New Generation of Tech media in China

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I am trying to collect a list of interesting media that is raising these years, and it is very different from the last generation. It is typically created by an experienced media industry person, but jumped out of the old framework. Here is the starting and I will keep updating the list.

  1. The Founder by former Chief Editor of China Entrepreneur editor Niu Wenwen
  2. Huxiu.com by former chief executive of China Entrepreneur editor Li Min
  3. TechNode by Lu Gang
  4. PingWest Just saw this morning. Chief Editor of CBNWeekly, editor Thomas Luo
  5. 36kr

 

10 Year Anniversary of Blogging

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Today is the 10th anniversary of my blogging.

Starting from Sept 11, 2002, with my first blog, I have been blogging for ten years. I cannot believe it! Ten year doing one thing everyday seems crazy for anyone, and I am surprised I am that crazy guy.

However, the bad news is, I realized that I am not as calm and as peaceful as 10 years ago. With the increase of age, and increase of responsibility, it is harder and harder to sit down at the desk, and write something. Email flys in; mobile rings; Weibo checking; Yifan calls…. More importantly, within my mind, thousands of things flying to different directions. I heard something  this morning: with the increase of age, especially after 35, there are too many distraction that few can stay calm and concentrated. It needs a lot meditation and understanding of what is important than the younger time. I believe I may entered another stage of life after 10 years of blogging. Look at the frequency, topic, and depth of the blog entries I wrote in the last three years, and I can clearly see the path of the declination in frequency, decrease in interestingness, and decrease in depth. I am full aware of it, and I know it is the competition of attention for me. The competition just get stronger when I am connected to more, and it is the time to cut something from my life.

Look at the simple life of Yifan, and I know days are long for him. There are a lot I can learn from Yifan – to keep focused and keep doing the important things.

That will be the word for my next 10 years of blogging.

 

IP Only

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I created my first plugin when I created my CEO Blog. The problem is obvious: I am going to have a CEO blog where I can share my thoughts with the team frequently. I tried to write a different blog, and I found it is just impossible to maintain two. So I decided to put it on to my own personal blog.

Although most of the articles are public in nature, I do have something that I hope to disclose to the general public later. I don’t want to have complicated OAuth based verification. A simple IP based restriction is good enough. There is no simple solution so I wrote one myself.

Here is the ZIP of the plugin: https://home.wangjianshuo.com/wordpresscn/wp-content/plugins/iponly/iponly.zip

You can download it, modify it, and do whatever you want. There are many hard code in the system – I never blame developers for doing dirty hacks when the time is limited, but we do need to polish it from time to time.

I promise to add all the hard code to options, and create an admin panel for it, in the next version.

 

I Won’t Drive to Hangzhou Again

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I am back from Hangzhou, and I would say, I will never drive to Hangzhou again.

Hangzhou is only 45 minutes away via high-speed rail, and the transportation to and back the railway station is so simple for me, and the only bottle neck is to get to hotel from the Hangzhou railway station. It takes for ever to build the metro in Hangzhou. Despite that, I should enjoy the relaxed time in Hangzhou via taxi, or local cars, not driving. I am very tired after the long trip.

 

Language Matters

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For some reason, I enjoy learning languages, no matter it is the language of daily life sense, or computer sense.

I can read and write in:

  1. Chinese
  2. English
  3. C/C++
  4. Java (a little bit)
  5. JavaScript (Not to compare it with Hax)
  6. PHP
  7. ASP/VB/VBScript
  8. C#
  9. Propositional Logic
  10. Mathematics

I am looking forward to learn more. Some language I started a little bit (but I put some serious effort behind) are:

  1. Italian
  2. German
  3. Python
  4. Perl
  5. Lisp
  6. Objective C
  7. Japanese

I found how hard it is to maintain two blogs at the same time, one in English, and the other in Chinese. I found I tend to write in Chinese for long enough before switching to English, and vice versa. It is the same in programing languages. To switch from PHP to Python really took me some time these days.

Language is an expression of thoughts. But it cannot be separated from thoughts. I realized when I think of issues in startup, and technology world, I tend to use English in my mind, and when I think of feelings, mathematics, and local matters, of cause my preferred language is Chinese. When I write anything related with web, PHP is still by far the most natural choice for me, but for algorithm, I still prefer C (not even C++). I never liked Java. Never.

