From our favorite technology company, Goo gle, here comes 10 tips on how to get the best out of your skilled employees.

There are excellent ideas there, and managers would do well to consider them.
For example, “hire by committee” is the kind of ideas which would make people goes “why didn’t we think about it”. It just makes sense.

They seem to like Peter Drucker, and do exactly what Drucker said – “cater to their every need”. At their office, you’ll be able to find gyms, laundry, car wash, dry cleaning, shuttle bus, etc. Their staff, even the unmarried ones, can get all (literally) their jobs done at the office. A serious productivity boost, and something that a company as big as them can afford, considering the benefit out of it.
As an engineer myself, I know that sitting all day and pushing your brain to the limit tend to deteriorate your body. I visit a gym regularly to keep me healthy, but having the gym inside my office would really, really help indeed.

“Encourage creativity” – this may sound cliche, but their implementation of it certainly is far from it. It is, shall we say, very creative.

“Data drive decisions” however, might not always be possible. Certainly you’ll need to strive for this, but there WILL be situations when there just isn’t enough data available to make a fully informed decision. Make no mistake, as a manager, you WILL be in this situation.
There will be situations where, for example, there are several options available. To make things worse, taking the wrong decision may harm the company.

This is where another tip comes in – “strive to reach consensus”. You’ll need to involve your people on such important decision. Let them have their say heard.

However, when you fail to reach a consensus, it’s a manager’s job to decide. The buck stops at him, and so he must make the judgement, based on whatever data he has.
The employees must obey AND fully committed to make the decision a success, even if they disagree with it.
This is how a good team works.

This, however, would only be possible with a solid team, where each and every one trusts each other. To accomplish this, you’ll need to “communicate effectively”.
Team members need to be able to communicate freely to build trust. Don’t make it hard for them to do so.

Anyway, go now and read the article. You can’t afford to miss it.

Just returned from a client, yet another internet cafe converted to Linux / LTSP solution. Even after paying my consulting rate, he still saved a LOT of money by doing so, and therefore shortening the time for ROI drastically.

I’ve had a few problems though with Mandriva 2006. But it’s nothing serious, just glitches.
Some are quite strange tho. Like, how the start menu shows the image “KDE free 3.4”, but there’s no KDM in the display manager choices (there are only GDM and XDM ….)
Couldn’t create icons on the desktop – but this is probably a restriction on root account, since we can do that just fine on normal accounts.

Had problems with Compaq machines with ESS Audio drive chip (ES1869F), got around that by using sb module, thanks to this post.
But the strangest is 3Com’s 3C900B-TPO network cards, they just won’t boot to the LTSP server. When replaced by other NIC, the machine boots up normally into the server. We might have to replace these NICs.

The DHCP server doesn’t work properly, workstations are unable to get IP address from it. A friend then suggested that we used older version of dhcpd, to be exact, from Mandriva 2005. It then works without any more problem.

Mandriva 2006 seems to be quite a nice distro. Hopefully it’ll prove itself stable and reliable too for this server role.

God I am so tired. Gotta rest.

Wow… very interesting 🙂 a few articles: how to survive a riot (does happen in Indonesia, so quite relevant), how to stop a car with no brakes, survive a plummeting elevator, etc. There are a few strange ones too – how to foil alien abduction, jump from rooftop to rooftop, etc … ha ha.

All in all, makes for very interesting reading. And who knows, it may save somebody’s life too.

[ PopularMechanics.com: HOWTO survive worst-case scenarios ]

I’ve been wanting for some time now to help advocate / spread / advertise Firefox, especially on this website.
Previously, I’ve registered my family as donater to Firefox campaign. The Spread Firefox team then was able to purchase a 2-page advertising on New York Times. (click here to download it as PNG/PDF file)
But then I got busy with other things.

Then I noticed that Google has opened up their Firefox referral program to international AdSense publishers.
Wonderful – you get to advocate for your favorite browser, and got paid at the same time.

So, there goes the little Firefox button on top-right side of this blog 🙂
I noticed that the buttons are pretty small, most are only 2 – 3 kb in size. So I hope it won’t inconvenient you too much.

Right, now, does anyone knows how to make AdSense adverts show up only on English contents…?

When I was still in UK, I happened to meet a friend in Sheffield. He impressed me with a lot of things and ideas, but one thing stood out – his kids are messing around with Lego Mindstorm, and it was the first time I encountered it.

I thought I’d buy it for my kids, but it’s rather hard to find. Then I got busy with other things.

Today I read a post on Slashdot.org regarding Mindstorms and lack of its popularity in Lego. Thankfully, a poster told about a (seemingly worthy) competitor – FischerTechnik

When my kids have grown up a bit more, I’d like to buy a few pieces of this, and get them started in (robotics) engineering; and see if they’re interested on it. If not, I can always put the kit available for loan, to whoever could use it.
Heck, it may be a good idea to create a robotic club, so my kids would be more enthusiastic about this (since they’ll be doing it with others).

If you know of other good alternative to Lego Mindstorms, do feel free to comment.
Thanks.

Salah satu pertimbangan saya dalam membeli Kia Carens II (yang ternyata sucks itu) adalah karena mobil tersebut menggunakan bensin – bukan solar; dimana saya kira bensin adalah lebih ramah lingkungan daripada solar.

Ternyata, kelihatannya bensin itu justru jauh lebih beracun daripada solar, menurut artikel di Intisari tahun 2000 ini
🙁

Sekarang saya sedang berencana untuk mengganti Kia Carens II dengan sebuah mobil diesel, mungkin Panther atau Innova (versi diesel).
Ideas most welcome.

