Book Review: How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk

As a parent, have you ever wondered what could be a better solution to your child's tantrums? Do you frequently come across situations where the child asks for something and you deny it, and this keeps on repeating for 10-15 minutes until either you give in or make the child cry for another good 15 minutes till she gets distracted?

"How to Talk..." is a must read book on parenting; though it's focused more on the parents of 5-10 year olds, the advice is applicable to all sorts of dependents, in my opinion---even 25 year olds who have not started to live independently.

Look at the situation in the picture below, and compare with how the mother deals with it in a later picture in this post.

The book suggests that you deal with the situation of conflicting desires between you and your child by helping children deal with their feelings. The first step is to listen quietly and attentively to your child's concern, and thus, acknowledge their feelings. If a child is feeling hurt, he/ she _is_ hurt; denying this feeling is not a good strategy. In fact, you should give a name to their feeling so that they can understand themselves better. Without utter denial, assure the child that you understand how they feel and then follow up with other strategies.

The book is based around a set of strategies for dealing with 5 different areas: 

1. Helping Children Deal with Their Feelings
2. Engaging a Child's Cooperation
3. What to do Instead of Punishment
4. Encouraging Autonomy
5. Freeing up Children from Playing Roles

It serves you by providing lots of "case-study" sort of situations and a good collection of cartoons to help you absorb the material. Though definitely it's not without flaws, these strategies are better than making up your own--which could be several years from now (and thus, would apply only to your grandchildren).

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[1] The book on amazon.com

Do you suffer from anxiety? Have you ever given it a thought?

Sad 3D Man

Have you ever tried to avoid a situation and wished that you had another way of dealing with it? Is it a recurring theme in your life with respect to some particular set of situations? If yes, you are not alone! Many people suffer from anxiety, perhaps without knowing it. No, really, it's very common.

The most common form of anxiety is the fear of snakes followed closely by the fear of public speaking. Do your tremble while giving a public speech? Do you feel bad about being under a spot light? Does talking to unfamiliar people make you nervous? Does that affect the quality of life you are living?

If you have never given it a thought, perhaps, it's the right time to stop avoidance and start to look for a better solution.

Stress Meter

But first of all, it's important to differentiate between depression and anxiety (as well as various other psychological disorders).

Depression takes away your motivation, and you feel low in general. Anxiety on the other hand is usually related to some situation in particular where you try to avoid it needlessly (e.g., fear of heights or meeting new people, etc.) While depression degrades your quality of life in general, anxiety stops you from realising your true potential. If you have anxiety, won't you like to conquer it?

Some psychological disorders are better left to be treated clinically while others benefit tremendously from self-help.

Overcoming anxiety for dummies is a nice to read book which could help you in determining the exact nature of anxiety. A lot of ground is covered, yet the book is an easy read. Once the type of anxiety is unearthed, the book provides some strategies to deal with it. One of the most highly cited behavioural therapy to deal with anxiety is "gradual exposure". After making a list of things that induce anxiety, you start from the one which has the lowest fear factor associated. Make yourself exposed to that thing consciously. Gradually, the fear will pass away and it will give you an opportunity to move to the next level.

While the book provides good strategies to deal with anxiety, I believe that once you have identified the nature of anxiety, you would like instructions/ suggestions specific to you. Since this is a general book on anxiety, a lot of material will automatically become irrelevant to you---just skip what is not relevant or too basic.

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Note: Sad 3D Man and Stress Meter images attributed to FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

If you have ever been interested in motivating others, "Drive" by Daniel H. Pink is an important book to read. The main theme of the book is that the Carrot and Stick model of motivation is outdated. It has outlived its usefulness and doesn't apply to modern life, specially beyond algorithmic tasks.

"Management isn't about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices," he told me. It's about creating conditions for people to do their best work.

The author argues that core human motivators are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. He uses the example of Wikipedia vs. Encarta to support this argument: Wikipedia was backed by autonomy, mastery and purpose, and it managed to outclass the carrot-and-stick-backed Encarta.

With this great start, the author goes on to discuss each factor in detail. A lot of real-world experiments are discussed, such as the Flow game which arose out of Jenova Chan's MFA thesis.

