Strange Loops

No Matter Where You Go, There You Are

How to Start a Startup

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I just found Paul Graham’s new essay: How to Start a Startup. As always, it makes for thought provoking reading.

I thought one of his footnotes was kind of interesting:

[3] Learning to hack is a lot cheaper than business school, because you can do it mostly on your own. For the price of a Linux box, a copy of K&R, and a few hours of advice from your neighbor’s fifteen year old son, you’ll be well on your way.

Huh? Who would have thought…. I guess those “Learn X in Y (Hours|Days|Weeks|Months)” books might be worth reading after all.

Top Corporate Hate Websites

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Link: Forbes.com - Top Corporate Hate Web Sites.

Found this off Metafilter.

Lots of justifiably crappy products and services out there. Personally UPS (and delivery companies in general) have garnered my personal ire with their inability to deliver packages on a schedule that works for me. The convenience of buying stuff online is offset by the inconvenience of waiting at home for a package.

Despair

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despair
despair,
originally uploaded by kreet.
If you’re thinking of getting a dog/cat, consider going to your local animal shelter and getting one there. Your local shelter will appreciate it and I’m sure your new pet will too.

There is something to be said about our own humanity when we treat animals kindly. (I’m paraphrasing someone badly)

Don’t be cruel to animals!

Arch Is Complex

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Just got done with the 1st half of this tutorial. Wow!

 

Arch might be the most sophisticated open source version control software out there. It definitely has an extra level of complexity to it (vs CVS, SVN, Darcs). The closest competitor to it might be Perforce. Arch supports branches, changesets, patches, distributed repositories plus loads of other features I’m not sure how to categorize. Arch definitely feels like the complexity is there to deal with large scale distributed development work e.g. Linux.

Where SVN is a natural evolution of CVS, Arch is the revolutionary branch in the world of open source version control. Of the three I’ve tried, Darcs feels the most usable for a single user/small group, SVN if you want CVS with less quirks and Arch is the super scalable version control software.

I’ll keep playing with Arch using the repository I’ve setup. I have a feeling though that Darcs will be my choice for a personal version control system.

 

See more progress on: try arch

Idea Tools

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I’ve found another “idea development environment” yesterday. This one is called Curio. Another one I found a month back was Spring. The one I use personally is Tinderbox.

Though Spring and Tinderbox don’t bill themselves as “idea development environments”, they all essentially serve the same purpose. Applications that allow arbitrary data be stored and organized on some canvas.

Sadly the most useful place for any of these tools is in the office, where we don’t use Macs. Eventually I hope to use these tools with ”Getting Things Done”. Curio, Spring and Tinderbox seem ready made for these purposes (in fact Tinderbox has a GTD template already).

A Counting Problem

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Link: Movie 15.

Count the number of times the people in white t-shirts pass the ball to one another.

Read on for the answer.

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Did you notice the gorilla?

Bad Ubuntu Image

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I’ve tried burning the Ubuntu Linux image and it keeps killing DiskUtility. I guess I won’t be trying out Linux on my PowerBook.

<sigh>