Personal Update

Public service announcement! Tadaaa, this is Ida:


Ida is my girlfriend.


(This is my mum. Don't worry, mum, Ida is nice!)


I like Ida very much. We see here how she demonstrates the relative shortness of a Lamborghini.


Ida makes me very happy. :3


Ida is in Kuching at the moment, while I am at Singapore. She is going to London in September.


I no like LDRs. But there is one good thing about them.


Arrivals are made more awesome by waiting the distance. I am excited to go back to Kuching to be with Ida! I miss her so. <3

Minor Update

So here's a quick update: I have three more exams to go: Narrative, Chemistry and Software Engineering. All due next week.

I've probably failed my calculus exam a second time in a row, this time due to a combination of idiocy, gastritis (or whatever it is; Zakil tells me that it's an odd combination of symptoms that he can't place) and math phobia.

The summer holidays are up soon, which I think of as an excellent opportunity to spend time with loved ones, learn new things (Tornado webservers, anyone?), and work on Pandamian.

Speaking of which, Pandamian's a top five regional finalist for Meltwater's Movers and Shapers competition. The team's flying to Hong Kong on the 17th of May; I'll be missing out on that trip because I'll be back in Kuching on the 15th. But I intend to put in a full week of co-development before coming back.

Will be speaking for a little bit at the Singapore Startup Weekend this Saturday; Meng was really kind when he invited me over to share my experience with Pandamian. Am looking forward to an hour amongst startup-ish people, a free lunch, and then back to studying I go.

Sometimes

"Have you been to the library recently?" I ask Yipeng and Shawn. We are studying at the COM1 basement, books and papers strewn across the tabletops.

"Uhh. No." says Yipeng. "The last time I went to the library was last semester."

"They had this sign at the main entrance."


A pause.

"Sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice, coming to a Singaporean university."

Yipeng looks up from his papers, looking stressed. "Yes, sometimes I wonder that too."

Things I Like About Computer Science

I bumped into my Form 6 Physics teacher Pn Loh late last year, while at St Thomas's to teach debate. She looked harried, but smiled and stopped for quick chat.

"Oh hello!" she said, "What are you doing now?"

"Err ... holiday," I replied. "Here to teach debate for the afternoon."

"Oh, no, I mean what are you studying?"

"Computer science. NUS."

Pn Loh's eyes popped. "Wahh!!" she exclaimed. "How did you get in ahh?!"

"I also dunno." I say, but amused. We talk a bit more, and then she went off. But not before turning and saying: "Oh you know, maybe you should come back and talk to some of our Form 6 student here. They don't really know — I don't think many people here know — this computer computer thing."

Well I do know a thing or two about this computer computer thing. Here are a couple of things I like about it:

1. The Newtons Are Still Alive
There's this thing in Computer Science called object-oriented programming. The person who sort-of invented it (or most of its current ideas, and in particular modularization) is a woman called Barbara Liskov, winner of the 2008 Turing Award. She was my professor's PhD supervisor at MIT.

Computer science is such a young field that most of its legends are still around, teaching in the faculties of the various universities worldwide (though most of them, admittedly, are in the US). This youth means two things:

1) Big chunks of what you'll learn in computer science is wrong. You know this, your professors know this, but it's still slightly exciting to think that so much about compsci are still things that are horrendously broken, and in need of a fix.

2) You are still able to talk to the legends. Physicists can't talk to Newton or Einstein, but if you're in computer science it's still possible to find the equivalents, learn from them, and take them out to lunch.

(While I was at the Internet Archive I bumped into Ted Nelson, the inventor of Hypertext. I was showing his wife the Archive's new Javascript-based ebook reader, when he came wandering over. His wife introduced us. "Hi, I'm Ted. I did Xanadu. I invented Hypertext. You know — HTML?" He was eating sushi.)

2. Nobody Really Knows What You're Doing
This is slightly frustrating, but also slightly funny. A famous introductory lecture at MIT describes Computer Science as such: "Computer science has nothing to do with computers. And it's not really a science."

To your friends and relatives, being in compsci means that you're the guy they turn to when they have a problem with their computers. I use a Mac, and often have no idea as to how to best fix their Windows machine. (Most compsci majors use Unix systems, by the way. That means Linux or Mac. Rarely Windows).

The simplest way I can describe computer science to a non-techie friend is to say that compsci's a lot like add math. In primary school, we weren't allowed to use calculators to do our math. In secondary school, we were — but the math problems became so difficult that using calculators didn't help us as much. Computers are the most powerful calculators of all. Like add math, we're more interested in the potential problems we can solve with them than with the calculator itself.

