"Why I Write" by George Orwell

In this famous essay, "Why I Write", George Orwell discusses reasons why people write, and I found the article rather interesting. He said that "All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery", which is a phrase that is often quoted.

Icons for your Architecture Diagrams

If you have been wondering about where to find Icons for your Architecture Diagrams/ Presentations, here are few options.

1. Try Open Clipart, but get 0.18 (new version, categories are not good and very hard to find something)
2. If you are in Ubuntu, try /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable, there is lot of .svg files there
3. Look for wikipedia entry, images in there are reusable (same for wikimedia)
4. Google with create commons settings

Fourth Paradigm, an E-Sceince book by MSR

Microsoft Research has published this book "Fourth Paradigm", which describes how to handle very large data sets. If you are interested in E-Science use cases, this seems very good reading. It is partly based on Jim Gary's last work. The book is free and can be downloaded from here.