Author Archives: Mark Bao

China’s Detrimental Obsession with Cutting Costs

30th
Apr. × ’09
China is the manufacturing capital of the world. With over 800 million workers, its workforce is the largest in the world. The obvious answer to manufacturing anything anywhere is China. Because of one reason: it is cheap. China has a detrimental obsession with cutting costs. Lower costs to their manufacturing means more corporate profits. (Obviously, workers [...]
Posted in Society, World | Leave a comment

Giving It All Up

9th
Apr. × ’09
How to determine what’s important, and what you should drop Throughout high school, I’ve racked up many achievements and leadership positions related to school. Every year, though—I’ve decided to give it all up to focus. Sophomore Year: Sophomore Representative to School Council (and the year before as well) — could have done junior year, decided to quit Junior Year: Debate [...]
Posted in Life | 2 Comments

All Of A Sudden, We Are Connected

23rd
Mar. × ’09
As I step on the subway, I take note of society around me. I love the subway. It’s one of the best places to explore one’s curiosities about society and the world. However, today I notice one thing. Everyone is connected. Through mobile. Let’s take a step back. Let’s look at mobile from the big picture standpoint. [...]
Posted in Life, Technology | Tagged | 2 Comments

A Little Case in Statistical Bias

19th
Mar. × ’09
Although I’ve expressed approval for the new Facebook redesign, it’s obvious that many, many people hate it. If you’ve been on the new Facebook for more than a few milliseconds, you would have figured this out. Let’s analyse this disapproval. Firstly, every single Facebook redesign or new feature, since it went mainstream, has been criticised by [...]
Posted in General, Web | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

11 Things I Learned From Speaking and Networking at Gnomedex

24th
Aug. × ’08
Gnomedex was an amazing experience and the best technology conference that I’ve been to (which is admittedly not many.) Excellent sessions, excellent setup, excellent people. These are mostly lessons learned from mistakes, a couple of what I did right, but mostly mistakes. Speaking Gnomedex was my first speaking gig ever. Presenting in front of 280 Gnomedex attendees [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

Building a group micro-update webapp in 18 hours

4th
Jul. × ’08
News.YC readers: After receiving feedback on my original post, I decided to delete that posting and to rewrite it, with some more insight into less of what I did and rather why. After being somewhat burned out of my Avecora OnDemand project (because my CSS and Javascript were throwing fits in Internet Explorer) (yes, this is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 9 Comments

Mac OS X: Fix High CPU Usage by syslogd

24th
May. × ’08
Recently, I’ve been experiencing a high CPU usage by the process syslogd in Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard, coupled with strange Console.app behavior. If you’re experiencing this as well, give this a shot and see if it works (at your own risk.) FIrst, you should check if this is a problem on your system, which is [...]
Posted in General | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Coding on the Facebook Platform.

9th
Jun. × ’07
It is Saturday, May 26th. I am at home, headbanging to music, and catching NeighborFi (rare.) I’m just finding the Facebook Applications update. I look through the directory. In all nine pages at the time, I didn’t notice a del.icio.us or Flickr app. I decided that for that day I will work on developing a [...]
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