Because I swing between languages in daily life, I started to observe the impact of language on my thoughts. Some very long sentences can be easily constructed in English, but not in Chinese. But the spirit of many things can be so concise and precious in Chinese. I just like to use them interchangeably. I also use many English word in my Chinese, just like HTML inside PHP. Because there are many definition and history origins for certain word. For example, Hacker is a well defined world in startup world in English (I mean startup world, and the word hacker sounds scary for normal people who speaks English), but the 黑客 does not translate. I have to stick to that word, even in Chinese.

I hope I can continue to learn more language (Did I mention that I got 900 in the entrance exam for universities in 1995? The score range from 100 to 900). I learn

(sort (1, 4, 2, 3) #'<)

in LISP, and I feel I am a better CEO today when I talk with Joanna. I said:

A company is a sort function, and you have to decide what the second parameter is.

Maybe only LISP programmers can understand what I am talking about.

Aircraft Spotting at Hongqiao Airport

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I am not a professional aircraft spotter, but I am also amazed by the scene of an aircraft roars and lands at airports.

The best place to do it I know is at G318 (at K16+). It is easy to find if you follow the 沪青平 highway and you will be guided by the big noise of the aircrafts.

There are lines of this, and flushing one after another, creating a guiding line toward the runway.

Below are some of the photos I took today. Enjoy the big flying machine!

 

ISO 8601

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I am genuinely interested in numbers, and specs. I must be the strange person in other people’s mind, but I am just so excited to see things like numbers. For example:

1. CVC 22651

When travelling in California, I really love the CVC 22651 printed on the TOW AWAY plate, and traced to the following document: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d11/vc22651.htm

2. ISO 8601

The smart guys want to solve a problem of how to represent date across the world (both west and east and both computer or human). So they invented something like:

2012-08-20T13:09:16+08:00

and they call it ISO 8601 format.

3. RFC 2616

Maybe one of the most important RFC. It uses just 4 digits to express that. If you are curious, it is:

Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

The RFC has been there for 30 years, so I was pretty shocked to know there did exist an RFC 1: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0001

4. 200030

This is pretty simple: the post code of the area I am moving around. I love the idea of postal code, but the way it is presented in China is not so up-to-date. The postal code of US seems more interesting, for example, 94301, or Singapore, where they assign a post code for every building.

5. Other random numbers

The more universal numbers are most interesting for me. For example, the ISBN numbers (isbn:0375420827 for the Art of travel), the mobile phone numbers (13916146826 for me), or even PNR.

Why I am so interested in these numbers? I am still puzzled and don’t have an answer. Maybe that is the inborn instinct of an engineer?

Notes of Hiring is Obsolete

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Here goes my notes on Hiring is Obsolete.

Wisdom comes from facts. Everything is getting cheaper. (Computer of the same power? Automated services?) Cost of startup should only be people.

(Nerds have better things to do) => (Nerds are unpopular)

 

if( (Undergraduates are Undervalued) == true)

invest(undergradutes());

 

if((Smart people speaks stupid things) == true)

dont_ignore_people_do_stupid_things();

 

value = people_to_user();

compensation = company_estimate();

compensation = average(values);

 

assert(difficulty(valuing work) > 80%);

 

class bigcompany :

def __init__():

protect_mode = on;

 

def product_development() :

while(1):

improve();

release();

 

We really want to spend the money outside the company on marketing (throw the dollars to a anonymous guy you know will do bad seems wiser to give it to the best people in the company. Why?

Founders run engineering directly, and the rest …

The cage is open. There is no limitation. Blogging is possible in 1995, but people don’t write too much until 2001. It just took 6 years for people to realize the cage is open.

The older you are, the most risk you can take.

 

Elastic Search Solved a Problem

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{
  "ok" : true,
  "status" : 200,
  "name" : "Gardener",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "0.19.8",
    "snapshot_build" : false
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

These lines of response from Elastic Search at http://localhost:9200 seems so nice. I smiled when I saw this response, and I said to my self: “Hack! Those guys at elastic search really solved a problem.

They defined a problem in their statements, and they solved the problem. Doing a lot of things should be easier and easier  – that is the thoughts of typical hacker. Why should I even need to download something to my server to run search? I may further ask the question. I believe some hacker out there will solve this problem.

You know, for Search

So, we build a web site or an application and want to add search to it, and then it hits us: getting search working is hard. We want our search solution to be fast, we want a painless setup and a completely free search schema, we want to be able to index data simply using JSON over HTTP, we want our search server to be always available, we want to be able to start with one machine and scale to hundreds, we want real-time search, we want simple multi-tenancy, and we want a solution that isbuilt for the cloud.

“This should be easier”, we declared, “and cool, bonsai cool”.

elasticsearch aims to solve all these problems and more. It is an Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Apache Lucene.