There are gems here and there such as this statement from a hiring manager, "If you need me to motivate you, I probably don't want to hire you."

Some information in the book comes as a pleasant surprise. For example, I was surprised to know that the famous Post-It Notes were created in 3M using the permitted bootlegging policy. Permitted bootlegging is office time where staff are allowed to spend a certain amount of their time working on 'pet-projects' in the hope that would some day bring in revenue to the company.

Having said all this, "Drive" is not without its flaws. Though the author states that the lessons from this book can be applied to life beyond the office, i.e., to social life. But I feel that the books fails to address social issues. There book remains focused on the 3 factors, which I believe is seriously limited. Things such as peer pressure, addiction/ fashion and awareness.

In summary, it's a must read book but it's not idea. Will somebody ever write the ideal book on human motivation?

Book Review: Outliers

Malcom Gladwell has rightly adapted the tag line of the book as "The Story of Success." I find the book amusing in many ways---there are reflections on my own life which I can relate. The quest started with "Bad Luck or Dumbness (the details span over to Luck vs. Details debate by Salman Kasbati.

Some answers I learned in life myself, and some other answers were provided by the book. The nice thing is that Malcom has gone through case studies and hence there is considerable empirical analysis on which he basis his claims.

Book Review: Predictably Irrational

"Predictably Irrational" is what I classify as an "idea book." It's a good read by all means. The central theme of the book by Dan Ariely is twofold; firstly, human beings are not rational---they don't make the most logical choice---and secondly, the dimensions of this irrationality are predictable. Most of the content of the book surrounds "behavioral economics." Dan basis his claims around several "experimental studies" carried out on undergrad students in a few universities of the US (and some other people as well); however, I am not particularly impressed by the details---Dan doesn't discuss the "sample size" of his experiments.

What is genuinely interesting are the areas Dan picks up for study (such as "to what extent people are dishonest") and the reasoning he puts behind his claims---the experiments are a mere reinforcement of his believes.

The book is divided into the following chapters:

1. The Truth about Relativity: Dan argues that to make sound judgments, human beings are bound to make relative comparisons; marketers can exploit this fact by providing decoy choices. There is an excellent example of "web based" and "print" subscriptions of The Economist. The conclusion drawn is that one shouldn't fall pray to unconscious and unnecessary comparisons specially related to his social status or earnings.


2. The Fallacy of Supply and Demand: Here, Dan states that the principles of "demand" and "supply" (on which conventional economics is based) are not 100% applicable in practice. Human beings "anchor" to their first impressions, specially for the price of things. It's this first impression which matters more than the balance of demand and supply. Here, I believe, that things are oversimplified by not looking at the dimension introduced by "competition."


3. The Cost of Zero Cost: The author conjectures that we are afraid of making unsound decisions, and thus the word "FREE!" is so exciting to us. In actual, there is always some price we are paying for it; be it our time or energy.


4. The Cost of Social Norms: This is perhaps the best topic. Dan states that we live in two worlds---one derived by "market values" and the other one derived by "social values." Tasks, which we think, we are carrying out for market values make us demand more compensation. This includes things like our profession. On the other hand, we get offended if somebody wants to know the compensation required for tasks carried out in the social values context (such as helping a friend pack his stuff). Dan also concludes that the modern office environment mixes these two up to get the best out of human resources but in social lives if we introduce market values, our social lives will be doomed.


5. The Influence of Arousal: This part claims that the decisions we make in "cold" state are different from the decisions we make in the "hot" state; it's like an alternate-ego being activated when we are aroused. The concepts, although primarily related to sex, are applicable to wide range of issues such as rash driving by teenagers, being violent when annoyed, etc.


6. The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control: On the basis of assignments handed over to undergrad students, Dan shows that without an arbitrary deadline, almost all students procrastinate, and thus, mar there grades. However, with self-imposed deadlines (that is, deadlines chosen by students themselves), results are much better; still, the best results were shown when an external deadline is given to the students. The problem of procrastination can be avoided by building systems where each one of us can keep check on himself, and by making things simpler to remember.


