Terra Firms

Archive for June, 2011

Success is often thought of as the result of a series of ’successful’ decisions. A successive series of doing the right thing and avoid the caveats.

But maybe there’s a different way to think about success and that is to look at execution rather than perfection. This isn’t a novel theme of mine by any means, but it is something that is meaningful to me at this moment in time.

The region that I live in is going through a lot of evolution and revolution, at the same time, looking at the news paper today I saw at least 3 different situations in which government bodies of certain countries have abstained from making a decision.

In fast paced times, success is merely making a decision (be it the right decision or the wrong one) for as we live in a connected, fast paced, transparent, digital world…it is very easy to gather enough information to back up or refute our decisions shortly after making them.

If you had that kind of power, to alter the future, then measure it, then realize that you were either truly on-track with that decision or so far off base that you’ve made things worse… then why would you ’stall at all’

Success in my opinion is the courage to make a decision while knowing that you can never be 100% sure that it was right.

Success in my opinion is the foresight to put in place the systems to tell gather information and let you know weather your decision was right or not (after making it, while not holding everything stagnant).

Success in my opinion is the courage to reverse a decision once it has been proven wrong, or to double down on it with even more conviction if the evidence proves in favor.

Waiting around forever while your employees, your family members, or your citizens are boiling over with frustration, and delaying decision making until you are fairly sure you are right is the best way to let things boil over. Sometimes things boil over and get out of hand. Sometimes the price of boiling over is very high. Success is not about making successful decisions. Success is simply making decision to keep the ball rolling. When the ball is in play, you stand a chance to score. Being afraid of getting scored on, and keeping the ball stagnant will piss off your team mates, your referee and the spectators.

Evaluate your options.

Take a decision.

Measure your outcomes.

Evaluate your position.

Correct accordingly.

All successful people know this. In entrepreneurship we call it iterating on your product, business model or strategy. There is nothing that prevents us from iterating, measuring, and correcting other aspects of our life.

Life is built on decisions. Embrace it.

I love google web toolkit but some times it needs to be extended to do some fancy stuff.

One of the things I’ve been working on recently is revamping our software for better look and feel, higher user engagement and better user experience.

Consumers now are accustomed to nice web2.0 like buttons with solid background colors and white text on top… visit any of your favorite websites and you’ll see what I mean.

gwt out of the box doesn’t support this with the basic button class.

Here is a link to SuperButton.java class that I downloaded online and modified to fit my personal needs.

The original class supported widgetized buttons which allowed me to add widget (Such as a small absolute panel with a label and an icon added to it).

The original buttons like this:

The code to create this button looks something like this:

To explain this simple:

• Create a super button
• Size it correctly
• Create a new panel
• Add any text or images you want to said panel
• Add your panel to the button

This is the ‘out of the box’ superbutton class.

I have further extended it to create buttons that use a single as the buttons background image, including all the CSS modifications required to undo the typical button shading and borders and paddings that would interfere with this. You can also set a second image as your alternate image for when the button is disabled.

Here’s what the new buttons look like:

And here’s what the code to create these buttons looks like:

As you can see , when creating these buttons, I’m passing in either one or two image URL’s.

Buttons that need to show that they are ‘disabled’ or greyed out have 2 images associated with them.

Standard buttons that will always be enabled only need 1 image to create them.

For comparison sake, here’s what the old (and frankly dated) widgetized buttons look like (this image is from my Gimp mockups… it’s always faster to mockup your ideas in Gimp or photoshop BEFORE doing any coding… coding takes time to debug … you want make all style decisions rapidly on mockups, and only after you’ve finalized your fonts, styles, colors, ideas should you move to executing them… always separate the creative from the constructive otherwise you’ll bog down your creative in troubleshooting and coding and debugging).

Hope this helps someone…

The perfect man is a man who lives up to other people’s expectations of him.

By age 30 the perfect man has one or two degrees from college. Has been employed for 5 or more years at corporate. He holds a good position in his company as a middle manager. He has a wife and one or two young kids that look up to him. He spends 90% of his time at work keeping up this perfect life and the 10% outside of work he divides equally between sports, watching TV, maintaining his social obligations to friends, maintaining his social obligations to his wife’s family and extended family, hanging out with his kids, and having nice conversations with the neighbors.

The perfect man’s life is not in any way about himself. He is truly selfless. He lives for his wife, his kids, and his parents. He has sex to reproduce. He works to put food on the table. He reads because his boss handed him reading materials. He takes time off so he can feel good for work. He marries for family.

I on the other hand am a Haitham. A Haitham is a breed of vulture, and is a name not in anyway related to human beings. Furthermore the word Haitham is sexless. I couldn’t be a perfect man, I couldn’t be a perfect woman either.

I am an alternate being. I am an alien truly and wholly.

I believe in working for satisfaction.

I believe in reading for education and for thought exchange.

I believe in sex for pleasure.

I believe in marriage for bonding.

I believe in taking time off for taking time off’s sake.

I don’t believe in middle management because that in itself is an oximoron… a manager by definition manages, and cannot be managed.

I don’t believe in measuring people’s maturity by how many winters have passed by them, nor their resilience by how many zeros are in their bank account, nor their worth by the fictitious title bestowed upon them by the corporate lords, nor their social worth by their ability to take a leap into marriage just to trap a member of the opposite sex to make them look more ‘whole’.

You don’t have to believe in me. After all, most people don’t believe in Aliens.

As with any Alien race my objectives are seen as selfish invasive and destructive…

You can count on me to:

• Challenge the status quo
• Be a fan of technology
• Be oblivious to social and cultural norms and see no reason to maintain them and no harm in breaking them for the sake of the progress of the Alien race
• Try to destroy old constructs in order to assimilate new cultures and technology
• Have inexplicable and independent energy sources including sources of personal energy, sources of creativity, sources of inspiration, sources of intelligence, sources of that thing you humans call money… all without having a ‘corporate overlord’
• Have an affinity to colonise in a group of like minded Aliens and be content in my colony with no ‘need’ for marriage
• Only attempt to reproduce for the continuation of my race… and at the moment that doesn’t seem to be necessary

The business I’m building online is just an Alien front. What do you think TerraFirms really means ? Terra=earth, Firms=companies… We are building a company on earth to colonize…

There you go, my evil plot unveiled.

This is not the first time company founders have referred to themselves as extra-human.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irjgfW0BIrw

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/31/are-you-a-pirate/

http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP000456