Archive for March, 2005

« Older Entries

Stock Options based on Performance

Thursday, March 24th, 2005

I was writting a business plan last night in which I was proposing how equity would be divided between the founders. My first though was to split the entire worth of the company evenly between three founders. Then I added a vesting period. But then it hit me. Stock options shouldn’t be granted based on time employeed but on performance. I quickly revised my plan to grant a much smaller initial incentive to the founders and leave a larger pool for to be granted based on achieving performance goals.

I got up this morning and read PaulAllens’s blog Stock Options Vesting Based on Milestones, Not Calendar Months

This comment from Eliot W. Jacobsen on Pauls post also caught my eye
But now that companies must expense option grants and/or vesting in some cases, that disadvantage may be reduced, paving the way for more performance-based stock incentives. That would be good.

Posted in Entrepreneurs | Comments Off

Insights to CS

Monday, March 21st, 2005

Via Paul Graham:
I found, when I was studying mathematics, that 2 things were true: (1) the teacher was not too good and (2) the book was not too good. So I would always buy a half-dozen books on the topic and try to get the full picture by reading the same sections in each book. The combination helped me understand much more than the sum of the content. Also, I was never opposed to reading something as much as 10 times until I squeezed everything out of it.

I remember learning multi-variate caculus using the same techniques.

  • When it comes to integrating bleeding-edge open source technology. I have found irc.freenode.net to be very helpful.
  • Mailing lists have saved me many a time.

    • Academic papers are a lot like the mathematics books. I read Felsenstein 1984 paper on maximum likelihood calculations of phylogenetic trees and the source to PHYLIP many times before I fully understood.

Posted in Academia | Comments Off

Paul Graham: Simple and Direct

Monday, March 14th, 2005

I thoroughly enjoyed Paul’s latest post.

You need three things to create a successful startup:

  • to start with good people,
  • to make something customers actually want, and
  • to spend as little money as possible.

Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

Paul Graham makes everything seem so clear and simple. I’m convinced that we over-complicate entrepreneurship.
In summary, hard work, determination, and thrift will take you a long way on the journey of success.

Posted in Entrepreneurs | Comments Off

wchar_t, DoubleByte, MultiByte, UTF, UCS I’ve had enough

Sunday, March 13th, 2005

Yes I had to write some internationalization code on a current project.

In case you didn’t know


GNU gcc defines a wchar_t as 4 bytes


The ISO C90 standard, where wchar_t was introduced, does
not say anything specific about the representation. It only requires that
this type is capable of storing all elements of the basic character set.
Therefore it would be legitimate to define wchar_t as
char,
which might make sense for embedded systems.

But for GNU systems wchar_t is always 32 bits wide and,
therefore,
capable of representing all UCS-4 values and, therefore, covering all of
ISO 10646. Some Unix systems define wchar_t as a 16-bit
type
and thereby follow Unicode very strictly. This definition is perfectly
fine with the standard, but it also means that to represent all
characters from Unicode and ISO 10646 one has to use UTF-16 surrogate
characters, which is in fact a multi-wide-character encoding. But
resorting to multi-wide-character encoding contradicts the purpose of the
wchar_t type.

href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/intl/unicode_6bqr.asp">Microsoft VC++ defines a wchar_t as 2 bytes

If you are going to do any language internationalization I would recommend
using href="http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Generic-Conversion-Interface.html#Generic%20Conversion%20Interface">GNU
iconv library

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Rerooting rootless trees

Sunday, March 13th, 2005

I’m writing a phylogenetic inference package as part of my masters thesis. Needless to say it hasn’t been going as fast as I would like it. Tonight however I was able to locate a bug in code that reroots rootless trees at various points along the tree. This allowed simple, yet essential algorithms ( Stepwise addition and Tree bisection re-attach (TBR) ) to start to work, which was exciting. I plan on releasing my code under an open source license. If you have an interest in phylogenetic inference algorithms and software drop me a line at tewky@yahoo.com.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

IT Conversations: Audio Interview which let you meet and get to know the leaders of IT Industry

Sunday, March 13th, 2005

I discovered IT conversation through several articles at Phil Windley blog
I really enjoyed the interview with Dan Geer there.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Not Your Dad’s NetWare

Sunday, March 13th, 2005

Enterprise ITPlanet has a great article on the next version of Netware/Linux
I have always liked an admired Novell and the Netware product line. When it comes to pure file and print speed, you can’t beat it.
In the past Novell has blundered several attempts to make it “big time”.
However with SUSE and this latest announcement I believe that they have a chance.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

The Ultimate Web Development Test Engine

Sunday, March 13th, 2005

I want a web application test engine that I can use to drive all aspects of a web application.


Here is what I’ve seen and it isn’t adequate.

  • PureTest – PureTest uses a proxy server to intercept all your interactions with a web server. A script consists of ant tasks that shadow http protocol operation ( GET, POST). PureTest also permits you to write custom ant tasks to emulate more elaborate user activity.
    Pros:
    • I like the proxy intercept feature for creating initial scripts
    • Extraction tasks which allow you to set variables with strings matched out of the response body
    Cons:
    • PureTest doesn’t really provide a client solution. It is stuck in the middle
    • PureTest doesn’t preserve response bodies after initial capture for easy access to variables that you want to extract
    • I don’t want to have to compile my custom task, make sure it is in the classpath and reload to write a new component of a test. I should be able to do all that inside the app. I could probably live with java if PureTest was a Eclipse component. Eclipse would provide on the fly compilation and syntax checking and would make the java requirement resemble an interpreted scipting language rather that a compiled one.
  • HttpUnit
  • JWebUnit

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Optimizations to Phylogenetic Inference

Sunday, March 13th, 2005

I’m working on improving Phylogenetic Inference

The following are interesting member of my current literature search.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

SUSE 9.1 Live Saves the Day

Sunday, March 13th, 2005

Ok I had a server with a SATA controller with a messed up boot sector.


No sweat I have Knoppix 3.4 right.

Nope the 3.4 2.6 kernel doesn’t have SATA compiled into the kernel. Go to Jail. Do NOT pass Go. Go directly to Jail.

Enters SUSE 9.1 Live CD ( With compiled in SATA support )

I boot up and install GRUB.

Reboot and up comes the server. Life is bliss.

Posted in Linux | Comments Off

« Older Entries