7. The High Price of Ownership: A person selling something values his stuff more than the person buying the same; this is true for "used-stuff" for sale, and mainly so when the seller is not selling out of annoyance, rather because he "has" to sell that something. But a person trying to buy something could also "partially" own (in his mind) the thing he intends to buy. Such kind of "partial ownership before something is bought" is what marketers strive for. One should be wary of his feelings of ownership when he is about to buy something.


8. Keeping Doors Open: The idea of life is to increase your chances of survival. Many people try to keep their options open, and while doing so, spend too much time in maintaining the balance. One should remember that there is a "cost" of keeping your options open, be it a relationship or a career.


9. The Effect of Expectations: Preconceived notions and expectations set by marketing do affect the "real experience" of the end users. If you already believe that something would taste good, it usually tastes better than if you didn't have those expectations.


10. The Power of Price: It's a strange chapter in which Dan talks about placebo treatments; he says, that when a treatment has a high price attached to it, the patient creates his expectations and as a result feels "better" just because of the high price.


11. The Context of Our Character, Part I: The last two chapters treat "dishonesty." Having an oath undertaken doesn't necessarily mean that nobody would violate the oath, but just reviewing such an oath before a chance of dishonesty, unconsciously makes a lot of people honest.


12. The Context of Our Character, Part II: In continuation to the last chapter, Dan believes that more and more people would be dishonest when "indirect ways" of cheating are available. For example, there are more chances of "using a can of coke" without knowing who owns it than picking up some money. Such indirect losses to corporations in the US are much hire than the aggregates of robberies.


13. Beers and Free Lunches: I believe you can safely ignore this chapter. :)

I believe that the book could have been made better in the following ways:

1. The size of the book (around 300 pages) could be reduced by eliminating the last chapter as well as by merging the chapter on "The Effect of Price" with "The Cost of Zero."


2. By reading the details of the experiments, I sometimes felt cheated: it feels as if Dan is bent on trying to prove his ideas by ignoring various factors.

Here is an interesting negative review of the book.

On Pseudo-Science and Anecdotes

Joel Spolsky has criticized the pseudo-science employed in some of the recent best sellers. I now feel guilty of reading all the books he has mentioned:

• Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat"


• Malcom Gladwell's "The Tipping Point


• Naseem Taleb's "The Black Swan"

Deep inside me, I also held the same opinion as Joel. But how would I have come to differentiate "pseudo-science" from "real-science" without reading such books?

Book Review: The Black Swan---The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a highly opinionated and obstinate, yet knowledgeable book about randomness, uncertainty and luck. There are several good aspects of the book but the self-praise and repetitiveness mars the experience of the reader. I'd give it a 4 out of 10 rating just because of these short comings. Still, there is a lot to learn from this book.

You can read a very nice (positive) review over here and this great review of The Black Swan on Amazon.com. I believe I don't have much to add to the review, except for a few excerpts from the book, which I shall do at a later time.

In short, if you are good at reading repetitive books do get hold of this one, and if you don't like to read books but you are interested in understanding luck and life, get in touch with someone who has read it. :)

Book Review: Dreaming in Code

The road to wisdom? --- Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less
By Piet Hein (Danish Poet/ Scientist/ Designer)

I mistakenly bought this gem while actually looking for Beautiful Code. The tag line of the book, Dreaming in Code, is"Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and one Quest for Transcendent Software." The software project this book talks about as a case study is Chandler, which started around 2003 and expected to provide a solid version 1.0 to the world for personal information management by the end of the year. The project is still at version 0.7.7 at the time of this writing.

You might be thinking what exactly is so hard about writing a PIM tool. Well, if you want to do it right, and different, it would definitely take long. Just for the sake of example, consider how you enter dates in modern day information systems: using a drop down calendar, right? How about letting the user type in the date in any format he wants: "June 25, 2008" or "25-06-08" or even "today." These and several other novel ideas were behind the tool to make it the next "killer application."

