Author Archives: specialk

Revisiting things 6 years later

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A friend of mine is in Barcelona. I remembered a great restaurant I went to and the review I wrote. While searching for the review I found something else I wrote 6 years ago;

Hype is like cancer that spreads until it obliterates all facts in their wake.

Currently the Google word processor is being hyped as the alternative to using MS Word.

About two years ago I tried to use Open Office. MS Word was going to cost me an arm and a leg and I had every incentive. A month of painful struggle and irritation at what was an inferior and ultimately unusable product as compared to MS Word, I shelled out the big bucks.

Google Docs is an impressive piece of web software, and certainly superior to wordpress’ text editor widget. However, I am pretty sure, that I prefer using MS Word if I ever have to write any document.

Nonetheless, this document was written using google doc.

My next task is to see if I can get MS Word to publish directly to my blog….

And for the record, Open Office was far more usable.

It’s 6 years later, and it’s painfully obvious that Google Docs is the alternative to MS Office products.

One of the interesting side effects of being disrupted is that you can stare at the disruption and it.

Google Doc’s was clearly a primitive version of MS Office, but it was good enough for some tasks and it was cheaper and simpler to manage than MS Office. Use Google Docs and you don’t need shared storage, license keys, a Microsoft deal etc.

What I didn’t understand 6 years ago was how computers and infrastructure were becoming free. As the cost per user declines, it becomes possible to offer a service for free for most people and charge a small number of people a small amount of money and still come out very much ahead.

Google Doc and SaaS is the destroyer of traditional IT and the vendors that support it. The process may take time, but it is a tidal wave of destruction that will leave new players in its wake.

The arrow of time moves forward and now I find myself practically never using MS Office because Google docs are free and easy to use. Sure I can’t write everything I want in them, but I don’t care.

tl;dr The latest laptop I bought does not have Office installed because I prefer to use Google Docs.

Life immitates art

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From the personal archives.

4 years ago at NetApp, I was working on NetApp’s backup strategy. As the strategy belong’s to NetApp, I won’t share the outcome …

What is amusing, though, is I had a presentation with the then SVP (and now EVP) Manish Goel. And lo and behold my latest draft had gotten deleted. And because it was on a laptop and that laptop wasn’t backed up my most recent and polished slides weren’t there.

The presentation went well … but I found myself laughing hard when I discovered the files were missing.

The guy proposing a backup strategy for NetApp didn’t have a backup strategy for his own laptop.

Happy Holi

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One of the coolest parts about living in the bay area is that we get to celebrate Holi. After too many years of missing the fun, Nicholas and I went to party at Stanford organized by Asha.

Nicholas had a blast.

First there was just the fun of throwing colors. We eventually figured out that you don’t shove it in people’s mouth, but spread it on their cheeks and say “Happy Holi”.

Then we had ate some super-tasty and spicy Indian food. Nicholas ate some biryani. After a few bites he started to cry saying: Mouth hurts. I gave him some raita and promised it would feel better. He didn’t trust me, after all I gave him the rice to begin with. After a sips of raita, Nicholas told me: Mouth feels better! Then he ate some more rice, complained about his mouth hurting and ate some raita. When we were in the car on the way back Nicholas reassured me that Mouth feels better.

Finally we sprayed water at each other using water guns. It was a complete messy blast.

Arriving home we discovered that the colors are a little bit more resistant to water that I thought. After a thorough scouring we got – kinda – clean.

Introducing PlayScript

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Over the last year Zynga has been looking at solving a hard problem in the mobile and web space: how do you deliver games that run on both mobile and web simultaneously without having to do a full port.

Although there are a variety of technologies out there that solve the problem to some degree or another, none of them were quite right for Zynga.

What we wanted was a single language that could then be compiled to a variety of run-times allowing us to quickly build 3D games for both web and mobile devices.

We looked at technologies like HTML 5, hAxe, Native Client and others but they all suffered from a distribution problem: not every browser supports 3D (IE) or the tool doesn’t support 3D (hAxe) or the technology is limited to one browser (Native Client)

So a couple of our great engineers looked at the problem and decided to see if there was a way we could bring actionscript games to mobile.

And so PlayScript was born.

PlayScript provides a Flash compatible runtime and rendering environment on mobile via OpenGL via the .NET platform, allowing games to be written once and run across web and mobile with the same code base.

PlayScript compiler and runtime has been released to open source under the Apache license.

You can find it here:

https://github.com/playscript/playscript-mono

Happy Hacking!

The revolution begins in Japan

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The bank of Japan has decided to fight deflation. After all of these years, a populist came to power who was determined to help the little people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/business/global/japan-initiates-a-bold-bid-to-end-years-of-falling-prices.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

In a deflationary environment the owners of assets (money), benefit and the people without assets lose out.

When you hear people screaming about inflation pay very close attention to their wallet sizes.

If you don’t believe me, just go watch Downton Abbey. The aristocracy in England benefited from an amazing deflationary asset: Land. No new land was being created, and more people were being born, which meant that existing land holdings increased in value. Because the land holdings were concentrated into a few hands because of a rigorous enforcement of primogeniture no new land entered the market. As a result land increased in value and the owners of it became increasingly wealthy.

Net effect? The wealthier you were, the wealthier you became without doing anything. The aristocracy was so wealthy they were able to have 10’s of servants for a very small family. And their wealth translated into power that they were able to wield.

What broke their power? Why it was the introduction of an inflationary asset, you know something that increased as a result of people taking actions … Printed money and fractional reserve banking. That inflationary asset created people with new wealth and power that destroyed that aristocracy.

Why do people love the gold standard? Because people who have gold become wealthier just by holding onto their gold. If you look back into American history the populists had a saying about gold…Here’s the quote from William Bryant Jennings:

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

If you believe that we should create new business and new growth then moderate inflation is not a bad thing. Yes it sucks to have to keep creating wealth, it sucks when asset bubbles form because of excess credit, but a freely flowing currency enables new business and new growth and new opportunities. If you believe that you should live off of your existing assets and not work, then moderate inflation is a terrible thing.

For the well off this is a choice. For everyone else it’s a weird universe they don’t understand.

I never thought the revolution would begin in Japan. There is hope for this world, yet.

Childhood’s end

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Today is a sad day.

Lucas Arts, the magical gaming company, is dead.

See here for more details: http://kotaku.com/disney-shuts-down-lucasarts-468473749

For most of childhood the Lucas Arts logo would cause my heart to race. Whether it was Indiana Jones or Grim Fandango or  x-wing, they made great games. Their games were and are fun.  Fun because they were well designed, and because they exploited their material better than anyone had before.

Although the last several years have been poor, like a champion athlete, you just wanted to believe that they could dig deep and give us one last bit of magic.

But instead, like so many great athletes whose time has passed, management announced their retirement.

May the force be with you, always Lucas Arts.