One person cannot run a company into the ground. It takes an entire management team to do that.

– Stephan Pachikov

• Peter Coffee’s Dirty Dozen IT Embarrassments
  An AWESOME article about mistakes, blunders, and errors made that made history in the world of IT. Should be mandatory reading for new techies!
  (tags: programming IT management error architecture infrastructure cool)

• How I’m using Amazon S3 to serve media files | Holovaty.com
  An article discussing the design and implementation of web file delivery with S3. Excellent practical advice from an experienced web developer.
  (tags: amazon s3 server tutorial design python storage)
• s3syc
  A Ruby based system that mimics the rsync utility using Amazon’s S3. Interestingly, it looks like this file is also being hosted on S3.
  (tags: s3 backup rsync amazon programming integration)
• Replacing my home backup server with Amazon’s S3 (by Jeremy Zawodny)
  An interesting article that does a detailed economic analysis of using Amazon’s S3 vs. a local machine for backups.
  (tags: amazoneconomics s3 storage analysis web hosting)
• Amazon S3 vs DreamHost | Joseph Scott’s Blog
  An short post that does a compares the price of serving static files with Amazon S3 vs. a leading internet provider.
  (tags: dreamhost s3 amazon hosting economics)
• CodeWord: Apokalyptik » Blog Archive » MySQL on Amazon EC2 (my thoughts)
  A very detailed, practical article on running MySQL on EC2. It has a lot of good advice in tackling some of the shortcomings of EC2, namely reliablility and persistence.
  (tags: mysql ec2 amazon architecture infrastructure reliability s3)
• Whose turn is it to clean up the bits? - sa.muel
  A very enlightening article that discusses current security issues around using Amazon EC2. Great work done to make the system better.
  (tags: amazon data ec2 hosting linux security storage Virtualization web hack encryption cloud)
• Evolving Amazon’s services into products | InfoWorld | Column | 2006-10-04 | By Jon Udell
  Good article about AWS from a business perspective.
  (tags: amazon aws business development management)

I found an interesting article from Daniel @ benzadryne.cx attacking the spam issue from an economic perspective. This is not going to be a technical discussion; instead it will focus on the creative approach to solving the problem at hand.

The Problem

Spam is a complex problem, stemming from the following issues:

• Spam is anonymous as well as being fast, easy, and cheap to send.
• Blocking spam is slow, difficult, expensive, and difficult to organize on a large scale.
• Any effective spam defense can be overcome with enough time and energy.
• 99% of spam is unwanted by its recipients, who have to pay for it.
• 1% of spam is wanted, and this response rate is high enough to justify more spam.
• It is not uncommon for regular email to be accidentally blocked as spam, which aggravates customers to no end.
• People who send spam make a lot of money.

Yuck.

The Current Solution

This is quite a concern for email providers, as they have to make their customers happy. So, an entire industry (one even might say a subculture) has sprung up to try and solve the problem. So far, all the approaches have been around trying to block spam, either at the server or the client level. This has worked to make sure customers don’t see spam, but they still have to pay for it indirectly, through the systems that do the actual filtering.

Now, this isn’t bad for a first try, the thing is we are just treating the symptoms and not the disease. We don’t need to make our customers happy by making spam invisible, we need to do it by making spam go away. Nice thought, you say. How do we actually do that? If any effective counter measure can be overcome with time, then that route is just a short term fix.

The only other way to attack the problem is to make spam unprofitable.

The Creative Solution

What Daniel has suggested is to make it so that it takes hours (or more) for known spammers to try and send a single piece of mail. Thus, they can send less mail and make less money, making that activity less attractive to the unsavory elements. The technical details aren’t as important as the fresh approach to the problem. He has looked at the root cause of the problem and attacked it with simple and innovative approach that looks very promising.

Why You Should Care

Once again, this is a great example of how we can learn from the hacking community . Every organization has a problem like this one that seems insurmountable. A problem that is complicated, technical and personal, and every solution that has been tried so far has failed.

The way to start trying to solve a difficult problem is to:

1. Determine the root cause(s).
2. Attack the problem at the root cause.
3. Find a solution that works on the smallest possible scale.
4. Make the solution work on that scale.
5. Demonstrate the solution to others.
6. Help make the solution work on a larger scale.
7. Share the credit.

• Why Top Employees Quit - by Dumb Little Man
  (tags: IT management career work tips programming advice)
• What Kind of IT Shop Are You Running?
  A quiz to tell you more about your work environment, specific to IT.
  (tags: architecture business infrastructure management technology work IT article)
• The Power of Ordinary Practices — HBS Working Knowledge
  A management related article that gives a lot of food for thought both for employees and managers.
  (tags: management practices ordinary harvard business)
• Slow Leadership: Slowness and Quality
  More food for thought. Faster isn’t always better.
  (tags: speed management quality slowness business IT)