Book Review: Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric by James Edward Thomas, Thomas Gryta, et al.

The book was recommended by Bill Gates and I listened it on Audible.

It explored the downfall of General Electric under CEO Jeff Immelt. The fall of GE is set in stone by former CEO Jack Welch, who turned GE into a conglomerate of diverse components, ranging from industrial manufacturing(GE Aviation, GE Power and GE appliances) to media (NBC) and even finance (GE Capital). Jack Welch leveraged GE Capital (a bank in reality but valued as a industrial company which gave it a higher P/E) to smooth out the revenue and earning and created an illusion of superior management and innovation, satisfying Wall Street and hiking up the GE share price, enriching himself along the way. In truth, Jack Welch is more a shrewd Ponzi schemer and financial engineer than an entrepreneur. To a large extent, Jack Welch is a Bernie Madoff with a better timing. 

It is a sobering read on how crooks like Jack Welch and Jeff Immelt can fool the world and make General Electric an American icon. 

To knockout or not to knockout?

Want some pointers ? Check out Knockout vs Backbone The question is: How do you build large client app with a good structure when using Knockoutjs? Still thinking about it, but here are some pointers: A walkthrough using KnockoutJS and AMD AMD(Asynchronous Module Definition) vs CJS(CommonJS Modules 1.1) What a world of fun and thrill...

Tech gotcha of the day: kogrid needs knockoutjs version 2.2 and above

If you have been using knockoutjs for a while and then you heard of a beautiful grid that will work well with knockoutjs, aka kogrid, forewarned: To use kogrid successfully, you have to update knockoutjs to version 2.2 and above, otherwise you will get an empty webpage with no grid and when you F12, you will see a JavaScript funtion error of something like the object doesn't have a method "seek".

Learning AJAX and JavaScript(part 1):

Why learn JavaScript now?

Rich internet application(RIA) fattens the web UI considerably. HTML sprinkled with JavaScript event module won't cut it any longer. Before Silverlight and Air matures to a level that can seamlessly migrate current web app, JavaScript is the only option available.

Can't we rely on server technology such as ASP.NET/Google Web Toolkit to generate JavaScript for us(also referred as indirect Ajax programming)? Good question, and all these players are trying hard and they are getting there. But there still be the rare and critical situation in your project that you need to rollup your sleeves and do it yourself without help of tools. And I also think there are just too many indirection involved when using these tools. UI rendering requires a lot of trial and error iteration, and if tools add more steps in the middle, you may need to rethink about using them. Also Ajax as a web app pattern, there are still a lot to be explored and to explore we will need JavaScript as a tool to gain finer control of the whole HTTP communication process.

Cookbook approach to pick up JavaScript

1. How to do drag and drop?
   
2. How to create pop-up panel?
   
3. How to enable bookmark in Ajax app? (Google map uses "add a link" link to solve this)
   

Some patterns in JavaScript based fat UI

1. Browser-side templating(BST

   and this link
   

2. HTML Message (HTM) and this link
   

Comparison of Ajax library

1. ASP.NET Ajax library comparison
   

   http://www.daniel-zeiss.de/AJAXComparison/Results.htm
   

2. OSS Ajax library comparison
   

   http://www.sitepoint.com/article/javascript-library