The Blog of Jonas Martinsson

This post is part of a series describing the process I am using to attempt improvement in chess. The main post gives an overview of the process while this article explains one of the steps in detail. The first step on our chess improvement journey is to understand factually the strengths and weaknesses in our game. I am speaking from lifelong experience when I say that this is difficult to intuit. It is simple to remember recent blunders and draw conclusions that are not aligned with your performance over a longer period of time. The cognitive term for this is  Recency Bias . So, the question we are faced with is: How do you measure your chess ability? There are a great many approaches for this, and my choice is not necessarily the best fit for everyone. My approach is to identify all mistakes from my competitive chess games with a classical time control. Basically, taking the idea of the "List of Mistakes" that Axel Smith describes in the excellent book Pump Up Your Rating,...

In my late teens I feel in love with the game of chess. That is way too late in life to have a realistic chance of achieving true mastery of the game. Regardless, this hasn't prevented me from continuing my journey, trying to increase my knowledge and becoming more skillful.   I am now starting a new serious attempt to improve my understanding and execution of chess. Building on my past failures, I will implement a few novel ideas to this approach. My plan is to document the process for my own benefit and accountability, and for others to hopefully get inspiration from. My Hitherto Chess Journey Let's start with briefly recounting my chess journey so far. I can safely state that I've invested my 10,000 hours in chess without achieving anything resembling mastery. I started playing in my late teens. Today I am 47. I have been playing in the Swedish national league, postal correspondence chess, online leagues and been active in computer chess organizations. My FIDE Elo rating...

"So ferry, cross the Mersey, 'Cause this land's the place I love, And here I'll stay." Gerry and the Pacemakers Today, I've been living abroad for exactly 10 years. It's a time as good as any to share my first-hand experiences on immigration. Immigrants are individuals like me, sustaining themselves in a foreign country. But, I am not an immigrant . I am an emigrant . On a good day, I'll agree to be called a migrant , so let's use that term going forward as it's neutral. The distinction between the terms is important, as it contains the crux of uprooting yourself and replanting your existence in foreign soil. An immigrant is identified with her new country, while an emigrant is identified with her old country. I am not an immigrant because I belong to my old country. Despite having chosen my new country out of free will, I am not integrated, and I don't strive to be. I fail the primary directive of any successful government immigra...

I have previously written about my obsessions with task management, and various productivity techniques to fight off procrastination. In the past, I expected to holy grail of personal productivity to be found in an organized list with appropriate metadata for each task. Much like MS Project but on a personal level. This is why I was so pleasantly surprised to find out how much I love Any.do 's daily planning feature. In an otherwise bare-bones implementations with hardly any metadata for each task, and other features not completely ironed out - the daily task planning is divine. This is what made me switch from my trusted Toodledo to Any.do. Any.do's daily planning feature does everything right. It pops up a friendly and appropriately obtrusive reminder each morning to plan your day. With interspersed motivational messages it is a reminder that you should be in control of your to dos and not vice versa. In combination with a super-attractive and to-the-point GUI, the dai...

Phrase Finder , a quick solution I put together for finding popular expressions that include a specific phrase, is no more. Yahoo made true of their promise to shut down their free Search API, and with it Phrase Finder. I am sad to see it go, because I regularly used it myself. There are no plans to bring it back to life at the moment.

Today, more and more people find themselves living in a foreign country. Be it a temporary state or a more permanent situation (as for myself); regardless, the world is becoming more global and multi-cultural. Or is it? And what exactly is culture? These are some of the questions that is being answered in Geert Hofstede’s cultural research, which now spans five decades. The book is a goldmine for people who are puzzled by culture clashes, and want to increase their understanding of cultural behavior. And who isn’t puzzled by cultural enigmas these days? No matter where you live, you just have to turn on the TV or head down to your local market or restaurant, and you will be exposed to foreign culture. Cultures and Organizations: Software for the Mind, Third Edition It turns out that the environment where we grew up ingrains eternal values in us. These values can be analyzed and measured, with averages calculated per country to quantify regional differences. This is exactly what...

Maybe I am just getting old. But I simply don’t get the concept of RockMelt , the newest flockesque browser/social-thingy on the horizon. It crams IM, social networks, and a web browser into one glorified application. I quietly ask myself how I would ever be able to get work done in an environment with that amount of cognitive overload? When accessing a web page I would be bombarded with information from the social sphere. Reading a longer article in that browser would be a feat worthy of the deepest reverence. On the surface, it seems nice and innocent enough to save a couple of Alt-Tabs to access my social networks. But the Alt-Tabs are there for a reason: to separate different contexts. 95% of the time when I am on a web page, I am there for a reason, and I don’t want to be distracted by other stuff. I believe the way forward is to simplify the user experience and use separate applications for web browsing and IM/social, so that the IM/social interactions can be turned off when ...

