Alon Swartz

Interesting articles and links (Week35)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 5 Sep 2011 10:00:11 +0000

Interesting articles and links (Week34)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:02:27 +0000

Interesting articles and links (Week33)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:30:56 +0000

Interesting articles and links (Week32)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:46:53 +0000

Interesting articles and links (Week31)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 8 Aug 2011 09:59:26 +0000

How colors affect purchases

alon@alonswartz.org — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 13:58:45 +0000

via kissmetrics

Interesting articles and links (Week29)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 06:11:05 +0000

Interesting articles and links (Week28)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:44:57 +0000

The Rise of the Young Rich CEO

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:40:36 +0000

via focus.com

Interesting articles and links (Week27)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:32:44 +0000

Interesting articles and links (Week26)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 4 Jul 2011 07:48:23 +0000

I've been offline (deep in development mode), so not many links this week...

Interesting articles and links (Week25)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:17:09 +0000

Interesting articles and links (Week24)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 06:04:09 +0000

One Year of the Moon in 2.5 Minutes

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:10:18 +0000

src:youtube

Google search with instant pages

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:31:03 +0000

via googleblog

Implemented google custom search

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 10:02:23 +0000

Over time I've been adding stuff, and finding old posts are getting more of pain, so I just implemented Google Custom Search. Implementation was really simple, so was tweaking the styling.

Highly recommended for simple sites like this. Give it a try...

Interesting articles and links (Week23)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 19:52:49 +0000

Interesting articles and links (Week22)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 6 Jun 2011 09:17:28 +0000

Interesting articles and links (Week21)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 30 May 2011 17:49:07 +0000

My top 10 tweets of all time

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 25 May 2011 12:49:36 +0000

The top 10:

Interesting articles and links (Week20)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 23 May 2011 06:15:18 +0000

The Cult of Done (Manifesto)

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:34:39 +0000

src:brepettis.com

Interesting articles and links (Week19)

alon@alonswartz.org — Thu, 12 May 2011 11:22:37 +0000

2 more books I deem worthy of your time and attention

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 11 May 2011 11:10:01 +0000

I just got back from a long overdue vacation, and had the opportunity to catch up on some reading. I read 5 books on my kindle, and have added 2 of them to my bookshelf (books I deem them worthy of your time and attention).

The Power of Persuasion - Robert Levine
Getting to YES - William Ury

BTW, this was what my mornings looked like:

Why work at a coffee shop?

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 11:33:17 +0000

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. ~ Ernest Hemingway

I spend most my time working at coffee shops. I'm often asked how I manage to get work done, and why I do it - so I was very happy to see this article.

To sum it up:

Great coffee
Just enough distraction
The weight of hours is lifted
Outside the office seems less like work
A place to go (I can't work from home)

How people in different countries spend their time

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 11:21:34 +0000

src:economist.com

The unknown

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:56:39 +0000

It's really weird, but during the past week the famous Unknown quote came up in two different, completely unrelated conversations I had. I love this quote:

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.

-- Former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

src:wikipedia

YC Startup School 2010 - Videos

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 1 Mar 2011 12:52:16 +0000

Great videos worth watching:

Brain Teaser: 100 floors, 2 orbs

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 12:46:55 +0000

You have two identical crystal orbs. You need to figure out how high an orb can fall from a 100 story building before it breaks. You know nothing about the toughness of the orbs: they may be very fragile and break when dropped from the first floor, or they may be so tough that dropping them from the 100th floor doesn’t even harm them.

What is the largest number of orb-drops you would ever have to do in order to find the right floor? (i.e., what’s the most efficient way you could drop the orbs to find your answer?)

You are allowed to break both orbs, provided that in doing so you uniquely identify the correct floor.

Spoiler alert - See the solution.

Can you solve a 2nd grade (China) logic problem?

alon@alonswartz.org — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:44:42 +0000

Switch the frogs to the opposite side within 2 minutes.

