NabaTech

Diet and Weight—The Body Has a Mind of Its Own

It’s so hard to lose weight and, once you have lost the weight, to keep the weight steady! Of course, the theory is to take in fewer calories and expend a bit more calories by exercising. Taking in fewer calories (by cutting down food) seems easy, but I think the body has a mind of its own. It’s constantly on the lookout for any attempt on your part to reduce the calories it wants and it wants a lot more than it needs! When I tried to lose weight by cutting down on my food intake, the body always found a way to make up for it. If I skimped on breakfast and lunch, I simply ended up eating a lot more at dinner. If I lowered calories uniformly, the body seemed to adjust to the lower intake and adjust who knows what so I still stayed the same weight.

When I started losing weight, what worked for me was a sudden change in the composition of the diet coupled with slight escalation in the amount of exercise. My wife drastically cut down the carbohydrates in our diet, but—and this is the key—kept the volume of food about the same by replacing the carbs (rice, noodle, potatoes, etc) with vegetables (lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, etc.). The point is that the diet composition changed, but I ate similar volume as before. I also made sure that I ate a good breakfast and a meal about every five hours. I think the sudden diet change took my body by surprise and before it could figure out what’s going on, my weight already dropped by nearly 40 pounds. Of course, my body quickly adjusted to a new steady-state weight. To stay at the current lower weight, I continue a similar lower-carb diet (with enough volume of food) and steady exercise. To avoid the hunger pangs, I eat at regular intervals and snack on mixed nuts (almonds, cashews, peanuts—only the unsalted kind). And I drink lots of black tea. It’s going well so far, but I have to watch out constantly for my wily body. I’m afraid the moment I drop my guard, the body is going to stock up on calories and pick up some extra pounds!

See also: Diet and Exercise: What’s the Program Doc? NPR recently aired a story on why we gravitate towards unhealthy food—Jonesing for Fries? Blame the Cave Men

Tags: healthy living diet exercise low-carb weight loss

Google, Amazon, Yahoo, ... as the New Content Intermediaries

Commenting on one of his recent posts on whether self-publishing changes all the rules, Tim O'Reilly's noted that the middlemen never go away; technology just changes the middlemen. His observation certainly rings true and it’s really not a problem because we need the middlemen. As someone capable of producing content that the market might want, I have been wondering how I could get paid for at least some of my content in the new world of tagged content. It seems easy for authors to become online content creator/provider, but we need intermediaries to get content to the paying customers, deliver the content in a format that the customer wants, collect the payment, and apportion the payments among various content creators/providers. Here’s a simplified diagram illustrating the new content intermediary:

The content still stays under each author’s control, but I am envisioning an automated process where the intermediary’s systems can gather relevant pieces of content from different providers based on what a customer needs. The intermediary enables customers to search the content, browse catalogs, view rankings based on third-party reviews or sales rankings, and mix and match to create a custom set of chunks of content. Perhaps the customer can even decide in what format she wants the content—print or any one of several eBook formats—and all these are generated on the fly from the tagged content. (Print version could be done by the intermediary’s print-on-demand system.) The intermediary takes care of accepting payment from the customer and keeping track of sales for all content providers, and making payments to the providers. Nothing that revolutionary in the concept except that we probably need some tags for providing pricing information for content. Do we also need any standard taxonomy for the tags or could the intermediary discover these through online indexing of the content? These are some of the details that a prospective content intermediary needs to work out.

Who could be these new content intermediaries? Well, you know the potential players already—Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc. and perhaps some of the current book publishers would become the new intermediaries (publishers could also be content aggregators that feed the content intermediary that sells to the public). The new twist is that we’d have a new way of selling smaller chunks of content instead of today’s model of one bookful at a time.