My yearly Sweden vacations are ever so offline. Checking e-mail is 15 kilometers away, and an unexpected liberator in that. So how does this affect me? Well, last year's experience made me discover Honore's "Slow", a short book about simplifying your life, and taking time to smell the roses. During this year’s vacation, I hit the Swedish book shops with the intent to find similar titles. But I was disappointed with seemingly shallow follow-ups trying to ride the success wave of Slow. Hours of book browsing later I came back empty-handed, disappointed not because I couldn’t find what I wanted but rather because I didn't know what I was looking for. Some days later I received a gift from my mother, a book with exquisite drawings and fine writings from a Swedish lake in the Mälaren area ("Sjö" by Gunnar Brusewitz). I was extremely pleased with the gift and started to ponder how removed I had become from nature. Living a city life, commuting to a cubicle,...

I’m now back from a relaxing vacation, doing close to nothing. The return to a hectic business life is a stark contrast. This has led me to set out a plan of doing less this year. But don’t get me wrong. Last year, I had great strategies, plans and goals for FeedJournal as well as for other personal projects. But looking back, nothing much moved forward. I can find no other reason for this than that I was feeling bogged down by the weight of my commitments. That’s why I this year plan to do less. By this logic, I hope to accomplish more. As an example, the long promised rewrite of the FeedJournal Publisher interface will take the back seat to a revamp of the existing interface, which by all means is working well. Improving what is there requires some magnitudes less effort. I hope it’s as simple as that.

Do you ever feel like you want to change something but don't know how? If you are anything like me, this is a challenge you face daily. Luckily for us, the Heath brother has taken upon themselves to create a comprehensive framework for how to go about changing someone or something. What's even better is that they succeeded to write another great book, that lives up to the high expectations from their debut blockbuster Made to Stick. Switch reaches Gladwellian mastery when it comes to readability and entertainment value. But the true value comes with the concrete framework for driving change. Laying out such a framework follows in the tradition of Made to Stick, and has become something of a Heath trademark. With this framework, driving change replaces the guesswork with a more methodological approach to change where the outcome can be predicted. I enjoyed this book immensely and I expect to get as much value out of Switch as I got out of Made to Stick. I can't wait fo...

Valerie Skinner interviewed me for the IBM “Yin meets Yang” blog. I am sharing my thoughts on agile, Jazz and other software development stuff. Impeccable timing, since my company today also launches a preview of our integration product for Jazz and Lotus Connections.

Recently, I had the enjoyment to read two good books on presentations. You know, these humiliating affairs feared more than death itself. One is “Confessions of a Public Speaker”, which I panhandled from a colleague after reading his praising tweet; the other is “Presentation Zen”, a longtime item on my Wish List. I wrote Amazon reviews for both books: One thing is certain, Scott Berkun has the gift of the gab. The author's personal experiences as a speaker at conferences is greatly entertaining and full of humorous anecdotes. I promptly subscribed to his blog , to get more of Berkun's good writing. But of course, that's not why you read this book, you want to learn about public speaking. And Berkun doesn't disappoint. His first-hand, pragmatic advice on all matters related to public speaking is useful and highly relevant for budding speakers. The book is not, neither does it try to be, a complete reference - but rather a view into the hard work behind presentatio...

I read Global Catastrophic Risks not only to deepen my understanding of global risks, but also to find ways to practically do something about it. Hopefully, blogging about the chapters as I digest them will assist on both accounts. “All else being equal, not many people would prefer to destroy the world. […] Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be a mistake.” Eliezer Yudowsky goes on by describing mistakes in human reasoning and how flawed our intuition is. The heuristics we use to evaluate probabilities, form the basis for how we deal with all types of existential risk. Knowledge of human psychological flaws are therefore important as we shape agendas for risk prevention. It is interesting to note that knowledge of these very biases and flaws does not make us much smarter. Research shows that when we compensate for our known biases, they are reduced by some 50% but never go away completely. “It is a terribly frightening thing, but peopl...