The project was initiated by Mitch Kapor of Lotus fame. In later years, it turned out to be extremely ambitious, and Scott Rosenberg (author of Dreaming in Code) tries to find out the reasons behind the slow progress/ wrong estimates of the project in paritcular, and why software is so hard in general. To give you an idea of what the current version of Chandler delivers, I quote from the project wiki:

1. The basic unit of information is The Note
   • Starred
   • Added to the Calendar as Events
   • Addressed and Sent to others via Email
2. Notes can be organized into Collections
   • A Note can be added to Multiple Collections via drag and drop
   • Collections have 3 views: All, Starred and a Calendar
   • Calendars can be color-coded and overlayed
3. Each Collection is divided by Triage Status into 3 sections: NOW LATER DONE
   • Events are automatically triaged based on when they happen
   • Events automatically move into NOW when they start
   • You can also set custom Tickler Alarms to automatically move Notes to NOW
4. You can back up your data, access it from the web and share collections with others by signing up for a FREE Chandler Hub account.

The book has around 350 pages divided into 12 chapters. Below is a brief outline of each chapter:

• "Software Time" sets the stage in an interesting manner; comparing author's youth game programming to modern day's web 2.0 site management. He also talks of bridge construction and mechanical engineering, and comes back to this comparison quite often in the book.



• The chapter titled "Doomed" starts the discussion on the Chandler project from a meeting being held in July 2003; the meeting discusses a bug, flickering when Chandler's window is resized. The bug turns out to be in wxWidgets which is used by the project team to build a cross platform UI for Chandler. It also reveals to the user that the project has missed several of its release deadlines and the team is in trouble.



• "The Soul of Agenda" goes into some history of "personal information management tools." It also talks of the last project Kapor managed at Lotus, Agenda. The software came with the idea of "put it in first; categorize it later," which Kapor wanted to be the core of Chandler as well.



• "Prototypes and Pythons" talks of Rapid Application Development and some history of programming languages, specially the creation of Python and the new ground it intended to break. Chandler team finally settled for Python as its programming language.



• "Lego Land" discusses the repository design of Chandler and Zope Object Database aka ZODB. The chapter goes into the core issue of "building reusable software components," like Lego blocks that can be connected to build something new. It's a dream promoised by every new technology/ programming language but which, in reality, has never come true. Other topics of interest could be Brad Cox' Objective-C.



• The topics covered in "Managing Dogs and Geeks" are the Mythical-Man-Month, Dilbert's Pointy Hair Boss, the word Geek and how to manage them.



• "Getting Design Done" talks of User Interface designing. Additionally, it discusses the merits of going with a web based approach vs. a cross platform desktop application. Chandler finally settled with CPIA, Chandler Presentation and Interaction Architecture.



• "Detail View" tells the readers how a feature that might seem tiny to end-users, has hundreds of issues associated with it which need to be handled by the software developers. The book gives the example of "a recurring task in a calendar." Do we generate all instances of this recurring task? What if the time for one particular instance of the recurrence needs to be changed? What would happen if we want to associate some notes with this task?
  



• "Stickies on a Whiteboard" informs us how Chandler's featuers were divided into releases to finally get something out. It also taks about the push to use "WebDAV" for information sharing between Chandler clients.
  



• In the chapter labelled "Methods," Scott Rosenberg digresses for a moment to talk of software methodologies, ranging from waterfall through CMM to eXtreme Programming. I consider to be the best part of the whole book. If you can get an excerpt of this chapter, I highly recommend reading it.
  



• Besides Methdos, "Engineers and Artists" is an extremely well-written chapter. This one is also applicable to software development in general. Amongst other interesting ideas, Scott talks of how essays/ poems written by students are read out in an arts class for criticism/ review/ improvement and no such practice is carried out in software engineering curriculum. Another interesting concept is that of Leakage of Abstraction.
  



• The term dogfood as discussed in "The Road to Dogfood" is using your software for your own work. Chandler finally delivered a working Calendar application and Mitch Kapor started using it for himself.
  



• A Long Bet is a closing chapter where we are told that Kapor wagered $20,000 that by 2029 no computer or "machine intelligence" would have passed the Turing Test but Kurzweil, a leading inventor, disagrees.

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I give this book an 8 out of 10; there is some repetition and the focus is too much towards Chandler, which make me deduct two points. It's another must have!