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books content intermediary trends

Enterprise Architecture—Part #4: Developing the Architecture

In previous posts I talked about making sure that you think of an “enterprise” as a business undertaking and then figure out the enterprises comprising your own organization before you start developing the enterprise architecture (EA) of each enterprise. I find it helpful to begin the whole EA process with an operational context that shows all the groups of people and institutions that interacts (receives or sends information) with the organization. Here’s an example:

Next, sketch out a high-level of view of how the entire organization does everything—from recruiting employees to doing “whatever your company does” to managing the finances. The key here is to stay at a high level. You would then group related activities into categories such as “Financial Management” or “Human Resource Management”—identifying the different “enterprises” I talked about earlier. It’s helpful if you can do this in the operational context that you have already sketched—think of this step as showing us what’s inside the “Your Organization” circle in the previous figure, but at a very high level. Again, here’s an example of that view showing high-level business processes of an organization:

In addition to the diagram, you should prepare a textual description of what each of the high-level business processes do as well as the information that those processes exchange with each other. You don’t have to break down the information into specific details. In the sample diagram, I’m showing the core business of the organization generically as “Do the Work” and “Manage the Work.” You should show this in terms of your organization’s specific business activities. Next, you have to further decompose the high-level processes and show more details for each one. Assuming that some of the standard business enterprises such as human resource management and financial management will be handled by off-the-shelf systems (or maybe even outsourced), you can focus on the EA for your organization-specific enterprises—“Do The Work” and “Manage The Work”—and start developing the business architecture of each enterprise. I’ll talk about that step in another post.

Tags: enterprise architecture EA architecture IT

Trends in Popular Computer Book Topics

In the late eighties and early nineties, X Window System (X) was a hot topic and there were quite a few books about it. These books did quite well.  (On a side note, Tim O’Reilly started by publishing a set of books on the X Window System and O’Reilly still carries those early X titles in print; even my own X Window System Programming still shows up in Amazon catalog, so these titles did have some traction!) Even though X is still the windowing system underlying many GUIs on many different systems, there is no market for X books because programmers now work at higher levels of abstraction. They typically create GUI applications using a GUI builder that can spit out whatever code is needed, so most programmers don’t need to learn X or even the various GUI programming toolkits. I bring out the X Window System as an example of trends in computer book topics—as programmers move to higher levels of abstraction, some of the underlying technologies lose viability as book topics (even when they retain a niche book market). At the same time, the X example shows that when a technology is young and programmers still work at lower levels of abstraction, books covering the low-level details are probably going to do well. This observation helps point to what book topics might do well in the near future—those that focus on the highest level of abstraction of a specific technology that is being embraced by software developers. One caveat is to make sure that you are looking at the emerging trends and not what’s well entrenched.

In spite of my comments about everyone gradually moving to higher levels of abstraction, there is, however, no denying that there are basic computer topics—programming languages, operating systems, networking protocols, software architecture, and so on—that are always being sought by new waves of programmers and autodidacts who strive to learn these subjects. These basic topics will always have a demand; perhaps small, but surely steady. Computer book publishers who know how to exploit the timelessness of these basic computer books—by printing a book on each topic and keeping them available forever at a low volume or on demand—are going to do well.

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books trends

Nonlinearity of Creative Endeavors

Have you noticed how creative endeavors such as writing, programming, or designing progress nonlinearly? You don’t get the same amount of creative output for the same amount of time spent, day in day out. Sure, you can set goals—so many words a day or so many lines of code per day, but writers and programmers know that sometimes they’d finish a whole lot in one day and sometimes there may be little to show after several days of work. That’s what I mean by the nonlinearity of creative endeavors.

That’s just the way things are with creative work, but the trouble is that those who manage the creative undertaking expect a steady progress. They want twenty five percent of the pages finished and twenty five percent of a computer program written when a quarter of the allotted time has elapsed. They want the creative output to appear at a steady pace—linearly with time. It’s just simpler to manage that way. So what’s a writer or a programmer to do? At first I thought of trying to explain the concept of nonlinear progress, but I realized that that’s a lost cause. Instead, I started using the concept of buffering. You know... generate more stuff when everything seems to be going well, buffer it for the future, and dole out the creative products—pages of writing or lines of code—in a steady, linear fashion. Buffering your creative output is one way to bridge the world of creative endeavors and the linear expectations of the world that wants to manage creativity.

Self-Published Computer Books—Problem is to Convince Buyers They’re Worth Buying

We have been talking about self-publishing computer books in recent posts (see my post on Self-publishing Computer Books and Joe Wikert on Self-Publishing). In a recent post in his ePublishing blog, Brad talks about the lack of literary quality of eBooks when compared to books published by mainstream publishers and he thinks reviewers will become essential as filters for quality. Brad talked in general about eBooks; my thoughts are about self-published computer books. I have not studied enough eBooks to comment on their quality, but Brad’s conclusion seems plausible considering that the editorial process at mainstream publishers tend to improve the quality of books, but self-published books may lack the editing steps.

