captainccs

Retired management consultant, individual investor, Mac developer, web host, occasional writer, racing sailor and cook on a visit to Gaia.

[captainccs]

What I write here is a result of personal evaluation of the past and current evolution and bottlenecks of the China EV market and how Mr. Hu was able to bring Kandi to the forefront of the China EV market. I have had the chance to meet Mr. Hu a few times and have an enriching exchange of views with him which has helped me in the past to make a few predictions that have proven to be quite accurate till now. Which business strategy might result into creation of the biggest EV market for the Kandi-Geely JV and give them the best prospects for a substantial market share all over China?

[captainccs]

One interesting comparison between humans and computers is their ability to learn and store information. Humans are learning machines. We store information internally both genetically and intellectually and we store information externally in what might generally be called "libraries." All the internally stored information disappears on death except for the part that is transmitted genetically to the offspring. The newborn human cannot receive a "download" of information the way a brand new computer can. On the other hand, computers are not generally programed to learn on their own the way humans can and do.

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[captainccs]

When I posted about Kandi's acquisition of Zhejiang New Energy Automotive Systems Co., Ltd. I didn't realize the full significance of the transaction. The factory is ready to roll! They announced the grand opening ceremony for this Saturday, March 9. What this means is that when Mr. Hu went to See Mr. Li he already had this ace up his sleeve making Kandi eligible for a 50% partnership in the JV with Geely.

[captainccs]

March 7, 2013

I usually have a supply of rice noodles and bean threads but they were missing this week when I felt like making a Chinese dish. I did have vermicelli. Since improvisation is the order of the day in the frugal kitchen vermicelli it was and a new fusion dish was born.

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[captainccs]

Reporting Error 500 with phpErrorReporter.php

Production websites have become an integral part of business and one can no longer afford not to monitor them actively to detect any errors visitors might be experiencing. Suppose you have something as common as a contact page but which is not working as expected. Under normal conditions the error would be reported to the visitor but not actively to the website owner/operator. A lost contact might mean hundreds of dollars of lost business. The error is reported in the website's Access Log but a month might pass before it is detected if the Access Log is monitored at all. Since errors are relatively few, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Active monitoring is required. phpErrorReporter.php has been installed on my websites since 2011.

[captainccs]

February 6, 2013

Kandi, The Prince and The Art of War

Machiavelli's The Prince and Sun Tzu's The Art of War are the two best known classic treatises on strategies to conquer and to govern. As Kandi's electric vehicle strategy unfolds, I'm reminded of these masterpieces.

[captainccs]

An old joke in the software business is to call a bug a feature. This is not so far fetched because often one finds uses for unplanned behavior of the software. Hot linking is an HTML feature that allows a server to tell the browser to get images from a different server and it is, indeed, a very useful feature. Unfortunately it is feature easily abused by unauthorized websites. I don't mind if a low traffic web page hot-links to one of my images, the additional load it puts on my server is minimal and not worth fretting about. The domain in question has been in use for 14 years and hot-linking had not been a problem all these years. But this schmuck, to be kind, used one of my images as his avatar at a fairly high traffic forum. Now he is blocked but so are all the lesser infringers who I didn't mind. They can thank the avatar thief. BTW, now he is stealing someone else's bandwidth, using a different image. I guess he does not much care about his identity. Schmuck. Most forum software gives you the alternative to hot-link or to upload the avatar. There is nothing wrong with hot-linking from one of your own servers but if the image is on a third party server the least you can do is to upload it to the forum server.

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[captainccs]

July 11, 2012 

Seldom does a real life product follow a script as closely as MAKOplasty is following Geoffrey Moore's Crossing The Chasm. More often than not, an investor who knows the theory has a difficult time applying it to actual products because markets are messy, each product and its market have their own peculiarities. Less than a year ago I wrote The 'Gorilla' Case for MAKO Surgical (MAKO) and in view of MAKO Surgical's disappointing earnings pre-announcement this is a good time to review how the story is unfolding.

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[captainccs]

pragmatic adjective dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations: a pragmatic approach to programing JavaScript.

For a long time I avoided JavaScript as much as possible because it is simply daunting, it's huge, it's Object Oriented with hundreds of JavaScript Objects (or so it seems) each with a variety of Methods and Properties. Keeping it all in your head, which could be done with earlier, simpler languages, is just not practical, if it were even possible. Even that master archiver, Google, is not all that useful if you don't know what you are looking for. Searching for JavaScript solutions on the web can easily turn into a needle in the haystack game.

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[captainccs]

A lot has been written about zebra striping HTML tables when the table is built using the tag but I could not find any references to zebra striping tables built with CSS tables and I had to build my own.

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[captainccs]

It is good practice to initialize all php variables and arrays. Until now there was no simple way of doing so. There is a 2003 solution by Amit Arora of digitalamit.com but which relies on GLOBAL variables which is not only a bad idea but supposedly GLOBALS will be deprecated in php version 6. My thanks to Amit for the inspiration!

The core problem is that variables cannot be called by reference. But arrays can and THAT is at the heart of the solution! 

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[captainccs]

I've added a "Software download" section to Software Times. For now it has only two downloads:

The Ultimate PHP Error Reporter Keeping track of the health of websites is more critical than ever.

Class Smiley php5 An open source smiley script

As time permits I'll add some other bits of code I have elsewhere.

Enjoy!

Denny Schlesinger

[captainccs]

Cream of Potato Soup My Caveman Diet is slowly accumulating recipes while slowly reducing my weight by two or three pounds a year. It might not sound like much but I can also pull the belt tighter meaning the weight is getting lost from the right place which is what counts.

The other day I overcooked potatoes which gave me the idea for a cream of potato soup. If you can make cream soup out of other vegetables, why not potatoes?

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[captainccs]

MyTweets November 9, 2011

@CommentatorIntl You are tweeting too much, crowding out my other friends!

[captainccs]

MyTweets November 8, 2011

EuroClown Sarkozy calls Bibi a liar. The shitty little frog is becoming a pest. http://st26.net/ofdofv Sarkozy tells Obama Netanyahu is a liar

@PeterSinger When will the US accept its responsibility to stop contributing to #ClimateChange? -- Hopefully NEVER! AGW is a political scam

[captainccs]

MyTweets November 7, 2011

@WBPubs Did you know women now live longer than men in all world regions? -- ¿Do they have more fun? That is the question!

@montrose77 Maybe it's a good sign when poppies are the overarching problem of the world.

Justices hear case of American born in Jerusalem http://st26.net/uwgm47 -- If Jerusalem isn't in Israrel, where is it? On Mars?

My palm tree seeds seem to be sprouting, four of them!

Daylight Saving Time ended Sunday, November 6, 2011. -- No wonder the market opens late!

If "Daylight Saving Time ended," are we now "Wasting Daylight time?" If so, where does that time go?

Palatschinken (Hungarian crêpes) for breakfast. Yummy! The thinner you make them the better they taste.

Sarkozy, why fret about that shitty little continent?

[tim-berry]

[captainccs]

tim-berry:

Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. The Tweaker.

I haven't read it yet but Steve Jobs in Malcolm Gladwell's pen must make good reading.