in Singapore. And all MNCs started their life as a tiny little SME.

So yes, we need to continue to help our SME. It is also likely many of these SME will not make it…but all Singapore need is one or two to make it big. And if we have four, it would be a homerun.

ps: Helping does not means we should throw money at them to keep them afloat. If they are not able to survive on their own, it probably means they should die. Survival of the fittest.

Today, I learnt that it is a bad idea to read Straits Times after you spend the last few hours reading Singapore National Education@BrownTown…

Your brain will go crazy…

Security Analysis, The Classic 1940 2nd Edition by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd

Bought this book at Citylink after lunch with Teyu…Wanted to re-read the book again but could find my old copy.