When it comes to self-published computer books—whether eBook or print format, the hurdle is to convince the buyer that the self-published title is of good quality and worth buying. As it is, a prospective computer book buyer already faces lots of choices when buying computer books published by mainstream publishers.  Each major publisher has at least one book, and sometimes several, covering each technical subject that has enough interest (see Joe Wikert’s post on When Is a Topic “Big” Enough to Warrant a Book?). Throw in self-published titles into the mix and the choices can get really confusing. For computer books from mainstream publishers, a buyer can at least rely on a publisher’s reputation when selecting a suitable book. Besides, the mainstream publishers’ books are more likely to be at local bookstores where potential buyers can actually thumb through the books and pick one they like.

In the end, the success of a self-published computer book seems to depend on the author’s name recognition and reputation, the word-of-mouth buzz from an established online presence, and the book’s focus on a niche subject area that the mainstream publishers have ignored. I don’t have the recipe for success with self-publishing, but I think it makes sense for aspiring self-publishers to build an online presence and focus on niche topics that are underserved by mainstream publishers. For topics that merit the attention of mainstream publishers, authors can as well approach a mainstream publisher and avail themselves of the editing services and distribution channels. The only problem is that the market may be already saturated with computer books covering those mainstream topics :-)

Note: Read Tim O'Reilly on: What do you think about self-published books?

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books trends

Running Races: Pike's Peek 10K

Montgomery County Road Runners Club (MCRRC) had their 10th annual running of the Pike's Peek 10K today. It's a nice and easy course, starting at the Shady Grove Metro Station and gradually descending down Rockville Pike all the way to the finishing line at White Flint Mall. It's a huge annual event. This year we had 2,000 runners, my daughter Ashley and me among them. It was good running weather—starting off cold (around 42°F) and sunny, but gradually turning cloudy. With 2,000 runners, they had to use ChampionChip chips for race timing and a wave start in four waves depending on pace. I had to work really hard to convince Ashley that we could manage the second wave, which was for a 6:30 to 8:00 minute a mile pace. Ashley can do a lot, but she just doesn't know it. I had to set the pace at what I imagined was between 7:30 and 8:00-minute mile. With my regular treadmill running, I think I got the rhythm of my steps down pat. We could both keep roughly less than 8-minute pace up to about 5 miles. Then we slowed a bit. In the end, Ashley finished 49:34 net time, which is about 7:59 pace and I was at 8:00 minute pace with a 49:42 finish for the 10K. This was a huge confidence boost for Ashley, which is what I liked best about today's race.

What amazes me is that a year ago I would not have imagined that I could run 10K in under 55 minutes. Somehow I got it stuck in my mind that I could do bno etter than 9 minute a mile for the 6.2 mile course. First I had to prove myself wrong by running 10Ks under 55 minutes on the treadmill and once I knew I was capable, it was just a matter of keeping the pace to finish the 10K at an 8-minute pace. Goes to show, the body can do a lot more than I ever imagined!

Note: I use this Performance Predictor at run-down.com to figure out my expected times for various distances based on results for a specific race.

Tags: healthy living diet exercise low-carb weight loss

Expect More Subscribers as More Web Browsers Include Built-in RSS/Atom Support

Subscribing to RSS/Atom feeds has really changed how I keep up with online information. After I started my own blog, I also started subscribing to other blogs—on topics such as news, book writing (computer books as well as fiction), publishing, and much more. I still search for information when I need, but because the feeds are updated periodically, I can easily catch up with the latest wave of thoughts and opinions (and only the ones I specifically want to keep up with). All the latest posts are right there in my RSS reader/aggregator. I like the idea of not having to go to individual specific Web sites to get my news and read about what's the latest in my areas of interest. Now I understand why you need an RSS feed for any online content. Without an RSS feed, you'd simply miss out on many in your potential audience who wants the steady, soothing drip-drip of their daily dose of syndicated content :-)

Speaking of subscribing to RSS feeds, the first thing I needed was an RSS reader and I did what any self-respecting Web aficionado would do—Google for "RSS Readers". In a few minutes I found out about all the popular RSS readers for the different platforms—Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Web (Web RSS aggregators are Web sites where you can read your feeds using your Web browser). I did not want to run yet another stand-alone application. Because I have several Web browsers always running, my choices were between a Web RSS reader or a reader that plugs into the Web browser. For reading feeds on the Web, Bloglines seemed like a good choice. As for a browser plugin for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), I accidentally found Pluck. After a quick download and an easy install, Pluck added a toolbar to IE6 (see figure).