10 Simple Truths Smart People Forget

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 12:43:23 +0000

Education and intelligence accomplish nothing without action.
Happiness and success are two different things.
Everyone runs their own business.
Having too many choices interferes with decision making.
All people possess dimensions of success and dimensions of failure.
Every mistake you make is progress.
People can be great at doing things they don’t like to do.
The problems we have with others are typically more about us.
Emotional decisions are rarely good decisions.
You will never feel 100% ready when an opportunity arises.

See the full article here.

How to write good code

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 12:41:26 +0000

via xkcd.com

I recently wrote a semi-related blog post entitled: Practical guidelines for beautiful Python code

I spread your idea because...

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 5 Jan 2011 12:35:01 +0000

Ideas spread when people choose to spread them. Here are some reasons why:

I spread your idea because it makes me feel generous.

because I feel smart alerting others to what I discovered.

because I care about the outcome and want you (the creator of the idea) to succeed.

because I have no choice. Every time I use your product, I spread the idea (Hotmail, iPad, a tattoo).

because there's a financial benefit directly to me (Amazon affiliates, mlm).

because it's funny and laughing alone is no fun.

because I'm lonely and sharing an idea solves that problem, at least for a while.

because I'm angry and I want to enlist others in my outrage (or in shutting you down).

because both my friend and I will benefit if I share the idea (Groupon).

because you asked me to, and it's hard to say no to you.

because I can use the idea to introduce people to one another, and making a match is both fun in the short run and community-building.

because your service works better if all my friends use it (email, Facebook).

because if everyone knew this idea, I'd be happier.

because your idea says something that I have trouble saying directly (AA, a blog post, a book).

because I care about someone and this idea will make them happier or healthier.

because it's fun to make another teen snicker about prurient stuff we're not supposed to see.

because the tribe needs to know about this if we're going to avoid an external threat.

because the tribe needs to know about this if we're going to maintain internal order.

because it's my job.

I spread your idea because I'm in awe of your art and the only way I can repay you is to share that art with others.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Visualizing facebook friendships render the world map

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:32:46 +0000

via facebook.com

TurnKey Linux featured on Category5 TV

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:31:08 +0000

The TKL segment starts at around minute 25.

Google Zeitgeist 2010 - Year in Review

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 12:29:47 +0000

Ranking Programming Languages

alon@alonswartz.org — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 12:28:39 +0000

By tiers:

Tier One: C#, Java, PHP, C++, Objective C, JavaScript, Python, C, Ruby, Perl and Shell
Tier Two: Scala, Actionscript, Haskell,
Tier Three: R, Assembly, Visual Basic, Coldfusion, F##, Groovy, ASP, Clojure, Erlang, Lua, Scheme, Common List, Emacs Lisp
Tier Four: D, Fortran, OCaml, Tcl, Go, Smalltalk, Viml
Tier Five: IO, Racket, VHDL, Verilog, Haxe, Objective-J, Boo, Vala, Coffeescript, Supercollider, Ada, Self, Arc, Eiffel, Factor, Nu, Sclang, PureData, Duby, ooc

via readwriteweb.com

Filtering Thunderbird for Starred Mail

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 12:25:24 +0000

This little tip just changed my life… I swear. I've been looking FOR-EV-ER for a way to filter my Thunderbird Inbox so that I see only the "starred" messages. Despite my poking and prodding and searching I couldn't figure out how until today.

When you're building your filter/custom view/folder criteria, "starred" is not an option in the first drop down (like Flag, Tags, and Junk Status are). Additionally, despite the fact that the mail server knows all about whether a message is "starred" or not, it's not in the header of the email either

In Thunderbird, Starred is a STATUS!

That's right, a STATUS. Drop the first box down and select "Status", drop the second box down and select "is", then drop the third box down and select "Starred". That's it, you're done.

via revjim.net

UDS theme song - narwhals narwhals....

alon@alonswartz.org — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:24:02 +0000

Thanks to Scott Moser, Dustin Kirkland and the whole server team!

