Eric Reis‘ defintion of a startup
A human institution designed to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty
In other words, you don’t really need to work at a startup or out of a garage to be an entrepreneur. You can do the same thing in a typical corporate setting.
BTW.. check out this very cool conversation between Leo Laporte and Eric at
We were getting a free t-shirt at work and I requested a medium.. response from the person giving the t-shirt
You used to be a medium, when you started working here!!
And I was given a large..
Ouch :)..
A couple of weekends ago, I had to buy some tablets for work. So I stopped by the trusty neighborhood microcenter and told the salesguy that I wanted to buy 3 iPads. The guy says “hmm.. I don’t know if I can do that, you see, we restrict each household to one iPad because there is so much demand”. I think.. fair enough and go on to tell him that I actually need to purchase a total of 9 tablets. 3 iPads and 6 Android tablets. Assuming that he will understand I am not your typical household, but a business. He goes into the “back room” to confirm with his supervisor and comes back saying.. a policy is a policy, we cannot do it. At this point, I am a bit ticked off.. I mean, don’t these guys want to actually sell these devices. I am on my way out to find another store and see a “manager” walking the aisles. I stop him and explain the situation, assuming he would be smarter and have the authority to “break” policy. Again no luck.. the guy kept repeating,”it is our policy to restrict each household to one iPad!!!”. Totally missing the point that I want to buy 6 more Android tablets too!!
I go to the competition across the road, TigerDirect and tell the first sales person that I need to buy a total of 9 tablets, 3 of them being iPads. The guy says “hmm.. we restrict iPads to one per household, but let me check with my manager”. The manager stops by assesses, the situation and “breaks” the policy and approves the purchase. I walk out with 9 tablets under my arms and making TigerDirect a couple hundred dollars richer (hopefully!! 🙂 )
Same policy in two different stores, but the fact that the manager in TigerDirect was able to asses the situation and go against the policy was a win-win situation for both the customer and his company.
Morale of the story? Hire good people and give them the authority to make decisions. Good things will follow :).
I was reading this post (http://mindprince.blogspot.com/2011/10/state-of-railway-e-ticketing-in-india.html) by Rohit Agarwal and happened to check out the official site for the Indian Railway (which is a public enterprise).
And what do I see there? Ads for dating services and Penny Auctions!! Last I checked, the Indian Railways was one of the most profitable ventures in the pubic enterprises in India. What gives? Here’s a screenshot for proof 🙂 
Quick note for myself to check web services using curl ([L/U]nix utility to play with http(s) traffic)
[code] curl https://URL_TO_TEST –insecure –trace-ascii debug.txt [/code]
Comments on options :
–insecure is used if you are testing web services served over SSL using self signed certs
–trace-ascii dumps all traffic between the client (curl in this case) and the server in human readable format
Ran across this error message on Flickr, when I was trying to get to my photostream
Amit Gupta, a fellow geek and photographer, has been diagnosed with Acute Lukemia.. He needs a matching bone marrow to survive the odds. How can you help? Two (well three) simple steps
Not a lot of things in life are free and satisfying.. This is one of them.
I am attending the Camp DevOps conference in Chicago over the weekend and one of the speakers was Zack Steinkamp. Zack manages the operations tools group in addition to information security at Groupon. He spoke about a custom configuration management tool called “roller” (http://steinkamp.us/campdevops.pdf) that is used at Groupon. He said the tool is scheduled to be open sourced soon. roller is very similar to puppet, chef, bcfg2 etc. I am not sure if we need yet another configuration management tool, but Zack made a good point for why there is a need for a simpler and secure configuration management tool.
Anyways.. this post is not about roller, but rather about some tidbits that Zack shared about Groupon’s infrastructure in the talk