Book Review: The Jinn From Hyperspace

If you are a fan of Martin Gardner's recreational mathematics book, and would like to see his other writings, this book might be for you; others should be ok if they miss it. It's a collection of essays, on no single topic. The book is divided into four parts, with 36 chapters in all spread over 300 pages. The parts are

• Science, Math, and Baloney: This part (19 chapters) contains Martin's opinion on various science related topics, as well as some paradoxes which philosophers and logicians seem to be very fond of. The topics range from False Memory Syndrome to a hypothetical Time Reversed Universe. The title of the book is actually name of a fictional story related to Klein bottles in this part.
  


• Literature: This series of chapters (5) contains Martin's view of literature, specifically focusing on the work of Chesterton and how the Santa Clause came into being.
  


• L. Frank Baum: Martin Gardner seems to be a fan of L. Frank Baum (the author of The Wizard of Oz); though, people outside the US (like me) might not have heard of him earlier. This section consists of 7 chapters, entirely dedicated to the writing style of L. Frank Baum.
  


• Lewis Carroll: Like Frank Baum, Martin seems to be a fan of Lewis Carroll as well. Martin discusses the background of the writings of the famous logician. This might be very interesting for you if you know a little bit about Lewis and/ or have enjoyed reading Alice in the Wonderland/ Through the Looking Glass. This part consists of 5 chapters, and also sheds some light on the life of Lewis.

Depending on where you live, some of the content---such as False Memory Syndrome which discusses false childhood abuse memories---in the book might be disturbing for you. While there were certain bits and pieces to learn from here and there, I am not much impressed by the overall theme and content of the book.

Book Review: The Tipping Point

I just finished reading "The Tipping Point" and I definitely classify it as a thought-provoking book, which has some very useful insights into the way we live our life. The book by Malcom Gladwell basically takes the idea of epidemics and maps it to social trends and fads, and how we can use the lessons learned to diffuse something of our own interest for the betterment of all. The only criticism I have of the book is what I usually have for almost all the books I read: the size of the book could easily be reduced to 3/4th by omitting repetitive content and stuff which is too obvious.

The book is organized as follows:

• The Three Rules of Epidemics: The rules as mentioned by the author are the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. Malcolm Gladwell analyzes how epidemics actually start out from a few who are socially quite active. He also finds that an epidemic must be "sticky" to cause widespread effects, and the context must be relevant for that as well.



• The Law of the Few: Malcom finds three types of personalities which are very affective in making something contagious. These are Connectors (people who have lots of contacts), Mavens (people who are an expert and looked for advice in some particular field) and Salesmen (people who are quite good at convincing others). Malcolm argues that not only the "content" of the message must be interesting/ important for widespread awakening but also the "carrier" of the message holds importance. He exemplifies with the help of Paul Revere's mid night ride during American Civil War. Paul Revere being a Maven as well as a Connector was more successful than William Dawes in alerting the militia about the British attack during American Civil War. Both of them rode rode all night on 18th/19th April 1775 in opposite directions but the results were very different.



• The Stickiness Factor: A message shouldn't just be "exciting" or "informative" to be contagious. It must also get stuck in the minds of the listeners. Malcolm gives the example of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues, and what went into their making.



• The Power of Context: There are two chapters on this which deal with various case studies relating how the context/ environment effects the spreading of the same message across masses. The author narrates an experiment which involved thousands of students required to grade their own answer sheets. Similarly, another experiment involved telling people to move from one building to another where somebody along the passage acted to be in desperate help. The results show that "character" isn't a simple set of traits; it behaves depending on the context.



• Case Study: Rumors, Sneakers, and the Power of Translation: The last few chapters present case studies. Rumors first "level" the details and then "sharpen" some of them according to the context or understanding of the individuals. Such "translation" is also done by "cool people" who make messages more sticky.



• Case Study: Suicide, Smoking, and the Search for Unsticky Cigarette: Malcolm tries to find out why the anti-smoking campaigns are not successful. He compares it with the suicide trend amongst young boys of Micronesia. He talks of "permission givers" and why people smoke despite knowing that smoking is injurious. He concludes that smoking is not cool; it's the smoker who is cool and acts as a salesman/ permission giver. He further concludes that nicotine is sticky (depending on your genes) and instead of spreading awareness, we should find how to make cigarettes unsticky.



