Archive for the 'Links' Category

Monday, November 21st, 2011

The only members of the crew who didn’t come down with dysentery were Huston and Bogart, because they were drinking whisky rather than the water, which turned out to be the source of the infection.

- The African Queen

On a related note, I’ll be headed to Africa for a month, albeit the other side of the continent, next February.

I’ll need to pack some whisky.

Posted in Links, Travel | No Comments »

Daniel Jalkut on Asking for Help

Friday, November 19th, 2010

All the bugs in our group were difficult. One day I was assigned a particularly vexing one. I had shown a knack for tracking down tricky issues, but this one stymied me. I hammered away at the bug but I couldn’t figure out the cause. I couldn’t even think of where to go next. I was petrified.

- Red Sweater Blog – Ask For Help

Read the post, it’s worth it. The moral is, if you need help, ask for it. By the time I was at Apple, this was one of the things we drilled into new recruits, for precisely the reason that it could be paralyzing to be dropped into that environment. The company very much has a Do-It-Yourself culture, but not asking for help when you need it can be paralyzing and demoralizing, and totally unnecessarily so. It’s not a defect to need help once in awhile.

Posted in General, Links | 1 Comment »

Ross Perot and Scott McNealy

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

    Before they flew east, Alvy and Ed were apprehensive. They had heard strange things about Ross Perot from a credible source, Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems, a rising young star in Silicon Valley. Scott talked about how he and Ross were supposed to meet at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to shake hands on a deal. The terms had already been negotiated by their people, but the two leaders had never met in person.
    At O’Hare, Ross Perot sized up the younger man and asked: “Are you married?”
    “No.”
    “Where do you live?”
    “California.”
    That was all Ross Perot wanted to know.
    He stormed away. The deal was off.

- The Second Coming of Steve Jobs

I heard this story awhile ago, but this is the only reference I can find to it in print.

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Kellan Elliott-McCrea on Flickr and Data

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system. Every photo, in every size, plus the completely untouched original. (which we store for you indefinitely, whether or not you pay us) Every tag, every comment, every note, every people tag, every fave. Also your stats, view counts, and referers. […] Flickr actually goes a bit farther, not only can you get your data out, but it gets enriched as it passes through the system. […] This isn’t the exhaustive list, just a few of the things Flickr does to respect, and collaborate with the people who share their time and data with us.

- Minimal Competence: Data Access, Data Ownership, and Sharecropping.

Anyone who writes a web service should be aiming for this. Anybody who uses someone else’s service that doesn’t provide this level of access should be asking why.

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