February 2012
4 posts
A tumblr entry with a hashtag
Sometimes you just need to test something, like a #hashtag or #some #other text, perhaps a duplicate of the first #hashtag, or some text that has a hashtag as its very last #thing
Estación de Francia →
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle →
January 2012
1 post
1 tag
“It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the...”
– History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire // Edward Gibbon
June 2009
2 posts
Python code for retrieving all your tweets →
Here’s a little Python code to pull back all a user’s Twitter tweets. Make sure you read the notes at bottom in case you want to use it.
import sys, twitter, operator from dateutil.…
Video from FluidDB talk at PGCon →
Here’s the video from my talk on May 22, 2009 at the Postgres Conference (PGCon) in Ottawa. This blog theme cuts off the slides on the right; a better place to watch it is here.
Your…
May 2009
4 posts
Slides from FluidDB talk at PGCon →
Here are the slides from my talk on May 22, 2009 at the Postgres Conference (PGCon) in Ottawa. The video will be available soon.
The design, architecture, and tradeoffs of FluidDB
Talking at Postgres Conference (PGCon) in Ottawa →
Here’s just a quick note to mention that I’m talking at the annual Postgres Conference aka PGCon. The talk is titled The design, architecture, and tradeoffs of FluidDB, and is at 3pm on…
A mixin class allowing Python __init__ methods to... →
I posted to the Python Twisted list back in Nov 2008 with subject: A Python metaclass for Twisted allowing __init__ to return a Deferred
Briefly, I was trying to find a nice way to allow the ...
Balcony music →
Today I discovered the wonderful Grooveshark and some thoughts occurred to me that I feel like writing down.
I haven’t spent much time thinking about rights over digital media,…
April 2009
2 posts
OK, it’s a pandemic. Now what? →
Here are some more thoughts on the (now official) influenza pandemic.
I would like again to emphasize that I’m not an authority and I’m not trying to pass myself off as one.
I’ve…
A few comments on pandemic influenza →
Here are some thoughts on the current swine influenza outbreak. These are just off the top of my head - I will undoubtedly think of more to say and add it in the comments or another…
March 2009
1 post
The entrepreneurial spirit in literature →
Once in a while I run across a piece of writing that has little or nothing to do with being an entrepreneur, but which reads as though it did. I posted an example in 2007: Orwell writing…
January 2009
3 posts
FluidDB domain names available early (and free)... →
Sometime in the next few months, Fluidinfo will launch an alpha version of FluidDB, the database with the heart of a wiki. It’s a big engineering task, and there will still be a lot to…
Who signed up for Twitter immediately before/after... →
This is just a quick hack, done in about 20 minutes in 32 lines of Python. The following script will print out the Twitter screen names of the people who signed up immediately before and after a…
10,000 things: Andrew Hensel lives (on Twitter) →
Andrew Hensel was an extraordinary human being.
We were graduate students together at The University of Waterloo in Canada in 1986-88. I met him on my first day there and we spent many…
December 2008
5 posts
Not alone →
Robert Scoble has just written a really nice article about Fluidinfo, calling us both “world-changing” and “unfundable”. Funnily, Tim O’Reilly said something similar when I talked…
Twittendipity: a chance interview with Robert... →
On Monday Tim O’Reilly posted a Twitter tweet suggesting to Robert Scoble that he contact me while in Barcelona.
First off, Tim is very generous in doing this. He’s ultra connected…
Airports to install giant security mood rings →
In March 2004 I was in a silly mood (yes, a euphemism) and dreamed up the idea of airports installing giant mood rings as security devices. Prospective passengers would be made to walk…
Serverpronto (Infolink) is a RIPOFF →
I signed up for a dedicated server from Serverpronto in late 2006. At $30/month for a real Linux box the price seemed great. I recommended them to a friend who also signed up.
On July 29, 2007 we…
Amazon SimpleDB a complete flop? →
Today Amazon slashed the price on storage in SimpleDB from $1.50 per Gb per month to just $0.25 per Gb per month.
Note that you can buy a 1TB hard drive these days for $75. That’s 7.5…
November 2008
7 posts
Changing POV under Twitter →
One thing I’d like to be able to do in Twitter is change my point of view. That is, see what Twitter looks like from the POV of another user.
Given Twitter’s asymmetric follower model…
A kinder and more consistent defer.inlineCallbacks →
Here’s a suggestion for making Twisted’s inlineCallbacks function decorator more consistent and less confusing. Let’s suppose you’re writing something like this:
@inlineCallbacks
…
bzr viz is so nice →
A year ago we switched from SVN to Bazaar for source code control. I started using source code control in 1989 with RCS after comparing it with SCCS. Then I duly moved to CVS and on to…
Passion and the creation of highly non-uniform... →
Here, finally, are some thoughts on the creation of value. I don’t plan to do as good a job as the subject merits, but if I don’t take a rough stab at it, it’ll never happen.