A Universe From Nothing

alon@alonswartz.org — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:22:13 +0000

Excellent talk by Lawrence Krauss

How to start a movement

alon@alonswartz.org — Fri, 1 Oct 2010 12:20:01 +0000

via ted.com (talk by Derek Sivers)

What a Google server looks like

alon@alonswartz.org — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 12:17:47 +0000

See the full article at news.cnet.com

Solid State Hard Drives - You gotta love 'em!

alon@alonswartz.org — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 12:11:44 +0000

Linus shared his thoughts on the Intel SSD's.

Update: I just ordered an Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD (SSDSA2MH160G2R5)

The most powerful colors in the world

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:14:48 +0000

via colourlovers.com (see the article for more image maps)

Validation - One of the best youtube video's I've ever seen

alon@alonswartz.org — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 12:08:30 +0000

I'm going back to school - Khan Academy style

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:06:53 +0000

The Khan Academy is a non-for-profit with the mission of providing world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Despite being the work of one man, Salman Khan, the 1600+ video library is the most-used educational video resource in the world (as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month).

I'll be starting with one of my favourite subjects (outside of technology) which is biology and will probably then move onto organic chemistry and then physics.

For fun, I might dabble a little in Linear algebra, probability and statistics - we'll see...

I highly recommend Khan - give it a shot...

The most common lies ever told

alon@alonswartz.org — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:03:08 +0000

via graphjam.com

Others:

My dog ate my homework.
What happened between me at that other woman was meaningless.
No, you don't look fat in that.
It will only take me a week to code that.
I thought I sent that email, I'm sure I did.

999 Business Ideas

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:00:15 +0000

Prepackaged school supplies based on the lists from the school districts

Incubator site providing office space, hosting, etc. for startups that are seed funded.

In-grocery store prep service (buy vegetables first and drop them off to be chopped to your specs - pick them up on the way to checkout)

A website that you can submit your design and work with vendors to manufacture your own clothes line.

Online discount brokerage that has no closing hours and provides access to all exchanges throughout the world and handles currency and legal issues automatically.

Stamphead, where stamps can be custom made in the likeness of an avatar the user creates.

Aggregator site for affiliate marketers to collect daily reports. Would work on a tiered pricing structure giving you more info the higher up you go. Basic would be for people like me who just want to know if they made something and how much; advanced would pull down all available data.

A gadget to cook beans/lentils/vegetables/rice for the same amount of time (quicker than what can be done in a slow cooker.)

Herbal Flavored Gum. MMM...rosemary.

Church issued credit card with automatic 10% for religious tithing

See the other 989 ideas at sixmonthmba.com

Optimizing your feedly experience

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:58:22 +0000

I just found out about feedly, my initial thoughts are quite good. I especially like the keyboard shortcuts. Take a look at the below video to get a feel for it.

via blog.feedly.com

Brilliant talk by John Cleese on creativity

alon@alonswartz.org — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 11:56:37 +0000

Recommending books worthy of your time and attention

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 3 Aug 2010 11:55:01 +0000

There are lots of great books out there, as well as tons which are utter crap - and not worth the paper they are printed on.

It's easy to tell the difference between the two, the hard part is differentiating between a great a book, and one that is really great - and worthy of your time and attention.

I've read a lot of books over the years, but only a handful of them fall into the really great category.

Finding a book in this category is hard, so from now on when I finish a book I deem worthy of this category, I'll recommend it. I'll also go back to my bookshelf and cherry pick the great ones as well.

Hope you find my recommendations useful. If you have any of your own, let me know.

update: see my book recommendations

Dell recommends IE8, on Ubuntu?

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 3 Aug 2010 11:52:03 +0000

Well, not really... But I thought it was funny considering the positioning of the chat popup over the Ubuntu banner.

Drink coffee - do stupid things faster...

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 3 Aug 2010 11:49:32 +0000

I saw this on the wall of my local coffee shop and had to share it.

This is how you re-kindle a lost relationship with a former user (DynDNS)

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:44:12 +0000

I just received the below email from DynDNS. Reading it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling - just the right amount of humour and marketing wrapped up in a neat package - sent by their resident Ninja Squad Sensei.

Koketsu ni irazunba koji wo ezu (Nothing ventured, nothing gained.)