I read Global Catastrophic Risks not only to deepen my understanding of global risks, but also to find ways to practically do something about it. Hopefully, blogging about the chapters as I digest them will assist on both accounts. This is the weakest chapter so far. Millenialism is the expectation that the world will be destroyed and replaced with a better world. Millenial belief comes in two flavors: religious and scientific. The religious form spans many religions, while scientific millenialism is best exemplified by the Singularitarians , led by Ray Kurzweil . While the larger portion of the chapter outlines different types of millenialism, the question is: how does it relate to evaluating  global catastrophic risks? This is where the chapter truly fails. While the author brings forward examples ( Y2K ) where millenial impulses helped to bring risks to the global agenda, there are no genuine suggestions how to factor in millenialism when evaluating risks. The bottom lin...

I have been hosting my web sites on WebHost4Life for a long time, and they have served me well for years. However, after they recently migrated to a new infrastructure I have experienced problems. They still offer a great budget hosting alternative for ASP.NET/SQL Server sites with lower system requirements, but I decided to take my business elsewhere. I evaluated Windows VPS hosts that offer an isolated hosting environment for a good price. Here are the shortlist of the Windows virtual private servers that I considered: 1and1 I immediately recognized the brand from magazine ads. Their Windows VPS offerings are very attractive on paper, but their system specs seemed somewhat outdated, especially their choice of database server. They offer MSDE 2000, which Microsoft stopped supporting two years ago. I didn’t really see this as a showstopper, and sent a message to their sales department to understand if I would be able to upgrade the database server myself. After over 2 business day...

The last couple of months have proven hectic, as Mainsoft pushed out Harmony for both Google Docs and SharePoint. Harmony is a free product that lets you access your online documents from an Outlook sidebar. As Harmony’s product manager it’s been one hell of a ride defining and seeing the product through to launch. You can see (hear) me presenting a video for each product on the respective product pages for Google Docs and SharePoint . After all the hard work it is great to read the write-ups in TechCrunch , Lifehacker , and other sites . So what is Harmony in a nutshell? Having your shared documents available in Outlook enables some cool new features which changes the game for how you think about e-mail and attachments. You can drag attachments from incoming messages to the Google Docs or SharePoint, where they are easily shared with anyone. And when you send a message, linked documents are automatically shared with recipients, regardless if they have a Google account or not....

I just finished Dan Brown’s latest book, The Lost Symbol . I enjoyed it to a great extent, especially being introduced to curious new subjects such as Noetic theory . As with most commercial successes, The Lost Symbol did not go down well with critics. But of course, the culture elite can’t stay elitist if their taste blends with the populace. Good for them. Just as with Brown’s previous book, The Da Vinci Code, it sparked my interest in code breaking. Researching cryptography, I stumbled upon the tweleve discussion forum, dedicated to solving puzzles and treasure hunts. There, I discovered two intriguing unsolved puzzles: Maranatha and Quest for the Golden Eagle . It doesn’t hurt that there is a million dollar prize in each puzzle. Wish me luck.

I read Global Catastrophic Risks not only to deepen my understanding of global risks, but also to find ways to practically do something about it. Hopefully, blogging about the chapters as I digest them will assist on both accounts. The book’s chapter 3 discusses our understanding of evolution, given the long perspective. Evolution is not unique and has occurred several times in our history. Tool-making hominoids with communication skills have evolved independently in Africa (our ancestors), Europe (the ancestors of the Neanderthal) and south-east Asia (“hobbits”). Environmental change is the major catalyst to drive evolution. Once species have filled their niches in the wake of an environmental change, adaption of organisms is only fine-tuned. It has also been shown that in the last 40,000 years evolution has been driving our species forward, 100 times faster than before. Why this is so, is still unclear. Today, psychological pressures and new environmental factors decide w...

Recent discussions about the coexistence of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and agile development has prompted me to revisit my master's thesis on the subject. Ten years ago, I was one of the first practitioners of eXtreme Programming (XP), a software development method that belongs to the agile development movement. The big stumbling block of these methods has always been how to introduce it in an organization. Mentioning the words "extreme programming" makes you fight an uphill battle from the start. Agile is definitely a better word when presenting it. But still, the adoption of agile development requires a shift in the organizational culture, which historically has been more formal. After having participated in and coached a few pilot projects, I started to think about how to best introduce the method in a software organization. This thinking caused me to return to university to research the topic - the result was a master's thesis on the subje...

I created two new Google Drive document templates for Product Management work: a Product Requirements Document (PRD) and a Functional Specifications Document (FSD) . These are central documents in the product development lifecycle. The requirements document is used for a product's business and marketing requirements, while the specification document further details how those requirements will be implemented in the product. I'll start to dogfood these templates right away and will make updates along the way as needed. Please let me know if you find them useful or would like to see any changes!