(An apt analogy is that calling computer science "computer science" is a little like calling biology "microscope science". Like many biologists, we can't really help you if you've got a problem with your microscope.)

3) Has Created The Most Number of Billionaires Under 30
During the railroad revolution a disproportionately large number of people who became rich were in the railroad industry (or in other complementary industries such as steel; see: Andrew Carnegie). The same thing is happening in the digital industry today: the people who are creating the most value in the world are the ones either working on or with the Internet.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Kevin Kelly, in his 1999 book New Rules For The New Economy, points out that the Internet is essentially a communications accelerator. This is important because communication isn't just one part of the economy; communication is the economy. In simple terms, anything that accelerates communication accelerates the economy (or at least disrupts the power structures within it). And this has proven to be true: almost every industry that has come into contact with the Internet has been irrevocably changed, often with chaotic, ugly results.

Newspapers are struggling to make money. Music labels are going to hell, and blaming digital piracy for the disruption of their business models (they're wrong, but this isn't immediately clear if you haven't been thinking about the problem for a long-enough amount of time). Publishing, which I work in, is being slowly disrupted by the coming ebook revolution, which prices ebooks at less than 20% of the current retail price.

This chaos presents an unparalleled opportunity for anyone with the guts and the brains to build the (digital) economic structures of the future. It's not going to happen immediately — I started writing and thinking about the digital book-future four years ago, and much of it has yet to happen — but if you're daring enough, and smart enough, you can very well shape the fabric of the future. (And get rich in the process; but that's secondary to making the world a better place, isn't it?)

4) Has The Largest Potential For Empowering Social Change
Exhibit A: in the aftermath of the 2008 Kenyan elections, blogger Ory Okolloh put a call out to her readers: “Guys looking to do something: Any techies out there willing to do a mash up of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?” The NYTimes reports:

A few days later, Kenyans had a Web site that allowed people to text or e-mail reports and see them plotted on a Google map of the country. It became useful not only for rapid intervention, but — as the name suggests — to document the deaths, injuries and destruction when virtually all other media were blacked out.

The software they built is now an open source project called Usahidi. It's been used in just about every disaster since: two hours after the Haiti earthquakes, Usahidi set up a Haiti site and got a Usahidi compsci student at Tuft's University to organize a group of 300 volunteers. Radio stations in Haiti then got listeners to text in reports, which thousands of US-based volunteers then translated and aggregated to the maps on the Usahidi site. Any report requiring immediate action (from a trapped person, for example) was forwarded to the closest rescue team, again through Usahidi software.

Usahidi has been used to catalog and report election fraud in Mexico, report damage caused by the Gulf spill, and organize efforts around medicine shortages in Uganda. Something to think about: why haven't we used Usahidi to catalog and organize election efforts in Malaysia?

Accelerated, accessible communication changes just about everything it comes into contact with. Recent revolutions were powered by Facebook and Twitter (in Egypt, organizers got tips from Tunisian revolutionaries through Facebook as to how to resist tear gas). And the enablers of this change will very much be the builders of the digital world: the computer scientists, the engineers, and the programmers working on the technology to connect people in new and often surprisingly novel ways. Some of them are working in Google and Facebook, but many more in universities and startups around the world.

But what does communication have to do with computer science? There are a couple of things. For instance, as the web has become more 'real-time', so the technologies written to support it have to adapt to the speed of transfer. Facebook's feed, for instance, is updated so frequently it has to use a non-relational database system called Cassandra. NoSQL datastores are fairly new in computer science, and it's not entirely certain how they'd do in most production environments. (There are many more other challenges, but I'll not go into detail here)

The point is: I am a computer science student in an era where so many things are being thrown into chaos by a digital shift. It's exciting, it's young and it's scary, but it's also what I like most about my field.

The Death Of Advice

Two years ago, if you'd asked me advice on what to do after college, or how to succeed in life, I'd have given you a set of straight answers I believed to be true. "Find your passion." I'd say. "Study what you love in Uni." "Learn to take the initiative." "Work hard."

All of them obvious things we've been told, as kids, at one point in time or another. But the funny thing is that — with experience — I'm now no longer as certain as I was back then. A couple of juniors asked me a year back, during the summer holidays: "What do you think I should do in university?" And my answer was "It depends ..." with a guilty shrug appended at the end.

Consider the four bits of advice I've listed above:

"Find your passion." sounds simple enough — if you do what you're passionate about, you'll be good at it, and you'll be set for the rest of your life. Right? No, not really. The problem with this is that it's really hard to find out what you're a) good at and b) passionate about plus c) it being a field that's lucrative enough for you to live your life the way you want to (notice that I said enough — how much you live by is really up to you). Whether you find all three is a matter of randomness. If you're lucky you'd discover what you love to do at a relatively early age. Or you may take 40 years. Or you give up on one of the three. There's no good way to tell.

