Terry Jones

Archive for June, 2007

smell the fear

Saturday, June 30th, 2007 Posted under companies, tech. | Comments Off on smell the fear

Entertainment retailers are not happy that Prince is giving away his upcoming album, via a deal with the Mail on Sunday newspaper. Their reaction is one of abject fear with ... Read more..

forgetting how to dial international

Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 Posted under me, tech. | 1 Comment »

A weird thing happened to me this morning. I needed to call someone in Portugal. I reached for the trusty land line, checked for a dial tone (so old fashioned), grabbed ... Read more..

my O’Reilly number

Monday, June 25th, 2007 Posted under books, companies, tech. | Comments Off on my O’Reilly number

I like O’Reilly technical books. Back in 1987 I put together some notes to write a book on the vi editor, and later considered submitting the idea to O’Reilly. I ... Read more..

literary arbitrage

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 Posted under books, companies. | Comments Off on literary arbitrage

The two books I just bought on Amazon.com cost me $37.74, plus shipping to Spain of $13.47, for a total of $51.21. The same books are available on Amazon.co.uk for a ... Read more..

better together

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 Posted under books, companies, tech. | Comments Off on better together

Amazon, intentionally or not, have done a great job with their special offer feature that suggests a second book to you and offers you both at the same time for ... Read more..

Pondering the T&C of Amazon’s S3 and EC2

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 Posted under companies, tech. | Comments Off on Pondering the T&C of Amazon’s S3 and EC2

I’ve spent many hours reading about Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services since they were announced. They’re certainly very attractive, and they are being put to heavy use by many companies. ... Read more..

Sort uniq sort revisited, in modern Python

Sunday, June 17th, 2007 Posted under python, tech. | Comments Off on Sort uniq sort revisited, in modern Python

Just after I started messing around with Python, my friend Nelson posted about writing some simple Python to speed up the UNIX sort | uniq -c | sort -nr idiom. I ... Read more..

reflective bandwagon

Thursday, June 14th, 2007 Posted under me, tech. | Comments Off on reflective bandwagon

Here’s another thing I’ve had enough of: The graphic design bandwagon of which this image is a perfect example: This technique is like a rash all over the web. It’s one ... Read more..

it’s long

Thursday, June 14th, 2007 Posted under books, me. | 2 Comments »

There are a few things that bug me on the internet. One is that people often warn each other that articles are long, or apologize for writing long blog entries. There’s ... Read more..

resorting to regular expressions

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 Posted under python, tech. | 1 Comment »

I was going to write a much longer set of thoughts on moving to Python, but I don’t have time. Instead I’ll summarize by saying that I programmed for 28 ... Read more..

Comments on Productivity and being Always-On

Monday, June 11th, 2007 Posted under companies, tech. | Comments Off on Comments on Productivity and being Always-On

Antonio over at the Onda has a post up about Productivity and being Always-On. He’s got comments turned off, so I’m going to make a few here. First of all, ... Read more..

Orwell on T. S. Eliot and the path from existential angst to serial entrepreneur

Thursday, June 7th, 2007 Posted under books, companies, me. | 10 Comments »

I like George Orwell. A tired fool got me started on the four-volume collection of Orwell’s essays, journalism, and letters. It’s great. Among many things I could say, one is ... Read more..