I’ll first…
Expecting and embracing startup rejection →
When I was younger, I didn’t know what to make of it when people rejected my ideas. Instead of fighting it, trying again, or improving my delivery, I’d just conclude that the rejector was an…
Brief history of an idea →
In 1997 I had a fairly simple idea.
I spent a year thinking about it obsessively: where it might lead, what it would enable, how to implement it, etc. As I considered and refined it during this…
A Python metaclass for Twisted allowing __init__... →
OK, I admit, this is geeky.
But we’ve all run into the situation in which you’re using Python and Twisted, and you’re writing a new class and you want to call something from the __init method…
October 2008
4 posts
Twitter’s amazing stickiness (with a caveat) →
I just followed a link to a site that shows the date of the first tweet of 50 early Twitter users. I wondered how many of these early users were still active users, and guessed many would be.
…
Thinking about Tumblr
Is there a place for Tumblr in my online life….?
Digging into Twitter following →
This is just a quick post. I have a ton of things I could say about this, but they’ll have to wait - I need to do some real work.
Last night and today I wrote some Python code to dig into…
How many users does Twitter have? →
Here’s a short summary of a failed experiment using the Principle of Inclusion/Exclusion to estimate how many users Twitter has. I.e., there’s no answer below, just the outline of some quick…
September 2008
1 post
Pond scum →
I had breakfast this morning at a bar in the Santa Caterina market in Barcelona with Jono Bennett. He’s a writer. We were reflecting on similarities in our struggles to do our own thing. An…
July 2008
2 posts
GPS serendipity: Florence Avenue, Sebastopol →
I drove from Oakland up to the O’Reilly Foo camp last Friday. The O’Reilly offices are just outside Sebastopol, CA. I stopped at an ATM and my GPS unit got totally confused. So I took a…
Minor mischief: create redirect loops from... →
I was checking out the new bit.ly URL shortening service from Betaworks.
I started wondering how random the URLs from these URL-shortening services could be. I wrote a tiny script the…
June 2008
10 posts
Giants in the Born! →
Another day, another great sight in the Born.
I was sitting here 15 minutes ago when I became aware of lots of drumming and piping outside. I tossed up whether to go down and film some of…
Paella for 325 people →
Once a year they cook paella in the Born. They put out two long lines of tables and chairs. Anyone who wants a ticket buys one (8 euros in 2008) which gets you a large plate of paella, bread,…
Sardanas in the Born →
OK, this will be a quick one. I’m trying to post occasional videos taken in my neighborhood.
Here you have a typical Catalan scene: a band playing and people dancing Sardanas. You can see this any…
Embracing Encapsulation →
[This is a bit rambling / repetitive, sorry. I don’t have time to make it shorter, etc.]
Last year at FOWA I had a discussion with Paul Graham about programming and programmers in which…
Sequoia Capital is the new Delphic Oracle →
In a belated attempt to educate myself by reading some of the things that many people study in high school, I’m reading The Histories of Herodotus. It’s highly entertaining and easy to…
Random thoughts on Twitter →
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Twitter this year. Here are a few thoughts at random.
Obviously Twitter have tapped into something quite fundamental, which at a high level we might…
Python: looks great, stays wet longer →
I should be coding, not blogging. But a friend noticed I hadn’t blogged in a month, so in lieu of emailing people, here are a couple of comments on programming in Python. There are many…
Bandoneón →
I’d never even heard of a bandoneón before last Thursday.
There was a performance of the guitar class at the kids’ school and after they were done the two teachers played for us all. It…
Plurk could add all Twitter IDs:Twit users claim their equiv Plurk ID by twitting a Plurk-supplied rand string. Plurk verifies, gives access
http://www.plurk.com is very slick
May 2008
1 post
Manhole →
[Listening just now to the Tiger Lillies song Bankrobber Blues I decided to post another little fictional story I wrote some years ago. The first in the series was Lucky Streak. As a kid I had a…
April 2008
8 posts
Google maps miles off on Barcelona hotel →
I’m a big fan of Google maps.
But sometimes they get things very very wrong. In January I posted this example of them getting the location of the San Francisco international airport way…
Digital camera found in Barcelona. Do you know... →
We found a digital camera down in Barceloneta this afternoon. Here are a couple of the images on it.
Do you know these girls?
The menu on the camera is in German.
You can see why I’m…
Paper on the global spread of influenza published... →
I spent Sept. 2004 to Sept. 2007 as a postdoc in the Zoology Department at the University of Cambridge. We did research into influenza virus using a technique we called Antigenic…