(Worse, history is littered by people who found their passion early and failed miserably.)

"Study what you love in Uni", too, sounds nice, until you realize that many of the same objections that applied to the first nugget apply to this bit of 'wisdom' too. I love what I'm studying in University — but how I stumbled into my field is more luck than anything else. And so what do you tell the hundreds of students who aren't studying what they love? To shove off? That's not true, now, is it? There are hundreds of people who leveraged a course they hated and changed to happy careers later in their lives. Whether you hate what you're studying in University doesn't seem to matter — unless you want it to.

"Learn to take the initiative." used to be a general principle you'd assume to some degree of certainty would lead to success. But the world doesn't like certainty. I can think of a half dozen people who never took the initiative and yet have had awesome things happen to them; they were at the right place at the right time. Others do so but aren't rewarded with much worldly success. So initiative and drive aren't guaranteed metrics of success, either.

"Work hard" is a lie. You don't necessarily have to work hard to succeed. This is because there are different kinds of work, and therefore different kinds of returns. A builder hammering nails into the wooden structure of a house earns as much money as he hammers nails; a computer programmer writes software once and lives off its revenues for ten years afterwards.

I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that: for every bit of advice that someone gives you, there is always a counter-example to disprove the rule. Work hard ... except when you don't need to. Find your passion ... except for when you become successful on something you hate. Study something you love, except when studying a field you dislike leads you to an opportunity you've never dreamed of.

My mind clogs up with edge cases when someone asks me for advice, today. I realize now that there are no simple rules in life. The only one that's served me well isn't really advice — and so I hesitate to give it to other people:

Make the best out of what you're given.

Or, put another way: always choose the local maxima.

What I mean by this is that, when at a crossroads — don't think too far ahead. Just pick what gives you more opportunities. For instance, when faced with a choice to study Economics or Math in university, pick Math, because Math gives you more opportunities (you can study Economics at graduate level with a Math degree, but not vice versa). When faced with the spectre of Matriculation vs Form 6, pick Form 6. When faced with the opportunity to go to San Francisco to speak to a private gathering of influential technologists or stay in Singapore and study for exams ... choose to fight for San Francisco.

'Choose the local maxima' isn't exactly life advice, because you're making things up as you go along.

Much of my life (so far) has been like this, I think. I started debating because I thought it would be useful to be persuasive. I then thought to put those argumentative skills to use when I started writing a blog on digital fiction, because I thought it was an interesting, unexplored field. This blog then led me to think about some unsolvable problems in digital publishing, and act on them in 2008, with the creation of the Web Fiction Guide. My frustration at my inability to program led me to choose Computer Science for university, a field which I now love. My work with Novelr got me into NUS despite my bad grades. Novelr's community — now 600-700 strong, led me to create a company to solve some of the more annoying problems I'd been struggling with for the good part of four years. The creation of that company (and the clarity of ideas behind it) led me to an invitation to a private gathering of ebook technologists in San Francisco. I am now committed to solving some intractably difficult problems in publishing — problems that very well may take 30, 40 years of my life to see through. In short: I know what I want to do for the future. And it's all luck. That, and following the local maxima.

Of course, I'm not saying that my life if guaranteed to turn out well. Life is random, after all. But the principle still applies: if you fail an exam, or flunk college, or drop out, or find yourself in a bad place, choosing the local maxima is almost always the best thing to do. There is, after all, this saying about life and lemons ...

I'm tired now, and chronically sleep-deprived, and am writing this only to relax after a solid 24 hours of assignment hell. I'm not even sure if I make sense. But I do think this is true, and I hope you've found it interesting. Thanks for reading.

(Note: I'm Christian, and so what I really mean by 'luck' is God's grace, and what I mean by success I mean worldly success — something that isn't as important to a Christian as fellowship with God. But if you're secular, or from another religion, ignore this. Just understand that I'm actually thinking about different things.)

The Cat's Chair, Interactive Edition

I spent the whole of yesterday working on this: The Cat's Chair. It's a 2009 (or was it 2008?) short story that I wrote, which I've now taken and converted into a semi-interactive digital reading experience.

From the about page:

This project is an exercise in character. I have no control over the names each reader may choose to use for their reading of the story — or, indeed, should they choose not to set names of their own and read the story with names chosen by the reader before them.

This naturally makes it tricky for a reader to refer to the characters of the story — for instance, how might I talk of the protagonist if her name changes with every reading? How am I to talk about the Evil Cat (the antagonist in this piece) when his name changes according to the whims of a reader?

