Category Archives: Books

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

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John Gray appeared on Season 2, Episode 3 of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!, during which Penn quipped “I guess the title ‘We’re all people and should be treated with love and respect’ just wouldn’t fit on the book spine”.

In Futurama, “It is true what they say: Women are from Omicron Persei 7, men are from Omicron Persei 9.” In one episode Amy is also seen reading a book titled “Martians are from Mars, Venusians are from Venus.”

— Wikipedia

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2010.12.26 Sunday ACHK

Free for All

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Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans
by Peter Wayner

The pdf file of this book is available on the author’s website.
— Me@2010.12.18
2010.12.18 Saturday ACHK

The Sims

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The Sims:

In addition, the game includes a very advanced architecture system. The game was originally designed as an architecture simulation alone, with the Sims there only to evaluate the houses, but during development it was decided that the Sims were more interesting than originally anticipated and their initially limited role in the game was developed further.

Flickr:

Flickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company that launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp’s Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.

Early versions of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities. There was also an emphasis on collecting images found on the web rather than photographs taken by users. The successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It was eventually dropped as Flickr’s backend systems evolved away from the Game Neverending’s codebase.

— Wikipedia

— Me@2010.01.18

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2010.12.16 Thursday ACHK

Apple II

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The Apple II really started the whole gaming industry, because it was the first time a computer had been built with sound, paddles, color, graphics—all the things for games. And it was really so that I could implement Breakout in software.

— Steve Wozniak

— Founders at Work

2010.12.03 Friday ACHK

The Prestige

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死亡魔法

Copyrighted by respective owner.
Do not use this image commercially.

The Prestige 令我心緒不寧. 一套戲, 竟然可以有百幾條伏線.

初中時, 我有學過少少魔術, 可惜沒有開花結果.

或者, 科學就是真正的魔術.

— Me@2009.02.27

2010.11.27 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

BBC Brain Story

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As we get older, our world become more personalized, that’s why old people feel that the world is smaller.

— BBC Brain Story

Episode 1: All in the Mind
Episode 2: In the Heat of the Moment
Episode 3: The Mind’s Eye
Episode 4: First Among Equals
Episode 5: Growing the Mind
Episode 6: The Final Mystery

2010.11.20 Saturday ACHK

How To Win Friends and Influence People

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The one book we encourage startup founders to read is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. It’s critically important for anyone in business. Try to get a used copy printed before the 1960s; after Carnegie died, the book continued to be “updated” by a committee, and the changes were not for the better.

— Paul Graham

I read this book in 1997, when I was 17. I cannot survive without this book.

— Me@2010.11.06

2010.11.06 Saturday ACHK

Hackers & Painters 3

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1. How to Start a Startup.
  Build something users love, and spend less than you make.

2. Startups in 13 Sentences.
  Above all, understand your users.

3. Hiring is Obsolete.
  The market is a lot more discerning than any employer.

4. How to Make Wealth.
  To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.

5. You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss.
  Startup founders seem to be working in a way that’s more natural for humans.

6. Why to Not Not Start a Startup.
  All the reasons you aren’t doing it, and why most (but not all) should be ignored.

7. Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy.
  It’s the people that matter.

8. A Student’s Guide to Startups.
  Starting a startup could well become as popular as grad school.

9. Ideas for Startups.
  The initial idea is not a blueprint, but a question.

10. Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas.
  A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make, is extraordinarily powerful.

11. Be Relentlessly Resourceful.
  You have to keep trying new things.

12. The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups.
  If you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed.

13. The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
  Some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.

14. How to Fund a Startup.
  Venture funding works like gears.

15. The Hacker’s Guide to Investors.
  Hackers don’t know how little they know about this strange world.

16. How to Present to Investors.
  Explain what you’re doing and why users will want it.

17. The Equity Equation.
  You should always feel richer after trading equity.

18. A Fundraising Survival Guide.
  Founders have to treat raising money as a dangerous process.

19. The Venture Capital Squeeze.
  Why not let the founders have that first million, or at least half million?

20. The Other Road Ahead.
  You may not believe it, but I promise you, Microsoft is scared of you.

21. How Not to Die.
  Startups run on morale.

22. What Business Can Learn from Open Source.
  There may be more pain in your own company, but it won’t hurt as much.

23. What the Bubble Got Right.
  Even a small increase in the rate at which good ideas win would be a momentous change.

24. The High-Res Society.
  The economy of the future will be a fluid network of smaller, independent units.

— Y Combinator Startup Library

2010.11.04 Thursday ACHK

Groundhog Day

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電影與現實 4 | 偷天情緣 | 月黑高飛 | The Shawshank Redemption 

Murray plays Phil Connors, an egocentric Pittsburgh TV weatherman who, during a hated assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, finds himself repeating the same day over and over again.

— Wikipedia on Groundhog Day (film)

The day is not repeated if you know that it is repeated. If you know that it is repeated, you are already different. You can keep improving yourself until the time loop is broken.

— Me@2010.10.31

Phil wakes up the next morning and finds the time loop is broken; it is now February 3 and Rita is still with him. Phil is a different person than he was on February 1 and, after going outside, Phil and Rita talk about living in Punxsutawney together.

— Wikipedia on Groundhog Day (film)

2010.10.31 Sunday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Halcyon Days

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Developing game concepts is like getting wet in the rain, if you know the technology backwards and forwards, and know what market segment you are trying to amuse with the technology.

Since I had been involved in the whole development of the hardware and had been explaining microprocessors to the world for several years, the only question was which market segment Magnavox wanted to address next. They would say “boys,” and I would say lets blow something up and have it come after you if you miss; any playground would tell you the same thing. They would say “moms,” and I would say lets do educational games. When they said “dads,” the strategy board games were born on the back of a cocktail napkin.

— Ed Averett

— Halcyon Days (book)

— James Hague

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2010.10.05 Tuesday ACHK

What Color Is Your Parachute?

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What Color Is Your Parachute? is a job-hunting how-to book, but written with the style of a philosophy book. If you are an undergraduate student, read this book at least 1 year before graduation.

The ones I have read are the 2005 and 2007 editions.

— Me@2010.10.02

2010.10.02 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Getting What You Came For

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The Smart Student’s Guide to Earning an M.A. or a Ph.D.

by Robert L. Peters

If you are an undergraduate student, and you plan to go to graduate school, read this book at least 1.5 years before that.

— Me@2010.09.25

2010.09.25 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

I am a Strange Loop

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I am a Strange Loop answers the question “Who am I?”

— Me@2010.09.18

The Buddha attacked all attempts to conceive of a fixed self, while stating that holding the view “I have no self” is also mistaken. This is an example of the middle way charted by the Buddha.

— Wikipedia on Personal identity (philosophy)

2010.09.18 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK