Ramblings & ephemera
From Nicholas Carr’s “Cloud koan” (Rough Type: 1 October 2009):
Not everything will move into the cloud, but the cloud will move into everything.
Related posts
Which is better: products or services?
What successful startups need
Tim O’Reilly defines cloud computing
Paul Graham’s lessons for startups
Many layers of cloud computing, or just one?
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
Image by Esther_G via Flickr
From Josh Olson’s “I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script” (The Village Voice: 9 September 2009):
It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you’re dealing with someone who can’t.
Related posts
Why Picasso charged [...]
Posted on September 16th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, commonplace book, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
photo credit: State Library of New South Wales collection
From Peter Stark’s “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow–First Chill–Then Stupor–Then the Letting Go” (Outside: January 1997):
There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau’s cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. [...]
Posted on June 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, science | No Comments »
From Wikipedia’s “Clarke’s three laws” (2 November 2006):
Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
Memories are passive fragments.
— Scott Granneman
Related posts
My new book – Linux Phrasebook – is out!
How to tell if someone is a good writer
Architecture & the quality without a name
A living story, tattooed on flesh
A grammarian’s haiku
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, musings, writing ideas | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas” (April 2005):
Trevor Blackwell presents the following recipe for a startup: “Watch people who have money to spend, see what they’re wasting their time on, cook up a solution, and try selling it to them. It’s surprising how small a problem can be and still provide a [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas” (April 2005):
It’s much easier to sell services than a product, just as it’s easier to make a living playing at weddings than by selling recordings. But the margins are greater on products.
Related posts
How to start a startup
You need to know if your product is a luxury [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “How to Start a Startup” (March 2005):
People who don’t want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it.
Related posts
Why infosec is so hard
Why cons work on us
What it takes to get people to comply with security policies
The shift from interior to exterior lives
The most volatile [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “How to Start a Startup” (March 2005):
You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business | Comments Off
From “Beauty Is Our Business: A Birthday Salute to Edsger W. Dijkstra“:
David Gelernter said in “Machine Beauty – Elegance and the Heart of Technology“:
Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.
Related posts
The Vitruvian Triad & the Urban Triad
Web design contrasted [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Nicholas Thompson’s “Who Needs Keys?” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2004):
… the main principles of hacking, which state that information should circulate as widely as possible, and that breaking into systems is acceptable if you cause no harm.
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The origins of 2600
The Chinese Internet threat
More problems with voting, election 2008
Failure every 30 years produces better design
Your [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From “Fuzzy maths” (The Economist: 11 May 2006):
Google seems to use betas as dogs sprinkle trees – so that rivals know where it is.
Related posts
Denise-ism #62
Why did Thomas Jefferson bring a stuffed moose to France?
The strictest of teachers
The most volatile compound known to man
The military’s 8 P’s
Posted on June 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, technology | Comments Off
From The New York Times‘ “Form Follows Function. Now Go Out and Cut the Grass.“:
Failure, [Henry] Petroski shows, works. Or rather, engineers only learn from things that fail: bridges that collapse, software that crashes, spacecraft that explode. Everything that is designed fails, and everything that fails leads to better design. Next time at least that [...]
Posted on May 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, science | Comments Off
From The New Yorker’s “The Disappearing Poet” (4 July 2005):
There is no more volatile compound known to man than that of decorum and despair. — Anthony Lane, on Weldon Kees
Related posts
Word of the day: pareidolia
Why we can easily remember jingles but not jokes
Why so many Google projects & betas?
Why infosec is so hard
Weldon Kees, polymath
Posted on May 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature | Comments Off
From Noam Eppel’s “Security Absurdity: The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security“:
A cyber-criminal only needs to identify a single vulnerability in a system’s defenses in order to breach its security. However, information security professionals need to identify every single vulnerability and potential risk and come up with suitable and practical fix or mitigation [...]
Posted on May 12th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, technology | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn“:
1. Release Early.
The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users’ reactions.
By “release early” I don’t mean you should release something full of bugs, but that you should release something minimal. [...]
Posted on May 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn“:
We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly miraculous. It is also palpably short. You’re given this marvellous thing, and then poof, it’s taken away. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. But even to people who [...]
Posted on May 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book | Comments Off
From Brian Hayes’ “The Post-OOP Paradigm“:
Christopher Alexander [a bricks-and-steel architect] is known for the enigmatic thesis that well-designed buildings and towns must have “the quality without a name.” He explains: “The fact that this quality cannot be named does not mean that it is vague or imprecise. It is impossible to name because it is [...]
Posted on April 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, on writing | Comments Off
From The Register’s “How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking“:
And there wasn’t time for the banks to fix the problem if anyone went public with it. Their MTBU was too short. MTBU? That’s “Maximum Time to Belly Upâ€Â, as coined by the majestic Donn Parker of Stanford Research Institute. He found that businesses that [...]
Posted on January 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off
From Garr Reynolds’ “Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic“:
A key tenet of the Zen aesthetic is kanso or simplicity. In the kanso concept beauty, grace, and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission. Says artist, designer and architect, Dr. Koichi Kawana, “Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means.” …
The aesthetic concept [...]
Posted on January 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, teaching, technology | Comments Off
