Ramblings & ephemera

An analysis of Google’s technology, 2005

From Stephen E. Arnold’s The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software (Infonortics: September 2005):

The figure Google’s Fusion: Hardware and Software Engineering shows that Google’s technology framework has two areas of activity. There is the software engineering effort that focuses on PageRank and other applications. Software engineering, as used here, [...]

A botnet with a contingency plan

From Gregg Keizer’s “Massive botnet returns from the dead, starts spamming” (Computerworld: 26 November 2008):
A big spam-spewing botnet shut down two weeks ago has been resurrected, security researchers said today, and is again under the control of criminals.
The “Srizbi” botnet returned from the dead late Tuesday, said Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer at FireEye [...]

How Obama raised money in Silicon Valley & using the Net

From Joshua Green’s “The Amazing Money Machine” (The Atlantic: June 2008):
That early fund-raiser [in February 2007] and others like it were important to Obama in several respects. As someone attempting to build a campaign on the fly, he needed money to operate. As someone who dared challenge Hillary Clinton, he needed a considerable amount of [...]

How the settlers changed America’s ecology, radically

From Charles C. Mann’s “America, Found & Lost” (National Geographic: May 2007):
It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms—specifically the common night crawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before Columbus. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in [...]

If concerts bring money in for the music biz, what happens when concerts get smaller?

From Jillian Cohen’s “The Show Must Go On” (The American: March/April 2008):

You can’t steal a concert. You can’t download the band—or the sweaty fans in the front row, or the merch guy, or the sound tech—to your laptop to take with you. Concerts are not like albums—easy to burn, copy, and give to your friends. [...]

Details on the Storm & Nugache botnets

From Dennis Fisher’s “Storm, Nugache lead dangerous new botnet barrage” (SearchSecurity.com: 19 December 2007):
[Dave Dittrich, a senior security engineer and researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle], one of the top botnet researchers in the world, has been tracking botnets for close to a decade and has seen it all. But this new piece [...]

Do’s and don’ts for open source software development

From Jono DiCarlo’s “Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software” (5 October 2007):
Do

Get a Benevolent Dictator
Someone who has a vision for the UI. Someone who can and will say “no” to features that don’t fit the vision.
Make the Program Usable In Its Default State
Don’t rely on configurable [...]

Success of The Shawshank Redemption

From John Swansburg’s “The Shawshank Reputation” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):
Yet even King didn’t think [The Shawshank Redemption] stood a chance at the box office-and he was right. Though the movie got good reviews, and seven Oscar nominations, Shawshank in its original release grossed only about half of the $35 million it cost to make.
The movie [...]

More movies made from Stephen King’s books than anyone else

From John Swansburg’s “The Shawshank Reputation” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):
Fifty-eight movies have been adapted from his writing, not as many as from Dickens, but more than from any other living author.

Related posts

Success of The Shawshank Redemption
Scarcities and the music, movie, and publishing businesses
If concerts bring money in for the music biz, what happens when concerts [...]

Failure every 30 years produces better design

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 [...]

Paul Graham’s lessons for startups

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. [...]

The structure & meaning of the URL as key to the Web’s success

From Clay Shirky’s “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview“:
The systems that have succeeded at scale have made simple implementation the core virtue, up the stack from Ethernet over Token Ring to the web over gopher and WAIS. The most widely adopted digital descriptor in history, the URL, regards semantics as a side conversation between consenting [...]