Marco Catino
Mostly about security, business and economics
That’s an awesome billboard – a short note
This is going to be a really short note. Actually, only a picture and a simple comment: Awesome!
So glad I’m not in the business of housing and hosting – a short note
This is gonna be a short note. I’m leaving tomorrow for few days of holidays, still have one million things to do, and not much time to write this note.
But I spent a couple of nights playing with AWS (Amazon Web Services), and in particular EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and S3 (Simple Storage Service). If you are not familiar with these services, just quickly check aws.amazon.com. To say it in few words, this is the cloud computing of Amazon, that lets you instantiate a virtual machine, storage, virtual networks, load balancers and much more in just few minutes. And once you learn how to use it, it really takes only few minutes to set up a little network and expose a couple of services to the Internet. Everything is charged on a pay-per-use basis, which makes it possible to enormously optimize the costs.
But what I like the best of this service is that I am in no way involved in any company that acts as a direct competitor. Because if providing a wretched virtual server for 20€ per month might seems cheap, still is nothing you would want once it is compared to an istance of a well dimensioned machine on EC2. Amazon Web Services make SaaS doable for anybody, letting the product developer really concentrate on developing the product. Awesome, I think!
The Art of War for the Manager by Buttignol – A short review
I got this book from Amazon few days ago, and it took me only few hours to read it. Is it because it is awesome and once you start you can’t stop until you are finished? No… It is because it actually doesn’t give a lot of information and pretty much keeps repeating the same things over and over again. But the positive side is that everything in this little book is quite interesting and worth investing a couple of hours for.
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is here commented by Livio Buttignol with the idea of extracting advises useful to the modern manager. And the target is, in my opinion, totally reached.
Of Spies and Men: secrecy in the era of the easy sharing
Intelligence, CIA, NSA, Mossad… fascinating for who, like me, loves security and what revolves around it. Spy stories make good plots for a lot of movies, but what might be interesting are spy stories that happened for real.
Just few days ago I saw this Tweet:
“Iran claims capture of 12 CIA spies zite.to/vRxR3L“Which brought to my mind the famous operations of some sort of 007′s widely filmed by security cameras in Dubai. And I am not talking about a movie…
Twitter, Facebook and the six (four) degrees of separation
I have recently subscribed to Twitter. I used to be a heavy Facebook user (mainly a reader) but lately I found myself just scrolling fast through the news of my “friends”, being interested in nothing that I saw. On the other hand, I am always eager to read the news I see linked in the different digests I get from the LinkedIn groups I am part of. Well, Twitter is a continuous stream of news, right?
It is enough to carefully pick the users that you follow, and you will find yourself flooded with articles that you want to read and you care about. Actually, I don’t even have time to read them all, but I do my best to keep up. Also, Twitter has the great advantage to force tweets to be at most 140 characters, which makes it easy to have an idea of what the article linked is about in just few seconds. Cool, isnt’t it? Yes it is.
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