Dear ex-DynDNS Customer (who wants to be an ex?),

So do you remember us? Well, we certainly remember you. You were one of our earliest customers. You put your faith in us before we had proven ourselves. Your support helped lay the foundation for DynDNS to become a world leader in networking specializing in DNS, email and domain name services for customers in over 200 countries (yup, TWO HUNDRED). We've catered to the needs of more than 12 million users (that's 12,000,000 with six zeros!), from home enthusiasts to Fortune 500 companies, and we've barely scratched the surface of where we expect to go.

For some reason, we've lost touch. Believe it or not, we still offer entirely free dynamic DNS services as well as a broad range of services that you can learn about here: LINK. Our active customer roster has expanded to almost 4 million individual users just like you as well as major companies such as Twitter, Squarespace, Warner Brothers, and Yum! Brands (KFC and Taco Bell...mmmmm).

There is a reason we are reaching back out to you. We want to re-kindle our relationship or at least remain friends.

We're taking a chance that you actually want to hear from us. You were a customer before it was commonplace to just ask for permission to follow-up. If you don't create an account and opt-in then you'll only hear from us one more time. Wouldn't that be a shame? Our product offering is constantly evolving, our client's are changing the world, we've been getting lots of noteworthy media coverage and our team continues to be thought leaders as it relates to DNS.

We hope you'll consider rejoining our "DNS is Sexy" movement that you helped jumpstart.

Sincerely,

Chris Widner DynDNS Ninja Squad Sensei

How to win at Rock Paper Scissors every time

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:38:57 +0000

via chacha.com

35 of the greatest programming quotes

alon@alonswartz.org — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:27:44 +0000

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.

-- Edward V Berard

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

-- Hofstadter's Law

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

-- Rick Osborne

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

-- Brian Kernighan

The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 10% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

-- Tom Cargill

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

-- Jamie Zawinski

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

-- Bjarne Stroustrup

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

-- Bjarne Stroustrup

If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it.

-- John Carmack

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.

-- John Carmack

Linux is only free if your time has no value

-- Jamie Zawinski

In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.

-- Unknown

It works on my machine.

-- Anonymous programmer

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

-- Jon Ribbens

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

--Edsger Dijkstra

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

-- E. W. Dijkstra

Debugging is anticipated with distaste, performed with reluctance, and bragged about forever.

-- Dan Kaminsky

Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have, to fake it.

-- Seymour Cray

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

-- Isaac Asimov

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

-- Mitch Ratcliffe

Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.

-- Cory Doctorow

There are only 3 numbers of interest to a computer scientist: 1, 0 and infinity.

-- Unknown

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

-- Alan Kay

Perl - The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.

-- Keith Bostic

Debuggers don't remove bugs. They only show them in slow motion.

-- Unknown

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.

-- Yogi Berra

Never trust a programmer in a suit.

-- Unknown

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

-- Alan Kay

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.

-- Seymour Cray

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

-- Bill Gates

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

-- E. W. Dijkstra

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

-- C.A.R. Hoare.

I Hate Programming. I Hate Programming. I Hate Programming. It works! I Love Programming.

-- Unknown

It takes 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the task.

-- Fred Brooks (on adding more programmers to get a job done faster)

via stackoverflow.com

The Unix family tree

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:20:28 +0000

via quicklycode.com

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

alon@alonswartz.org — Thu, 8 Jul 2010 11:18:14 +0000

The new captain jumped from the cockpit, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the owners who were swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach.

“I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners.

Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

Read the full article here (you really should!)

Ubuntu on Nexus One Android

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 7 Jul 2010 11:15:36 +0000

via nexusonehacks.net

Ubuntu is installed in a chroot, running a VNC server. Which allows you to use both Andriod and Ubuntu (via the VNC client) at the same time.

Not sure how useful this actually is, but it's cool none the less.

Drive Thru with a difference

alon@alonswartz.org — Tue, 6 Jul 2010 11:12:42 +0000

via moneyweb.co.za

How to get hired

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:10:49 +0000

Focus on one company.

Learn all about them.