Company

Any company started with an observed problem in this world, and people in the company get excited about solving that problem. If they solve that problem, they created something people want, just like those guys created elastic search, which is what I and Xiaopai wanted.

If you create something people want, you are likely to be fine. People will take care of the monetization problems and others easier than creating something people want. I saw a good model in Elastic Search.

Value of Technology

New ways of doing things, like elastic search takes JSON as input and output, and adapted schema free, and NOSQL type of approach is new way to do search, and that works very well for me.

It is the technology that makes this world better (well, among many other great things), and I am happy to be still back to the technology world.

 

Bad Programmer Destroys Wealth

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After code review, I understood why people say bad programmers destroy wealth. Their productivity is less than 0, which means they are creating bugs and drag the team to fix it. I consistently saw really bad and buggy code here and there, by one programmer who is not at our company. But the code there is guaranteed to be bad, and buggy. Interestingly, bad programmers are very productive if you measure by lines of code they created. So identify them! Early!

Typhoon is Over

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This year’s Typoon is over in Shanghai. Actually some nice changes happens this time.

Typhoon hits Shanghai almost every year. Although not seriously, it does impact the lives.

This year, the biggest difference is not the typhoon itself. Yes. It is stronger this year, but the biggest difference is the government.

The Beijing’s heavy rain claimed lives of nearly 100, and Shanghai government acted very proactively. They started to use the post-SARS type of effort to inform residents about what is coming. They also shutdown parks and some public events. At least, this time, due to the recent pressure of the press, and Internet, they are doing reasonably well.

For sure there are many concerns about what they did – they claimed that being late should not be regarded as being late for businesses, and many other measures. I think they may over used their power, and no one granted that type of power to government. (Well, if we have a congress or local city council, I may vote to grant that power, but so far, there is no documents saying so). Having said that, I still applaud for what the Shanghai did, because it is the first step to “doing something” instead of wait passively about what is happening. By “doing something”, it may cross the line, but a very good starting point.

Yesterday was obviously the heaviest rain in recent years, but it was not that bad based on my personal experience. STRONG DISCLAIMER: I didn’t see flooding does not mean there is no flood, but equally important is, I cannot claim flood if I don’t see it personally. That is just the difference of perspective, and we need to put the information together. I am bringing my piece here.

There are several leaks in my house, and I have to swipe the floor from time to time. But compared to what happened in Zhejiang, it is just nothing.

 

Learning Git

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I am learning GIT.

A new frontier for me to learn. GIT.

Technology is actually driven by tool makers. Think of the few generation of advancement: Weaving machines in Florence, Herring cutter and commercial boats in Holland, stream engine in English, electronic and information technology in US – all of them are tools. The advancement of tools help human develop and advance.

GIT is such a tool. I started to use version control with SD (SourceDepot). That was a very good tool developed back in 198x, before git appears in the horizon.

If you want to predict which technical company will win, check what tool they use! If a company start to lose in the tool front, it is losing in many front.

 

Nanjing, the Capital of a Republic

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A danger of travel is that we see things at wrong time, before you have the opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chains. – Alan de Botton

This time, I visited Nanjing during the weekend, and I had some preparation to get the receptivity, and tried to use a connecting chain to guide what to see. The topic will be the government of Republic of China, a historical term in mainland China, and a current term in Taiwan.

I went to the following places:

  • The presidential palace
  • The Executive Yuan
  • The Legislative Yuan
  • The Judicial Yuan
  • The Control Yuan
  • The Exam Yuan

They are scattered into different places across the city, but to follow a path to visit every single one of them makes a great day.

Nanjing is a city with great histories. Many of the memories were painful, just like the feeling of Berlin. It is also moving very fast. I didn’t expect to see a building 450 meters high (due to my ignorance, I didn’t know that). Many years ago, I would say Hangzhou is a much better travel destination than Nanjing, and now I rediscovered the city and claim it to be better to spend a weekend than Hangzhou. Here is why.

  • Nanjing is only 1:40 hour away from Shanghai. Hangzhou is less than 1 hour but the difference is not big.
  • There are 70 G-trains between the two cities everyday, making it more convineint to get there. The fastest train is only 1 hour and 15 minutes.
  • Nanjing was capital of 6 dynasties, and the recent Republic of China. There are a lot architect and stories there. Hangzhou is a little bit less “historical”
  • Nanjing’s transportation is amazingly good. The two metro lines (one connects at the Railway station!) completely beats Hangzhou. It was nightmare to wait for taxi at Hangzhou railway station.
  • In the recent years, Nanjing suddenly became more modern than Hangzhou, with some very nice shopping malls like Deji Plaza at Xinjiekou.
  • The mountains of Nanjing is more approachable.
  • For many people in Shanghai, Nanjing is obviously a less visited city than Hangzhou, so worth the time.

