Shameless plugs

Better the head of a chicken than the tail of an ox. This Chinese proverb captures entrepreneurial thoughts I’ve long harboured. It’s a common affliction around my neck of the woods.

Unfortunately, I’m disinclined to abandon my cushy job to work my fingers to the bone for an uncertain reward. My dreams are likely doomed to remain dreams.

To compensate, I’m living vicariously through friends who are being their own boss. I’m devoting this post to them; may it contribute at least an iota to their success.

China Luxury Travel Network (CLTN.net)

Ethan lived on the ground floor of my apartment at Stanford. Early in my degree, he finished his Masters, in financial mathematics I think. I’m uncertain because we rarely chatted about school! I’m sure his latest venture will succeed, and not just because he’s capable.

I was in Ottawa for a conference in '03. I skipped half of it to hang out with Ethan, who gave me a tour of the city where he grew up, which became challenging when a widespread blackout hit the region. On top of all this, I had FedExed a visa document to his parent’s house (which I needed to return to the US), and he went out of his way to deliver it to me.

A few years later, I was in China on vacation, mainly because I wanted to see the Guangzhou Trade Fair. I met up with Ethan. I thought we’d do little more than catch up over a meal. Well, we did chat over dinner: Ethan had worked in Hong Kong’s finance sector for a while, and was now living off savings while exploring China. I was still a starving student.

But then Ethan took us to a health spa in Shenzhen which was cheaper yet far more luxurious than the hotels we had been considering. For about $20 a day I got massages, food, spas, haircuts, movies, a place to sleep, etc. I never thought I’d get a pedicure in my life, but because it was effectively free, I had to try it.

Then in Hong Kong, we crashed at his place, which saved a lot of money. He took us on a whirlwind shopping and eating tour. Soon after, we had to part ways, but not before he showed us a website offering discounted rates at hotels in Guangzhou. We got a great deal at a great hotel across the street from the trade fair. At the check-in counter, the guy in front of us was livid when he learned how little we were paying.

He offered to take me on a tour of China after the trade fair was over, but I declined. I deeply regret my decision. What’s a few weeks of missed grad school? Ethan spoke three or more Chinese languages. He knew where to go. He had contacts everywhere. Clearly, the China luxury travel business is perfect for him.

Embrace

Rahul lived a few apartments away from me in grad school. He mysteriously vanished one year. I heard later it was because he was “saving babies”. This raised yet more questions! Wasn’t he an engineer?

Certain problematic births are far less problematic when an incubator is available. Unfortunately, the cost of typical incubators often places them beyond the reach of poor remote villages, contributing to higher infant mortality. Rahul helped design a vastly cheaper incubator, and hopes to eventually supply one wherever babies are born.

Total Phase

I met Kumaran through his wife. I was a Teaching Assistant for an introductory computer science class she was taking. Kumaran wanted to meet partly because he wanted help recruiting people for his company. I was of no help: at the time, my engineer friends were already employed, and they were busy recruiting people themselves!

Total Phase’s biggest hit is a USB protocol analyzer, an invaluable tool when developing USB products. Kumaran loves being an engineer designing for engineers. They never bothered advertising since engineers tend to use logic to determine purchases, and their products are better and cheaper than those of their competitors. I saw parallels when I read about the HP200A, an audio oscillator that was profitable because it was the best and the cheapest.

Disc Eraser

My cousin Wade designed a simple tool to render CDs and DVDs unreadable. An easy motion etches deep parallel scratches into the media: Freddy Krueger for discs. Quick and safe. No batteries. No electricity. The disc stays in one piece, ready for recycling.

He used to work on hard drive platters at IBM (before they sold the division to Hitachi) so he knows what he’s doing. He verified his claims with AcoDisc, a data recovery company. After a single application of the Disc Eraser to a CD, the data was deemed unrecoverable.

I don’t burn much, let alone anything confidential, so it’s not something I need. However, I’m grateful for a sample he gave me: as a kind of therapy, I savagely mutilate CDs I receive as junk mail.

Bump

Dave was yet another electrical engineering student in my neighbourhood during grad school. I never would have guessed he would join the dark side and become a Pointy-haired Boss of a startup. Seriously though, I like tech companies with an engineer at the helm. And Dave’s hair is not pointy.

Years ago, a friend once pointed out that two people in the same room cannot easily get their laptops to talk to each other. Sure, there’s Bluetooth, ad-hoc wireless networking, and other hacks, but he was right: even now, it’s easiest for one party to verbally ask for contact details of the other. This is somehow troubling.