Dulu saya juga pernah menggunakan mobil diesel, yaitu Toyota Previa. Tapi saya selalu berusaha menjaga agar emisinya jauh berada di bawah ambang batas aman. Mobil ini sangat menyenangkan dalam pemakaiannya. Sayang harganya disini jauh lebih mahal daripada di UK.

Mobil diesel jadi semakin menarik saja; lebih ramah lingkungan, irit, bandel, nyaman (terutama yang telah menggunakan teknologi EFI / common rail), dan tetap berperforma tinggi (terutama yang ada turbo-nya).
Saya kira, kalau APV atau Xenia mengeluarkan versi diesel, mobil MPV bensin bisa overstock gila-gilaan karena tidak laku nih 🙂

Anyway, selamat membaca:
[ Mesin Diesel: antara mitos dan fakta ]

On the 15th November 2005, I was involved in a motorcycle accident.

I have finished my work and asked one of my staff to drive me home on the office’s motorcycle. I didn’t expect anything since he’s quite polite and well-mannered.

It started when a bus stopped on our lane. Clearly, this means that there’s another vehicle in front of that bus, most likely will be entering the opposite lane. The bus was giving way to this vehicle.
However, instead of stopping, my driver was pulling the throttle to the max, and he tried to overtook the bus. My heart stopped pounding for a while, and I thought that this would be my last moments on earth.

Thankfully, the vehicle was entering the other lane slowly, and we passed by unharmed. If only that car was going a bit faster, we’d have been dead, or at least severely wounded.

I was just about to shout at this idiot when I saw something else – there’s a girl riding motorbike in front of us, and she’s going to do a right turn.
Unfortunately, my idiot driver, probably still feeling victorious for being able to overtake so many vehicles in one go, again accelerated the bike, and tried to overtake her motorcycle from the RIGHT.

Truly, there’s no limit to human’s stupidity.

I was only able to shout “awas!!” (watch out), and the next thing I know, we were thrown pretty far away from the collision spot.

I was injured on my left arm, left leg, and minor injuries on my right leg.
There are bruises in several places. Also I was unable to use my left leg without feeling sharp pain in it.

Actually, I should suffer worse injuries on my left leg, but I was saved by the PDAir casing that was being used to enclose my Nokia 9500.
The case was badly damaged, many deep scratches and it won’t close anymore. However, my Nokia 9500 escaped the incident with no damage at all. And if it’s not there, then my upper leg would have been torn apart. Thank God.

The girl that he hit was a bit injured. When he was more concerned about my condition, despite me already saying I’m alright, I shouted to him to escort her straight away to the nearest hospital.
Thankfully, she was diagnosed only with minor injuries, and discharged from the hospital before us.

A bit more about this incident later, must rest now.
If you find it hard to contact me this past few days, here’s why. Apologies, hopefully you can understand my current situation.

A few photos:

My injuries : warning, some may find these pictures depressing. Don’t click if you can’t see rather gory images.

Wound on my left arm
Injuries on my left foot
Minor injuries on my right foot

My PDAir case:

The scratches, actually it’s pretty deep. Makes me shudder, when I remember how strong the metal is.
The whole picture
Now it can’t be closed anymore

My left leg took most of the weight when I fell, the trouser was ripped apart. Thankfully, there was the PDAir case behind it, acting like an armor for my leg.

Here’s for PDAir case : Highly recommended !

It seems that it’d be Western Digital WD4000YR. Check this out : 400 GB capacity, 16MB buffer, uses WD’s Raptor technology heavily, beats pretty much all other SATA hard disk in various benchmark, and so on.

A bit of history; I bought 2 WD Caviar SE 120 GB, the ones with the (then) phenomenal 8 MB buffer, making it the (then) fastest ATA hard disk. Unfortunately, they seems to be not very reliable, with both already dead.
Reading the review above, it seems that WD has fixed this issue.

It seems to be THE hard disk to buy if you’re a power user.
Do you agree ? Let me know.

Terkadang, saya memposting beberapa link di satu post, dan memberikan komentar-komentar untuk masing-masing link.

Untuk posting kali ini saya hanya ingin menampilkan satu link: [ I Want To… ]

Komentar saya hanya 2 kata : HARUS LIHAT ! 😀

Very useful stuff indeed. Don’t miss it.

Interesting website – it lets you catalog your books easily and conveniently.

You can then print the catalog, or save it to your own computer, or whatever.

Needless to say, I’ve opened an account there.
Check it out.

I was browsing around and decided to visit idsoftware.com after missing it for years.
My, looks like they’ve been very busy this October !

They just announced the new Wolfenstein (will be developed by Raven software). Return To Castle Wolfenstein (RTCW) had the best co-operative multiplayer game. You actually had to work together, or you will lose the game. It’s MUCH better (IMHO) than the usual deatchmatch-style games.
I was lucky enough to be in UK at that time (big Internet bandwidth), and therefore was able to enjoy many excellent multiplayer sessions online. It was an awesome experience; if you think deathmatch is great, wait until you tried co-op.
But now in Indonesia, I hope this new Wolfenstein will include a bot 🙂 so we can enjoy it without needing to connect to the Internet. It’s not as if I’d be able to play it freely though, since I’ve got way more responsibilities now….. Anyway, next:

Quake 4 !
I was looking rather warmly at it – but soon I got very interested, since it’s made by Raven software. This company has good record of creating games with excellent gameplay.
“Fight with the support of an elite squad” – so they’ve finally figured out an AI algorithm good enough for this? Good for them, RTCW:ET was released as free game because they failed to get this working on time.
So I guess this means I can also expect the new Wolfenstein to have bots in its co-op mode (hurray)

And of course DOOM: The Movie. If you ever played the game (especially DOOM 3), or just want to watch an excellent action/horror movie, you don’t want to miss this.

Well done id software.