• Conclusion: Focus, Test, and Believe: There isn't much to learn here.



• Tipping Point Lessons from the Real World: The author praises his work in this chapter :) I don't think you need to read this one.

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Overall, I rate it as an 8 out of 10 book!

Book Review: Rebel Code

One of the books I purchased recently is "Rebel Code, Linux and the Open Source Revolution"; written by Glyn Moody, the book is around 320 pages. It's available in paperback form, and is easy to carry and read when you are traveling, for example.

A lot is discussed and I'd agree with Eric Raymond's comment that this is the best history of the open source movement. It starts off from Richard Stallman, GNU and "Free Software Foundation" and goes to the Mozilla foundation and the new trendy name of "Open Source Movement." The best parts are the email excerpts from various mailing lists, which take you back into history when things were still being defined.

Below is the table of contents and a brief overview of what various chapters contain:

• The Coolest Year provides some background on the university years of Linus.


• The New GNU Thing talks about the famous AI Lab at MIT which are the earliest traces of "hackers." It tells how the group was disbanded and how Richard Stallman took onto himself to write a "free" Unix.


• A Minor Rebellion starts off with Linus' interest in 386 processor and how he gradually went onto writing Linux, after working on Minix. The chapter takes excerpts from the famous flame war between Tenenbaum and Linus.


• Factor X talks about various contributing factors which made Linux a hit, including XFree86 and NFS. It also discusses 386BSD. Linus is quoted as saying that he wouldn't have bothered with writing Linux if 368BSD had come out a few years earlier.


• Patching Up is all about contributions to the kernel in the form of patches; the most interesting part is the fork in TCP/IP stack -- when Linus finally preferred Alan Cox over Fred.


• Boot then Root covers the origins of Linux distributions, specifically SLS and Caldera, and how their maintainers became famous people.


• Linus 2.0 is about Linus getting a job in Transmeta, and he moving to the US from Finland.


• Learning from Berkeley is about Internet revolution and Perl. It covers a lot of background information on Larry Wall, the author of Perl.


• The Art of Code discusses the importance of a paper by McVoy at Sun for having a unified Unix release. It also talks about Eric Raymond and Donald Knuth (and of course, TeX).


• Low Down in the Valley discusses how Linus' family life and work started interfering in the open source work; it also talks about the most dangerous point in the history of Linux development---when people started talking of having a different leader to take over kernel maintenances.


• Mozilla Dot Party tells you how Mozilla came into being, starting from the origins of Netscape to the open source project, heavily inspired by the writings of Eric Raymond. The most interesting part is the one that discusses Jamie Zawinsky. By the way, I personally think Jamie Zawinsky is very, very cool.


• A Foothold enlightens you how IBM dumped its own HTTP server and adopted Apache for all its products


• Distributions and Shares is about companies which started working on Linux distributions, most notably Redhat.


• Open for Business talks about the various business aspects of the open source projects, and how most of them contributed back to the open source world. I think Glyn Moody didn't do justice with this topic, and a lot is left to be desired. Perhaps, the later editions of the book provide more insight.


• Trolls Versus Gnomes is about the desktop on Linux.


• Lies, Damned Lies, and Benchmarks truly represents the chapter title. It's one of the things that proved to be demoralizing for the hackers---various tests, which talked of Windows being superior to Linux, proved to be true on multiprocessor machines.


• Tomorrow's Hothouse discusses the trends as the author foresaw them at the time of writing.


• Beyond the Market is also about future.


• The Postscript is a little bit on Python and related trends.

I got hold of a very old edition of the book; it discusses events till 2001. A lot has happened after that which isn't discussed in my copy. I'd give it a 4 out of 5 rating---a must have.

Review: Everything is Negotiable

I am including book reviews on this blog. I read a lot but I never find people to share the joy with, and thus I forget almost as fast as I learn. I believe that by including book reviews, I'll attract some comments, which imply discussion and thus, better understanding for me.