The Cat's Chair, written under the pseudonym Eli James in 2009, has been edited no less than five times, and once more in preparation for this project. It has an off-beat, quirky tone to it; something that I have attempted to maintain despite the change in medium.

My hope is that your reading of this narrative would be truly unique, small as these differences may be. For we do know that names do change our perception of character; The Cat's Chair is written to be geographically neutral, and it doesn't take much imagination for the story to change, should one enterprising reader switch all the names to Russian!

I'd love it if you give it a try — I, for one, think that all the cats in the story are rather cute.

Courage, My Friend

I'm programming right now, so I'll make this quick — just to record a few thoughts I had this morning.

I learned today that St Thomas's Junior Team dropped out from Swinburne WSDC, because a member of theirs got scared and pulled out from the team. As a debate coach, I used to find this sort of thing despicable. (I still do, to be honest). With that said, there isn't anything new about this when you're working with high school kids. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to sit down with a scared first-timer, and talk to him into joining a competition. "It'll be alright." I tell him. "You'll thank me for the experience." (The ones who do go almost always do).

Sometimes they listen, and go to Swinburne, pale-faced and clammy at the start of the tournament. Other times they make some lame excuse and drop out, and let their team-mates, their school, and their coach down.

The funny thing about these kids is that I find the ones who dared — the ones who were brave enough to go, who were willing to swallow their fear and fight for their school — more impressive as individuals. And almost everyone I've met in Uni who've done cool things have this element of facing up to their fears and conquering them. Regardless of whether it's applying for a scholarship, or applying for an internship (I have two friends who are going to intern at Facebook, and then later Google, this summer), or tackling some new problem in a field they know little about.

Now, I'm not saying that the kids who don't conquer their fears would end up as failures in life. Life is too long and too random to predict anything of the sort. (It's fair to assume that some of them would come into their own in Uni, after all — and I really hope that they do). But by and large, I'd say that the people who matter — the ones who change things, in the world — are the ones who face their fears, swallow bile, and conquer them.

In this way, all the kids who attended Swinburne today are winners. Each and every single one of them. The ones who dropped out of WSDC— or worse, the ones who dropped out and caused their team-mates the opportunity of going and learning — are the real losers of this tournament. My only hope is that they grow up to realize that.

The Debate Letters

In 2009 I was in my second year of teaching debate at SMK St Thomas's. During that time, I began writing weekly letters to the Thomians, as an aid to the things that I was teaching them at the regular training sessions. I called them 'The Debate Letters', and intended them to be a syllabus for debate training in the school after I left.

(I did most of the writing, but Paul helped me design the structure of the syllabus - e.g.: which concepts to teach first, and so on.)

Three years on and these letters have proven their worth: St Thomas's went to the semi-finals last year, and are now regarded as worthy opponents in Swinburne's WSDC Tournament. A number of other schools got their paws on the letters: St Colomba in Miri use them for training, and St Mary's had them by default, seeing as I was coaching both St Mae and St Thom for a time. I'm also fairly certain Batu Lintang and Kuching High have a copy, though I'm not certain as to their dissemination or use.

I am, today, on the eve of the 2011 Swinburne WSDC tournament, making these letters available to all schools. You may read them here. I've actually been considering this for a few years now: if the debate letters has been so helpful to the three schools who use it, why not make it open and give all other institutions the benefit of this experience?

I have two main reasons for doing this:

1) A rising tide raises all ships. If all the debate teams in Kuching improve, then St Thomas's, too, would benefit. There is no joy in debating in an environment where crap teams win because of crap adjudicators. The more teams recognize quality debating when they see it, the better off everyone would be.

2) This is in line with my debate philosophy: I teach debate not merely because I like the sport, but because I believe it's a wonderful tool with which you may teach kids the elements of critical thinking. And God knows, we need more critical thinkers in Malaysia.

Print it, read it, copy it, modify it to suit your needs. And please, if you're reading my blog, I'd appreciate it if you spread this to as many debators in as many schools as possible.

JK

I was about to turn in for bed yesterday when I realized: I'm no longer invested in my country's political process. I don't care who wins, or who loses. The Anwar sex tape scandal feels like a joke, played out by actors on a worn-out stage. I don't read Malaysian newspapers, and I can't be bothered to give a damn about the stupid things our politicians say in public (and there are too many instances to count ...)

The Malaysian government's stupidity is a norm now, not an exception. But we all know that. I suppose I'm jaded and cynical and tired out by the whole process, and that I should care, but I can't bring myself to.

My country is a joke.