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Guy Kawasaki on The Art of the Start

October 6, 2006 / Funny / Leave a Comment

Video of Guy Kawasaki’s talk on The Art of the Start at TiECon 2006.

It’s informative, even if you don’t want to start a venture, but I didn’t know Guy was such a funny speaker! He begins with:

Early in my career, I sat through many keynote speeches — at Comdex, at Mac Road Expo. I saw many many hi-tech CEOs speak, and I have to tell you, one thing I noticed is they pretty much sucked as speakers. And the second thing that I figured out sitting in these audiences of sucky keynotes is that if there’s anything that’s worse than a CEO who sucks as a speaker, it’s a CEO who sucks as a speaker and you have no idea how much longer he or she will suck! And so, I have adopted the top 10 format for all of my speeches. This way, if you think I suck, at least you can track progress through my speech.

Towards then end, when he’s run well over time…

What are you going to do? Not invite me again?

He gets dragged off the stage.

Automated resume filtering

October 3, 2006 / How I do things / 23 Comments

I had to screen resumes from a leading MBA school. I’m lazy, and there were hundreds of CVs. So after procrastinating until this morning, I decided on 2 principles:

  1. I will not spend more than 45 minutes on this. (That’s the duration of my train ride to office.)
  2. I will not read a single CV. (I would write a program.)

The CVs were in a single PDF file. I saved it as text (it shrunk from 66MB to 1.6MB without the photos). Then I wrote a Perl program to filter CVs by keywords. We were looking for people with an interest and/or experience in IT consulting, so I picked “technology”, “consulting”, “SAP”, “IBM”, “Accenture”, “Deloitte”, etc.

Anyone without these keywords would fall out of the list. This eliminated 75% of the crowd. But since I didn’t want to read the rest, I used my favourite text-analysis technique: concordance. I extracted 3 words on either side of each keywords, and just read those. It was easy to see who’d “worked with suppliers like IBM” as opposed to who’d worked at IBM.

That’s it! I managed to cut the list down to 10%. Better yet, I also had a preference ranking. People with multiple keywords ranked higher than those with fewer keywords. And all this took little more than my train ride to office.

I can see this going to the next level. It’s easy to write a customised rejection letter, depending on which keywords are missing for each person.

Now, if it’s this easy to filter resumes, I can see every organisation do it in a few years. Which means, you need to write resumes for machines as well, not just for humans! For example, on my next CV, I’ll make sure I include the words “Boston Consulting Group” as well as “BCG” — just in case the software searches for only one of those keywords. Further, I’ll make sure I avoid spelling mistakes!

Netflix prize

October 2, 2006 / Links / Leave a Comment

Netflix has released a sample of its customers’ movie ratings at Netflix Prize. You can download these (700 MB), create an algorithm that rates the training data, run it against the test data, and see if you can get better ratings than their algorithm. If you do, you win $1 million. (Chris Anderson explains why.)

Tamil lyrics quiz – TMS MGR

January 25, 2025 / Quizzes / 20 Comments

Here are words from the middle of 8 songs TMS has sung for MGR. Can you guess which movie they are from?

Don’t worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green.

Software for my new laptop

December 7, 2021 / Top 10 lists / 11 Comments

And so, thanks to Infosys Consulting being spun off as a separate legal entity in the UK, I got my new laptop. (Because our old laptops were legally the assets of Infosys Technologies Ltd, and not Infosys Consulting Inc. Weirder things have happened, but who’s complaining?)

My old Toshiba Portege A200 has been replaced by a Dell Latitude D420 (which I was dreaming for, after having just read Jeff’s post on big laptops).

Dell Latitude D420

Firstly, it’s light. I thought my Toshiba was light compared to the Dell monsters others had, but this weighs 1.4 kgs! Secondly, it’s thin. It’s thinner than some of the paper notebooks I used to carry. It’s hard to imagine where we will be in 5-7 years time if innovations keep rolling in at this rate.

There were only two (minor) problems I saw with it. It didn’t have an S-Video port — so I can’t watch movies on TV. And it had a fairly small (12″) screen. Being a wide screen, I get a lot less height than I used to. I’m still having some trouble getting used to that, especially when browsing tall pages but it’s a good laptop for playing games such as 올인구조대.

My weekend was like a kid in a candy store. Here’s what I did.

Uninstalled useless software: The laptop came with Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 Basic and PowerDVD 5.1. I got rid of them.

Copied all my files: I had about 25GB of data (15GB of music, 5 GB of books, 2 GB of video, 3GB of work). This was a bit tricky: some of my data was in SVN repositories, and I had to migrate them.

Configured the new system by literally running through each entry in the control panel, and ensuring that it’s the same as my old machine. Most of my changes are spartan (aimed at less eye-candy, usually). For example,

  • Display: I switch to Windows Classic and a black background. I used to do this because it takes less memory, but with 1GB of RAM, that’s no longer a consideration. I just got used to this. I also turn off all special effects, and remove everything except the Recycle Bin from my desktop. But the really useful thing is to turn on ClearType.
  • Taskbar and Start Menu: I switch to the Classic Start Menu, and turn off everything. Here’s what mine looks like now.Start Menu settings
  • Toolbars: I like my toolbars to fit on one line. So I do some heavy customisation with the Internet Explorer toolbar to shrink it to a line. Similarly on the desktop toolbars.

Installed software. This is the fun part. I’ve made a number of changes to my software inventory.

And finally, after reinstalling my SVN repository and copying my WinAmp playlists, Firefox bookmarks, etc, my new laptop feels as good as old.