Saturday, January 23, 2010

"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.

Friday, January 8, 2010

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

Sunday, January 3, 2010

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.