I organized my subscribed feeds into folders and now I browse the feeds from a sidebar that I can toggle on or off. Anytime I visit a blog or a Web site with any XML feeds, the Feeds button on the toolbar gets activated and I can subscribe to the feed by clicking that button. All in all, Pluck seems to be working quite nicely for me, but all the extra steps of downloading and installing may be too much for many users. Luckily for those of us in blogosphere who dispense information through RSS/Atom feeds, the trend seems to be for Web browsers to support RSS/Atom feeds directly in the browser. Apple has even put RSS right in its Web browser's name: Safari RSS. And the recently-released Opera 8 Web browser lists "RSS/Atom newsfeed reader" as part of Opera Mail. Most likely Internet Explorer 7, which is in Beta 1 now, would probably include some sort of built-in support RSS/Atom feeds. That should really bring RSS/Atom feeds to the masses and with it an avalanche of new subscribers for the feeds.

Enterprise Architecture—Part #3: Four Basic Components of an EA

An architecture—the parts of something and how the parts fit together—needs many views to bring out the details. Take a building’s architecture, for instance. You have the artist’s rendition of the building, maybe a 3-D model, the engineering drawings: the plan view, the elevation view, and the other diagrams such as plumbing, electrical, data network, and so on. The same concept of multiple views applies to an enterprise architecture (EA). The following figure shows the four basic components of an EA: business, data, application, and technical architectures.

The EA for a specific business undertaking includes: (1) the business activities and information flows, (2) data that the activities create and use, (3) the structure of the applications that support the business activities, and (4) the technical infrastructure (networks, systems) that provides the platforms on which the applications run. Regardless of the framework used to document an EA, it has the four basic views that you can also refer to as architectures—business architecture, information (or data) architecture, application architecture, and technical architecture. I think it’s best to think of an EA in terms of these four basic component architectures without regard to the actual tool or framework you use to analyze and document the EA. That way you can avoid getting caught up in terminology of a framework and keep your thinking grounded in reality. Next, you have to focus on documenting the business activities and the information flows in the business area within the scope of the EA.

Tags: enterprise architecture EA architecture IT

Self-publishing Computer Books

I suspect most computer book authors have thought about self publishing at one time or another. Maybe it's because we know a bit about computers and software and we think we can do the typesetting ourselves and it's just a little more to get copies printed and distributed- - and make a bundle of profit, right? Well, maybe not. But that doesn't mean that you can't be curious about it or that some authors have not succeeded doing it on their own. You can get tons of books on self publishing, but the granddaddy of them all is Dan Poynter's book: The Self-Publishing Manual: How to Write, Print, and Sell Your Own Book. Believe it or not, it's now in its 14th Edition and I had bought my copy before the Web and Amazon existed. As the book's title suggests, Dan Poynter's book does cover all aspects of publishing a book on your own, but I never gave his advice a try. There are just too many pieces in the self-publishing puzzle and I was not sure I would have the time to do everything and still write the book. Besides, I have been lucky enough to have had a sustained long-term working relationship with a publisher.

If you are tempted to consider self-publishing, you might want to learn from the experiences of someone who has tried it recently. A good example is Srikanth Shenoy's self-published Struts Survival Guide: Basics to Best Practices—he summarized his overall experience in his blog recently. If you want to check out his book, he now offers a link to the PDF file that you can download for free (in case you are curious, he sold all print copies and broke even). You can also read David St. Lawrence's blog for another interesting first-hand experience of self-publishing as well as lots of practical advice. Even though I personally have not tried self-publishing yet, I admire those who have  given it a try!

Note: For another good account of self-publishing experience with lots of tips and tricks, visit Brian Bischof's Web site.

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books trends