Tell them how much you want to work for them.

Be persistent (though succinct).

Do this until hired.

See the full article by Derek Sivers.

For further inspiration, read how Tom Williams got hired by Apple at 14, using this method.

"Secret" Pac-Man Drawings - by the creator

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 11:08:26 +0000

via kotaku.com

I own you, and you are easily replaceable

alon@alonswartz.org — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:46:28 +0000

via chemistry-blog.com

How the world spends its time online

alon@alonswartz.org — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:48:44 +0000

via visualeconomics.com

How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen

alon@alonswartz.org — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:56:37 +0000

Reduce your big idea to Version 1.0.
Write a simple overview of what it does.
Write a detailed walk-through of every click.
Break it up into milestones.
Make your first milestone a stand-alone project.
Post it at elance, guru, odesk, vworker.
Hire one from each.
Continue with the one you like best.

See the full article by Derek Sivers.

For those who are programmers themselves, I recommend reading Getting Real by 37signals.

Exploring the software that powers Facebook

alon@alonswartz.org — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:54:43 +0000

The scaling challenge

570 billion page views per month.
25 billion pieces of content (status updates, comments, etc) are shared every month.
3 billion photos are uploaded every month.
Stores more photos on than all other photo sites combined (including sites like Flickr).
Serves 1.2 million photos per second, not including via their CDN.
Running 30,000 servers in 2009.

Software used

Memcached: a distributed memory caching system.
HipHop for PHP: converts PHP into C++ code to be compiled for better performance.
HayStack: high-performance photo storage/retrieval system.
Bigpipe: dynamic web page serving system.
Cassandra: distributed storage system with no single point of failure.
Scribe: flexible logging system
Hadoop and Hive: map-reduce implementation to perform calculations on massive amounts of data.
Thrift: cross-language development framework.
Varnish: HTTP accelerator

That Sounds Smart

alon@alonswartz.org — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:58:40 +0000

How do you tell if what someone is saying is smart? Most people’s first instinct is to think that things they can’t understand must be smart. After all, to say such things they must have learned them and aren’t people who have learned more about something generally smarter than people who haven’t? Thus the common phenomena of people trusting jargon-laden statements.

One problem with this method is simply that jargon can be faked. It’s not too hard to make up a bunch of longish words that sound complicated. And if you don’t understand them, you’ll have a hard time telling whether they’re real or made up.

But the more serious problem is that this method is exactly backwards. Smart people actually say things that are very simple and easy to understand. And the smarter they are, the more clear what they say is. It’s stupid people who say things that are hard to understand.

See the full article by Aaron Swartz.

Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument

alon@alonswartz.org — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:42:03 +0000

That won't scale.
That's been proven to be O(N^2) and we need a solution that's O(NlogN).
There are, of course, various export limitations on that technology.
The syntax is idiosyncratic.
Trying to build a team behind that technology would be a staffing nightmare.
That can't be generalized to a cross-platform build.
Unfortunately, the license would contaminate our product.
If we go with that idea, we're going to have Don Marti camped out in the front lobby with 300 angry software jihad supporters.
Our support infrastructure simply can't handle the volume that change would involve.
I had one of the interns try that approach for another project, and it scrambled the CEO's hard drive. So I think it's going to be a hard sell.

See the full list here

It's high time I started using this posterous thing...

alon@alonswartz.org — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:39:02 +0000

OK, so it's like this. Over the years I've had numerous failed attempts at blogging, and finally just gave up on the idea altogether. I think the main issue I had (besides time constraints) was what I should write about.

It's not that I didn't have ideas, it's that I had too many. I wanted the content to be deep, not wide. Build an audience and all that. What's the point in ranting about stuff if no one reads it?

For a while now I have been using twitter and writing regular blog posts for TurnKey Linux. Twitter is great platform to be 'wide', and TurnKey is a great platform to be 'deep', what's missing from the mix is random fun stuff, that's where posterous comes in.

So, what will I be using it for? Well, random stuff that doesn't make sense to be posted to the TurnKey blog, as well as personal stuff too.

But, who knows what the future holds...