When we don't see the sun, we see other stars

What are your motivations for creativity?

- I want to make a change.
- It makes me happy! It is a need of my mind.

How to be creative for a thing?

There are two steps:

- See the thing as every people see it

- Think about a new different thing from it

How to think about a new different thing?

There are two ways:

- Forget all things you have already known.

- A whack on the side of your head. ;)

This was what I have learned from the following great book:

source: Amazon.com

Well! A physical whack on the side of your head is needed sometimes but the meaning behind is that you need to break these 9 following locks on your mind. Remove them!

The lock #1: "The correct answer"

We all learn from schools that there is only one correct answer to a question. For example, a proposition is only true or false in Algebra. In reality, there are always some answers to a question basing on a point of view. For example, number 6 becomes number 9 if you look it in the opposite.

The lock #2: "That is not logic"

There are two kinds of thoughts: soft thinking and hard thinking. Soft thinking focuses on finding a relationship among things. On the other hand, hard thinking focuses on the differences between things. The metaphor is a technique of soft thinking which needed for creativity.

The lock #3: "Follow the rules"

Sometimes, creativity is not always a contribution but a damage. However, in order to create a new model, we need to break an old model. Break the rules!

The lock #4: "Be realistic"

Answering the question "if...then what happens?" is useful somehow. For example:

- Imagine if what other people (your inspirational ones) will do in your situation. E.g: I sometimes say to myself when I face an issue: "What will Mr. A do in this situation?"

- Imagine if you are what you think. E.g: Imagine you are a paper; what are your characteristics to make you more convenient for users?

- Imagine an idea which is obviously not realistic. According to this idea, you can come up with a better realistic one. E.g: original idea: the Government will give money for whom put trash into trash bins. Improved idea: every time people put trash into trash bins, they will receive a random fun from the trash bins.

The lock #5: "Play is frivolous"

"If necessity is the mother of invention, then play is its father". There is no doubt about it!

The lock #6: "That is not in my field"

Specialization is necessary in most of the cases; however, bringing a knowledge from a field to another field is really useful as well.

The lock #7: "Don't be silly"

Actually, a comedian is smart. He/she always thinks in different ways. It is like a movement of a car, sometimes it needs to go back in order to go straight.

The lock #8: "Avoid ambiguity"

People avoid ambiguity because it results in the misunderstanding in communication. However, just keep listening to your dreams and playing with it.

The lock #9: "Mistakes are wrong"

In most of the case, a mistake can result in a very bad situation. However, a mistake sometimes helps you come up with some new approaches.

Reference:
[1]. Roger von Oech, A Whack On the Side of the Head

Comments

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

Installing NGINX on macOS

I have heard of a lot of NGINX recently. One of them was it can help for security issues; for sure, it much be more. It so happens that our team has got a ton of user stories from a security audit. It's time to delve into it. What is NGINX? In order to get a basic idea and have some fun , I've just picked some available posts from my favorite Vietnamese blogger communities as below: https://kipalog.com/posts/Cau-hinh-nginx-co-ban---Phan-1 https://viblo.asia/hoang.thi.tuan.dung/posts/ZabG912QGzY6 NGINX (pronounce: Engine-X) is a web server (comparing to IIS, Apache). It can be used as a reverse proxy ( this is what I need for security issues with configuration ), load balancer and more. How to get started? I found the below path for learning NGINX by googling "learn nginx": https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-online-resources-to-learn-Nginx In this post, I only went first step. This is installing NGINX on macOS and taking a first look at the confi...

Strategy Design Pattern

For example, I have a program with an Animal abstract class and two sub-classes Dog and Bird. I want to add new behavior for the class Animal, this is "fly". Now, I face two approaches to solve this issue: 1. Adding an abstract method "fly" into the class Animal. Then, I force the sub-classes should be implemented this method, something like: public abstract class Animal{ //bla bla public abstract void fly(); } public class Bird extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Fly high"); } } public class Dog extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Cant fly"); } } 2. Creating an interface with method "fly" inside. The same issue to an abstract class, I force the classes these implement this interface should have a method "fly" inside: public interface Flyable{ public void fly(); } public class Bird implements Flyable{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.pr...

Building Axon.ivy Projects on Bitbucket Pipelines

Read me if you don't know what Axon.ivy (Ivy) is. Motivation - Ivy projects are designed to be built on a continuous integration (CI) server like Jenkins - Today, Bitbucket supports for CI with Bitbucket Pipelines - We're using Bitbucket. Then, why not? It must be very cool and convenient for us if we can centralize our CI and VCS (version control system) tools in one place. Here is an approach We have to use a maven plugin called project-build-plugin to build ivy projects. This plugin requires an instance of Ivy engine during building time. Bitbucket Pipelines allows us to specify our own docker image as a build environment. What we need to do is to prepare our docker image with needed stuffs such as JDK, Maven, Ivy engine, etc. Step 1. Prepare Docker images For testing purpose, I already created two docker images: Maven and Axon.ivy engine. They are now available on Docker Hub This image for Maven using Oracle JDK 8 This image for Axon.iv...

Creating a Chatbot with RiveScript in Java

Motivation "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered a major innovation that could disrupt many things. Some people even compare it to the Internet. A large investor firm predicted that some AI startups could become the next Apple, Google or Amazon within five years" - Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University. Using chatbots to support our daily tasks is super useful and interesting. In fact, "Jenkins CI, Jira Cloud, and Bitbucket" have been becoming must-have apps in Slack of my team these days. There are some existing approaches for chatbots including pattern matching, algorithms, and neutral networks. RiveScript is a scripting language using "pattern matching" as a simple and powerful approach for building up a Chabot. Architecture Actually, it was flexible to choose a programming language for the used Rivescript interpreter like Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Perl. I went with Java. Used Technologies and Tools Oracle JDK 1.8...

vhandit

Search This Blog