Joshua Go

Money makes the world go 'round. No matter how many of these heart-breaking letters Doctors without Borders, the Grameen Bank, or Amnesty International send me, I won't have anywhere near enough in the foreseeable future to send much to all of them. I can only pick one at a time. I once read that good entrepreneurs are inherently insecure people — that they're insecure about their material wealth and status, and so they work hard to acquire more, and are never satisfied. In this sense, I worry about my own effectiveness as an entrepreneur, because if that greed is what has to serve as the driving force or the fire or the motivation — whatever you wish to call it — then I am severely lacking it. It's commonly accepted that the most powerful force that can drive a man is self-interest. Now, the only reason I see for amassing billions in personal wealth is to make the world a better place. I'm a little embarrassed to admit such a touchy-feely motivation — I like to ...

Last week, I went to Guangzhou, China for the 101st China Import and Export Fair (中国进出口商品交易会) . Here's the view from our 18th floor hotel room. We got a better deal on our hotel than most of the other visitors because my father's friend is from Guangzhou. This friend's sister-in-law is a hotel manager. Everything in China just has to be huge. The big heavy machinery was necessarily outside. Here's a forklift company with shiny forklifts. I have no idea what this power company does, but they had a nice booth. Because of the immense size of the fair and all the heavy catalogs I was carrying around, I had to step outside to rest my feet and my shoulders for a bit. This is the place right by the street where people were allowed to step outside for a quick smoke. The following is a large expanse that they were just preparing for the second phase of the trade fair. Inside the complex, there were even more displays, but the booths were far smaller. Here's my father at the ...

For as long as I can remember, I've been excited about environmentally-friendly solutions. For energy, my dream for clean energy centered around solar and wind power. For barren soil, it was composting. For everyday fuel, I thought of renewable sources such as ethanol or hydrogen. Now I'm glad it's becoming more widely adopted; I thought I'd never see the day when such things would actually become economically feasible. There's an ethanol craze sweeping America at the moment, and I hadn't bothered to read much about it until this week's Economist leader, "Castro was right," pointed out that there are two main ways of producing ethanol on an industrial scale: corn and sugar. Ethanol advocates often point to Brazil as a shining example of a large country that uses ethanol on a large scale. Knowing that Brazil is doing fine with massive ethanol deployment made me more excited about having it in the United States, until I found out that their ethanol i...

I'm really into writing documentation, and very often, this documentation must include code samples. I wanted a JavaScript syntax highlighter that: involved very little hassle in setting up, worked like a real parser using parse trees to ensure accurate highlighting, and provided decent coverage of the most common programming languages in use today. Obviously, by opting to go with a JavaScript syntax highlighter, I chose to forgo the option of doing my syntax highlighting on the server side. Doing it on the server side still interests me, but for immediate and practical reasons, the quickest way to get syntax highlighting in my documentation would be to do it on the client side. I went searching around for JavaScript syntax highlighters, and these are the top three that met my criteria. Javascript code prettifier . This was the first decent one that I found. It's pretty basic but I got up and running very quickly. The documentation is sparse and the tone of the README quite ter...

Back when I was writing software that ran on HP LaserJet printers, I hated having to wait 45 minutes for one-line changes to compile (in a ClearCase build system) and then burn to flash memory. Sometimes, a problem with the printer's behavior wouldn't even be a problem with my software. It would sometimes be caused by an obscure bug in the hardware. Because of time to market pressures, the team would have to work with prototype hardware, the design of which wasn't even finalized yet. The guys who wrote the low-level code had to write some registers and hack their way around hardware defects. Somehow, it seemed wrong to me that I should constantly be worrying about the integrity of the underlying hardware or the operating system on which my software ran. I should have been able to take it for granted. I longed for the day when I could instead work on web applications, where I could safely assume that the hardware was fine and that there were no major defects with the platfo...

Last night, I played some of my old classical music CDs — good music to program to. The songs skipped every other second because of the scratches on the discs. It appeared that my careless handling of CDs over the years eventually caught up with me. Tonight, I ripped some of these to Ogg Vorbis (an open and royalty-free file format similar to MP3) to see if I could listen to my songs without the skipping. Sure enough, they were all smooth! Now, none of this is stuff that I'm terribly surprised about, but it just served as a reminder to me that relying only on physical media to store data is a little dangerous, especially when the medium goes bad or acts flaky. The lifetime of information on the network is short, but as long as it's out there, stored and accessed frequently, it's constantly being duplicated and refreshed. Information that's alive and circulating is healthy information.

This month's Harvard Business Review contains an apt and timely article, "Leading Clever People." Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones define clever people as "the handful of employees whose ideas, knowledge, and skills give them the potential to produce disproportionate value from the resources their organizations make available to them." Still, this doesn't mean that they're better off working on their own. One of the people they quoted, the head of development for a global accounting firm, stated that clever people "can be sources of great ideas, but unless they have systems and discipline they may deliver very little." One good point they made about managing clever folks is the importance of demonstrating that you're an expert in your own right. This is to establish credibility and respect. At the same time, one mustn't be so above-and-beyond or in-your-face so as to discourage the real talent. Read "Leading Clever People" at HBR. ...