Everything is Negotiable by Gavin Kennedy falls under the category of non-IT books that I occasionally pick up (and do not regret). The guy runs a company in UK which helps break deals and negotiate for you, apart from training your people to do better at deals.

The books starts off with a simple question:

Faced with a difficult opponent, it is better to concede something of little value in order to create goodwill. True or False?

Many people will tend to concede. That something is of little value to you, right? and the opponent is somebody overly demanding as well! Gavin Kennedy tends to disagree and he has sound reasons for that:

1. Goodwill is a myth! Business is about offering what you have in exchange for what you want. Why is the other person bargaining for that something of little value?


2. You are encouraging the behavior of your difficult opponent by conceding in the first deal. He/ she will become more and more unrealistic in future. On the other hand, you will have little ground to behave differently.

This remarkable opening is followed by around 24 chapters, which include various negotiating scenarios (not all of them provide insight, though). The book is around 350 pages lengthy, and available as paperback. Below is a content outline, with some of my comments:

1. Of Owls, Foxes, Sheep and Donkeys


2. Why you must revive long forgotten negotiating skills (learn from children!)


3. The worst thing you can do to a negotiator (accept the first offer!)


4. How not to get your room changed (don't just complain, negotiate a remedy!)


5. Why seven "no's" are no way to get a "yes" (seven successive proposals!)


6. The negotiator's most useful question (what if?)


7. The Myth of Goodwill


8. How to make them cut their prices (shock'em with your opening offer)


9. Why ONO is a NO NO? (ONO = or nearest offer)


10. How to handle difficult negotiators (don't let the intended damage to happen)


11. Who has the power? (depends on who believes it to be with the other person)


12. If you haven't got a principal, invent one! (my brother says you must not accept less than £615)


13. There ain't no such thing as a fixed price!


14. How to stop conceding?


15. Don't change the price, change the package!


16. All that glitters is not gold


17. On being Russian-Fronted (hijacking countered by buying time -> makes them tired)


18. How the hard bargainers make it hard to bargain (creating issues at the last moment --- when the real cost of moving away from the deal is too high for you)


19. How addressing other people's interest gets them interested (what we want vs. why we want)


20. The long distance negotiator (local hero going global)

"The Cathedral and The Bazaar" and Other Essays

As I got free from the second term, I rushed to the library to find something interesting to read. By chance, I found a copy of The Cathedral and The Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. It was on my reading list for quite some time. I had tried reading the papers via the web but it's always very tiring and I had never been successful to read past a few paragraphs.

The book is a collection of papers written by Eric Raymond about the Open Source Initiative, Hackerdom, the value of such software and the motivation behind the effort required to create huge free software. In fact, he has presented "a set of theories" about how and why things work in the open source world.

It's interesting but I won't categorize it as a must read. Reading from cover to cover will only be interesting for people who are doing some kind of research on OSS, such as this one.

I'll like to provide an abstract of the papers collectively published in this book:

A Brief History of Hackerdom is a very quick overview of the early days of computing - how people started writing software and enjoyed the beauty of it. It goes back to 1961!

The Cathedral and The Bazaar is perhaps the most interesting amongst the essays. It compares the classical way of building software (the cathedral) and the distributed open source methodology with very loose control over things (the bazaar). It tells you how classical theories about software fail in the open source world. If you have time only for one of the essays, read this one.

Homesteading the Noosphere builds a theory about the culture of hackers. It gives some hints why people write free software by creating analogy with homesteading (I still don't know what a noosphere is). Amongst other results, it indicates that the motivation behind spending time on free software is analogous to the motivation for status in a gift-culture. Of course, such people should have already stopped worrying about the lowest levels in Maslow's pyramid of needs. The essay also answered a question that had bothered me for some time, "why don't people fork open source projects?"

The Magic Cauldron will be very interesting for people who want to know about the economic value of open source software. Eric Raymond also contemplates on when it is feasible to go open source.