I remember a light-hearted news report I watched once, which described a gadget in Japan. You’d enter a few personal details, and carry it around. It would alert you if someone of the opposite sex nearby had the same gadget and had similar interests to you. What became of this? Couldn’t they do something like this so you would never have to spell out someone’s email address or type in a phone number?

Enter Bump, an app for iPhone and Android that attacks this problem in a cute way. Both sides run the app, then lightly bump their phones together to swap contact details, or other data. No physical contact is actually needed as the phones just have to be close enough, but smashing your fists together is more macho!

Millinery Kestralia

Kestrel lives a few streets away, which benefits me greatly because she is a good chef and a keen gardener. She also loves making hair accessories, and recently started selling them. Each handcrafted piece is unique and beautiful, like their creator.

Self-publishing with CreateSpace

From time to time, somebody sends me a kind email saying that they only truly appreciated Git after encountering my Git guide. One such reader had already bought a few Git books, and he suggested I should therefore turn my website into a book.

I had idly thought about doing this, but why bother? Was: FREE, Now: $9.95!? However, the email made me realize that some seek information by buying books first, then look around online if they want more. Making a book out of my guide might be a good idea after all: I’m not trying to sell it to people who already know they can read it for free; rather, I’m aiming for those who might not otherwise find it until much later because they visit bookshops before search engines.

CreateSpace

Because the most renowned technical publishers already offered books on Git, I chose to self-publish on CreateSpace. Their tools are free, and they list your work on Amazon (who owns CreateSpace). I’d love to have bricks-and-mortar bookshops carry copies of the book too, but an Amazon listing should be enough for now.

In a brief search, I found controversy over CreateSpace ISBNs, but Richard Sutton’s post reassured me: firstly, for my book, the issues stemming from CreateSpace being the registered owner of the ISBN are irrelevant, and secondly, if you really want you can have an ISBN registered in your name (but you’ll have to buy it yourself).

The whole process is not quite free. After submitting your PDF file, you must order a proof copy. If you find errors, you submit a corrected PDF, and repeat. I made a stupid mistake the first time, so I went through this cycle twice and finished down about 16 bucks.

It’s not all bad though. I was surprisingly pleased to hold my book in my hand, as it felt like I had accomplished something. Also, in print form, the same old sentences become more authoritative and strangely convincing. Online, they look like stuff that some guy posted on some random website.

Preparing the book took much longer than expected. I had mentioned to a reader that I was considering making a book. I tried follow advice he gave me so it would look less amateurish. I cut a chapter and an appendix. I added an index. I renamed headings so they were more descriptive. I replaced all variables (e.g. "SHA1_HASH") in the command-line examples with values (e.g. "1b6d"). I selected a 6 inch by 9 inch form factor, which meant I had to shorten some lines to get them to fit. While doing all this, I found poorly spelled words, poorly worded paragraphs and poorly organized sections. I doubt I caught them all.

To avoid further delays, I used their Easy Cover Creator. Perhaps I’ll revisit this eventually, as I want a more spartan look: something like Kernighan and Ritchie’s "The C programming language". Or perhaps a sort of cheat sheet so the book would be useful even while shut.

I set the price to $9.95 USD, which means I get 2 bucks or so per sale. I considered a lower price, but I’ll be lucky to make my $16 back as it is! Still, it ought to be low enough that a buyer won’t be too annoyed when they find out the material is freely available on my homepage. (I would have linked to the free version from the book description, but this is forbidden.)

AsciiDoc, xsltproc, fop

I had some trouble with my tool chain that produces PDFs from text files. AsciiDoc produces a DocBook XML file out of the source text, which xsltproc turns into an XSL-FO file, which fop renders into a PDF. The design of the various formats probably have technical merit, but I found it difficult to figure out how to get what I wanted.

For example, I replaced variables with values because I could not italicize them easily with AsciiDoc. The only methods I discovered destroyed the natural beauty of the source text.

It seems the smaller the detail, the larger the effort required to tune it. Changing page sizes, font sizes and chapter heading styles was easy enough to figure out, but I still don’t know the right way to insert a blank page after the front matter so the first chapter starts on an odd page. I gave up editing some XSL file or other. Instead, I scripted a fragile search-and-replace on the XSL-FO output.

Nonetheless, I stand by my choices. There’s something appealing about source files which resemble old-school text files. Also, once the configuration nightmare is over, editing is simple: I can use any text editor, and the tool chain will automatically produce several HTML versions as well as a reasonable PDF for a book.

Shameless plug

I couldn’t possibly end this post without a link to my book: "Git Magic". It’s the most important book you’ll ever have, or my name is not Winston! Buy it now!