I will visit Nanjing soon during weekend. A weekend escape in Nanjing is just a very good experience for me – high-speed train, Hanting Hotel, plus Metro tickets are good package for me.

Drawings of Interiors

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Let me continue to post my drawings in Italy. This time, the topic will be interiors of buildings. I drew something of what is inside of a building.

Below: The terrance of the hotel (MMV Resort) in Cannes.

Below: Tino steak house in Firenze. Drunk some wine, and was not really conscious at that time. You can tell from the messy strokes.

This one was even worse. I was almost completely drunk, and I am impressed that I could still draw something in that mood.

The Terminal 3 of Dubai Airport.

Like it?

Confessions of a Failed Programmer

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I love to write code. That is not a good news for a CEO who has a business to run, but I just cannot stop loving writing code!

Why?

The story started in 1986, when I was in grade three in primary school. There was a small computer calendar booklet in my home, among tones of others on electronic engineering.

I read it and was amazed by the idea that computers were so smart that they can calculate 1000 times faster than human brain, but at the same time, they were so stupid that they could only do very limited plus calculation at the bottom. That was the early years of my exposure to computer. The lesson learnt is, if you want your kid to grow into some type of people, just buy some books on the topic and put it within the reach of the kids. See what happens!

I first seriously learnt BASIC when I was 12 years old, taught by my older brother Jianzhao in winter of 1989. BASIC was not that hard to learn for a kid, although the concept

i = i + 1

was actually a valid expression puzzled me and almost failed my math test. I went to my parent’s office to use the IBM terminal to run BASIC programs during the summer holiday. The green characters on black screens were just amazing. When I understood that the terminals were all hooked into a central computer 10 floors down the building, and the CPU time was allocated to each terminal in very fast circles, I just feel like, in Matrix!

Although my chance to use computers ended from that winter, I just kept writing code on papers days and nights for the coming summer. I still have a big box of paper with all the BASIC codes on it – pages after pages. Those codes were never run on real computer, but I read it and run them on my brain again and again, just like people reading novels today. Among them, the most complicated one was a computer game “Policeman vs Thief”. The game was re-written in C 10 years later on a rented PC in my dorm, which Wendy praised: “Cute!”.

The passion for programming was pressed in middle school when getting into university was the only goal. I lost 6 years of golden time that may be valuable to become a great hacker. Lesson learnt: Why there is no Linus, or Jobs, or Gates in China? The most creative and passionate time one can have for one thing, say, piano, drawing, writing, or in my case, programming, was wasted to compete with each other to get the keys to secure a job!

The renaissance of programming came when I got to university. I spent hours in computer labs, skipping a lot of classes, programming in C and IPX/SPX protocol. In my graduation essay, I choose to write a workable SQL database starting from SQL parsing, to storage, and a little bit indexing and serving. The professors never got really interested in what the hack the 300 pages of paper were. I am equally not interested about they said. I did just for fun.

But, I have to say, university was just too late for anyone to grow to be really good hacker. I went to work for Microsoft for few years, where I think the best programmers in the world gather at that time (1998), but that was not the case. Till now, I would say, I am still an OK programmer at most, despite of the passion. The lesson is, programming is also like piano. It must start early, and to spend enough time before university. Now, I am still very attracted by python, and similar code, but it is more like my own way of enjoy life. Drawing and coding are my equivalent of movie, massage, watching TV or reading novel.

That is my brief story of coding – a failed case of someone who loves code but switched path along the way, and failed to be a great hacker. Here is the lesson I learnt and I hope it can be helpful to build a great hacker.

  • Give kids the opportunity to expose to as many things as possible
  • Do it in small ways, like throwing a book on the floor. A rat will bite the cake, and a cat will be attracted to fish. You don’t know what your kid is.
  • Release the pressure for near future, so the kids have time to work on life long goals.
  • If you have something you love to do, stick to it, and be confident that you are right. Others are just not you.

 

Drawing of Nature Series

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After drawings of churches, interiors, streets, this series is about nature – the trees, sea, and mountains.

This is at Milano, the big part near the fort.

A sketch of the Mediterranean at 5 Terra, Italy.

This is the view from top of the mountain, where our B&B hotel is.