Finally, The Revenge of the Hackers is how Mozilla came into being. Amongst all the OSS, I like Mozilla the most - though there are die-hard fans of Linux, Apache, MySQL, Open Office, Mono, and many others. But there is something magical about Mozilla. Eric says that Netscape folks later told him that their decision to go open source was inspired by his writings! In fact, the paper tells us that the author was also involved with MPL (Mozilla Public License) and the shift from the words "Free Software" to "Open Source."

However, I don't agree with some of the conclusions/ afterword. Mainly, I believe that he downgrades Windows 2000 a lot. Personally, I believe Windows is a great environment to build for. I also think that Windows 2000 and now XP have come a long way from the days of Windows NT and deserve at the least some respect from the hackers.

One of the most weird things that Eric says at the end is an answer to the question, "How can I become a hacker?" Instead of indicating the complexity of software, he motivates the reader to start by learning HTML! Though HTML is really a good start for beginners but one should clearly indicate that if the reader starts learning HTML perhaps only his/ her children would be able to hack real code.


All in all, Eric Raymond is a great writer. He chooses words very carefully and has a very sound abilitiy to see things at a meta-level.

---

مشکلیں جب بھی آ جایں گی، درد حد سے گزر جاءے گا
کوءی غم نہ پھر ھو گا مجھے گر خوابوں میں تم آو گے

("Bikhra Hoon Main" by Jal)

The Alchemist: Beginner's Luck and Warrior's Ending

I came across The Alchemist a few months ago. Somebody gifted the book to my elder brother and I got a chance to skim through it. Once I started reading, I put down the book only after finishing it. And since then I have recommended it to many friends.

The book, written by Paulo Coelho is actually fable of one Santiago - a shepherd who has a dream as well as the courage to follow it. The story of Santiago has important lessons that might go a long way with your life. It's about taking risks, the net result of every effort, the relationship between occurrence of events and improvement in characters as well as lessons on merging with the flow of nature. Don't underestimate the story by my description, it is very captivating. Everything is metaphorical and there are no direct lessons in philosophy. Though some of you might find some marketing elements of story writing in it, it's still a good read.

If you ask me to recommend a single book written by people from our era, based on my limited knowledge of literature, I would recommend "The Alchemist." You can get the book in paperback from Liberty Books for Rs. 250/-.

"When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."
(The Alchemist)

Your Time Starts NOW!

The chapter on Patterns has finally been closed. I'll rethink over all the issues and this might become the foundation of a book on life. The next few posts will review a couple of books followed by entries on technology/ career in software development.

A few months ago, I partially read The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Ekhart Tolle. I couldn't finish the book as it is repetitive at many places and I seldom get even an hour of leisure in a day. Still it's a good read if you can spare some time. The crux is that there is a hairline difference between Life and Life Situation. Our life situation starts from a time in past and ends at somewhere in future - it's a span with starting and ending points - a line.

Life, on the other hand, is NOW. It's a moment - a point - a reality. Life situation is imaginary because past is no more with us and future is what we never experienced. Most of the problems that we think we are facing are with the life situation; you will hear people complaining: My exams are going on these days and I am under pressure; I am in debt; My parents aren't happy with me these days; I am not progressing in my current job, etc.

Contrarily, mostly there is no problem NOW. What problems are you facing while reading this text? You must thank Almighty for the breath that you take without any difficulty, the eyes that are letting you read this and the mind that is processing the information as you read and enables you to follow the complexity of this text without requiring a re-read.

Amongst other interesting things discussed by the author is the treatment given to mind. According to him, mind is a tool like other parts of body that is meant to be used; it shouldn't start working on its own and thus create noise. To be present and alive in Now is what the book tells you to do - stop living in past or future. I leave the rest for you to explore.

Great minds have concluded that time is an illusion. Let's take the example of a star that is at a distance of 100-light years from Earth. When you see such a star in the sky, you are actually seeing the past! It was there about 100 years ago and may not be there anymore because the light has already taken a hundred years to reach you.

But doing is more important than mere reading. And "to believe" is even more important. Whenever you finish reading a book, don't just continue with another - assimilate what you have learned. As a friend says, "Be the change you want to see in this world."


One half of nothing is still nothing.
(somebody commenting on Eric Lippert's blog)